In 1984, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions signed a five album deal with Polydor records and, almost immediately, things went according to plan. They had a flawless hit with Perfect Skin and the debut album Rattlesnakes was greeted as a pop classic. The second album, Easy Pieces, sealed it commercially by selling more copies in its first two weeks than the much better Rattlesnakes had managed in the whole previous year, and Polydor must have been more than pleased with its investment.
But even with songs like Lost Weekend and Brand New Friend behind them, the Commotions were far from certain what exactly they wanted to be. That difficult third album, Mainstream, while a critical success, contained no hits at all and Cole, already fed up with the whole thing, split the group and high-tailed it to New York City. He has been there ever since.
"I had been in a band for five years and I'd been living with the same woman for five years and all of a sudden I was with neither. I was living in London at that time and I came about as close as you could to buying the one bedroom pieda-terre and resigning myself to a miserable bachelor life.
"But then I thought, no, I'm just going to become a maudlin old guy so I just packed three suitcases and thought I'd spend some time in New York. It had been fun when I had visited before, so I took a six-month lease on a place on the edge of SoHo."
Many years before, however, Cole was a bedroom bass player attending sixth form college and eagerly discovering the sounds of New York, notably The Velvet Underground and John Cale in particular. At the end of the 1970s, he briefly studied law at University College London and spent much of his time going to see the bands of the moment like Magazine and Joy Division. He was also, by his own admission, very impressed by cosmopolitan London and was soon wearing make-up and smoking menthol cigarettes. With little interest in law, he switched to an English/Philosophy and General Arts degree in Glasgow University and it was here that the Commotions first began to take shape. But it may well have been those very early listening experiences in the Cole bedroom which had provoked that sudden flit to Manhattan.
"It was maybe something subconscious. When I was at school I was buying Talking Heads, Television and Richard Hell records on import from the back of the NME. There was definitely something about the New York club scene which was for me very exciting, and obviously there was The Velvet Underground and Patti Smith. When I actually came to New York none of that existed at all. But once I got here it definitely seemed like the right place at that time of my life."
Cole confesses that, for about a year, life in his adopted city did not require shaving and he began to resemble Jim Morrison in decline. There were no longer any pop star demands on his appearance and there was much drinking, playing pool and, as he puts it, "more girlfriends than I'd had in the rest of my life". He got sense, however, and after a year of late nights, he married one of those girlfriends - Beth Lewis - with whom he now has two children. This was also a period when, in musical terms, he came to accept that he was not a rocker after all - and what's more New York didn't seem to mind. He found himself entirely welcomed as the new, unshaven, kid in town.
`IT was phenomenal for me - not for my career but certainly for my life. I'd come from living in London with all the backbiting and bitchiness. You constantly feel that you're in competition with the other bands. Johnny Marr would never have dreamed of playing on a Commotions record and I would never have dreamed of playing on a Smiths record, but when I came over here I met people who were in other bands and were excited that I'd come to live in town. And they said they'd love to do something with me. Because I was very spoilt being in a group with Neil Clark, I had a list of only two guitarists that I wanted to work with - Richard Thompson and Robert Quine.
I met Quine within the first six months that I was here and he is one of my best friends still." Quine was a veteran of Lou Reed's band, as was Cole's new drummer Fred Maher. They had also both played on those Richard Hell records Cole used to buy on import back in his sixth form days. Joined by Matthew Sweet and Blair Cowan, they began work on what was to be Cole's first solo album (the X album) which was released in 1990. The follow-up, Don't Get Weird on Me, Babe, perhaps provoked as much confusion as it did favourable reaction and 1993's Bad Vibes fared little better. The solo career appeared to be going nowhere, slowly. Then, in 1995, Cole was suddenly back on Top of the Pops with a song called Like Lovers Do. The album Love Story was a more recognisably Lloyd Cole affair than anything he had done since arriving in New York, and suddenly it seemed that the artist was back in a territory that suited him.
"I'm at a nice place right now. I've made four solo records but, when I was put in a position of putting out a "best of" record, I found myself having to write extra songs to go on it and that was a rotten idea. So I gave up and I thought, well, wouldn't it be nice to have a little band that all lived in the same town instead of flying people in from all over? So I formed this band called The Negatives - just a pseudonym so that we could play some quiet gigs without people knowing that it was me. So I ended up being much more natural and organic with my writing again and, because we played gigs quite often, I had an outlet for my songs. You'd play the songs and some of them wouldn't be very good and you'd throw them in the dustbin and the ones that were good I'd put on the record."
The success of Love Story and his first Top of the Pops appearance since the end of The Commotions brought Cole back to Britain for a successful tour. There were echoes of the early days when the intense looking young singer had first set out to be both a serious writer and a pop star. In New York, however, he now enjoys the anonymity which that city can afford to people like himself - and it suits him.
"There was a certain thing in London where people would follow you just for the sake of it. Teenage boys always seemed to like to see what you were shopping for. I don't really like to complain about things like that because, if you want to be a pop singer, you know that's going to happen - and whining pop stars don't get a lot of sympathy from me. But it was nice to come to New York where I'm not well known. So I am anonymous here and only known amongst people who are real music fans. I still play the old songs but it's only the ones that I feel good playing. Its nice, at the grand old age that I'm at right now, that I can afford to be picky and there's still plenty of songs."
After just over a decade in New York, it seems unlikely that Lloyd Cole will leave just yet. His concerns these days are the normal ones, and in New York he has found that an easy normality is always strangely possible. 10 years ago he sang about the rain falling on Bleecker Street. His heart, if not his apartment, is still there.
"At the moment I'm living in a part of New York called Chelsea and I don't like it. It's not like the Village in that there's not really a community there. When we lived in the west part of the Village we used to go to the local park and all the kids knew each other and you met other parents because your kids would be playing with their kids. But that doesn't really go on in Chelsea - it'smuch more upwardly mobile single people. "It's just a bit cheaper and we needed more space because we've got kids. But there is something fabulous about the city. It's just a big dirty, vibrant place - but not as dirty now as it was in 1988!"
Lloyd Cole plays HQ in Dublin on May 16th and 17th.