Search and Destroy : Julian Cope

Destroy -- _My Nation Underground_ was a *dreadful* mistake...

Destroy: 'Reward' -The Teardrop Explodes - Suddenly and inexplicably popular on BCC trailers, sports clips etc.

DESTROY- My Nation Underground. Yucko. Find Interpreter overproduced, but can live with it. I'm also afraid of Brain Donor, yet will purchase it anyway, as it might be so spectacularly bad that it will be great somehow.

Destroy: My Nation Underground

I say to Julian .... Ride On !!!

Long may he continue to entertain. Good value live too and when the records were good they were sublime.

Destroy: That bloody endless Mellotron two chord solo.

destroy: the non-believers.... jus' kiddin'

seriously, julian is something you have to wrap your mind around to understand the whole trip... a very accessable bloke as well. top shelf, my fave.

Destroy: My Nation Underground, Saint Julian, Autogeddon

Bill Drummond Said: "Julian Cope's vast talent has never been stretched ... Nobody who has worked with him has had the bollocks to tell him, 'Julian, it's a load of shite, go back and do it properly' ... To have that sort of talent and waste it is a crime against creation."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/radcliffe/

Has anyone seen him play recently? Any good?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/

Genius squanders. It's a well known fact.

Autogeddon is fab.

Destroy: There is little I would literally destroy but much that I never listen to: _Floored Genius 2_ and everything from _My Nation Underground_ onward.

http://www.thewire.co.uk/images/artists/cope_julian/COVER309.jpg

oh dear

Incredibly giant version: http://www.thewire.co.uk/images.php?imageID=2779

His hair is bad.

God loves Helvetica.

I am not a fan of Cope's music, but I can't help but admire the man. He always makes me smile. I love his purple prose writings.

I notice the Wire describes how he took two acid tabs to celebrate (or get over) his 50th birthday. He took a dose of salvia this past summer ("the doors it opened took a very long time to close again"). As a result of which he has temporarily stopped driving his car: "he says he saw a wasp on the windscreen and tried to squash it with his finger, and inadvertently poked a hole right through the glass".

I didn't think the effects of salvia were that extreme.

he's starting to look like Don Bolles

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3043/2815187723_7b229622f6.jpg

A lot of posters seem to respect the man but slight the music. Which is fine, but I love the music to death. Sure, he's terribly uneven, but I'm a sucker for unadorned guitar pop perfection, and most everything he's released contains a couple classics (kinda like Robyn Hitchcock or GBV/Pollard in that sense). Seek the Julian Cope EP (w/ "World Shut Your Mouth"), Fried and Peggy Suicide for starters. And work out from there. A few favorites:

Reynard the Fox
Bill Drummond Said
Sunspots
Elegant Chaos
Head Hang Low
World Shut Your Mouth
Warwick the Kingmaker
Spacehopper
Jellypop Perky Jean
Hanging Out and Hung Up On the Line
Safesurfer
Head
Upwards at 45 Degrees
The Tower
Don't Call Me Mark Chapman
s*t*a*r*c*a*r
Senile Git

And the Citizen Cain'd LP (I no) is pretty goddam great, as far as heavy-duty Stooges/High-Rise worship goes.

I really like the album "Interpreter". Maybe it's unfair to call it his Brit-pop album, but it does have some musical and production similarities with other albums of the time, like "Different Class" or "Denim on Ice". It's eclectic, well produced pop music that is very seductive because of the idiocyncratic author and some more interesting influences than most pop records at the time.

A lot of posters seem to respect the man but slight the music.

I realise that I wrote above that I'm "not a fan of his music". That was rather sloppy of me. I should have said that I've not yet gotten to know his music. I actually reckon he'd be right up my alley. So thanks for the recommendations. The Citizen Cain'd LP especially sounds perfect.

He played a couple of solo shows in Italy last week and I'm told they were beautiful affairs (friend band Father Murphy supported him in Rome).
Cope on acoustic guitar, casiotone and piano, a lot of old and new favourites, including Teardrop Explodes stuff like You Disappear From View.

Screaming Secrets:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysbtAOtF-w8

Pristeen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj5tizDPubg&feature=related

Citizen Cain'd is great. It includes two brilliant lengthy songs in a kind of perfected heavy ecstatic Neil Young vein: "I Will Be Absorbed" and "Feels Like A Crying Shame".

Contenderizer OTM- his every record has duds, but his way with a killer hook is too seldom noted.

I must say I quite liked last year's Black Sheep. A very good acoustic-tinged album, with more than a few nods to Jehovakill and Fried.

so, no one loves Autogeddon, then? I'm about 5-6 albums deep & thinking of picking up that one (or 20 Mothers) next

Autogeddon's no Jehovahkill, but it's decent enough imo. This was a pretty bizarre Top Of The Pops appearance from that era:

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

Autogeddon has more than a couple of good songs - I even like Starcar, that's nothing more than a blatant rip-off of Maggot Brain.

There's a lot of filler in 20 Mothers, but I listened to it a lot at the time and again there is more than a nice pop song.

I always loved Robert Mitchum. Not sure if it's on an album, but it was done for a Radio 1 session as tribute to Pete de Freitas.

I remember a funny interview Cope did about the time of Autogeddon, admitting that he'd very recently learnt to drive, and was really enjoying his new-found driving freedoms.

Planetary Sit-In seems like another stab at it

Anyway, he did do TOTP. with Try*3 and he looked happy doing it

Little did I know!

Planetary Sit-In is more spacey-hippy-dude than upfront poppy; the Interpreter album overall is pretty accessible though!

Well I for one remember hearing it on the radio and thinking it was going to be a bigger hit than it was. Definitely sounds to me like he had a hit single mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd5Fmb17jjY

in

I bought St. Julian on the strength of a newspaper review and goddamn if it wasn't the most amazing thing I'd ever heard -- both just like the classic rock I was listening to and also totally not -- it rewired me

― Guayaquil (eephus!),

otm – and I only heard it a decade ago

Check out the CD version, "Radio Sit-in". Very daft.

... and in a cabinet close to the exit an arrangement of football shirts with green-and-white hoops: Glasgow’s Celtic FC, of course. Like Edinburgh’s Hibernian, Celtic FC came into being during the late 1880s, in celebration of Scotland’s ancient Irish roots.

... if you ever needed definitive proof that Julian Cope had long ago lost his marbles.

Has anyone heard the Vesuvio album? Apparently this was a real album fleshed out from a fictional band mentioned in one of his books, a guitar drone record with Stephen O'Malley and Slomo's Holy McGrail.

https://www.headheritage.co.uk/merchandiser/item/TRCD06/

At least one track on SoubdCloud, CD still available. I skipped it, I'm not down with his sludge metal stuff.

Yeah I saw it was still available on his site, honestly more interested because of O'Malley than Cope himself, though I am a sucker for fictional albums fleshed out to become real things (cf Fucked Up).

I keep buying his new albums, but the returns... are diminishing. Wish he would actually try and record a proper album in a studio again with like a band and a producer.

There's rumors of a big Teardrop Explodes box set this year, though. Which could be fun.

Would it be fair to say he's not released a properly worthwhile album since Interpreter

I mean, John Balance Enters Valhalla was fun I guess

Citizen Cain’d is song-based and fantastic

yeah but that was eighteen years and seven albums ago

Yeah he honestly lost me around the turn of the millennium. I liked the Head Heritage music discussions for a good stretch there but eventually drifted away.

I really like Revolutionary Suicide

Like the last decade has been interesting but in a pinch I'd still rather hear even My Nation Underground

i saw JC live a few days after MNU had been released.
the hardcore fans at the front were singing along to one of the tracks, and JC said : 'how do you know the words !?'
of course the best part of the gig was when he went absolutely mad during the Reynard The Fox.
the venue, (Leeds Univerity Refectory), had this balcony, so during the instrumental section, he climbed up the speaker stack, got onto the balcony, and than ran all over the place.
gets to the central section of the balcony and leans over and starts shouting/singing re reynard.
it was one of the best gigs i had ever seen.

has MNU ever been reissued ?

Nah, Cope hates it and is unlikely to revisit in with a deluxe edition or whatever... I guess Island could do it without him.

thats what i thought.
not heard it in years as i bought it on cassette.

I too own My Nation Underground on cassette, and I love it! Had no idea JC was not into it but we all have our quirks.

Playing it now. Is that... a vibraslap on 5 O'Clock World???

It's an excellent album - title track and Charlotte Anne esp.

(A weird comparison to make as they're nothing alike musically but in terms of discography replacement/neglect it's sorta Julian's The Burning World)

Interpreter is exactly where I stopped with my Cope collection.

I don't want to go too hard on the post-Interpreter era because I really do love some of it (the drone trilogy Queen Elizabeth, Odin, and Woden for example) but really how do you top a run of albums like Peggy Suicide -> Jehovahkill -> Autogeddon -> 20 Mothers -> Interpreter?

With the two Teardrops Albums + World Shut Your Mouth + Fried + St. Julian but that's just me

“I will be absorbed by the river” and “feels like a cryin shame” are as good as anything he ever did

But as pointed out, citizen cain’d was a long time ago too

And in the days of LP those two songs could have made a whole album almost

Peggy Suicide -> Jehovahkill -> Autogeddon -> 20 Mothers -> Interpreter

I mean, this was exactly the run where I first dipped my toes in, but yeah... such a fantastic run.

Which is to say I understand CC has its share of filler but the core is v v nugatory

Peggy Suicide -> Jehovahkill -> Autogeddon -> 20 Mothers -> Interpreter?

There should be a name for this era. When he became full archdruid making fantastic multihued earth-conscious concept records but still had hit albums and hit singles. It's the period I've always been the biggest fan of.

yeah, it's like the era of overlap between his pop star and drude phases

It's like the opposite of Abacab-era Genesis

(aka the best era of Genesis)

I too own My Nation Underground on cassette, and I love it! Had no idea JC was not into it but we all have our quirks.

lol I saw this thread in SNA and I thought, I'm going to post about how I regularly put on my cassette copy of My Nation Underground while putting away laundry ... and yeah! It's really fucking good!

xp that is indeed the best era of Genesis

I gotta say there is one blemish in that imperial drude phase and its name is autogeddon

Hey wait is “Charlotte Anne” a pun on “charlatan”?

Sure is. (Or at least I have always assumed it was.)

I gotta say there is one blemish in that imperial drude phase and its name is autogeddon

― realistic pillow (Jon not Jon), Monday, 30 January 2023 20:12 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

but it rules

I like the song where he brains a fucker but it’s mostly dud for me

Autogeddon is kind of crucial in two different sequences of Copework - it's a self-consciously "minor" album after Peggy and Jehovah, keeping a similar crew of regular players and ambitious songwriting, but with less production and more focused themes to the writing - which paves the way for the similar restricted instrumentation and non-fussy production of 20 Mothers - which broadly takes a more positive approach to themes than the 'hovakill->'geddon sequence, and continues up to the outright "fuck it, pop star!" vibe of Interpreter. (The sonic approach of Autogeddon also suits the lyrical concept, ofc.)

But it's also the culmination of an extremely minimal detour with Rite and Skellington 2 - it works as a final chapter in that trilogy, as a bridge back to fully-arranged songs, or as a grounding/reset after the two major-label double-albums.

This looks interesting -

https://superdeluxeedition.com/news/the-teardrop-explodes-culture-bunker-1978-82/