Vinyl Release

I’m not really what you’d call the campaigning type but in the days when I edited HFN we launched a couple nonetheless. The most famous was ‘Jarvis Is Innocent’, occasioned by the Pulp frontgeezer getting himself arrested for stagecrashing Michael Jackson at the 1996 BRIT Awards. Within a few hours we had t-shirts on sale in the street outside gig venues all around the country, the funds raised, as I recall, contributing to his legal aid. And, of course, much fun and many games were to be had by all.

Endangered species

The other campaign was not quite so newsworthy but equally as heartfelt. In October 1992, Island Records had quietly announced that it was dropping Julian Cope from its roster, due in part to his erratic behaviour but mostly because his records, although critically celebrated, had ceased to sell. Homeless, orphaned without a parent company, it looked as if Copey – an eccentric national treasure since he fronted The Teardrop Explodes – was done-for career-wise.

This was a situation anyone with any sense of fairness and adventure would surely find intolerable. So, we put all the considerable power of our print behind him and whacked him on the front of the paper with the cover line ‘Endangered Species’. I think we did badges and a petition and suchlike if I’m not misremembering. Whatever, again, fun and games ensued.

The thing is, it had all begun so well. Cope had signed on to Chris Blackwell’s Island label at the end of 1986 after exhausting the patience of Mercury/Polygram with World Shut Your Mouth and Fried, a couple of idiosyncratic albums that couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be The Doors, The Stooges or Syd Barrett and wound up in the bargain bins. Island, however, had long been a haven for what you might call unique talents, such as John Martyn, Bob Marley, The B-52’s, Nick Drake, Earl Brutus, Incredible String Band, Kevin Ayers and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry to name but a few. It was also famed for offering sanctuary to those who wished to follow their own star rather than the wishes of the money men.

Island greeted Cope with open arms and all and sundry settled back in anticipation of an artistic marriage made in heaven. Which, initially, is exactly what it was. Cope – who’d last appeared before the public crouched in mud, naked, under a tortoise shell on the cover of Fried – seemed to embrace his rock god within. Here he was, suddenly Saint Julian, resplendent in leathers, his hair stylishly tousled, arms stretched out in a cheeky crucifixion pose in a scrapyard full of wrecked cars in the middle of the night.

Hop to it

Simple, upbeat and riff-driven, Saint Julian, debuted in 1987, was Cope at his most amenable, and not too weirded-out to ignore the fact that an audience might want to play along. The opening track ‘Trampolene’ was as bouncy as its title suggests, as was ‘Spacehopper’ too. Even the ominous-sounding ‘Shot Down’ wasn’t so disturbing that it scared the kids.

The icing on the cake was the wonderful hit single ‘World Shut Your Mouth’, which should surely have been on the earlier album of the same name but was either written as an afterthought or stored away somewhere in his honeycomb brain. Anyway, it was – and still is – utterly irresistible, with a sublime singalong chorus.

Strike a pose

The whole of Saint Julian sounded fresh, wrapped in a treble-y sheen courtesy of producers Warne Livesy and Ed Stasium, while the group Cope had assembled, which he christened the Two-Car Garage Band, was unfussy and on-point, happy to rock out rather than embellish.

The thing with Cope, though, is he’s never entirely convincing, his accent never really settling for being one thing or another. When he’s being gruff, there’s still a little pussycat in there, and when he’s pouring his heart out, he’s still checking himself in the mirror, posing. Even when the lyrics threaten to deal with the big issues like God and life and death and so on, you can never take him fully seriously. He’s like a kid in a sweet shop except the bon-bons and liquorice sticks have been replaced by Amon Duul, Scott Walker and The Ramones.

Much like Primal Screams’ Bobby Gillespie, he knows too much about rock and pop history to ever shake off the shadow of his groovy forebears. In short, he’s too much of a fan.

Still, better Cope’s daftness than, say, Bono’s earnest inability to truly have fun. It’s hard to think of anyone appreciating Julian Cope as an artist more than Julian Cope himself. The ego is enormous, the talent flailing in its wake. But Saint Julian came as close as he would ever get to returning to the fresh-faced poptastic incarnation he was in The Teardrop Explodes, the tunes at least having a punt at snagging our attention.

Suburban saint

For what’s it worth, my theory about Cope is that he always had a chip on his shoulder about not being from the city. While his contemporaries Ian McCulloch of Echo & The Bunnymen, Pete Wylie of Wah! and Ian Curtis of Joy Division had working or dole class roots and urban cred, Cope was a rural suburbanite from Tamworth. He was always pretending to be cool, eventually creating for himself an alternative kind of strange bucolic cult at his domicile near the standing stones of Avebury.

Anyway, it wasn’t long before the alarm bells began ringing. The tour arranged to accompany the album found Cope scrambling up and down a laddered scaffold erected at the front of the stage, perched atop like a wobbling psychedelic budgie. Then, after Saint Julian, came My Nation Underground, which Cope renounced as a pop misstep. This was followed by two deliberately grubby and sketchy albums, Skellington and Droolian, issued independently, before another Island release, Peggy Suicide, found Cope convinced he was in the MC5.

The krautrock paganfest Jehovakill, released in 1992, proved the honeymoon was over. Which is just about where we came in – Copey’s a faux Hells Angel druid now, making records only his close relatives and most devoted disciples can stomach. Gawd bless his little cotton socks.

Reissued in 2024 by Island Records, this 180g black vinyl LP [UMCLP088] ‘faithfully replicates’ the original 1987 pressing [ILPS 9861] of Saint Julian, including the front and rear artwork and gatefold lyric insert. The UK tracklisting sees ‘Trampolene’ open Side 1, whereas ‘World Shut Your Mouth’ was chosen to kick off the album in the US. Not included here is the interview LP – The Saint Julian Interview – that was packaged by Island for a 1987 bonus edition. HFN