Lloyd Cole Sings His Body (of songs) Electric

By Henry Lipput

Last Wednesday evening I had the great pleasure of seeing Lloyd Cole performing his solo electric show at City Winery in Pittsburgh. It was a packed house of like-minded and adoring Cole lovers.

Early on in the proceedings, Cole let us know he was working electric on this current tour because after 25 years of solo acoustic shows he felt the songs he had written were much better represented in an electric mode. He also let us know he hadn’t figured out how to play all of the songs he had played acoustic on the electric guitar. For starters there would be no songs that evening from his mid-90s output (which for me meant nothing from 1993’s Bad Vibes; later I thought ‘Which song from that album would I have chosen? Perhaps the single “Morning Is Broken”?).

What we did get was a generous helping of tunes from the first two Commotions albums, Rattlesnakes and Easy Pieces. (Having listened to Easy Pieces for about 40 years I could never figure out where the title had come from but as Cole sang “Lost Weekend” and the lines ”I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it/Drop me and I’ll fall to pieces/ too easily” I finally got it.)

We only got two songs from the third and last Commotions album Mainstream but fortunately they were two of my favorite songs from the album: “Hey Rusty” and “Jennifer She Said” (but of course there’s also “Mr. Malcontent” and “Sean Penn Blues").”On “Jennifer She Said” Cole told us that because of his age he felt a bit awkward singing part of the song’s ending so he asks us to do it for him. Of course we would and so performed a rousing “ba ba ba ba da da da” as long as we needed to.

The other bit of audience participation came when Cole was about to sing “The Idiot” from his most recent album 2023’s On Pain. He told us there was a line in the song he couldn’t do as a solo performer because it was right on top of another line he was going to sing. Would we be game for singing “stop being drug addicts” in the right places? Of course we would! (Although we almost started again at the wrong time but all was forgiven.) We also got performances of the title track as well as “Night Sweats” and “The Loudness Wars” from the previous album Guesswork.

Cole did a deep-dive into his catalog with three songs from 2004’s Music In A Foreign Language: “My Other Life,” “Cutting Out,” and “No More Love Songs.” We also got “Like Lovers Do’ and “Baby” from Love Story. 

 From his self-titled first solo album we heard “Don’t Look Back,” “No Blue Skies,” and “Undressed” although only one song from the Don't Get Weird On Me Babe album (a choice that surprised me), “Butterfly,.”

It was great to see Cole again (I think this was my seventh time including with the full band for the first two solo albums). He was in excellent voice and his mastery of his songs on the electric guitar left nothing to be desired.

It appears that his concert in Boston on April 30^th is the last show in the US (so if you're anywhere near Boston this is you chance!) and then it’s off to Belgium, France, and then the UK. You can see all of the dates and how you can buy tickets here.