Hi, I haven't read the article on the Creative Noise site, but I don't intend for this to be a reply to it. Some have accused Lloyd Cole of name-dropping, but I think he has been misunderstood. I consider the allusions to literature and film in his songs as a part of the story, the characters, the atmosphere in which they live. Think of Charles Ryder before he met Sebastian. Think of the discussions in your western civ course freshman year. It's embarrassing but also refreshing to recall the earnestness of those years, when you thought you were free of the doggedness and tedium of high school, not yet aware of the careerism and feudalism within the university system, when you believed socio-economic status had no bearing on membership in an intellectual elite. If it's overly literary, it's because it's in the characters. And sometimes it's obvious enough to make you aware of the posturing, as in the end rhymes in "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?". I think of Lloyd Cole as very American. There's the rootsy, blues element in his music, the tales of cosmopolitan sophisticates with roots in some midwestern town (I'm making this up, but it seems at least partially true of "Four Flights Up" and "Why I Love Country Music"), the out-of-place narrator in "Speedboat" (my feeling, based on stereotype, is that if he were British, then he wouldn't be there, or he would be openly antagonistic). So maybe that's another reason not to take Lloyd Cole's literariness at face value. Although he went to the University of Glasgow, Lloyd Cole is supposed to be from Derbyshire and Sheffield, according to Peter Miller. Someone in B&S mentioned that they held the press conference in London cos Glaswegians don't go for that sort of thing. Now I can hardly imagine Lloyd Cole coming from such an environment or recognize any sign of its influence on him. Not with all those pin ups. If there's anything for which he should be criticized, it's for being too eager to please, too available. I can see why a friend of mind doesn't like the way he sings in "Her Last Fling"; it's great to me, but for some, it might lack restraint. The exact opposite is true of B&S: the way Stuart sings, the way they dealt with the press, etc. I read that "Rattlesnakes" was influenced by Joan Didion, the song itself by _Play It As It Lays_. Somewhere on his web site (lloydcole.com), he writes that "Easy Pieces" was influenced by Raymond Carver. These writers and others cited in his lyrics are mostly American. Whereas B&S seem particularly British in outlook (why they could be loosely compared to the Smiths but LC couldn't; why LC couldn't completely carry off a song like "James"), that is, when they aren't netherworldly (there's something holy about Stuart). I don't think the mention of American writers in "Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie" is meant to be sympathetic, as those of Sid James and Paula Wilcox are. There's a level at which the speaker identifies with the (anti-)heroine, but another at which he's mocking her for putting on bourgeois airs, alone in her bedroom with the sort of books young people read before going off to college. A common link might be the French New Wave, but I think of that more as Isobel's pet interest. Yours, Youn +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the undead Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "peculiarly deranged fanbase" "frighteningly named +-+ +-+ Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+