The Carleton is exceedingly pleased to announce the return of Lloyd Cole to Halifax for the first time since his Halifax Urban Folk Festival performances in 2011. Lloyd will be doing two, “An Evening With…” shows on Sunday, July 26th and Monday, July 27th at 8 PM each night. Tickets are only $30 advanced or $35 at the door.

Regarded as one of the finest songwriters of his generation, a young Lloyd Cole, along with his band The Commotions, was responsible for some of the most literate music coming out of England in the post-punk days immediately preceding the advent of MTV and MuchMusic. Hits like Perfect Skin, Forest Fire and Brand New Friend from The Commotions’ three albums gave way to a series of excellent solo records before releases with his New York band, The Negatives, and more solo work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVfXT0TomIw

There were stylistic changes over the years but the quality of the songwriting has never flagged and that’s the main reason Lloyd has remained that rarest of writers, one who’s later work stands up to the promise of the talent presented as a young man. This guy has a career.

The album Broken Record was released in 2012 and is uniformly cool, as evidenced by this video for the excellent Writer’s Retreat…

His latest, Standards (which I thought was going to be some kind of lame covers album but isn’t!) was recently released and is terrific too. Here’s the video for Period Piece from that record.