Ladies and gentlemen, behold the wonder that is Julian Cope – naked, he poses beneath a turtle shell, a battered toy truck lying discarded nearby. Elsewhere in the sleeve’s sumptuous packaging, he wades through a swamp. ‘Namdam am I, I’m a madman,’ declares a caption. The album is Fried, Cope’s second in less than a year, and its auteur is clearly damaged goods.
In the wake of the dissolution of the Teardrop Explodes, it was easy to imagine Cope as Syd Barrett in post-Floyd freefall, and whilst the first solo outing World Shut Your Mouth offered tightly constructed pop (albeit suffused with Cope’s own brand of madness), Fried is of a different order entirely. Sparse, barely-realised songs recall the fragility of Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs. But where Barrett’s stumbling chaotic performance suggested genuine mental breakdown, Cope remains firmly in control of his material. Even in Fried’s flakiest moments (the ‘talkdown’ sequence from Reynard the Fox), the delivery is tight and assured. Granted, this is the sound of a troubled individual, and that screaming is real – but it’s right on the beat.
Reynard… casts Cope as the outsider, pursued and ultimately taking his own life. The setting for these events is a real place, and was used as the location for the sleeve photography: a spoil heap at Alvecote near Tamworth, hard by the railway line and the M42 motorway. Though of recent origin, there’s something primal and unsettling about the Alvecote mound, and Cope’s obsessive interest was probably the beginnings of his later investigations into genuine neolithic sites.
Reynard suggests at violence and disorder to come, and whilst there is certainly more of the same to follow (The Bloody Assizes, O King of Chaos) nothing else comes close to the naked emotion on display here. It's obvious why this track was placed first in the running order. But Cope will always be Cope, and his devious sense of humour is never far from the surface. He seems to take a perverse delight in following the freakish opener with a throwaway pop song, its jangling twelve-string and backwards guitar reminding us of his passion for mid-60s psych. Lyrically, Bill Drummond Says is a string of the ex-Teardrops manager’s aphorisms strung together: ‘give me one good reason why I shouldn’t win.’ Drummond later got his own back with the ludicrous ditty Julian Cope is Dead on his solo album The Man.
Throughout Fried, Cope makes full use of his vocal range, which extends from fragile choirboy (Laughing Boy) to randy old goat (Sunspots). The latter has Cope gleefully making childish car noises: ‘eeeyyomm – it goes away’ and the subsequent single release includes a picture of a toy racing car on the sleeve, yet another of his obsessive interests.
It’s the quieter, more considered moments on Fried that are the most effective – the chilling sepulchral church organ drone of Torpedo; the curiosity that is Search Party; Me Singing, a clear piece of autobiography, and Laughing Boy, a song that somehow evokes the wintry landscape of Cope’s then home county, Warwickshire.
In between these moments of genuine fragility come some pop belters. Though lyrically obtuse, if not raving bonkers, Holy Love might easily have been a single, and contains one of the album’s most memorable couplets: ‘Who’s that rolling in the hay/ the baby Jesus or the cavalry?’ This, as if proof were needed, makes Cope’s messianic delusions clear for all to see. For further evidence, see the sleeve of St. Julian.
What elevates Fried to greatness is Cope’s delight in what he’s pulling off. Yes, he’s a madman but at the same time he knows exactly what he’s doing. Perhaps his greatest trick of all was in persuading a major label (Mercury) to release this fragile artefact. Fried sounds like something dug up from an ancient burial mound, an album built on fear, supersition and arcane ritual. Cope would not scale these heights again until 1990’s Peggy Suicide. But the fact that he tries and occasionally fails is all part of the Cope mystique.
These days, he seems overlooked, and although communiqués from planet Cope still arrive quite regularly via his own label, it's been years since Cope last troubled the majors. Clearly, he's now found a way of doing his own thing without playing the 'greedheads' games. Recent releases seem to confirm that the transformation begun with Fried is now complete. Cope, the self-proclaimed Arch Drude, is no less than a force of nature. If any pop star is going to come back from the dead (as he predicts on 2007's Hidden Doorways) then Cope's your man.
Back in the 80s, it was perhaps too easy to take Cope for granted, in the presence of so many other intelligent pop artists, yet even then, his peculiar brand of ‘floored genius’ set him apart from his peers. Twenty five years on, with pop music largely in the hands of uninspired and unambitious corporate artists – brands, not bands – it’s clear how much the world needs another visitation from the phenomenon that is – or was – Julian Cope.
Second coming, anybody?
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