Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
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Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
Julian Cope:
What can you say? A man with heroic powers of self invention, a man who was obviously told by someone as a kid that he could be what ever he wanted to be and believed them.
Terms like Renaissance Man and Polymath don’t often get bandied about pop stars without people falling off their chairs, but he is a real communicator of his passions whether they be unjustly forgotten pop stars and styles of music out of fashion or stone circles and eco-protest.
What ever he does he seems to do with 100% dedication and focus whether it be power walking around Staffordshire, investigating neolithic monuments or wearing dubious leather clothing. His changes of direction can seem baffling and capricious, but looking back there is a sort of magnificent arc to his story.
As a writer he has written two huge and handsome tomes on Megalithic sites in the UK and Europe and whist he may be a bit embarrassed by some of the crank theories he gave an airing to in them now they are still remarkable pieces of work. He was one of the leading re-popularisers of Krautrock with his book Krautrock Sampler and he has tried to do the same with Japrock. He has also written Copendium an anthology of his writing on underground rock music that he has published on his own website over the years:
https://www.headheritage.co.uk
He has written probably the greatest autobiographies by any rock star ever, not a wide field of excellence but his writing voice is impossibly engaging, funny and honest.
He was the driving force behind the release of a compilation of Scott Walker’s music - Fire Escape in the Sky The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker - when it looked like he was drifting into irrelevance.
He was a presence, in the form of Sqwubbsy obviously, in the protests during the dog end years of Thatcherism.
And we still haven’t talked about his musical legacy from Read It in Books with the Crucial Three to his latest albums.
It is easy enough to google up something should you wish to hear it and I can’t believe anyone who is reading this is unaware of his body of work. When I wanted to get a copy of Fried in the mid 80s I had to travel to London and spend a stupid amount of money on a white label copy without a sleeve, money well spent. Now all you need to do is get ye to You Tube.
He became a pop star by accident and shrugged it off. Many of us will be able to remember how he escaped from queasy clutches of Smash Hits trying to make him a teeny bop heart throb.
He did one of the best gigs I have ever seen in the early 90s 2 hours plus of glorious music and Mellotrons. He is a great live performer because he is simply unbelievably comfortable and charismatic on stage.
Commanding Glastonbury from Yggdrasil his home made mike stand that he could climb up.
Having honey licked off his chest at the Queen’s hall in Edinburgh
Striding into the crowd in Shephard’s Bush in 2000 to eject a heckler and give him his money back.
There was an interview with him in Guardian late last year where he was pictured thusly:
This occasioned some ribald comments about wearing his stage gear in such incongruous surroundings until someone commented that they had seen him filling up the family car in Marlborough the week before dressed exactly the same gear. Total commitment to being Julian Cope at all times.
What a Drude!
1986
2014
What can you say? A man with heroic powers of self invention, a man who was obviously told by someone as a kid that he could be what ever he wanted to be and believed them.
Terms like Renaissance Man and Polymath don’t often get bandied about pop stars without people falling off their chairs, but he is a real communicator of his passions whether they be unjustly forgotten pop stars and styles of music out of fashion or stone circles and eco-protest.
What ever he does he seems to do with 100% dedication and focus whether it be power walking around Staffordshire, investigating neolithic monuments or wearing dubious leather clothing. His changes of direction can seem baffling and capricious, but looking back there is a sort of magnificent arc to his story.
As a writer he has written two huge and handsome tomes on Megalithic sites in the UK and Europe and whist he may be a bit embarrassed by some of the crank theories he gave an airing to in them now they are still remarkable pieces of work. He was one of the leading re-popularisers of Krautrock with his book Krautrock Sampler and he has tried to do the same with Japrock. He has also written Copendium an anthology of his writing on underground rock music that he has published on his own website over the years:
https://www.headheritage.co.uk
He has written probably the greatest autobiographies by any rock star ever, not a wide field of excellence but his writing voice is impossibly engaging, funny and honest.
He was the driving force behind the release of a compilation of Scott Walker’s music - Fire Escape in the Sky The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker - when it looked like he was drifting into irrelevance.
He was a presence, in the form of Sqwubbsy obviously, in the protests during the dog end years of Thatcherism.
And we still haven’t talked about his musical legacy from Read It in Books with the Crucial Three to his latest albums.
It is easy enough to google up something should you wish to hear it and I can’t believe anyone who is reading this is unaware of his body of work. When I wanted to get a copy of Fried in the mid 80s I had to travel to London and spend a stupid amount of money on a white label copy without a sleeve, money well spent. Now all you need to do is get ye to You Tube.
He became a pop star by accident and shrugged it off. Many of us will be able to remember how he escaped from queasy clutches of Smash Hits trying to make him a teeny bop heart throb.
He did one of the best gigs I have ever seen in the early 90s 2 hours plus of glorious music and Mellotrons. He is a great live performer because he is simply unbelievably comfortable and charismatic on stage.
Commanding Glastonbury from Yggdrasil his home made mike stand that he could climb up.
Having honey licked off his chest at the Queen’s hall in Edinburgh
Striding into the crowd in Shephard’s Bush in 2000 to eject a heckler and give him his money back.
There was an interview with him in Guardian late last year where he was pictured thusly:
This occasioned some ribald comments about wearing his stage gear in such incongruous surroundings until someone commented that they had seen him filling up the family car in Marlborough the week before dressed exactly the same gear. Total commitment to being Julian Cope at all times.
What a Drude!
1986
2014
Moorcock, Moorcock, Michael Moorcock, you fervently moan.
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- jimboo
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
I love the guy , for all the reasons listed above. Always interesting and entertaining.
If I jerk- the handle jerk- the handle you'll thrill me and thrill me
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
I just love Julian Cope - I have everything the great man has ever produced
This is one of my favourite Cope albums
Here's a very robust track from the said platter
ROCK DRUDE!
.
This is one of my favourite Cope albums
Here's a very robust track from the said platter
ROCK DRUDE!
.
mudshark wrote:Where is he anyway, that very soft lad?
- The Modernist
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
Did anyone read his new novel?
- C
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
Copehead wrote:2014
Notice the Neu! T shirt
The lad's got taste
Yes, the lad's got taste
.
mudshark wrote:Where is he anyway, that very soft lad?
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
loved the Teardrop Explodes, cant be arsed with his solo stuff
So Long Kid, Take A Bow.
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
BCB Cup Winner 2011 wrote:Did anyone read his new novel?
Yep.
It was as you might expect really. I was't blown away, but it was fun.
We saw him supported by my mate Urthona (playing as Atlantis? one of the bands from the novel) just before Christmas and he was as charismatic as ever.
The mrs reckons the beard makes him look like Matthew Kelly though
Hmmm
I've been talking about writing a book - 25 years of TEFL - for a few years now. I've got it in me.
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
Everybody needs to hear these:
Beautiful Love
Try Try Try
Bill Drummond Says
I Come From Another Planet Baby
World Shut Your Mouth
Head Hang Low
Shot Down
Double Vegetation
Matt 'interesting' Wilson wrote:So I went from looking at the "I'm a Man" riff, to showing how the rave up was popular for awhile.
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
Fried and St Julian are essential.
20 Mothers has some great tunes, Don't Take Roots and Wheelbarrow Man spring to mind.
I've enjoyed his writings more than his music since the mid '90s though.
I am reliably informed that he is a great chap 'in real life' too and I can confirm that his daughter Avalon is a charming young lady - she does his merch.
20 Mothers has some great tunes, Don't Take Roots and Wheelbarrow Man spring to mind.
I've enjoyed his writings more than his music since the mid '90s though.
I am reliably informed that he is a great chap 'in real life' too and I can confirm that his daughter Avalon is a charming young lady - she does his merch.
I've been talking about writing a book - 25 years of TEFL - for a few years now. I've got it in me.
Paid anghofio fod dy galon yn y chwyldro
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
Stupid Giraffe wrote:I like Safesurfer. World Shut Your Mouth is shit.
Ridiculous comment it is obviously one of the greatest pop songs ever written.
How can someone not like that?
If you are talking about albums ( not that there is an album called Safesurfer ) then it is one of his worst.
Moorcock, Moorcock, Michael Moorcock, you fervently moan.
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
Copehead wrote:Stupid Giraffe wrote:I like Safesurfer. World Shut Your Mouth is shit.
Ridiculous comment it is obviously one of the greatest pop songs ever written.
How can someone not like that?
I don't know. It's great.
Matt 'interesting' Wilson wrote:So I went from looking at the "I'm a Man" riff, to showing how the rave up was popular for awhile.
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
Copehead wrote:
How can someone not like that?
While I don't like everything he does, when JC is good (World Shut and Peggy suicide being two off the top of my head), he is great indeed. HIs two autobiogs - Head On and Repossessed are also well worth a few hours of any one's time
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
Stupid Giraffe wrote:Jeemo wrote:loved the Teardrop Explodes, cant be arsed with his solo stuff
Same here. Diminishing returns - not helped by him being a cunt.
Why's he a cunt? I rather like him -a genuine eccentric.
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
I suppose if you're on 'Team Mac' or Team Wylie' ...
I've been talking about writing a book - 25 years of TEFL - for a few years now. I've got it in me.
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
I was hooked on JC after seeing the Teardrop Explodes on Top of the Pops in 1981. I must say it has been a particularly rough ride for the past decade-and-a-half.
I think I should have listened a bit more carefully to the endless witless impromptu monologues emerging from live versions of 'Sleeping Gas' in the Teardrop Explodes days, because they showed that beloved Julian not only lacks a quality filter at times, he sometimes cannot even find the 'off' switch.
Entire albums post-1997 leave me cold. What sort of person puts a 16-minute dirge like 'The Armenian Genocide' as third track on an album? And the live spoken word performance of his Modern Antiquarian books was just shouty sloganeering drivel.
That's not to deny that the books themselves are excellent, and that pretty much everything he did up to 1996's Interpreter ranges from listenable to wonderfully joyously essential.
But since then, and that's getting on for 20 years, I find a serious lack of joy or even direction in his releases. Here's part of a review of You Got A Problem With Me from Anthony Jay in 2012 that says it better than I could:
"Julian Cope is capable of writing some of the most melodious, catchy AND meaningful pop music anyone could wish to hear. The mystery behind the man and subsequent albums like 'You Gotta Problem With Me' is therefore why he deliberately chooses not to. Its as if Cope feels that songs with a recognizable tune or pop sensibility lose their lyrical power because the listener is distracted away from his always passionate (and often angry) lyrics by musical hooks. In this, Cope does not do himself justice for those of us who love him are ALWAYS aware that he is a man with plenty to say and thus no matter how he dresses his songs we ARE listening!
And so 'the man who could easily be king' continues to release albums like this. 'You Gotta Problem With Me' is a difficult beast to love. One of Cope's finest in places all too often Julian decides to sabotage his own work by deliberately making songs like 'Beyond Rome' as hard to enjoy as possible. Tuneless, with its production sound rather like that of a demo session taped in a cave and with his vocals almost impossible to pick out of the mush Cope does his best to alienate his listeners to, one can only assume, his personal delight. In fact, most of this album has an 'eclectic' style of production. Most of the songs here revolve around a guitar riff and many sound like 'unfinished demos' rather than completed works. Whether this is down to sheer arrogance on Cope's part or by design only those who know the man can tell but with a more polished and musically friendly approach 'You Gotta' could easily have turned into a classic."
I think I should have listened a bit more carefully to the endless witless impromptu monologues emerging from live versions of 'Sleeping Gas' in the Teardrop Explodes days, because they showed that beloved Julian not only lacks a quality filter at times, he sometimes cannot even find the 'off' switch.
Entire albums post-1997 leave me cold. What sort of person puts a 16-minute dirge like 'The Armenian Genocide' as third track on an album? And the live spoken word performance of his Modern Antiquarian books was just shouty sloganeering drivel.
That's not to deny that the books themselves are excellent, and that pretty much everything he did up to 1996's Interpreter ranges from listenable to wonderfully joyously essential.
But since then, and that's getting on for 20 years, I find a serious lack of joy or even direction in his releases. Here's part of a review of You Got A Problem With Me from Anthony Jay in 2012 that says it better than I could:
"Julian Cope is capable of writing some of the most melodious, catchy AND meaningful pop music anyone could wish to hear. The mystery behind the man and subsequent albums like 'You Gotta Problem With Me' is therefore why he deliberately chooses not to. Its as if Cope feels that songs with a recognizable tune or pop sensibility lose their lyrical power because the listener is distracted away from his always passionate (and often angry) lyrics by musical hooks. In this, Cope does not do himself justice for those of us who love him are ALWAYS aware that he is a man with plenty to say and thus no matter how he dresses his songs we ARE listening!
And so 'the man who could easily be king' continues to release albums like this. 'You Gotta Problem With Me' is a difficult beast to love. One of Cope's finest in places all too often Julian decides to sabotage his own work by deliberately making songs like 'Beyond Rome' as hard to enjoy as possible. Tuneless, with its production sound rather like that of a demo session taped in a cave and with his vocals almost impossible to pick out of the mush Cope does his best to alienate his listeners to, one can only assume, his personal delight. In fact, most of this album has an 'eclectic' style of production. Most of the songs here revolve around a guitar riff and many sound like 'unfinished demos' rather than completed works. Whether this is down to sheer arrogance on Cope's part or by design only those who know the man can tell but with a more polished and musically friendly approach 'You Gotta' could easily have turned into a classic."
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
i find him tedious. a couple of good years but, like LMG, it all petered out.
next!
next!
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
Sometimes , I think that because of the music he has championed over the years he feels like he has to follow the same path. He himself isn't easily or naturally the kind of artist he so admires.
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
jimboo wrote:Sometimes , I think that because of the music he has championed over the years he feels like he has to follow the same path. He himself isn't easily or naturally the kind of artist he so admires.
I was just thinking along the same lines. There's an idea that just because you can write perfect pop that is what you should want to do. Cope clearly would rather plough his own unique furrow. He doesn't need the hits to pay the mortgage anymore.
I've been talking about writing a book - 25 years of TEFL - for a few years now. I've got it in me.
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
Deebank wrote:jimboo wrote:Sometimes , I think that because of the music he has championed over the years he feels like he has to follow the same path. He himself isn't easily or naturally the kind of artist he so admires.
I was just thinking along the same lines. There's an idea that just because you can write perfect pop that is what you should want to do. Cope clearly would rather plough his own unique furrow. He doesn't need the hits to pay the mortgage anymore.
Are you sure you understand what he wrote?
Matt 'interesting' Wilson wrote:So I went from looking at the "I'm a Man" riff, to showing how the rave up was popular for awhile.
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Re: Beyond the BCB 130- Julian Cope
LMG wrote:I was hooked on JC after seeing the Teardrop Explodes on Top of the Pops in 1981. I must say it has been a particularly rough ride for the past decade-and-a-half.
I think I should have listened a bit more carefully to the endless witless impromptu monologues emerging from live versions of 'Sleeping Gas' in the Teardrop Explodes days, because they showed that beloved Julian not only lacks a quality filter at times, he sometimes cannot even find the 'off' switch.
Entire albums post-1997 leave me cold. What sort of person puts a 16-minute dirge like 'The Armenian Genocide' as third track on an album? And the live spoken word performance of his Modern Antiquarian books was just shouty sloganeering drivel.
That's not to deny that the books themselves are excellent, and that pretty much everything he did up to 1996's Interpreter ranges from listenable to wonderfully joyously essential.
But since then, and that's getting on for 20 years, I find a serious lack of joy or even direction in his releases. Here's part of a review of You Got A Problem With Me from Anthony Jay in 2012 that says it better than I could:
"Julian Cope is capable of writing some of the most melodious, catchy AND meaningful pop music anyone could wish to hear. The mystery behind the man and subsequent albums like 'You Gotta Problem With Me' is therefore why he deliberately chooses not to. Its as if Cope feels that songs with a recognizable tune or pop sensibility lose their lyrical power because the listener is distracted away from his always passionate (and often angry) lyrics by musical hooks. In this, Cope does not do himself justice for those of us who love him are ALWAYS aware that he is a man with plenty to say and thus no matter how he dresses his songs we ARE listening!
And so 'the man who could easily be king' continues to release albums like this. 'You Gotta Problem With Me' is a difficult beast to love. One of Cope's finest in places all too often Julian decides to sabotage his own work by deliberately making songs like 'Beyond Rome' as hard to enjoy as possible. Tuneless, with its production sound rather like that of a demo session taped in a cave and with his vocals almost impossible to pick out of the mush Cope does his best to alienate his listeners to, one can only assume, his personal delight. In fact, most of this album has an 'eclectic' style of production. Most of the songs here revolve around a guitar riff and many sound like 'unfinished demos' rather than completed works. Whether this is down to sheer arrogance on Cope's part or by design only those who know the man can tell but with a more polished and musically friendly approach 'You Gotta' could easily have turned into a classic."
there is definitely an element of pleasing himself in the albums he did when he cam back from his Modern Antiquarian years.
they are far less poppy, far more underground influenced and far less enjoyable.
Every so often the humour and catchiness poke through and you get a gem like,
but much of it is like endless retreads of Skellingon and Ye Skellington Chronicles
But in my view he has earned it
If that is what he wants to do then fair play
Moorcock, Moorcock, Michael Moorcock, you fervently moan.
Bear baiting & dog fights a speciality.
Bear baiting & dog fights a speciality.