I’ve been reading The White Album. Yeah, you read that properly, this particular White Album being the collection of essays by Joan Didion from 1979. This prompted me to watch the screen version of her novel Play It As It Lays, which in turn prompted me to give Lloyd Cole and The Commotions’ album Rattlesnakes a spin.

In explanation, according to an interview with Lloyd in the Guardian in 2019: ‘The idea for the song Rattlesnakes came from a line in Joan Didion’s book, Play It As It Lays: “Life is a crap game, and there are rattlesnakes under every rock.” ‘

I haven’t read the novel myself, but the movie, a searing depiction of hollow Hollywood, which Didion adapted for the screen along with hubby John Gregory Dunne, is worth a watch, albeit it never absolutely gripped me until the final scene. Early in the movie, the central character does dislodge a rock from the earth it sits on to reveal a rattlesnake. Cut to her randomly firing off shots as she soars down a freeway in the desert. She also tries her luck with a traffic policeman, very likely ‘out of boredom more than spite’, although I’m not sure if her never-born child is still haunting her as she does so, though it is later revealed she has had an abortion.

Maybe I’ll have another look and review it. Maybe I’ll eventually get round to reading the book too.

I could be completely wrong here but I vaguely recall the young Lloyd Cole discussing the possibility of writing a novel himself at some point once his music career had ended. The career is ongoing to this day, and the book I have to assume, if that really was ever a plan, remains unwritten.

Anyway, here is the reference heavy Rattlesnakes:

Like Lloyd, I studied at Glasgow Uni. Kind of. I doubt taking an adult education course in writing radio drama really counts. Again like Lloyd, I never finished the course. Lloyd dropped out of his English literature and philosophy degree due to the blossoming pop success of The Commotions; I bowed out for the slightly less glamorous world of a temp Christmas job at the Glasgow Mail Centre unloading vans filled to the brim with sacks of cards and pressies, the twelve hour shifts – well, it is a busy time there – clashing with the course.

Any radio play by me certainly remains unwritten, albeit one of the ideas that I was working on was later developed and led to me being invited to take part in a year long course run jointly by the BBC and Royal Court Theatre with mentoring and semi-regular meet-ups in London and Manchester. Nothing came of that, though.

The adult education course tutor was author, journalist, former fanzine writer and radio dramatist Beatrice Colin, who was perceptive and highly encouraging. Before writing novels such as The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite and To Capture What We Cannot Keep, Beatrice was also one half of Glasgow based-band April Showers.

I wasn’t living in Scotland when the band emerged and missed out on them completely. I’d guess Billy Sloan would have played them on his Radio Clyde show, but they were never regulars on the live circuit although they did apparently take part in a ‘spontaneous happening’ in the early summer of 1983 in The Venue in Glasgow along with The Primevals, Pastels and headliners Strawberry Switchblade. Sounds like fun, even though I’m not sure just how spontaneous it all was, given it was being advertised beforehand. The debut issue of fanzine Juniper Beri Beri named them the ‘hippest group around just now’ in a Glasgow scene A-Z, while #2 featured an idiosyncratic interview with them, accompanied by the photo above.

Written by Jonathan Bernstein, the other half of April Showers, Abandon Ship is the band’s sole release. Even though it wasn’t a big commercial or critical success, its’ reputation has grown since it was issued in the summer of 1984 – as The Commotions were scoring their first hit with Perfect Skin – and it’s a real favourite with bloggers like The Vinyl Villain.

It’s not hard to see why. Anne Dudley, whose immaculate string arrangements on Rattlesnakes were a key ingredient of that song’s success, produced here and again her work is exemplary. The combination of that lush string section and languid bass with Beatrice’s vulnerable vocal works beautifully. Even little details like that percussive clack is perfect – I’m not sure what instrument that is, it couldn’t be a rattlesnake castanet, could it?

Abandon Ship was included in Gary Crowley’s 4CD Box-set Lost 80s in 2019 and it’s one of those songs that I always have to play at least twice in a row. They really shoulda been contenders.

Another single was to have been released by uber-stylish Brussels label Les Disques du Crépuscule, founded by Michel Duval and Annik Honoré, but this never got beyond the planning stage, which is a real pity.

Jonathan Bernstein went on to work as a film critic for Spin magazine and has published many books. During lockdown, I finally read his Pretty In Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies which acts as a guide to what were dubbed ‘Brat Pack’ films during the 1980s. He writes with an accessible and humorous prose style and even persuaded me to watch some movies like Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off which I’d never had any great interest in seeing beforehand. The book also got me thinking that if a contemporary director with Anglophile tastes like John Hughes had selected the track for one of films of the time, it would have: A) surely sounded perfect for some montage sequence where Molly Ringwald’s character is going out on a fun date with a new boyfriend, played by say Anthony Michael Hall or Andrew McCarthy and falling in love, and, B) The high-profile exposure would have gifted the band a great leg-up and likely sent sales on both sides of the Atlantic rocketing.

Nowadays, like Lloyd Cole, Jonathan lives in America and he continues to write prolifically while, sadly, Beatrice Colin passed away almost five years ago aged 55, after a fight with ovarian cancer, which makes one of the lines in the song especially poignant.