Blair Cowan plays keyboards on the first five Lloyd Cole records, from 1984 to 1991. Then his line stops.
It starts again in 2010, and he is on three of the four records after that. Nineteen years of nothing in the middle of the longest line on the print except Cole's own.
The short version. My Lloyd Cole map plots 17 albums from Rattlesnakes in 1984 to On Pain in 2023, three of them billed as Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, with 66 musicians named in the research. Cole is on all 17. Blair Cowan and Neil Clark reach 9 each, both with gaps of more than a decade. Fifty people appear once and never again. Two albums have nobody on them but Cole. Available as a Giclée art print in A2 and A1, unframed or framed, from £42.00.
This Gift for Lloyd Cole Fans Is Full of Lines That Stop and Start Again
Most discography maps have lines that run and then end. This one has lines that run, vanish for a decade or two, and reappear.
Neil Clark, the Commotions guitarist, plays on the first three, misses two, returns for 1995, runs to 2006, then disappears for thirteen years and comes back for the last two. Fred Maher drums on the 1990 and 1991 records, goes, and returns fifteen years later. Matthew Sweet plays on three albums between 1990 and 1993, then one more in 2013, twenty years after the last.
Nobody was sacked. People moved countries, had other careers, and came back when there was a record worth coming back for.
Lloyd Cole Discography Map
Seventeen albums across 39 years, the Commotions and the solo records drawn as one network.
Explore This Art PrintAfter Nineteen Years Away, Is It Still the Same Line?
This is the question this map made me answer, and I do not think any other print in my range forces it as hard.
A tube line is a continuous thing. That is the whole visual promise: you put your finger on a name and follow it. But Blair Cowan's involvement is not continuous, and drawing it as though it were tells you something false: that he was quietly around the whole time.
The alternative is to draw him twice, as two separate short lines that happen to share a name. That is worse. It implies two different people, and it destroys the one thing the map is actually good at showing: that the person who played on Rattlesnakes is the same person playing in 2023.
So the line runs, with a hole in it. The gap is visible because the stations in between simply have nothing on that line, and the eye reads the absence without needing a caption. It is the closest a transit map gets to expressing that somebody went away and then came back.
The Commotions Rhythm Section Never Came Back
Two people do not return, and it is worth saying who.
Lawrence Donegan on bass and Stephen Irvine on drums play on Rattlesnakes, Easy Pieces and Mainstream, the three records billed as Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, and then never appear again across the next fourteen albums.
So of the band, the keyboard player and the guitarist both eventually came back, and the rhythm section did not. On the print, that reads as two lines that stop dead in 1987 while two others carry on through to 2023.
Donegan, incidentally, went on to become a golf correspondent for the Guardian, which is not something the map can show.
Two Albums Have Nobody On Them But Him
Plastic Wood in 2001 and 1D Electronics 2012-2014 in 2015 are instrumental electronic records, and the credits on both name exactly one person.
These are the narrowest stations in my entire range. Not thin because the paperwork failed, which happens, but thin because one man made them alone.
Selected Studies, Vol. 1 in 2013 is nearly as sparse as two, the other name being Hans-Joachim Roedelius of Cluster, the German ambient pioneer, which is not a collaboration anybody predicted from the man who wrote "Perfect Skin".
He Put Out Two Unrelated Albums in the Same Year
2013 gets two stations. Selected Studies, Vol. 1, the ambient duo record with Roedelius, and Standards, a full band rock album with ten people on it.
Side by side on the map they look like they belong to different artists, which is the most efficient illustration I can offer of what this catalogue actually does.
Standards Pulls Three Separate Eras Into One Station
Standards is the reunion record, though it is never described as one.
Blair Cowan is there from the Commotions. Fred Maher and Matthew Sweet are there from the New York records of the early nineties. And Will Cole, Lloyd's son, plays guitar and sings harmony, appearing on the map exactly once.
Three decades of the same career standing at one station. On a list of credits that is a row of names. On a map it is three long lines converging after years apart, which is a different thing to look at.
Lou Reed's Guitarist Is on Four of These
Robert Quine plays on the 1990 self-titled album, Don't Get Weird on Me Babe, Love Story and The Negatives: four records across ten years.
Quine is best known for his work with Lou Reed and for the Voidoids, and he died in 2004, so his line on this map is a complete one. It runs, and then it stops for the reason lines eventually stop.
He is not the only surprise from that stretch. Don't Get Weird on Me Babe in 1991 brings in Leland Sklar and Carlos Vega, two of the most recorded session players in Los Angeles, alongside Suzie Katayama on strings. That record has ten people on it, and my notes claimed six.
Sizing This One Depends on Which Half Matters
The stations are wildly uneven here, which changes the usual advice.
The A2 at 420 x 594mm (18 x 24 in) handles the shape well: three crowded Commotions records, a busy American stretch, then the sparse experimental years. It starts at £42.00.
The A1 at 594 x 841mm (24 x 36 in) is worth it if the person receiving it cares about the middle of the catalogue. Easy Pieces, Mainstream, Bad Vibes and The Negatives all carry twelve or thirteen names, and those are the stations where the smaller size asks you to squint.
Both come unframed if they would rather choose a frame themselves, or framed and ready to hang. Every print is a Giclée on 230gsm premium fine art paper, textured matte, archival and acid-free, with the full detail on the print and frame specification page.
Questions About the Commotions, the Electronic Records and the Gaps
Does it cover the Commotions as well as the solo albums?
Both. Rattlesnakes, Easy Pieces and Mainstream are the first three stations, billed as Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, and the map runs on through fourteen solo records to On Pain in 2023.
Are the instrumental and electronic albums on it?
Yes. Plastic Wood, Selected Studies, Vol. 1 and 1D Electronics all have stations, even though two of them credit only Cole himself. Leaving them off would make the catalogue look tidier than it is.
Why do some lines have big gaps in them?
Because the musicians genuinely stopped and started. Blair Cowan has a nineteen-year gap and Matthew Sweet a twenty-year one. The map draws each of them as a single line with a hole rather than as two separate lines.
Does it show who played what on each track?
No. Each line tells you which albums that musician appears on. Track-level roles appear only on my Rolling Stones Goats Head Soup album map.
A Brass Player Links This Print to a PiL Record
The cross-connection here is one I would never have guessed and only found by reading both sets of credits.
Gary Barnacle is credited with brass arrangements on Easy Pieces in 1985. He also turns up in my research for the John Lydon map, playing brass and keyboards on Public Image Ltd's This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get in 1984. A jangling Glasgow pop record and a post-punk album made a year apart, sharing a session horn player.
For neighbours rather than credits, the Smiths map covers the same mid-eighties British songwriting shelf, and the Joy Division and New Order map is the other print where a band becomes something else entirely partway through.
The full range sits in the music art print collection. If you came here for the gift rather than the research, the Lloyd Cole discography map is the print itself, in A2 or A1, unframed or framed, from £42.00.
