Rocking out within the margins, Julian Cope has been on a roll lately. 2020’s Self Civil Conflict was his best report in 25 years, and 2022’s England Expectorates was virtually nearly as good (bonus factors for the melodic nail-bomb of “Cunts Can Fuck Off”). Then got here final yr’s Robin Hood, with out Cope’s identify on the packaging, and now Friar Tuck, additionally mysteriously cloaked. It seems, as all his music has since 1997’s Ceremony 2, on Cope’s personal Head Heritage label (a vinyl version is on its approach too, his first since 2017’s Drunken Songs): meaning house recordings and low manufacturing values on one hand, however direct and fluid expression on the opposite. Principally, he’s free to do what he needs, with all the nice and unhealthy that entails.
Largely, on Friar Tuck, that results in an exhilarating 40 minutes. It doesn’t have the madcap vary of 1991’s Peggy Suicide or the next yr’s Jehovahkill, data on which Cope explored the tough and prepared, first-take ethos he’d found on 1989’s Skellington and 1990’s Droolian, however these 12 songs are brimming with a breezy vitality that’s not all the time been current on Cope’s epic releases during the last couple of many years.
In the event you’ve heard any of these, you understand partly what this report feels like: distorted wah-wah guitars, DI’d electro-acoustic guitars, drum machines and Mellotrons armed with the very tapes used on Tangerine Dream’s Atem. And but Friar Tuck additionally reaches out sonically to synth-string funk on “In Spungent Mansions”, chiming, Smiths-esque melancholy on “1066 & All That” and slow-burning drone-rock on the seven-and-a-half-minute “Me And The Jews”.
“The Dogshow Should Go On” is the earworm right here, a sub-two-minute storage charmer that strikes from a krautrock Stooges groove (paying homage to 1995’s “Queen/Mom”) to the form of post-punk Cope pursued on his personal solo debut, World Shut Your Mouth, 40 years in the past. In stupendous and hilarious Cope-ian trend it references Crufts, the Gurteen Stones, Jesus Christ and “a brand new individuals important of canine love”, however the total which means stays thrillingly slippery: is that this a rallying pro-dog message from somebody who’s owned miniature schnauzers named Smelvin and Iggy Pup? Or is that lacking the purpose completely? Cope equally makes no try at accessibility on the closing miniature, “Will Sergeant’s Blues”, the place he’s absolutely taking the piss out of Ian McCulloch’s vocal type, whilst he sings about Eeyore promoting off Thousand Acre Wooden for fracking.
Elsewhere, Cope’s drift is clearer when he appears again from the vantage level of his late sixties. “I didn’t suppose I’d get to reside this lengthy,” he croons on “Achieved Myself A Mischief”, “I’ve been so many individuals/And I’ve been only one.” “In Spungent Mansions” takes a take a look at his Liverpool punk pal Pete Burns, who he all the time remained keen on: “Beautiful and otherly/And every one on the dole… And I had scabies…” On the organ-driven motorik of “4 Jehovahs In A Volvo Property” he zooms right into a second from his childhood, when a pal’s spiritual household moved away, ruining Cope’s Subbuteo championship. “Now I’m caught trashing my preteen little brother,” he laments. “I hope Jehovah finds your home and causes degradation…”
But what of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck? What about this fable has so intrigued Cope, a person often within the extra rock-solid monuments of prehistory? “It’s a secret,” he tells Uncut, and clues are few and much between right here. “R In The Hood”, like “Eve’s Volcano (Coated In Sin)” put via a dub echo chamber, talks of “peace” in contradictory phrases earlier than concluding “all people needs a peace of the motion”. Contained in the booklet there’s a map suggesting Tuck got here from the north of Scotland, journeyed to Sherwood Forest and ended up heading to the Crusades through “the Jewish Port of Mara Zion” in Cornwall.
Maybe Cope identifies with the Merry Males’s anti-authoritarian views, as echoed in a poem, “Flibberty Gibbet On The Jibbet”, within the album’s booklet, the place he appears to name for the hanging of Liz Truss (then once more, Truss would little doubt agree with Hood’s libertarian drive in opposition to taxation). No matter Cope’s motivations, simply head to the poem’s opening traces and luxuriate in his persevering with garbled genius: in any case, no-one else goes to rhyme “Keir Starmer” with “Martin Bramah”.
Q&A
JULIAN COPE
Three albums in three years… are you on a little bit of a artistic roll?
No, I’m working at a velocity that could be very comfy to me. However I’m considerably reborn, sure. These previous 30 years, I’ve felt an obligation to make artwork that’s Helpful.
“4 Jehovahs In A Volvo Property” – is that this a recollection out of your childhood?
Duncan Grey, poor child. We’re proper in the course of the season and he has to maneuver to the Orkneys as a result of his knobhead mother and father imagine bullshit. Funnily sufficient, their Volvo property had screamed stability till they sodded off.
What has particularly impressed the album, musically?
I simply attempt to replicate sonically the present state of my Melted Plastic Mind. So I like Novelty so much and I reside in a world of Intense Melody. So I wish to ship my vocal messages over a heady brew of crusty Brechtian storage rock – wah-guitars, marching drums and two Mellotron 400s full of tape frames from Tangerine Dream’s 1973 epic Atem. Correct musical necromancy. Three sounds per body with handwritten descriptions, too. Even have the uncommon black instances for all three. On Robin Hood, I alluded to them once I performed the “Atem” theme throughout “An Oral Historical past Of Blowjobs”.
INTERVIEW: TOM PINNOCK