Julian Cope, the druid of rock | Culture

It is a joke that is still repeated. It means that music journalists are nothing more than frustrated musicians. True, there are examples of this hidden vocation but, with the same frivolity, we could affirm that there are musicians who long to work as musical scribes. I can think of cases of artists who have even shone in this work: Ben Sidran, in jazz, or Julian Cope, in rock.

Sidran just visited us, so…

It is a joke that is still repeated. It means that music journalists are nothing more than frustrated musicians. True, there are examples of this hidden vocation but, with the same frivolity, we could affirm that there are musicians who long to work as musical scribes. I can think of cases of artists who have even shone in this work: Ben Sidran, in jazz, or Julian Cope, in rock.

Sidran just visited us, so I guess there’s no need to introduce him. The thing about Cope is thornier: he enjoyed success, with the group The Teardrop Explodes and under his name, but in recent decades he has gone into the spotlight. undergroundto going underground with his own record label (a decision motivated by his antipathy towards the established industry, rather than by necessity) and to mix it all up with obscure parallel projects.

The amazing thing: while he immersed himself in those puddles, Cope remained active as a writer, including two memoirs and a novel. He also served as an erudite musicologist with Krautrocksampler and Japrocksampler, very personal panoramic visions of the emergence of German and Japanese rock. The second, subtitled How rock blew post-war Japan’s mind, was translated here by Contra; For this reason, Cope even gave an interview to Iñigo López Palacios, published in Babelia.

For 10 years, Cope posted on his website (headheritage.co.uk) a album of the month. Torrential reviews where he explored everything from cursed records from the sixties to independent releases from the 21st century, which, to give you an idea, do not usually appear on Spotify. Overflowing with enthusiasm and colloquialisms, his style is more Lester Bangs than Greil Marcus. His rock canon leaves out white blues, singer-songwriters or the virtuosos (although you can detect similarities between some John McLaughlin recordings and the hammering of Black Sabbath). His aesthetic filters are strict but he lacks prejudices: he celebrates the electronic Battiato as well as the Sevillian band Orthodox, with their Easter-metal.

These texts are compiled in a volume of more than 700 pages, Copendium, a title that—I want to think—is also a salute to Compendium, a legendary Camden bookstore that shared his passion for unconventional knowledge. Simultaneously, Cope has developed another career as a fan of archeology, with two books dedicated to prehistoric monuments that fit with his pagan worldview. First, The Modern Antiquariansold enough to justify a BBC documentary.

There he acknowledges that it took him a while to explore those sacred places; He only did it when he learned to drive, already in his thirties (“A rock star always has a chauffeur to get around, apart from the fact that he is usually so hungover that he couldn’t get behind the wheel”). As rock star, Cope has moved with his mental weather vane. The angelic figure of Top of the Pops He ended up stripping himself of everything: he is naked, under a turtle shell, on the album cover fried; she ended up adopting a look between hell’s angel and Wehrmacht officer. In recent years, Cope seems away from writing, although he still maintains an endless flow of records. I imagine him last summer solstice, spending the night at the Avebury megalithic circle, which—unlike Stonehenge—is not fenced. Among many freaksit could even have gone unnoticed.