Julian Cope: The Early 90s Thrillogy

Craig Stephen reflects on the post-Teardrop Explodes musical legacy of Julian Cope, with focus on an early 90s “thrillogy” …

He gained chart success as a leather-jacketed rock God for the St Julian album, and followed it with a failed attempt at being a pop star on My Nation Underground, which he then dismissed as “the Scottish Album”. So Julian Cope went back to what he was best at: being a demented Druid-loving weird bastard.

And it worked, magnificently so. Cope produced what can be described as a monumental cannon of work tied together by his ambition and determination to subvert the norms, on three excellent and individualistic albums released between 1991 and 1994.

Each of these three albums - two of them doubles, such was the Arch Drude’s prolific output at the time - could be reviewed extensively and separately in their own right. And as tempting as that challenge would be, you know, I’ve got flies to swat and window sills to clean, so this compilation will suffice.

Peggy Suicide (1991)

A masterful concept delivered over four sides and 18 tracks that even contained some pop songs catchy enough to venture into the charts. Before unleashing Peggy Suicide, Cope had mightily pissed off Island Records through the covert, in-one-take-and-outta-here Skellington. He’d also found time to record and release another album that would never be played before 7pm, Droolian, which contained snippets that presaged what was to come.

Yet it was a leftover from the maligned My Nation Underground that set the ball rolling, ‘Beautiful Love’, with its subtle radio friendly sound the ghastly daytime DJs couldn’t help but resist. It was an exception, however. The follow-up ‘East Easy Rider’ was a Funkadelic-style trip utilising wah-wah pedals and heavy riffs. And Cope’s themes of the time – stone circles, cars v bikes, the Poll Tax, neoliberalism and climate change majestically seeped through almost every song. Cope was Jim Morrison and Syd Barrett rolled into one.

‘Promised Land’, for instance, bemoans the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, who had been deposed a few months earlier: “The hate that she inspires/ Has to be seen to be believed.”

‘Soldier Blue’ was a diatribe on police brutality: “On your hind legs you beat us/ And I hope that you're proud, Soldier Blue”, while sampling the famous 1990 anti-Poll Tax riot that Cope attended in costume and which ended in violence following police provocation. It also included a sample of Lenny Bruce’s notable refrain from a live skit: “Here's a stick and a gun and you do it/ But wait 'til I'm outta the room/ But wait 'til I'm outta the room.”

As Cope’s sleeve notes explain, ‘Leperskin’ is “for all the Lepers of Lambeth – Polltax value £521.” The Community Charge, which the British government always called it, saw rich pricks in mansions pay the same amount as people squashed into bedsits. No wonder the people were revolting.

Experimentation, mainstreamism, short songs, long songs, anger, energy, mellowness … Peggy Suicide had a massive reach.

Jehovahkill (1992)

Island hated Jehovahkill … and that in itself is a mark of honour. You can imagine the suits’ faces on learning what the title would be and the angst they’d endure about possibly upsetting a religious sect. They rejected the first version of the LP, called Julian H. Cope – again more God-baiting titles – which seemed to settle the nerves of the label heads but the resulting album was a commercial bypass.

It was far less attractive to the Madonna fans out there than its predecessor, with more emphasis on a Germanic, experimental sound, as exemplified on ‘The Subtle Energies Commission’ or on ‘Necropolis’, with plenty of rock and psychedelia in the mix too. 

It also developed Cope’s medieval/pagan themes with a photograph of the neolithic Callanish Stones of the Western Isles for the cover. There’s less of the blatant sloganeering and politics of Peggy, which allows Cope to focus wholly on subject matters that delve deeply into the esoteric.

Autogeddon (1994)

Shorn of the unwanted interference and haughtiness of Island, and now on new label Echo, Cope cracked on with the car-hating Autogeddon. It was also less encumbered, with just eight tracks on a single album, without any of the “phases” that broke up the previous works.

Cope’s dislike of our wheel had come full circle. Inspired, he writes on the reissue sleeve notes: “ … by Heathcote Williams’ epic poem of the same name, and a little incident concerning my pregnant wife (and myself) and £375,000 of yellow Ferrari in St Martin’s Lane, London, England.”

These moving chunks of metal had become symbols of the ecological vandalism wrought by man on the planet. “And my waking dream won't go away/ Motorway services were the new cities/ The poisonous air had wrecked our homes/ Gasoline rivers burning up the seas” (‘Autogeddon Blues’).

Cope laments the loss of the English countryside and the people who lay claim to the land: “But out here in the fields/ You know they're still just fields/ Still fences and signs screaming: Keep off my land/ No Trespass - By Order.”

On one of his more outlandish efforts, ‘Don’t Call Me Mark Chapman’, Cope truly takes the C road into Backwater Valley, dropping another assassin’s name, Sirhan Sirhan, into the mix, as well as Duran Duran and … the man who gave us ‘Copacabana’ and ‘Mandy’: “All night Barry Manilow playing loud over the speaker system/ Just trying to drive the fucker out.”

It’s not known if Jeremy Clarkson is a fan of the album.

Superfantasticextraspecialultradeluxe editions …

All three albums have been reissued with an array of b-sides, outtakes etc, making already lengthy albums even longer. These include remixes of two of the singles on Peggy Suicide and other such treatments, and on Jehovahkill the original 21-and-a-half minute version of ‘Poet Is Priest’.

Autogeddon, while not as revered as much as the other two, has been given an excellent reissue treatment, coming in a hardback book format with extensive notes including a lengthy retro review by Martin Bramah of the Blue Orchids. It includes the very obscure Paranormal in the West Country EP and a couple of other hard-to-find tracks on the extra disc.