My Bag (Lloyd Cole and the Commotions song)
1987 song by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions
"My Bag" is a song by British band Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, released in 1987 as the lead single from their third and final studio album Mainstream (1987). The song was written by the band and produced by Ian Stanley. It peaked at number 46 in the UK Singles Chart and remained in the top 75 for three weeks.
Background
Musically, "My Bag" was written as a group effort by the band and originated from several other song ideas which were never fully developed. Cole's lyrics were largely inspired by the cocaine-addicted narrator of American author Jay McInerney's 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City. In a 1987 interview with Sounds, he revealed, "I actually thought that in 'My Bag' I'd recovered some of the reckless, careless writing that I used to do in things like 'Perfect Skin'. I wrote it when I was drunk one night. It's basically about a coked up stockbroker. I took most of the scenarios from Bright Lights, Big City 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."
Bassist Lawrence Donegan told The Journal in 1987, "It's about a cocaine freak.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q117305751. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1987 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “My Bag (Lloyd Cole and the Commotions song)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.