Julian Cope - Black Sheep (2008)

Link

Jon Savage (The Observer Music Monthly)

Julian Cope arrives on my doorstep looking exactly like he does in all his photos. He is wearing leather trousers, heavy boots (it is midsummer) a flowing camo jacket and The Hat. He politely takes his boots off when asked, but The Hat stays on throughout the afternoon - an admirable dedication to image and expectation.

'The way people see you is the way you really are', Cope writes in his memoir of the Liverpool punk scene, Head On. As a self-willed creation - at once fan and critic, author and researcher, rock star and polemicist - he is determined that his appearance should advertise his difference as well as his desire to be a 'cultural irritant'.

Cope is at once consistent and contradictory: the Peace Warrior who is not afraid of an old-fashioned scrap (recent blog targets include Morrissey and Ian McCulloch, as well as organised religion); the wild rock 'n' roller and devoted family man; the avatar of psychedelic excess who has the discipline to sit in a room and write books - six of them to date.

At the age of 50, he is an impressive presence - tall, fit and often, quite literally, in your face, getting up close to make his point. In conversation, he will take a subject and run with it into highly esoteric territory and then surprise you with a surprisingly down-to-earth assessment of his own persona.

Cope might have flirted with derangement - most famously on the cover of his 1984 solo album, Fried, where he is pictured naked in the fields of Middle England with a turtle-shell on his back - but he's as wily as a fox. He knows exactly what's he's doing, which does not denote insincerity. As he says: 'In some ways I'm so fucking straight, but everything is so mythological to me.' It's all part of a curious kind of ludicrous rigour. Which is where The Hat comes in.

Observer Music Monthly Doesn't wearing The Hat all the time cause you problems?

Julian Cope: 'Going to the States, dressed just like this, the first thing is they go for their guns, then they remember that we're in the European Union. I've got to do it; it's essential that I do that. It's what the role-playing is about. Maybe rock 'n' roll isn't music. Maybe people just need to be reminded that the world ain't the way they think it is.'

OMM It looks pretty Germanic. What is it, exactly?

JC 'Actually, it's 1955 Luftwaffe; it's not Nazi. I put the braids on 'cos I thought it made it look heavier. I thought, "I've got to be really careful here, because I'm not a Nazi." When I first started wearing it, a couple of friends said, "why are you wearing that? People will think you're gay." Well, if you're worried that I would be worried, we're going through a pretty dodgy time. In that case, I'll wear it because I want people to think I'm gay.'

Born in October 1957, Cope became adolescent at the mass-cultural moment when rock became something made by outsiders for outsiders - a stray word, a piece of feedback, a great haircut, a guitar drone could suddenly open the door into a different way of looking at the world. It's to his credit that he holds true to that founding vision. 'To rally every black sheep is my goal,' he sings on the title track of his new album, Black Sheep. In a move that will delight fans, he has returned to the melodic folk style of Jehovahkill and Fried, in an attempt to create a conspiracy of outsiders. The booklet for Black Sheep includes a quote from William Blake: 'Create your own system or become enslaved by another man's'.

JC 'What I was trying to do on Black Sheep is to show people what we have got, and what we will lose, if we keep taking it for granted. We've fought for gay people to not get beaten up and called "queer", we've fought for women to be able to walk around in short skirts and not be called "whore". We've fought for people like me, people called Julian, to be complete and total pains in the arse.

'England is amazing. It's only by going out on the peripheries of Europe that you realise we're not a bunch of boring cunts; we've done a bunch of shit that means something to people. Maybe we are meant to be the cultural fly in the ointment. Maybe in 200 years' time, they'll look back and say - they had gay people who were not attacked; they had women walking around with no undies on and they didn't get attacked. I'm fearful that they'll look back and ask themselves what they let go. Are there moments that forge us as black sheep?'

[To OMM:] 'When did you realise you were gay?'

OMM It was seeing the Kinks on TV, doing 'You Really Got Me'. I thought Dave Davies was a girl. There they were dressed up, really effete, but they rocked so hard.

JC 'See, that's going to fuck you up for ever.'

Cope's own crucible of difference happened in October 1966. Black Sheep contains a very moving poem called 'The Aberfan Disaster', when 'a hundred and sixteen kids my age were all buried alive'. It ends with a slow incantation from the dead children: 'Just live every minute/It's life so live in it/Or we'll come and haunt you.'

OMM Why did Aberfan mark you so much?

JC 'I was staying in Bargoed, which is just over the hill. The reason I was there was I was having half-term early, so I was at my Nan's. You remember the outside broadcasts. How often was there daytime TV in the Sixties? That's when the world became heavy for me, when I was nine. You see pictures of me afterwards and I look very stern. It made me really fascinated by dying.'

Cope's sense of difference and hostility to organised religion - 'With God I went to war,' he writes. 'I thought, "how could he take so many?"' - continued through his adolescence in Tamworth in Staffordshire. 'I'd spent my childhood thinking bad things, bad things every day,' he wrote. 'It had made me sick, but it had made me determined.'

His final detachment from the world of parental expectation came at the age of 20. He'd gone to Merseyside to attend a teacher-training college and instead found himself involved in the Liverpool punk scene. He was not alone, finding like-minded souls such as Pete Burns and his wife, Lyn. 'I looked at them spellbound ... this was stuff that turned my head upside down.'

OMM Why did you become a punk?

JC 'I saw a picture of the Pistols with Jordan. Before punk, my favourite photo was the one on the back of Raw Power, with Iggy and the audience. There's no relation between them. You wonder how he came to be there. Now, what strikes me is that the audience is doing anything to avoid catching his eye.

'The thing about Liverpool is that I was an outsider, and in Liverpool they would call almost anybody a "woollyback". I had a bass player who knew this Japanese girl and he said, "I wouldn't fuck her, she's a fuckin' woolly." But it was genuinely Bohemian. Liverpool is a Celtic city. Manchester is an Anglo-Saxon city. There's a pragmatism about Manchester.'

OMM - and Liverpool will piss it all away.

JC 'Totally pissed it away. It's why I have difficulty going back and dealing with it. Someone like Pete Wylie would have been bigger if he had come from almost any other city except Liverpool.'

OMM I liked Head On because you didn't present yourself as cool.

JC 'By presenting it the way it was, it showed people how they were. I still get people coming up saying, "Mac [Ian McCulloch] fucking hates that book, he thinks you're a cunt." I don't know why I come out of it looking like a cunt. Mac doesn't come out of it too bad. I called him a lazy git. And he was.'

Cope's two volumes of autobiography, Head On and Repossessed, trace his odyssey from uncool 'farm punk' into dazzling early-Eighties pop star: 'I was goaded into becoming a rock star by Bill Drummond [the Teardrop Explodes manager, Zoo label boss and later KLF founder] and the pseudo-intellectual side of me thought it would be quite charming.' And then came the descent into drug mania, record company debt, exile in middle England and slow rebirth.

In his solo Eighties incarnation, Cope had singles hits - most notably 'World Shut Your Mouth' in 1986 - while three of his Island-era albums made the top 30. It was during this period that he honed both his anti-authoritarian beliefs - he appeared at the poll tax riots as his 'seven-foot alter ego', Sqwubbsy - and his hatred of organised, patriarchal religion.

When Island Records dropped him on the release of Jehovahkill in 1992, it was time for another change. Always an enthusiast, Cope had extolled the virtues of psychedelic rock in 1983 with an NME feature entitled 'Tales from the Drug Attic'. He was also, almost single-handedly, responsible for the revival of interest in Scott Walker.

In mid-1973, Cope had seen Krautrock pioneers Faust play in Birmingham Town Hall: 'It was epic, it was brilliant, it had attitude enough to raze cities and it ruined every show I went to for at least two years after.' From the early Nineties on, his obsession with Seventies German rock informed both his music - 'Necropolis', for instance, from Jehovahkill - and his second book. Published in 1995, Krautrocksampler turned fandom into a canon. Just like his Japrocksampler last year, it exposed a hidden pop history with anecdotes, philosophical inquiries and top 50 lists - a worldview couched in the consciousness-raising radicalism of late Sixties agitprop. His enthusiasm and the pace of his writing found him a whole new audience.

OMM So what is this about Axis Rock?

JC 'The Krautrock revival was going on all the time: Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks was a big fan. I had a band that were all Krautrock nutters and I had a guitar roadie who called himself Rizla Deutsche. He would play Neu! 2 endlessly. It's so disorientating anyway, with all the different speeds. He tried to turn me on to heroin, but I wasn't going down that route.

'So I thought I'd write a book about Krautrock. I remember going past a lorry on the motorway and down the side of it said "Norbert Dentressangle", and that made me think that the title had to be a long unwieldy thing. Krautrocksampler, that's going to look really German. I wrote it in about three months, based on everything I'd got. If I haven't heard of it, it doesn't exist.'

OMM Who did you base your writing style on?

JC 'John Sinclair and Lester Bangs. John Sinclair because I was absolutely wiped out by Guitar Army, the way he demanded that you take him seriously. I think that is the Holy Book. And Bangs because it was rock 'n' roll beyond anything that I had ever read. It had the rhythm of rock 'n' roll. And Lenny Bruce's The Berkeley Concert. It makes demands, sucking in all this stuff and spewing it out.'

OMM And then going from Germany to Japan, was that just a natural progression?

JC 'I just did a tour of Japan and realised that it was just an island worldview like ours. If an island is a big success and its context is that it's near a big continent, once they've had that success they're going to feel that they are marooned in a sea... that's what is different. Once I started realising what made the Japanese so different, it was useful for me, as a Brit.

'And here's why I think writing and photography are important to rock 'n' roll. When the music falls on its arse, rock 'n' roll photography and writing will carry the banner. I think if I saw my Japrocksampler, I'd have to have it to see the naked Japanese guys on the cover. They could sound like Badfinger and it wouldn't matter.'

In the Nineties, Cope began seriously pursuing his interest in archaeology, in particular the prehistoric sites of Britain: the stone circles and burial chambers dotted all over these islands. In 1992, he released an album of ambient instrumentals with Donald Ross Skinner called Rite, and in 1998 he published the full fruits of eight years' research, The Modern Antiquarian

With this lavishly illustrated and detailed gazetteer of more than 300 prehistoric sites, the final part of Cope's cosmology fell into place. The Modern Antiquarian and its 2004 follow-up, The Megalithic European, are both sustained, serious works. Cope has done his research and field work, and in doing so has gained the respect and friendship of noted archaeologist Aubrey Burl.

Websites are great at pulling a variety of disparate activities together and for those wishing to enter Copeworld, his Head Heritage website is a great introduction. Here you'll find a wide variety of record reviews, general articles of relevance - like Simon Fairlie's 'Can Britain Feed Itself?' - as well as a regular monthly blog by Cope himself.

OMM You have real discipline, and the rock 'n' roll life style does not encourage people to have discipline. How did you find yours?

JC 'I'm a huge fan of Robert Graves. There was one period in his life when he kept a column going in some magazine for five years. People did things like that in those days. When we were putting the website together, I said to my web guy, "I want to have an Album of the Month". He said, "you say that now, but will you still want to do it in six months?".

'But I've been doing it since May 2000 and I've never missed a month. I did one at the foot of Mount Ararat; I did another at the hotel in Pompeii. The last place I wanted to be was in the hotel writing, but it's what I decided to do. To be a practitioner was everything.'

Cope's albums are like a diary of his obsessions and Black Sheep is no different. Rants against bourgeois New Agers, power politicians and Christian tenets vie with a rousing, if queasy, denunciation of suicide bombers: 'All The Blowing-Themselves-Up-Motherfuckers (Will Realise The Minute They Die That They Are Suckers)'. As ever, vulgarity racks up against poetry.

At the album's centre are credo songs - 'Feed My Rock 'n' Roll', 'Psychedelic Odin' and 'Black Sheep' itself. 'I am the black sheep of this flock,' he sings, 'and I can answer to no one. I see you are the Black Sheep of your flock, too, methinks it takes one to know one.' At its heart is the piano-driven, haunting 'Dhimmi Is Blue', sung in Cope's most winning 'Helen Reddy voice'.

OMM You've said that Black Sheep is a bit of a change...

JC 'I've gone back to the Jehovahkill, heathen, dark folk sound - acoustic guitars, lots of mellotrons, hand drums, lots of melody. I headlined the 2004 Cambridge Folk Festival and I walked on stage and said, "I'm the only folk artist on this entire bill. This is all a hundred years ago, and my songs are about now." I won them over, eventually.

'I had something sent to me recently, an American band, and the music was great, but the song was about the Vietnam war. The Vietnam war needs to be written about by people who are going through the Vietnam war. Now, we're going through umpteen other wars, and they need to be written about.'

OMM Why aren't people doing that?

JC 'I think they're scared. They're scared stiff. They think that if they say anything against power, people are going to come and murder them in the night. I don't think so. What makes the western media so powerful is the ability to create something out of Islam that they can actually thrive upon. If Islam was all-powerful, we'd already be dead.'

OMM Do you think rock has become banal?

JC 'What has happened is an absence of transformation. If the shaman does not transform, he is not a shaman. Frank Zappa could be the most talented musician - I didn't like his music, but I can see he was very talented - but he did not declare himself as a shaman. Jim Morrison could be one of the most inept people in the world, but he declared himself a shaman. You've got to declare it.'

OMM And I like that the Doors are vulgar.

JC 'Me too, and that's why I write songs like "How German is Your Helmet". They're gauche. It's got to be a bit beery and belch. I'm really scared that in a hundred years people will look back on this time and they won't have people like that any more. I can't bear the idea that what we experienced was a blip, a freedom blip. I don't think I saw it as just something for me to enjoy myself, and part of me just feels I would do anything to sustain it.'

OMM You really think it's going to go?

JC 'Use it or lose it is a cliché because it's true. Supposedly intelligent people say to me: "Don't you think you'd be more successful if you re-formed the Teardrop Explodes?" I'm doing all this stuff to keep myself invigorated every day, hanging out with people I believe are culture heroes, and you think I'm doing all this because it hasn't yet occurred to me to reform the Teardrop Explodes?'

OMM You're not afraid to make a fool of yourself are you Julian?

JC 'A daft ha'p'orth is what I'm aiming for, in the words of my Grandma Cope...'

Fame and infamy - Cope's finest moments

21 October 1957 Julian David Cope is born in Deri, Mid Glamorgan.

1976 Attends City of Liverpool College of Higher Education where he meets Ian McCulloch and Pete Wylie.

1978 Cope and McCulloch begin writing together - one song, 'Books', was recorded by both McCulloch's Echo and the Bunnymen and Cope's Teardrop Explodes, who play their first gig in November this year.

1979 First Teardrops single, 'Sleeping Gas' is released on Zoo, produced by Bill Drummond.

1980 Classic debut album Kilimanjaro released.

1981 The Teardrops have three chart hits, peaking at No 6 with 'Reward'. Cope compiles Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker.

1982 Cope goes solo.

1983 'Hangs out all year, concentrating on his toy collection,' according to his own website. Cope is keen on Dinky cars.

1984 Releases Fried , which despite its bizarre cover, sinks without trace

1986 Back in the Top 20 with 'World Shut Your Mouth'.

1990 Releases Droolian - but it is available only in Austin, Texas.

1990 Cope is seen at the Poll Tax riot in London on 30 March in the costume of his 7ft alter-ego, Sqwubbsy.

1991 Peggy Suicide, Cope's best solo album, marks the start of his pollution trilogy.

1995 Publication of Krautrocksampler

1996 Presents Top of the Pops dressed as an eco-protester.

1998 The Modern Antiquarian published.

2001 Curates the Discover Odin festival at the British Museum, mixing Norse myths with Alice Cooper.

2004 The Megalithic European published.

2007 Japrocksampler published.

2008 Black Sheep released.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008