The English-born Lloyd Cole first began plying his singularly literate pop vision while attending college in Glasgow, where he formed Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. The quintet's 1984 debut album, RATTLESNAKES (which New Musical Express named one of the Top 50 Albums of the 80s) is now acknowledged as a pop landmark, and the group continued to reap trans-Atlantic commercial and critical success with the subsequent releases EASY PIECES (1985) and MAINSTREAM (1988). Cole released his first solo album, appropriately titled LLOYD COLE, in 1990, following it a year later with the ambitious half-pop, half-orchestral DON'T GET WEIRD ON ME, BABE.
BAD VIBES, his Rykodisc debut, marked a new step forward for an artist who'd already earned his stripes with such trademark tunes as "Perfect Skin," "Are You Ready to be Heartbroken", "Forest Fire," "Lost Weekend" and "She's a Girl and I'm a Man." Cole, who resides in Manhattan with his wife and son, laid groundwork for the album with a series of solo club dates. Those intimate performances revealed him to be at the top of his form as both a songwriter and a performer, and created a demand for a similar series of acoustic evenings to celebrate the album's release.
Source: http://www.rykodisc.com/Catalog/CatalogArtist_01.asp?Action=Get&Artist_ID=35
