Sock Free Hideaway

 SONGS THEY NEVER PLAY ON THE RADIO 

20. Julian Cope: Fried with, and the Death of the Synthesizer 

PART ONE

I CAN vividly recall the coach trip to Wembley Arena from Oldham's Chronicle offices to see Prince and playing Copey's debut solo album World Shut Your Mouth on the Walkman all the way there. It was and is quite like no other record in my collection. Well, maybe the excellence that is the follow-up Fried.

After being a bona fide pop-star, he, in reckless homage to Syd, attempted to uglify himself. Even cutting himself up like Iggy with his mike-stand, but even the criss-crosses still looked pretty. This fabled anecdote is wonderfully recounted in his important autobiography, Head On/Repossessed.  

Teardrops manager David Balfe insisted on splashing his massive keyboard lines all over their LP's until it all got too much and Copey went solo. Skating around his kitchen in Tamworth on the latest Blancmange LP, he invented a pastoral psychedelia made with more childlike organs and oboes. Still under the influence of LSD. 

My father hadn't been long dead, and I was filled with a rage that LSD definitely helped temper. Luckily, I wasn't signed to a major with a musical point to prove. The album kicks off badly ; Bandy's First Jump and Metranil Vavin make a familiar racket that defeats the objective of going solo. Elegant Chaos improves things somewhat with its lyrical genius, but still sounds like a refined version of the Inspiral Carpets. Albeit, half a decade earlier.

However, side one closer Kolly Kibber's Birthday is astounding and creates a true dilemma.  In Particular Nobody trenchantly notes "I can't decide what I love most. The 16 beats to the bar drum machine. Rhyming Liverpool with junior school. Or the two note guitar solo." Basking in this unique velocity gave me and Jeff our finest musical moment, bar none.

Side two opener Sunshine Playroom resonates with me on a deeply personal  level. Only a partition wall divided me and my mother, but in my deeply troubled state of guilt, she might as well had been on foreign soil. The song gave me hope in reconciliation. Head Hang Low showcases Kate St John's haunting oboe to great effect and again the lyrics speak to me on a deeply personal level. Elevating the healthier aspects of my own conflicted self allowed me to maintain a bit of a split personality.   

Saving the best until last Copey revisits the observational brilliance of Tiny Children in an astonishing burst of poetics. Lunatic Fire-Pistol is evidence his invention was bearing fruit. Fortunately, it also signposts the musical direction of travel for Fried. 

PART 2

NOT CONSTRAINED by the sense of unfinished business of its predecessor, Fried has a distinct air of freedom about it. Channeling the spirit of Brian Wilson long before every introspective indie band by living under the studio mixing desk means this period is not without its share of anecdotes. Again, refer to Copey's important autobiography. 

He declared that "If it hadn’t been done before, then I wasn’t interested.” This rejection of novelty meant he could formulate his ideas far more coherently and swifter than the indecisive Brian Wilson. Opener Reynard the Fox takes elements from medieval folklore, Thomas Grey poetry, a Black Sabbath number, a Them riff, and Copey's own brand of theatre art, to create the most self-important song of the eighties. No mean feat. By the decades end, had he actually spilled his guts out live on stage, as, after hanging off his massive mike-stand for an eternity when playing it, you were almost willing him to do, he might've stole a few more column inches.  

Miraculously, things pick up astonishingly. Jaunty backward guitars cushion his wide mouthed wonder of a delivery on Bill Drummond Said. Capturing his first effortless pop moment since going solo. Laughing Boy is all oceanic stoner plucks with equally atmospheric dark wordplay. It's utterly delightful. An imaginary conversation with his wife and an acoustic masterclass propel Me Singing from ditty to album highlight. These three songs sound as fresh today as the day they were released.

After such an exhaustively brilliant side of music, side two is a little underwhelming. That said, Search Party would've sounded great on his debut. Holy Love is whimsical and also demonstrates that the pastoral psychedelia he was immersed in was effortlessly dripping out of his players. Closer Torpedo is Cope laid bare with just a church organ singing his most honest lyrics, Syd style. It's a skeletal masterpiece that predates the semi-bootlegs he'd drop in Probe by half a decade.  

The tragedy is that he was dropped by his label before he could even get the twelve inch of sole single Sunspots out. It's both epic and magical, with the strangest use of a tuba in the history of music. A bizarre choice for a seven inch single coz the best bit is the drawn out and omitted coda. Fortunately, it closes the first side of what we've now established to be his masterpiece.  

When he should've been preoccupied with further stripping back his pastoral psychedelia, he instead became immersed in the fame game and adding lots of unnecessary layers to his subsequent records and building that aforementioned bloody massive mike-stand. Thankfully, we got a couple of semi-bootlegs a few years later, created in stolen moments, but we never got anything as enigmatically beautiful as these first solo efforts. 

When I went to Wembley to witness Prince, I felt disappointed that I was simply one of many, many people. However, when I went to the Apollo to witness Copey that same year, I felt equally disappointed that I was one of so few.