Julian Cope Album by Album by Single by EP by Pseudonym Thread

Their falling out had something to do with Mac's sister ....

 

Ah ok, thanks for correcting me.

 

"The friend I have is a passionate friend..."

 

I'm not as well versed in the Teardrops or early Cope stuff, but I'm a huge fan of his post-Peggy albums and projects. I will say the "feud" between him and Ian seems very childish, where neither can resist saying something bad about the other if asked. Move on people, it's been nearly 40 years.

Thanks for starting this thread, I will gladly participate once Skellington/Peggy comes around.

 

I posted this in another thread, would say Kilimanjaro is in my top 30 albums of all time.

Close to a masterpiece I think. I also saw them live concurrently in Liverpool. Was clear they weren't your average pop band.

First song I heard was When I Dream which was a minor UK hit. Following the release of Reward the re-released album went into the charts and Julian became a pop star (for a while). The next time I saw them a few months later the venue was full of screaming girls!

Standout tracks for me Ha ha, Brave Boys, Poppies, Reward *, Dream, Second Head, Baghdad, ah **** it's all great.

* when on album

 

Further to the Kilimanjaro sequencing discussion above, I've been playing around with an alternative sequence that works better for me. In trying to reason it out, I came to the conclusion that 'Poppies' and 'When I Dream' were already the ideal side closers, but there were way too many tracks that sounded to me like great side openers: 'Ha Ha I'm Drowning', 'Treason', 'Bouncing Babies', 'Books' - even an in media res opening with 'Sleeping Gas' fading in was tempting. I've included 'Reward' and 'Suffocate' at the expense of my two least favourite tracks ('Second Head' and 'Went Crazy') and tried to programme in some more variation. One thing that struck me relistening to the original album is that 'Bouncing Babies' and 'Books' are both excellent shots in the arm, and lose some of their potential impact being piled up together. I still don't think 'Brave Boys' is a particularly strong song, but it has a different vibe to most of the rest of the album and is good for pacing.

So for what it's worth, this is what I came up with:

Side One: Ha Ha I'm Drowning / Reward / Sleeping Gas / Treason / Books / Poppies
Side Two: Bouncing Babies / Brave Boys Keep their Promises / Thief of Baghdad / Suffocate / When I Dream

I used the remixes for everything that had one, and the longest version of 'When I Dream' for an epic finale. Side one is full of 'hits', side two is a bit more exploratory.

 

WILDER (1981)




There are two different cover variations for this album (flowers vs. gesturing Julian), but all versions have the same track listing and mixes.

Side One: Bent Out of Shape / Colours Fly Away / Seven Views of Jerusalem / Pure Joy / Falling Down Around Me
Side Two: The Culture Bunker / Passionate Friend / Tiny Children / Like Leila Khaled Said / . . . And the Fighting Takes Over / The Great Dominions

2000 CD edition includes tracks from singles and The Teardrop Explodes EP. The version of ‘Suffocate’ is the Kilimanjaro outtake from the US edition of that album, however, and not the third-album era rerecording, however.

2013 CD edition includes tracks from singles and The Teardrop Explodes EP plus the following BBC Sessions:

Unidentified Session 1981: Pure Joy / Like Leila Khaled Said / I’m Not the Loving Kind / The Culture Bunker
Richard Skinner Session 17/8/81: . . . And the Fighting Takes Over / Better Scream – Make That Move / Bent Out of Shape / Screaming Secrets

THE WILDER SINGLES


Passionate Friend / Christ vs. Warhol 7” (1981)


Colours Fly Away / Window Shopping for a New Crown of Thorns 7” (1981)
Colours Fly Away / East of the Equator / Window Shopping for a New Crown of Thorns 12” (1981)


Tiny Children / Rachael Built a Steamboat 7” (1982)
Tiny Children / Rachael Built a Steamboat / Sleeping Gas (live) 12” (1982)

 

I would die in a ditch defending this record. I think it’s a masterpiece. It routinely gets criticised as self-indulgent, to which my response is: self indulgent? You mean like The White Album, or The Who Sell Out, or For Your Pleasure, or Here Come the Warm Jets, or 154? I’ll take a dozen, thanks.

I prefer to see it as The Teardrop Explodes Explodes. Where Kilimanjaro was tightly focussed on a signature sound, the follow-up is all over the place, and includes songs that sound like nothing on the debut and not that much like one another. There’s still continuity, but it has a twist. ‘Passionate Friend’ picks up the pure pop baton from ‘Treason’ and perfects it. It’s one of the most purely delightful singles Cope ever penned. ‘Colours Fly Away’ is clearly the ‘son of Reward’, and while it doesn’t have its dad’s melody, it has a psychedelic buzz all its own (and also always reminds me of the theme song to a British sci-fi series of the 1960s, a feeling that the video does nothing to dispel). Perhaps best of all, the ‘Kilimanjaro sound’ returns only once on the album in its full glory, for ‘Pure Joy’, which condenses all that adrenalin into under two stunning minutes. ‘Just Like Leila Khaled Said’ isn’t as propulsive, but it’s probably the only other song that wouldn’t sound out of place on the previous album. The rest of the album runs wild, into spacey, dubby, dramatic territory few bands were exploring at the time – at least, not all at once!

The quirky ‘Bent Out of Shape’ isn’t the obvious opener, but it immediately announces a looser, more confident band. Nothing on Kilimanjaro swings like this does, and up until this point you could be forgiven for mistaking the Teardrop Explodes for a band that just wasn’t interested in swinging. ‘Seven Views of Jerusalem’ manages to stray even further from the template (I imagine a kind of world music conga line when listening to this), again without sacrificing the band’s intense musicality. After the strategic whiplash induced by ‘Pure Joy’, the album looks to the (near) future.

‘Falling Down Around Me’ is one of the album’s less striking songs, but it has a superb arrangement, anticipating the heavily sequenced realm of mid-80s pop. The instruments, rather than playing through-lines, instead contribute brief clusters of notes that are suspended in space and time to create a pointillistic arrangement. This was the brave new world facilitated by the sequencer (and Scritti Politti’s Cupid & Psyche ’85 may be the apotheosis of it), but I doubt sequencers were involved here, and I suspect Cope and the band were more inspired by Sly Stone’s similar arrangement tricks on 1973’s ‘In Time’. The technique is immediately reprised, in a more aggressive way, on ‘The Culture Bunker’.

Then on the rest of side two, we get haunted by the spirit of Scott Walker (then freezing in the wilderness between the visionary apparitions of Nite Flights and Climate of Hunter). ‘Tiny Children’ (probably my least favourite song on the album, to be honest) is the most delicate and moving song Cope had yet released, until ‘And the Fighting Takes Over’ outdoes it two songs later, and that exquisite track holds the crown for all of four minutes until the sublime ‘The Great Dominions’ sweeps in. That’s career-best songwriting right there, perfectly capping an album with a dazzling range of moods and tremendous musical invention.

 

I agree with you, their best album, maybe (perhaps) the best thing Cope ever did and easily in my top ten of British albums from that era. They took flight on this album, catchy, mysterious, romantic and endlessly listenable. Cope managed to tame his more out there impulses and decided to serve the music, which resulted in a beautiful work.
I'm a little late to this, but I'll just add that I saw the band on their first U.S. tour at Danceteria and they were a bit, untogether. I wanted to love them but the Bongos wiped the floor with them.

 

I love Wilder too. I think it's a lot more interesting than Kilimanjaro, since it plays with different genres of music, and at the same time is more spacious and relaxing. (It's very much like 154 is to Pink Flag).

A perfect example is "The Culture Bunker". It starts off with acoustic guitar strumming (similar to something off of Fried) but then suddenly turns into a funky, trancy, psychedelic groove. I love the relentless bass. I love the quiet bursts of [fake?] brass, piano, and the noodling synths and chopping guitar sounds in the background. There are so many different sounds on this song, probably indicative tons of overdubs. So, while it started out sounding like Fried, it ends up sounding more ambitious and acoustically detailed than anything Cope did before, or since. I liked this song so much that I named the first Julian Cope mailing list after it: Trav's Julian Cope Site - The Culture Bunker

I also love "The Great Dominions". A total classic, very dark and moody and pretty. I never get tired of it.

Some of the other songs might sound a little dated (due to their choice of synths and processed drums - I'm looking at you, "Seven Views of Jerusalem"), but the songs shift so quickly in style that you don't have time to get bored or irritated with them.

Wilder plays almost like a mixed tape, but with the same vocalist and possibly the same musicians, although the instrumental lineup seems to change from song to song. It's neat stuff, and definitely more re-playable than Kilimanjaro (to my ears, anyway)!

 

My dark horse favorite is "Like Leila Khaled Said", love the guitar and the backing vocals towards the end, but nothing tops "The Great Dominions".

 

I just listened to Kilimanjaro again tonight, while cooking. I listened on my living room stereo rather than my headphones. It was great, actually! So many good songs... Next up is Wilder.

I feel like Kilimanjaro is a bunch of A-sides, and Wilder is a bunch of B-sides. Put them together (and resequence them a bit) and you can get one awesome album! But Kili by itself, especially with headphones, is a bit exhausting! On speakers, it was surprisingly enjoyable. It helped that it was motivating background music (I hate cooking!)

 

Summer, do you plan to list the books as well? If so, would Head On go after all the Teardrops material, or would you wait until you get to the year it was published?

(For anyone who doesn't know, Cope has written several books, including 2 excellent auto-biographies; the first one of which covers the Teardrop Explodes years in hilarious detail).

 

Thanks to the OP for starting this thread. I love Kilimanjaro from start to finish - one of the best debuts ever and not a single dud track on it (imho). I only wish there was a proper CD release for each issue that uses correct track versions, running orders and sleeves. Not too much to ask for is it?

I like Wilder too but not as much. In fact my interest wanes towards the end of side 2, so I'm surprised by the amount of love for those closing tracks - I'll have to re-evaluate them.

I'm looking forward to the whole thread generally as I have (and enjoy) most of Cope's solo stuff. And I agree, we should cover the books too.

 

For me Wilder isn't in the same class as the debut. Too many drugs I think and the songs suffer.

 

I always assumed it was just different drugs!

 

Mac hated the portrayal of him in Cope's book as a rubber-lipped Joey Ramone look-alike. Can't think why...

 

Ha! Other way round for me with those two songs. I adore "Like Leila Khaled Said" and it is my absolute favourite on this LP. For me, Wilder and his first two solo albums are the best things Mr Cope did musically. That's not to say that I think what comes later isn't any cop - far from it as there's all sorts of goodness & madness throughout the 90s and beyond, especially thematically - but there is something about the music on these three LPs that leads me to group them together.

I'm loving this thread. An inspired idea to start it.

 

I have to say The Great Diminions is growing on me fast.

Is it time to move onto Buff Manila yet? In fact, did that even exist? I only know about it from the Wilder reissue. I've never seen one, it doesn't have an entry on Discogs and internet searching doesn't reveal anything.

 

Both of the releases credited on the 2000 reissues for the bonus tracks are imaginary. File alongside that long lost Whopper album.

 

Yeah.
Buff Manila plays hi-hat on Whopper's version of "Kwalo Koblinsky's Lullaby".
Some fun and games going on.
For those who don't know, have a gander here.
(Whopper's version is also on Piano.)
Shouldn't be too hard to work out who Mr Buff Manila is.
(I don't want to give it away if you haven't already twigged.)
While Mr Kevin Stapleton is the one and only.....

 

Thanks for clearing that up. So the "Buff Manilla" tracks are just out takes from the Wilder sessions? Or were they just works in progress for the next Teardrops album?

 

My guess, and it is a guess, albeit slightly informed [v.happy for higher authority to step in here], is that there are no "Buff Manila" tracks per se, "Buff Manila" being a humorous pseudonym for one of the Teardrops (I shan't say which one - let's leave some fun for those who fancy a spot of sleuthing, though it's easy to work out). Given that the Whopper track appears on Piano, which we have yet to come to in the thread but which is basically a comp of v.early works, and that it is the only non-Teardrops track on said LP, my guess is that the track on which "Buff Manila"appears (no idea if there is more than just the aforementioned one out there, but if so I am unknowing) is the result of early Teardrops' larks/altered states, rather than being a Wilder outtake.

 

Those tracks were Wilder b sides ( see above) or tracks from the third album sessions that were released as an eponymous EP after the band expired ( coming up in my next big post). Except that the version of 'Suffocate' is the wrong one , from the Kilimanjaro era. All a policy of deliberate confusion, perhaps.

 

Ready for the next one!