(Mercury, 1984)
Naked under a giant turtle shell, Cope gets to grips with psychedelic roots of oak.
“I still had this vision of pop music as a giant celebration of fucked-upness.” So recalled Julian Cope of the time he recorded his second solo LP Fried, in his ace biography Head On/ Repossessed. He was certainly poised for such a statement at the time; holed up in his hometown Tamworth and getting over the LSD-marinated demise of his pop career with The Teardrop Explodes, he’d spend his days listening to Skip Spence and Nick Drake albums, thinking of ways to contain the evil he felt sure was within him. But if Fried is an exorcism, it’s one of considerable rock prowess as well as beauty and splendour, with a satisfying sinister undertow. Careering opener Reynard The Fox and Sunspots provide the guitar grind, but it’s the more starry-eyed, awareness-heightened songs that take root in the mind. A golden halo, for example, surrounds Laughing Boy, where young guitarist Donald Ross Skinner’s jazzy playing and the oboe of Kate St John mimic heat haze, as Cope looks down onto a verdant landscape from above and murmurs, choirboy style, “No, don’t cast me out of here…” (it’s an atmosphere revisited on Search Party). Elsewhere you get a swipe at former manager Bill Drummond, a séance gone awry, and in Me Singing, a Vegetable Man-like questioning of whether the singer is there at all. Cope intended it to be a huge-selling cult-classic – eh? – but even though it wasn’t the former, by 1986 he was back in the charts, and all set for the singular flightpath that today sees him as the twenty-first century William Blake. His own verdict on Fried? “It was as free as I could ever be.”
Ian Harrison
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 24/07/2008
Julian Cope – World Shut Your Mouth (Mercury 1984)
Syd Barrett – Barrett (Harvest, 1970)
Skip Spence – Oar (Columbia, 1969)
SUGGEST YOUR OWN DISC OF THE DAY ON OUR MESSAGE BOARD HERE, OR, MORE PRIVATELY, HERE!
The gruff one emerges from the shouty art ditch with a varied, heartfelt album that’s among his best
6:00 AM GMT 25/07/2008
Naked under a giant turtle shell, Cope gets to grips with psychedelic roots of oak.
6:00 AM GMT 24/07/2008
2006 reissue of songs from Jim Szalapski’s now-legendary document of ’70s ‘progressive country’.
6:00 AM GMT 23/07/2008
The forgotten soul of the Beatles vanity label.
6:00 AM GMT 22/07/2008
Super-charming cottage-psych from Sheffield. Tells Eminem “it’s OK to be gay”
6:00 AM GMT 21/07/2008
Like a French Futurama festival. On CD.
6:00 AM GMT 20/07/2008
Comments
Comment on this post
Beautiful weirdness.
Posted by M.A.Melo at 11:18 AM GMT 24/07/2008 Report Abuse
Reply to this post
Comment on this post