Julian Cope: Live Review

 

I was once involved in a comedy group. I rarely went onstage, but sometimes my musical ‘talents’ were harnessed, and once there was a request in that field for me to sing a song by Julian Cope, in the background to a sketch which may or may not have involved the others in the group dressed up as moles planning to take over the world. I’m also a bit fuzzy on which Cope song it was (though I’d like to think it was the gem below) but it was my first encounter with Cope. It struck a relationship that never really broke the level of acquaintance, but was nevertheless buoyed by occasional appearances on Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone – Sunday nights on Radio 6, quite the best show on radio for experiencing such ephemera. So when I was whittling through the Manchester last.fm listings, it struck me that it can’t be that often that Cope performs any more, and I petitioned Scenewipe for a ticket.

I should have trusted my intuition – or at least just read the Ruby Lounge event listing better. I don’t know if others in the audience made the same mistake as me, but Cope was in Manchester (ahead of London and just behind Glasgow) to promote his new book, Compendium. As the plan for the evening was relayed to us by Cope himself, strutting onstage in his armless leather jacket, sunglasses and military beret cap, it became clear that I wasn’t going to hear “Sunspots” after all. A little clarity for those unfamiliar (and the product of some background research on my part, as I fall at least on the edge of that camp): Julian Cope is most famous as the singer-songwriter in Liverpudlian post-punk band The Teardrop Explodes, but has been a collaborator with several other underground acts over the past decades, before turning at least half his attention to writing on European megalithic archaeology, as well as his autobiography and of course, music.

The evening started with Cope in conversation with his publisher at Faber, Lee Brackstone. Brackstone was clearly enamoured with Cope’s writing skill and listed many endorsements from other musicians, but may have found Cope’s interviewee style a bit more tiring. First question: “Why this book?” First answer: “I haven’t got the others finished.” Perhaps slightly more surprising, though just as irritating to a promoter, was Cope’s languid self-deprecation – as a writer anyway, which he called ‘artless’. Using Compendium as a starting point, they still managed to cover quite a lot of ground, from the changing landscape of music production (how off-putting it was to have men in white coats turning the dials whilst in studios pre-90s, and how much better off musicians have it now they have their digital independence) to the reasons for America’s debilitating ‘Christian stasis’ (Hitler and Stalin, in case you were wondering). Once I got over the fact that nothing that came out of Cope’s mouth would be musical, I started to appreciate that he could nonetheless be lyrical. Considering what he must have put his body through in the past, he was very eloquent, even though he did sometimes lose his train of thought – once, in mid-flow discussing the ‘lives of the prophets’, turning pointedly to his stage partner and saying ‘I’ve completely forgotten what I was talking about.’

We also learnt about a forthcoming fiction venture called 131, a novel set in Sardinia during Euro ’90 about a man obsessed with Maradona who forms a rave band. He was at pains to state how carefully it had been researched, but the facet we were to be most educated on was the music, with a DJ performance by De La O (a collaborator from the band The Black Sheep) of the ‘soundtrack’ to the book. I’m not up on my rave music and I still can’t state with any confidence whether this is music created by De La O or some authentic examples from the era, though I would guess at the latter given what seemed to be a relatively wide-range. It’s not the kind of soundtrack you could read the book alongside too – I find it difficult reading along to the most minimalist Philip Glass – but more the music you might expect to feature in a film adaptation. It’s high tempo, effervescent stuff, but with an indie, swing-y feel, plenty of vocals – think early Prodigy.

Less obviously linked to the evening’s literary feel was a performance by drone duo Slomo, described as ‘peak ambient drone’ from the Pennines. Once again I feel unqualified to write on the subject, as my only real point of reference is a gig I saw earlier in the year by solo artist Grouper. So I feel a bit perverse in stating that I thought there was too much going on in Slomo’s offering. On the right, a piece of kit was being manipulated to produce some slow oscillations that gradually grew in intensity until you could literally feel them pressing on your ears. That much I could handle, but there was some strange beast-like wailing sounds lying on top of the undulation that were just distracting. The stage left partner also occasionally brought in some piercing guitars that acted against the purity of the underlying sound. That said, I was annoyed by some people talking nearby (who had come to the admittedly reasonable conclusion that 25 minutes of noise that didn’t do very much shouldn’t preclude them from having a sociable evening) so it must have held some sway over me. Afterwards I was disappointed to find no reason to challenge my sentiment – narrow-minded I’m sure – that this isn’t really music, more of a sonic experiment. Which is fine.

If this all seems a little mis-matched, well, it was. The next two items on the agenda did nothing to collect the threads either. The first was billed as a tour through the underground wilderness of YouTube by Julian Cope, which I admit I was looking forward to, having at least awareness of the delivery mechanism. But overrunning previous acts meant that this was limited to two brilliant videos of the 60s psychedelia band The Pretty Things. Cope told us the exact things we should have been looking for (the ‘sheer earliness’ of the prototypical long hairstyle of singer Phil May, his being upstaged by the drummer who toured the stage with a cymbal in hand, and the confusion of a French TV studio audience as they witnessed what can only be defined as a ‘clown solo’). It was a great introduction and showed Cope in an authoritative and perceptive light. Shame it couldn’t have gone on for longer, as less engaging was the showing of Fido’s Blues, a film documentation of the ‘Joe Strummer Memorial Busking Tour’. This was Cope and his followers busking at the less celebrated spots of historical significance across Great Britain in some sort of atavistic pursuit. Though I appreciate the idea, the soundtrack to the film seemed inane at points; it had nothing to do with the film itself and meant we didn’t even get to hear Cope sing in recorded format.

Earlier in the evening Cope said the evening was for chin-strokers. He also said it was an ‘opportunist rallying point for motherfuckers’ but I’m unsure as to what that means exactly. Chin-strokers however are all well and good, but perhaps I’m just not quite ready enough to get that kind of soft focus. A friend I was in attendance with bought Compendium. Perhaps I would appreciate the evening more after I’ve read it.