Pointing my finger like a standup comedian: here he is! When I’m feeling in a particularly chirpy mood, sometimes I go on stage to that. A couple of years later, I wrote to them and said, “Do you have an instrumental mix of that? Could I have a copy?”, so they sent me one. I can hardly imagine how anybody could feel bad about it. Their management sent it to me before the album came out, just to make sure that I wasn’t in any way negative about it. That’s really one of the nicest things that’s happened to me. What did you think of Camera Obscura’s song dedicated to you, Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken ? Your band still have a legacy in the indie world too. To go around the world and be hot shit for a minute was pretty exciting. And there he was! The first time performing in Paris, the first time performing in New York. Probably the first time going on Top of the Pops, and getting backstage at the Dominion Theatre in London and finding Morrissey waiting for us, at the very time when he was constantly saying, “I never go out, I never go out”. What is your fondest memory of back then? I think if anybody had made it, they were going to do well. We were incredibly lucky that we wrote those songs in 19, and we made Rattlesnakes, which was an irresistible record in a way. This summer’s been busy for you with the release of the lavish Lloyd Cole and the Commotions Collected Recordings 1983-1989. ‘To go around the world and be hot shit for a minute was pretty exciting’: Lloyd Cole and the Commotions performing on The Tube in 1985. So long as that is my job, I’ll be quite happy. He wrote to me the other day, and said: “What are we going to do?” I said: “Well, I can’t play anything from the album, they were all just patches that I recorded and sent to you!” I’m going to have to be the guy that creates the structure that people improvise from. In Berlin, they want me to play for half an hour with Roedelius. You’ll be behind a bank of machines rather than behind your guitar. Next month, you play your first live gigs as a synthesiser operator in Europe. I don’t think Standards is going to be my last album of songs. But I know some people are just going to listen and go, “What the fuck is that?” I had an opportunity to release this music rather than just keeping it in my attic, and people I trust have been incredibly supportive and encouraging. But I remember hearing Low for the first time and being completely bemused, and now I think side two of Low is one of the most beautiful bunch of tracks I’ve ever heard. Quite a number have been completely bemused. How have some of these gushing original fans reacted to your synthesiser music? So they know, but it’s always been that way, and it’s not new. Frank’s younger, he’s got two years left of high school. He soon realised something’s going on there. We lived in New York until he was five or six, and walking around, every now and again I’d meet a gushing fan. My oldest son William’s grown up and out of the house now, and he’s a musician too. How aware are your sons, William and Frank, of your reputation as a musician? I mean, I love the winters here, but if it wasn’t for my wife and children, right now, I’d be in Whitby or East Lothian. I’m sitting in our attic right now – with my guitars, my synthesisers, and our library – and it’s 9am, and it’ll be 90 degrees in an hour. ‘We were incredibly lucky’: Lloyd Cole, second right, and the Commotions. I don’t like what’s become of computers in the past 15 years – they’ve become overwhelming. One reason I’m making the music I’m making right now is that I built a modular synthesiser to get away from the computer. When computer audio became prevalent, I idiotically sold a lot of them. In my small rehearsal room in Tribeca in New York, in the same building as Matt Johnson from The The, I had the Prophet VS, a Minimoog, one of the first sampling virtual synths, and a Roland sampler that had to have a television screen attached to it, which worked with floppy disks. I used it on the title track of Mainstream, and from then on I began to amass a collection. There was a preset on it called Fripp-Eno, which I still love. In the 80s, sort of accidentally, after buying a Sequential Circuits Prophet VS synthesiser in London’s Denmark Street. And when did you start making electronic music yourself?
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