Julian Cope - Disc of the day

Julian Cope
Fried

(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