INTERVIEW: Julian Cope
- Joe Silva
If there ever was a pop star seemingly earmarked to end up trampling down rock's road to ruin, it was Julian Cope. He did Britain's Top of The Pops bent on acid, his band (The Teardrop Explodes) fell into ruins despite their enormous success in the early eighties largely because he became a "grand asshole," and for a time trifled with the likes of Kurt Cobain's widow, Courtney Love.
But somewhere in the midst of one of Britain's psychedelic revivals (there have been at least...oh, somewhere near 42 by now if you've kept pace with the UK music press..), Julian constructed Peggy Suicide, a double long player heavily laden with apocalyptic musings and trippy soundscapes that lifted Julian from the pop slag heap. The next thing he knew, he was nabbing four star reviews from Rolling Stone and having rock gods like Zepplin frontman Robert Plant pointing to him when journalists would ask what he thought was "happening" today in music.
But in true Cope fashion, Julian diffused his second coming by giving his record company another pricey double lp (_Jehovahkill) to push that seemed much "weirder" to the suits than Peggy was, and by mid-tour he was dropped. But consequently, Jehovahkill did do well and Julian went along his way unconcerned about where his future in recording lay.
"I'm going to be doing these things in twenty years, if there's still a world here, this is what I'll be doing so it doesn't really worry me." he says camped out in the Long Island home of his American mother-in-law.
And even if he never does make put another track to tape, Julian is still neck-up in other projects. He's just finished a personal memoir of his early history entitled "Head On" and about a year off from completing a comprehensive traveler's guide of sorts to the hundreds of Stone monuments strewn across the British Isles. Beyond that there's a collection of prose due compiled from his extensive journals and foremost these days is his family. In May of this year Julian's wife Dorian gave birth to their second baby girl, which they've named Avalon. After Dorian had their first child (Albany) by way of modern medicines, the couple decided to put a more natural slant on this delivery.
"This time Dorian was very cool about it. We went to a cottage in England where she didn't have the choice of those heavy drugs. So we listened to Tangerine Dream, ate hash cookies, and had gas and air. Which was pretty far out."
With his his speech pock marked with dated hippy terminology and his album covers smeared with his neo-pagan attitudes, Julian only narrowly avoids the tag "cheap new age cavalier" which he uses to refer to himself on his latest release, Autogeddon.
Autogeddon is the third socio-cosmic release from Cope in the last three years. It's the near manic and sonically fragmented saga of Julian behind the wheel "pissed off on the motorways of Britain." The tracks careen between the extremes of brisk toe-tappers and long rambling semi-instumental passages.
With Julian's travelling around gathering material for his tour guide, he's witnessed and felt the impact of having ancient territories violated in the name of having a snappier route to the city or the seashore.
"You see the differences between a British Autogeddon and an American Autogeddon are very pronounced. With Britain, any large, four lane road that is built fucks up a community which is close to 1,500 years old. In America if you build a highway, it's going to go trash some Indian sacred ground which is fine for white people because the landscape doesn't mean anything to them within the last three or four hundred that they've been here. Which is still powerful, but it isn't the same."
But while he rails against commuter culture he also reckons with the inevitability of travel in our times (as put forth in "There Ain't No Getting 'Round Getting 'Round) but insists, at length, that the journey has been spoiled for us. The current availability of fax service to the Wailing Wall, for those who can't get there by traditional means to put up their prayers, is a fitting example.
"People have actually broken the link between the pilgramage to and the arrival at." he says. "They've said that isn't important. If you make the road straight, it means that you're no longer looking at the landscape while you're traveling because you're too busy concentrating about staying on the road. Once you do that, your journey deteriorates in importance to the point where the journey is only a means to get there. We spend a lot of time in the West, the North, and the far South of Britain because that's where the Romans didn't get to."
The psychology of all this winds it's way on to the album. On "Drivin' On the Fast Side of Slow" Cope paints pictures of himself crawling through the windy back roads of places like Cornwall where the thoroughfares were originally cut out of the land in 2000 B.C.
"You get a completely different way of thinking." he explains, illustrating the sensation. "You have to travel between 20 or 30 mph. Once that happens, your sense drops slowly. You go beyond been angry, because you realize you have forty miles of this and it's going to take you three or four hours to get there. If you took a train from New York to Boston you'd spend most of the time in the countryside, thinking in terms of 'This is great virtual reality, I can't wait to get to Boston.' But because there's not enough of it to interest you and there's too much of it to grab your attention, it becomes sort of general outdoorness."
It must all seem like psychobabble to some, but to Julian these are the seeds of our cultural indifference and out eventual undoing where people spend so much time bustling through the now just to arrive at next, there is no sense of the future. While U2 spend time hanging with William Gibson and envisioning "virtual nightclubs," Cope's stance is the complete polar opposite. Last year he drummed up a good bit of flak slash cheap publicity for himself by posing for a photo with a t-shirt he made that had a not too flattering quote from Larry Mullen Jr. (U2's stick-man) printed on it. The Irish mega-cyber-band have often by a favorite target for Julian's verbal bashing, but his opinion of them has softened a touch.
"I find them less insufferable now. Just because..[their work and image]... is so completely all over the place, they don't know anything. At least before, they were these horrible prigs, slugging for Jesus. But now they're just slugging for themselves so they've been beaten. You know Bono thinks it's great to be ironic and smoke sharoots. So it's like, if that's the point great. It doesn't matter how big he get's now, you know somebody is gonna shoot the bastard someday and that'll be great." he says ending with a chuckle.
But U2 fans won't have an opportunity for rebuttal this year as Cope won't be able to tour the country behind Autogeddon as he had hoped. Between the book work and children and setting down the next set of songs, Julian's schedule is completely booked for sometime to come. Next year there should be a companion piece (entitled "Propheteering") to his autobiography which will include 50 poems, all his lyrics and except from the 800 pages worth of journals he's recently had bound up. The next record will include songs that are "...really devotional..." in nature, breaking up the heavy doom factor of the past three albums. As we approach the millenium, which might be the worst psychological trauma a generation may have to endure, Cope sees his role as a touch more theraputic.
"I think artists have got to be psychologists." he muses. "I don't think they always have to be and I don't think they always will have to be, but I think now they have to be. I think we are here to help see people through and all I see is a bunch of artists who don't have much of a clue about anything. " Oblivious to the depth of our discussion is Julian's daughter Albany, who can be heard happily playing and singing in the background. "I suppose that, looking back, all I'm trying to do now is prepare people for the twenty first century."
