Mainstream is the third and final studio album by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. It was produced by Ian Stanley and released by Polydor Records in the UK and by Capitol Records in the US on 26 October 1987. It included the singles "My Bag", "Jennifer She Said" and "From the Hip". Although the album reached number nine in the UK, it failed to chart in the US and was not embraced by all critics: Mainstream is the only Lloyd Cole and the Commotions album not to sell at least 100,000 copies in the US.
Recording
Finding a producer proved difficult for the band. They first went with Chris Thomas, when that did not work out they brought in Stewart Copeland. With Copeland they only recorded one track, "Hey Rusty", then finally found Ian Stanley, famous for his work with Tears For Fears.
Bass player Lawrence Donegan reflected in 2004 that "with the previous LP, Easy Pieces, we had tried to broaden out and make more of a pop record and it hadn't really worked. It sounded rushed and the songs were not all up to standard. So, a year after Easy Pieces, we went into the studio to try and make something more powerful. But the LP that we actually made took so long that we lost our initial vision by the time we finished it. The songs that Lloyd was writing were more introspective, so the stadium rock idea gradually went out the window."
Mainstream cost £300,000, ten times as much as their 1984 debut album Rattlesnakes, and took five months to record. Keyboardist Blair Cowan had already left the group by the time the album came out (hence his picture is missing from the photographs of the band that feature on the artwork, and only included on a 'dedication' to him on the inner sleeve) and Donegan was also close to calling it a day, having been accepted on a journalism course. As a result the group decided that they had come to a natural end and to split up after the release of the album, but were obliged to promote it and undertake a tour first, which took a year. After the Commotions broke up, Cole moved to New York to resume his songwriting partnership with Cowan and joined up with Fred Maher and Robert Quine, both former associates of Lou Reed, to begin work on a solo career.
Composition
The album's opening track and lead single, "My Bag", contains several allusions to cocaine. Cole said, "I wrote [the song] when I was drunk one night. It's basically about a coked up stockbroker. I took most of the scenarios from that song from Big Lights, Bright City [sic] or things that I'd heard like some executive that we've dealt with getting a phone call from another part of the office saying, 'Come upstairs, it's snowing' which of course meant a whole load of new coke was in. I thought 'a multi-story snowstorm' was quite a nice way to start a song." On the track "From the Hip", Cole laments over his helplessness in combating violence and abuse. "Jennifer She Said" has a Mark Knopfler-like guitar break and is about a newlywed who has lost interest and "last forever love that leads to a tattoo".
"Mr. Malcontent" is based on the character played by Daniel Day-Lewis in My Beautiful Laundrette and is about someone who would rather waste time than face the world. "Sean Penn Blues" is a "cheeky [and] upbeat" tune and "recover[s] the sly wit" of the band's earlier material. The track was inspired by an incident that Cole had read about in which the actor Sean Penn was invited to a poetry reading which turned out to be set up purely to mock him. The song opens with dialogue featuring the voices of Scottish actors Robbie Coltrane and Katy Murphy, taken from the BBC television comedy-drama series Tutti Frutti which had been broadcast seven months before the release of Mainstream.
"Hey Rusty", the one track produced by Stewart Copeland of the Police, has a "Springsteen-like theme and a U2-like musical track". "These Days" has a bassline copied from a track on Mister Heartbreak by Laurie Anderson and has been called "gorgeous [and] melancholic".