The basement under a Glasgow golf club is not where most debut albums begin. But Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, a British group formed by students at the University of Glasgow, wrote two of their sharpest early songs there in a single weekend. The band's frontman, Lloyd Cole, had grown up around the club where his father worked and the family lived. Those two songs, "Perfect Skin" and "Forest Fire," became the spark for Rattlesnakes, the group's first studio album. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions released Rattlesnakes on October 12, 1984.
Release and musical style
Rattlesnakes came out on 12 October 1984 through Polydor in the UK and Europe. The record sits at the meeting point of jangle pop, college rock and folk rock. Most of the songs were written by Cole, and every track was written within a year of the album's release. That tight window gave the record an unusual consistency: the same voice, the same concerns, the same small rooms.
The group moved fast. After getting a publishing contract, the five members bought a Portastudio, a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and a drum machine. Demos of two songs were recorded that same weekend. Within a month, a record label had signed them. The band's lineup was Neil Clark, Lloyd Cole, Blair Cowan, Lawrence Donegan and Stephen Irvine. They were young, quick and confident enough to trust their first ideas.
A month at The Garden
Recording the album took about a month at The Garden, a studio in Shoreditch, London. The Garden had been built and was owned by John Foxx, the first frontman of Ultravox. Guitarist Neil Clark remembered the sessions running from 10 in the morning until 6 in the evening. It was a disciplined pace, but the songs had already been lived with long enough to survive the studio without being overworked.
The album's title points to Joan Didion's 1970 novel Play It as It Lays. That literary bent runs through the record. The lyrics reference Renata Adler, Simone de Beauvoir and Norman Mailer. "Speedboat" was inspired by Adler's 1976 novel of the same name, and Cole borrowed a line from the book. These were not standard pop lyrics about dancing or heartbreak; they were songs about what people do when they are in love, filtered through a student's bookshelf.
Chart success and critical praise
The reception was strong for a debut. Rattlesnakes reached number 13 on the UK Albums Chart. NME placed it at number 21 among the albums of 1984. The record later earned a gold certification from the BPI in the UK. Critics kept returning to it: Mojo called it a timeless pop album, and AllMusic described it as a college rock masterpiece with ironic lyrics and folk-rock melodies.
The album's staying power came from its unforced intelligence. Cole later admitted that some of the early lyrics now seemed naive to him, but that naivety is part of the record's charm. These were songs written quickly, in a basement under a golf club, by people who had not yet learned to second-guess themselves. The result was a debut that sounded like a band discovering its voice in real time.
The result was a debut that sounded like a band discovering its voice in real time.
Forty-two years on, Rattlesnakes remains the album people name first when they talk about Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. It is a record made in a month, written in a year, and built on a weekend of songs from a basement. That speed did not make it careless. It made it honest.