I've just realized I didn't do a post on this one (really thought I had until I went and tried to look for it!. Then realized at that time I didn't want to post for a particular reason), can't be. Even if it's a short one, I'll sneak it now somewhere.
I started listening to him ages ago, and by then he already had a long career behind him, with an impressive amount of songs. He now lives in the US and is a very meticulous and quiet middle aged man in black, incredibly serious about his playing. .
..ever seen a setlist like this one? 
For someone who has not seen any image of him since his 80-90's grey eyed heartthrob aloof aired days, it's a change. He's still very much his very English self though, (his humour too!, made us laugh a lot) and a fantastic musician. And his voice has hardly changed.
He played solo and after the show he was very accessible (though his particular distant) so I was able to talk to him and ask him about "There for her", one of my all time favourite songs. He told me he also thought it was one of the best songs he's ever composed but that it was difficult to play it solo, hence his not playing it... bummer. I heard half of that song on a "independent" radio station one night ages ago, managed to record like 20 seconds of it (on tape, was that looong ago), loved it but didn't have the title, and no google then to do a search by lyrics. And few people listened to him in my country, certainly no one around me. I recognized his voice (I was quite taken with everything British then, would spend my allowance on imported Smash Hits and listen to the BBC Top 40 on the AM radio, lots of static, the sshhhs ended up being too much for me!) but that was all my info. A while after I went to the only record shop in my area that had his music and out of the Lloyd Cole cd's they had I tried to guess which had a title in it that could be my mystery song. I bet on "Love story" and my father bought it to me... it wasn't in it. Much later I remembered and googled it, finally found it, finally listened to it in full. When you have that story with a song, it's serious :)
He played solo and after the show he was very accessible (though his particular distant) so I was able to talk to him and ask him about "There for her", one of my all time favourite songs. He told me he also thought it was one of the best songs he's ever composed but that it was difficult to play it solo, hence his not playing it... bummer. I heard half of that song on a "independent" radio station one night ages ago, managed to record like 20 seconds of it (on tape, was that looong ago), loved it but didn't have the title, and no google then to do a search by lyrics. And few people listened to him in my country, certainly no one around me. I recognized his voice (I was quite taken with everything British then, would spend my allowance on imported Smash Hits and listen to the BBC Top 40 on the AM radio, lots of static, the sshhhs ended up being too much for me!) but that was all my info. A while after I went to the only record shop in my area that had his music and out of the Lloyd Cole cd's they had I tried to guess which had a title in it that could be my mystery song. I bet on "Love story" and my father bought it to me... it wasn't in it. Much later I remembered and googled it, finally found it, finally listened to it in full. When you have that story with a song, it's serious :)
Just lately heard Camera Obscura' explain that their song "Lloyd, I'm ready to be heartbroken" (fantastic song) is a reference to him and his famous Are you .... Apparently they sent it to him first thing and turns out his son is a Camera Obscura fan!
And it's a fact we take for granted that these days of Internet magic are so fantastic for music lovers...it was so much harder before. I've been using IMEEM quite a bit lately, pretty fast and has this ton of music, lots of different versions of songs and curious things. It's visually ugly and as far as radio /stats go lastfm is way better. But it has so much more music available. I recently read that this kind of sites (the article specifically mentioned Spotify as an example, which is not available here so I have no clue,but seems to be very popular in Europe), have reduced illegal music traffic by half. Still I doubt copyright owners are happy about it!
Anyway, I owe Lloyd for so many great songs (I'm still discovering some of them, today I listened to "Margo's waltz for the first time -shame on me-, so good, so dispassionately passionate, he was always one of the wisest). I also owe him for quite a lot of improvement of my English, after so many hours fighting to understand his lyrics, my Collins beside me...
I uploaded a few vids of his performance on my youtube channel.
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