Julian Cope
[Observer Music Monthly, September 2008]
The reason people can believe this religious bullshit is, of course you can believe in a miracle, of course you can believe that [?] came down from the sky and blah-di-blah, if you have a world where nothing remotely like that happens, it’s got to have happened to somebody else. You’ve got to be able to believe that it happened to somebody else. You are legendary, but it’s too soon. They don’t want to hear you, they want to hear your great-great-grandchildren telling them that great-grandfather The Sage Savage Spoke This. They need the distance to hear you.
Are you saying that in a way rock’n'roll has lost its quasi-religious function?
I’d say religion is treated that way until its two hundred years old.
And rock’n'roll is the same, really?
Yeah.
The dilution of it…
Yeah, and the way I see it, you’ve already got the generations saying it ain’t rock’n'roll unless it’s nineteen-something, but to me, 2008 is an amazing time to be making great rock’n'roll. Because we can be writing things that say fuck this, fuck that, more than ever. We did go through oases of time where there were fantastic moments of truth, amongst the Pickety Witch singles, or again, to me, the reason it was essential when Kurt Cobain topped himself in 1994, it suddenly said, the nineties counts, and therefore, all the John Lennon thing about the sixties, so only the sixties and the nineties count, and if that’s true then also part of the seventies must count, and you find that even some parts of the eighties count. It still only included certain things, and it’s fair enough that it should do, but at the same time, we live in a linear culture, and because we’re living on the end of a line, we always tend to think that the people of fifty years ago knew fuck all. But as we are living in a linear culture, you’ve just got to be able to create something that… I remember when Perry Farrell did nothing shocking, and twenty years later, so many things are so shocking. I get so shocked, by so many things. They are so much more grotesque than anything I could imagine would have been. You can’t anticipate.
Did you like Cobain?
Yeah. I thought he was amazing, I thought he became what he was because he was brilliant.
I interviewed him, and I really liked him. He was one of us, really, he got it. But there was a side, the junky side, and also the American guns and desperation side. Do you think that one of the reasons that rock culture has lost its nerve since then is because of the example of his death? You’re looking at it in a positive way, but I also see a negative thing about it, people are very afraid to go as far and as deep as he did? Because that’s what happens when you do?
I don’t think he even knew he was going deep. He was, very deep, but I don’t know what his intellect was like… but the fact that he worked with Burroughs before he died, that is evidence. Even if it sucked big wads.
Coincidental with the death of Kurt, you have the rise of Brit-pop, and Oasis, who I really liked when they started, but they became very banal, and they still are. And under the influence of Brit-pop, at least in England, I mean, the Libertines, they don’t rock. They do music hall.
But the guy is clearly a poet, isn’t he? That would be so disturbing, for your legacy to be that you turned people on to smack, in the poetic style, and leave no music? It would be a disaster, wouldn’t it?
What I was trying to do on Black Sheep, and I think it’s the same riff through the last fifteen years, is to show people what we have got, and what we will lose, if we keep taking it for granted. We’ve fought for gay people to not get beaten up and called “queer”, we’ve fought for women to be able to walk around in short skirts and not be called “whore”. We’ve fought for people like me, people called Julian, to be complete and total pains in the arse, I have to say I do wear the hat religiously, but I have two theories. First theory, which isn’t quite as strong, is that the rock in the north, where you’re not fighting for water holes and limited amounts of fertile land, in a land where technically we live in “plenty”, the gods will never be essential. If you can provide something that’s an amazing alternative, and what they used to provide in pre-Christian times, and into the Christian times too, they provide festivities, guaranteed coatedness, once a month. If you can be coated once a month, you will work on the land, and there’s a possibility of shagging someone who is outside your grasp, a chance that you’ll fall asleep in the hay with… whoever, yeah? But as soon as that is clamped down on, people will start to try to get around it. So my first theory is that rock’n'roll provided that – but unfortunately, the second theory is possibly stronger, that the religious impulse in humans might be so strong now that even if you don’t live in a latitude where you have to fight to live, you will somehow find a need for it. And what you’ve got to do is make rock’n'roll into a religion. I spent eight days recently, hand painting a William Blake quote on my big old motherfucker of a mic stand. Most of the audience won’t see it, but my musicians will be constantly looking down at this – to create some kind of relics. Were they owned by White Lightning, it’s a religious relic, nothing less. It drives me insane, having written books, we’re like Aristotle now. I think almost all of Aristotle is lost to the world now, apart from a couple of his plays, and some of his greatest thoughts as written down by other people. But we are in print. We cannot destroy it. And when culture comes to an end, all we can ever have is your opinions about the Sex Pistols, my opinions about Amon Duul at Colville, at the Royal Standard.
There’s a school playground poem that I’ve always used, “the train that’s coming in on platforms two, three, four and five is coming in sideways – and that’s what I think a trip is, not a single punch coming in, there’s a book about Crowley, a book about the big stones, a book about what it was like to grow up in the Liverpool punk era, you’ve got an album that deals with these concerns, you’ve got a William Blake quote on the mic stand, bit by bit, people will begin to say, Cope’s a daft bastard, but he’s such a consistent daft bastard, there must be something to it.
And you put it all together on a web site, a shop window. The thing I like about the blogs is that they’re mostly very enthusiastic and positive.
And they’re portentous, aren’t they? When we first started getting a lot of Polish migrants in, I was, Don’t compare people who have lived through World War Two and come and live here, and who have been through… with the people who are coming through since the fall of the Soviet bloc. They ain’t the same thing. I don’t care, I’ve just done the European book, and I’ve been told to fuck off in ever Indo-European language. It’s not important whether I’m right or wrong, but it’s important that I play that role. I might be a fucking bastard, I don’t think I am. I went to Armenia, it took me eight years to get to Armenia after being invited. It turned out the reason it took eight years was the person who invited me had spent the last three years in jail, in Georgia, for secretly filming an anti-Stalin documentary. Stalin was Georgian, and they’re fervently pro-Stalin whether he was good or bad. When I got there, a lot of the small villages are not accessible by roads.. it takes you four hours to get to this hill top village, because there’s a rumour of a bronze age cemetery. You get there, and you find the bronze age cemetery, because it’s so obvious, and then the head woman comes out, and brings everybody out, and says, you’re the person who has validated where we’re from. Because England is amazing, et-cetera, et-cetera. It’s only by going right out on the peripheries of Europe that you realise, we’re not a bunch of boring cunts, we’ve done a bunch of shit that means something to people, still. You still get Germans going, you just drive on the left to wind us up, don’t you? I think, maybe we do. Maybe we are meant to be the cultural fly in the ointment, more than anyone.
Maybe in two hundred years time, they’ll look back and say – they had gay people and they were not attacked. They had women walking around with no undies on, and they didn’t get attacked. I’m so fearful that they’ll look back and ask themselves what they let go.
Are there moments that forge us as black sheep? When did you realise you were gay? Did being gay make you a black sheep?
It was seeing the Kinks on telly, doing You Really Got Me. And I thought they were girls. There they were dressed up, and really effete, but hard fucking rocking, Jesus.
See, that’s going to fuck you up forever. I’m obsessed with the moments. When I played Latitude the other day, I had two mellotrons, a 1966 mellotron and a 1970 mellotron, two Salvation Army marching bass drums, painted with my inimitable heathen imagery. Walked out onstage and half of it didn’t work, so it ended up twenty five minutes. But I could see all these kids standing there, cos they all go thinking it’s going to be the Shadows or something like that, the only track we did was Come The Revolution, and by the second song people were shooing their kids off somewhere else. The I did a version of Sleeping Gas that went on for about fifteen minutes, invoking Jehovah, Allah and the Christian God, and it was a pale imitation of all my heroes. But at least it was a pale imitation of something that clearly meant something. Mojo magazine are still writing about it, years and years afterwards. From what we were saying about Cobain, there were those moments and they clearly overlap into now.
I think, if you go into a world where you’ve got these people who only want to be career politicians from the age of sixteen, and they’ve got no experience at all. We should be politicians more than anybody else. Of course we don’t because we… (indistinct) you’d do this to anybody.
Tell me about that piece of writing. Did Aberfan mark you?
The reason I was there was I was having half term early, so I was at my Nan’s. You remember the outside broadcasts. How often was there daytime TV in the sixties? There wasn’t much.
Right up until St Julian I hadn’t interfaced – my favourite word at the moment, cos it’s so robotic, so 21st Century – I always thought that I’d pissed him off. But at that point, yeah, that’s when the world became heavy for me, when I was nine. You see pictures of me afterwards and I look very stern.
You were just in the next valley, so you could actually feel it.
It’s a really beautiful area, even with the vileness of the dirty valleys. It was blackness in Aberfan valley, blackness in Derry. There’s a Neolithic and bronze age cemetery there. It made me really fascinated by dying, which is how I got so obsessed with nines was because it was my ninth birthday. A lot of people who are poetic will get into looking for patterns.
I think it’s similar to how it was for Joy Division, there was a dark stain over Manchester, and in a way Manchester never had its sixties, it was wiped out by the Moors Murderers.
The thing about Liverpool is that I was an outsider, and in Liverpool, they would call almost anybody a woolyback. I had a bass player who knew this Japanese girl and he said, I wouldn’t fuck her, she’s a fuckin’ wooly. But it was genuinely bohemian. Liverpool is a Celtic city. Manchester is an Anglo-Saxon city. There’s a pragmatism about Manchester.
… and Liverpool will piss it all away.
Totally pissed it away. It’s why I have difficulty going back and dealing with it. Wylie, would have been bigger if he had come from almost any other city except Liverpool.
New Order kept going, and any of the Liverpool bands could have done that.
It’s a question of not doing things that you were born to do. It’s a question of sustain.
I liked Head On because you didn’t present yourself as cool.
I think by presenting it the way it was, it showed people how they were. I still get people coming up saying, Mac fucking hates that book, he thinks you’re a cunt. I don’t know why. I come out of it looking like a cunt, Mac doesn’t come out of it too bad. I called him a lazy git. And he was. Another thing in Head On, I thought Warsaw were shit, but Joy Division were astonishing. What was that about? I saw Warsaw a lot, supporting people like the Cabs…
I can’t bear the idea that what we experienced was a blip, a freedom blip. I don’t think I saw it as just something for me to enjoy myself, and part of me just feels I would do anything to sustain it.
What is threatening those freedoms?
What we’ve done with it. Other people’s plans. Islam. China. The Fall of the Wall. We know the nuclear family doesn’t work. The fact that I have a functioning nuclear family shows how it doesn’t work, that someone like me, or maybe four other people I know have made it work.
I think punk started with Martin Luther. Saying no. It was all about fertile landscapes, and people saying no to the big man. I think when Martin Luther said no, even Catholicism changed. I know loads of Catholics and their Catholicism is nothing like Roman Catholicism.
Going to the States, dress just like this, the first thing is they go for their guns, then they remember that we’re in the EEC. And that in itself is, well I’ve got a bigger hat than you, Mister Federale, you know. That’s not me taking it for granted, that’s me being smart enough, that I’ve got to do it, it’s essential that I do that. It’s what the role playing is about.
I also worry, when I speak to my friend who’s a Spanish poet, and he said at secondary school all the authorities were teaching them all the time was how great the Alhambra was for kicking the Moors out. They absolutely dwell on it. And once they’d got rid of the Moors, they could be themselves again… I just have this fear that the wise ones of this generation are not doing enough. Because McCulloch enjoyed it, he doesn’t need to get up and say, you lot will not get what I got. He’s so solipsistic, he doesn’t really know if anyone else exists besides himself. And I’m so painfully aware of it, also by going to places like Armenia and seeing what people don’t have. I was there for ten days, 113 degrees. In the capital, the authorities switch on the water between six and seven in the evening,
I wonder why everyone has taken the stupid pill.
It is quite Brave New World, isn’t it? Maybe in the past, when the Man first grabbed everybody and stuck us in the cities to work, maybe it was so difficult to excavate any free time for yourself, that free time would be astonishingly amazing, maybe its become possible to excavate that free time to the point where you can be you, and it doesn’t matter whether the you represents anything. Maybe its just being on Red Tube giving someone a blow job, or on YouTube telling someone to fuck off. Maybe it’s become like Herodotus, who destroyed the temple because he didn’t think he would be remembered any other way.
It’s not like I believe that back in the day was better. I just think that there was less facility to be so stupid.
Do you think also that rock music has become a victim of its own success? When we were young, our parents really didn’t care for it.
Had to like the Moody Blues first because Justin Hayward had a “sensible” long haircut. You had to be sneaky.
My parents wouldn’t allow me to watch the Rolling Stones.
Looking back, what must they have thought?
I had to go to my granddad, who thought they were brilliant. He was an old jazz fan.
Ah, it’s those alternate generations that are fucked up.
They did Lady Jane, and I was entranced by it. He was sniggering all the way through, and I asked him why, and he said, it’s something you’ll understand when your older, it’s just about a boy telling a girl he doesn’t want her anymore. He loved the lyrics, he thought it was really smart. But my parents were like, Oh, they’re disgusting, they’re animals.
To this day I find it difficult to listen to the Beach Boys and the Beatles, because my parents thought they were acceptable. And there’s the Morrison thing. I bought The End, the Doors first album, in 1973, which was a bad time for it, it was the time of Ritchie Blackmore, when a guitar solo had to sound like a guitar solo. Very bad metal. And listening to the Morrison thing, they whole Oedipal thing, I never got over that. As far as I was concerned, that was the only way that a rock’n'roll star could be. That you ultimately had to try and fuck your mother.
I have a terrible relationship with my parents to this day, because of Jim. I don’t blame him. Fortunately I don’t believe in the nuclear family.
I hate middle management! When I did The Modern Antiquarian, I’d get middle management guys coming up here, saying, we don’t actually believe any of this. I didn’t get there by what you believe, I don’t know what orthodox and unorthodox is, but I get seventy year old guys like Timothy d’Arville who edits Antiquity, which has been going since 1934, saying, it doesn’t matter what Julian Cope believes, the mere fact that he’s been to all these sites and has an opinion is extraordinary in itself. That’s a confident motherfucker.
My observation from going to a lot of sites is that the energy is very strong. But do you think that your visiting all those sites has had an adverse effect?
They think I’m a fucking numbskull now. But the thing that it’s taught me most of all is that I’ve embraced the temple. I’ve always had this idea that because rock’n'roll, being a rock’n'roll performer is the closest thing to being the shaman of a nomadic tribe. Your rock’n'roll temple is pre-institution. We’re coming to a particular time of year, that gorge over there will be a good place, people will think I’m speaking with the god if I go and bang on that hollow rotting log, so I run on ahead, ooh look, the gods are speaking to me. I always figured it was like that. The rock’n'roll temple is where you’re booked. The perfect person to write about the temple building culture is someone who is outside of it, and rock’n'roll is pre-temple building. That’s something a lot of people are not aware of, and cannot be aware of. You, as a writer, and a rock’n'roll writer, are totally aware of it. Seeing Joy Division at Acklam Hall is a totally different thing to seeing them at Eric’s, or on the windswept plains of Leigh.
When there’s nobody there, it can be whatever you want it to be.
That was the night we nearly got arrested, and the night I started to spend time with Martin Hannett. He was mad, but he was wonderful.
He had this incredible sound that again, was based on imbalance. Jehovakill is the best example of the imbalance of my early stuff. I’d do the song with acoustic guitar and vocals, and I’d totally fuck it up with a bass solo that arrives out of nowhere. Martin Hannett had that imbalance, and what’s wrong with rock music now is it’s mixed to be balanced. Joy Division is some of the least balanced music in the world, sometimes you can’t even hear what Ian is singing.
Or the Stones, or all those garage records…
Terrible, you can’t hear a thing. But the records always sound good. The Stones records, considering they were made in America, sounded terrible, but fantastic. I don’t mean so bad they’re good, I mean they sound like rock’n'roll should. Could the bass on Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, or We Love You, sound any more horrific? I think not. They are incredible. They are heathen.
Here’s a great example of what rock’n'roll can be. May 26th I did a one and a half hour lecture at Birmingham Town Hall, Heathenism and Paganism beyond Rome. Explained how Christianity was press-ganged by St Paul, totally altered, Mithra-ified, taken to Rome and turned into an entirely different thing, and what I enjoyed isn’t so much what I said, as that at the end of the day I was paid with a cheque from Birmingham City Council.
One of the things we’re talking about is the question of how to grow old gracefully in rock music. Is it something you think about, or do you do it instinctively?
I’m now running on the jazz guidelines. Because I was never a jazz fan, I never liked the instruments but it’s very useful. If you look at Dizzy Gillespie in the 40s, he was like Prince. He was more beautiful than Prince.
If you look at the jazz guys, and the amount of time it had been going on, say Miles Davis in the mid-70s doing that chromatic funk, or even the obliterated stuff, like Dark Magus, which to me is like anticipating No New York – I just started living like that. Mrs Davis would be saying, you’re not going off and hanging out with those other black guys – cos Miles was very posh – what are you going to be doing when you’re thirty five? Well, I’m going to do it in any case. It was a young man’s thing to start with, purely because the people had not grown old. And rock’n'roll started out as a young man’s thing because it hadn’t been around long enough for there to be old people doing it. Unless they become like Duran Duran, and try to pickle themselves as they were in 1983, you can actually look like an old bastard, and do it very well. When I see bands get back together and everything is just a little bit… the bass player’s (indistinct)… and so and so is wearing a suit, when he never wore a suit… I would rather not do it at all.
You were a rock star, for a moment, and a lot of rock stars don’t develop emotionally, from the moment that they become rock stars. How did you manage to grow? Was it the fact that you weren’t that bothered about it in the first place?
I think so. I was goaded into becoming a rock star, and the pseudo-intellectual side of me thought it would be quite charming. It was Bill who goaded me. The great thing about that whole scene is that it was greedy. It demanded that people had to be taken totally seriously, as an arsehole. It’s one of the things that’s been completely lost to the west. Something that I love about the east, the paradox. We have never… you can’t be anti-roads, and drive to a road protest. You’re being a hypocrite. You can’t be a vegetarian and wear leather. You can actually hold totally opposing thoughts…
You must have come across people from all kinds of religious backgrounds, who think there’s nothing more grotesque and damning than being gay.
You’ve been writing screeds against Christianity and Islam, but I noticed you wrote rather sweetly about one C of E vicar. You agree that people who are religious can nevertheless do very good things?
Oh, completely. That would be being inhuman and dogmatic, there’s a total separation between those things. I adhere to the concept of Norwegian black metal, and the church burning, but I hate to think of what it did to those communities that lost their fourteenth century churches, that had dragons carved on them. That’s the closest you can get to a pure heathen Christianity. One of the weirdest places I ever went to was Haslov church, that had pentacles in the windows, and standing stones in the church yard. So the reality is completely different. The practitioners of the religion are very different from the… I just thought, that was just cos some lunatic came up and said, can we have pentacles in the windows this time, please? And the local Christian fathers said, okay, then. There was a consensus going on there. The Wise Fathers are not always bastards to a man.
If you ever want to read a book that will make your blood boil, More Christianity, by C.S. Lewis. It’s the most woman-hating, homophobic, wretched piece of pseudo intellectualism I’ve ever read in my life. It’s obscene, in the old sense of the word.
I’m very wary of certain aspects of the occult… one has to be very careful in one’s exposure to certain energies, would you agree?
So heavily. During the 90s I worked with a guy who we both decided would be called Thighpaulsandra, who was one of the most effeminate men I’ve ever met, but would never admit to being gay, to the point where I just didn’t think he could be gay. He left to be a studio manager. Within two years of beginning to work together, he’s become a member of Coil, and by becoming a member of Coil, he’d become a professional occult weirdo. Now, he recently accused me of being homophobic. I was angry with him because on the album sleeve they said, all models are eighteen or over. My problem was, they needed to say that. Oh, you’re homophobic. I’m not in the least homophobic, you are doing something in which I do not believe.
I’ve said that I think Adam Ant had a gift for knowing what his teenage audience was, where I lacked a gift for knowing what a teenage audience was. I thought that Thighpaulsandra was being opportunist, suddenly his music was modified to what he thought was a pagan audience. But there’s no such thing as a pagan audience.
Some of the guys you showed me, who grew up in the Midwest and probably went to church, but you couldn’t be more pagan than them. Now you need three things to be, you know, “official”.
That’s why I say I’m heathen, not pagan. Pagan has a religious element to it now. Heathen literally means, “of the heath”. Pagan is a mutated form of Paganus, in the early days of the Roman church, what made St Paul’s version of Christ so useful was they turned him into a warrior. Which is what made it so terrible for the Jews, who rejected him because they were expecting a new Moses, and they ended up with this proto-Buddhist priest. He was useless to them. But but putting him through a Mithras filter, you turned him into a warrior version, a kind of sun god. Anyone who was a practitioner of Christianity in Rome was known as a soldier of Christ. Anyone who was paganus was all the other guys. Paganus really means, civilian. It’s sometimes translated, rather punkily, as a villager, a local, or yokel, but technically it means a civilian.
I also don’t use pagan anymore because it’s been appropriated by neo-pagans, who tend to be just as dogmatic, and in some ways more dogmatic than Christians. It’s so degrading. To me, heathen is good, it just means, “of the heath”, and I am a heathen. In opposition.
Why did you want to join punk rock? Did you see a band?
I saw a picture of the Pistols with Jordan. Before punk, my favourite photo was the one on the back of Raw Power, with Iggy and the audience. You look at it, and wonder how he came to be there. Now, what strikes me is the audience is doing anything to avoid catching his eye.
The other thing there was I hated Raw Power, because I hated the Stones, and I thought Raw Power was like bad Stones. When I was sixteen, the reason I went Kraut-rock was, one, they played around the Tamworth area, so you could see them, but also because my teenage girlfriend was an absolute feminist, and the Stones of that period was Black and Blue, and all that sort of thing. Everything was very very obvious. I didn’t get into the Stones until after punk. So when I look at the picture on Raw Power, it was in spite of what the album sounded like. It was only when I heard it on the back of Funhouse that I thought, hold on, this isn’t like the Stones at all.
Here’s why I think writing and photography are important to rock’n'roll. When rock’n'roll music falls on its arse, rock’n'roll photography and writing will carry the banner. I think if I saw my Japrock sampler, I’d have to have it to see the naked Japanese guy on the cover. They could sound like Badfinger and it wouldn’t matter. So maybe rock’n'roll isn’t music. Maybe rock’n'roll is about me standing there, looking like a cunt, filling my 4×4 with diesel, so that BM drivers on the M4 will turn and go, what the fuck? Maybe people just need to be reminded that the world ain’t the way they think it is.
Rock music used to be by and for the weirdoes, and now it’s by and for the straights. And that’s a real pity. I don’t know why that’s happened, but it has. When I first went to Sounds, nobody gave a shit. The place was awash with drugs, there were people freaking out all over the place, heroin, shit-loads of speed. I look back, and see complete mayhem. Nobody cared, because pop music was something on the fringe. The problem is that it became big business. It became incorporated, along with everything else. The problem is, rock music and its self-image, it’s reality as an outsider genre, the problem is is it’s part of everything else. Structurally, as well…
And people aspire to fit in, just like Tommy Steele aspired to use rock’n'roll as a springboard to Shaftesbury Avenue. We’re in Tin Pan Alley, aren’t we? We’re talking about falling in love with the seven inch single all over again. The problem we have is we’re from a generation who can’t really imagine that there would ever be a time when a download would be enough.
Early Teardrops stuff came out on sheet music! Can you imagine Party Sheila sitting at the piano, going “learn to accept them, la la la”. You could buy the sheet music instead of the thing. What would Atmosphere be like?
I’ve got the sheet music to I’m A Boy. Can you imagine playing that?
Stridently. Actually that could be quite good. I remember Mick Houghton said to me, when the Fried album came out and everybody… well, looking back, not everybody did pan it, actually – nobody bought the Velvet Underground in Britain, it got four lines in Time Out. Nobody bought The Madcap Laughs, it sold six thousand in two years. So it was in my interests, for self-preservation, to know our history, so I didn’t feel like a voice crying in the desert. Or if I was, maybe it won’t be forever. So, one of the things that shocked me about people like McCulloch, they’re actually being rather stupid, on a self-preservation level, to have not investigated, because then they would know that they’re going through a fallow period, but they’ve just got to get back up there.
It’s a question of discipline, too, and the rock’n'roll life style does not encourage people to have discipline. How did you find yours?
Forcing deadlines, after that Duke Ellington line, don’t give me more time, give me a deadline. I’m a huge fan of Robert Graves, and there was one period in his life when he kept a column going in some magazine for five years. People did things like that, in those days. When we were putting the web site together, I said to McGrael, my web guy, I want to have an Album of the Month. He said, you say that now, but will you still want to do it in six months? But I wanted to do it, and I’ve been doing it since May 2000, and I’ve never missed a month. I did one at the foot of Mount Ararat, I did another one at the hotel in Pompeii. The last place I wanted to be was in the hotel, writing, but it’s what I decided to do. To be a practitioner was everything.
The problem is, we were brought up with a model of popular culture that said, you can be weird, and at the same time you can also be very successful. You realise that you’re never going to be as successful as you were with the Teardrops…
I think I’m a lot more successful in the wider culture. Not chart-wise, at all. We go in and grub about in places that people don’t even know exist, and we say, oy, anything here of interest, because it’s really smoking my pole. And everybody come along and says, rather.
I like anything that is what I term an amphetamine pestilence of the psychic jacksy.
- but also with a bit of head stuff, not pure amphetamine.
The only person I knew in Joy Division was Ian Curtis. I always used to rub Mac’s nose in it afterwards, about the Factory-Zoo interface. Everyone used to play footie, except for me and Ian Curtis. In my dreams we used to sit cross-legged, but I think the lotus position was a bit outré for the time. But we talked about poetry. And then later, when we played with them in London, and they overtook us on the motorway, they had their arses out of the window. People don’t want to know that, not about Joy Division, they wouldn’t do that. But they can be both. Hooky and Barney are still like that.
When did you publish the Krautrock sampler?
1995.
So where did your tastes lead? You had the psychedelic stuff, then Scott, which was a big push of yours in the 80s as well, then what, back to Krautrock?
The Krautrock revival was going on all the time. I had a band that were all Krautrock nutters, and I also had a guitar roadie who called himself Rizla Deutsche. He would play Neu! 2, endlessly. It’s so disorientating anyway, with all the different speeds. At that point (?) tried to turn me on to heroin, but I wasn’t going down that route.
I read (?)’s piece in Strange Things Are Happening, where he wouldn’t even call it Krautrock. I thought, we’re going backwards now. Our generation always called it Krautrock. Pete Shelley was writing sleeve notes on United Artists Can compilations, back in the 70s. Wasn’t Manchester and Liverpool bigger than Krautrock? So I thought I’d write a book about Krautrock, and I remember going past a lorry on the motorway, and down the side of it said Norbert Dentisangel (?) and that made me think that the title had to be a long unwieldy thing. Krautrocksampler, that’s going to look really German. I wrote it in about three months, based on everything that I’d got. If I haven’t heard of it, it doesn’t exist.
Who did you base your writing style on?
John Sinclair and Lester Bangs. John Sinclair because I was absolutely wiped out by Guitar Army, they way he demanded that you take him seriously. I think that is the Holy Book. And Bangs because it was rock’n'roll beyond anything that I had ever read. It had the rhythm of rock’n'roll. And Lenny Bruce live at Berkeley. It makes demands, sucking in all this stuff and spewing it out.
I was talking about the paradox. I’m supposed to be anti-car, made an album called Autogeddon. But I drive a 4X4, and people say that’s hypocritical. A bunch of cunts drive 4X4s, but when I’ve got one up my arse, they’re going to kill me a lot less easily if I’m in a 4X4 as well. I’m a pragmatic motherfucker. I’m not a Christian who’s going to martyr himself. I want to be around when I’m eighty.
Look at Neil Young, who people said at the time would represent the Woodstock generation. He obviously has a need to keep doing it, and they only people you can trust are the ones who have a need. I have a Churchill t-shirt I like to wear that says, History will be kind to me, so I intend to write it.
I’m a Brit. I’m a British artist, and it would be gauche of me to say I have a world view, that I can speak for other people, because I would have to travel forever and I would have to be that bothered. But if you stand here and think about what Britain looks like from here… you have to work out the nature of your neuroses, what the trip is about.
When Mac was slagging me off, he always used to say, Julian’s from the Midlands, and everybody loved him. Actually, coming from the Midlands when there was really fuck all going on, and to be appreciated was astonishing. I still feel more invigorated and informed by that, than any of them.
What is the hat?
Actually, it’s 1955 Luftwaffe, it’s not Nazi. I put the braids on cos I thought it made it look heavier. I thought, I’ve got to be really careful here, because I’m not a Nazi. When I first started wearing it, a couple of friends said, why are you wearing that? People will think you’re gay. Well, if you’re worried that I would be worried, we’re going through a pretty dodgy time. In that case, I’ll wear it because I want people to think I’m gay.
People have some silly ideas.
People will continue to have silly ideas unless you have mad bastards going around looking like cartoon navvies.
Going back to the record, you’ve said that Black Sheep is a bit of a change…
A bit of a change, yeah, proto-metal. I’ve gone into this territory where… I always had a deep hatred of metal, because metal to me was just this horrible outpouring of Thor, and Thor is useless to any artistic soul. The two main patriarchs in the Northern Lands, one is Thor, who is blue collar, he is Grand Funk, and the other is Odin, who gave his name to the ode, and he’s a great poet. I always thought that the greatest rock’n'roll was always Odinist. It’s informed by the female, it has a very strong female side. I thought Pete Burns was very Odinist. But I didn’t want to go into metal, because then you fall into the realm of Thor, which is Motorhead (?)…
But as I got more into it, I thought, who am I kidding? Kick Out The Jams is proto-metal. It’s just poorly played soul, but with an incredible desire to play well. Then I got to thinking, how do you navigate your past? Was anyone genuinely informed by this erupting (?)
I got Feels Like A Woman by the Troggs, which is what 20th Century Schizoid Man would’ve sounded like if they hadn’t been wankers. It all came down to Amon Duul, Dance of the Lemmings, bands that were influenced by Sabbath but were inevitably better. These were garage musicians that didn’t quite make it the first time, and got sign at the turn of the seventies.
If you listen to Dark Orgasm, it’s got a lot of metal in it, but it’s very unbalanced in it’s mix, cos I don’t like metal production. I’ve gone back to the Jehovakill, heathen dark folk sound, acoustic guitars, lots of mellotrons, hand drums, lots of melody.
I headlined the 2004 Cambridge Folk Festival, and I walked onstage with a big beard, and the most metal-looking solid body guitar I could get, and I said, I’m the only folk artist on this entire bill. This is all a hundred years ago, and my songs are about now. I won them over, eventually.
I had something sent to me recently, an American band, and the music was great, but the song was about the Vietnam war. The Vietnam war needs to be written about by people who are going through the Vietnam war. Now, we’re going through umpteen other wars, and they need to be written about.
Why aren’t people doing that?
I think they’re scared. They’re scared stiff. They think that if they say anything against power, people are going to come and murder them in the night. I don’t think so. What makes the western media so powerful is the ability to create something out of Islam that they can actually thrive upon. If Islam was all-powerful, we’d already be dead.
You’re not afraid to make a fool of yourself, are you, Julian?
A daft ha’p'orth is what I’m aiming for, in the inimitable words of my Grandma Cope….
I’m really scared that in a hundred years people will look back on this time, and they won’t have people like that anymore.
You really think it’s going to go?
Use it or lose it is a cliché because it’s true. I spent a few days with an old friend recently, and with all the conversations going on around him, he spent his days doing the Daily Express crossword. I wish I hadn’t done it, he was a smart guy, and his mind has become a vegetable. Supposedly intelligent people say to me, don’t you think you’d be more successful if you reformed The Teardrop Explodes? I’m doing all this stuff to keep myself invigorated every day, hanging out with people I believe are culture killers (?) and you think I’m doing all this because it hasn’t yet occurred to me to reform the Teardrop Explodes?
When I did The Modern Antiquarian, I dutifully did 23 meetings with production companies, not because I wanted to do a TV programme, but because Harper Collins is so monolithic, if they didn’t actually see me having the meetings, they’d think I was letting the side down. In the end, nobody was offering anything that didn’t seem like a total fucking re-tread of what I’d spent the last eight years doing, but for TV. I ended up doing a pilot for a series, and I kept telling them, I don’t want to be a TV presenter, and they kept asking me to shoot a safety shot, with me in the picture, and they used every single “safety shot”.
But you can’t play the culture hero unless you’re fulfilling the covenant. That’s why I was happy to do a voice over, cos I know I’ve got a good speaking voice.
Who are your favourite archaeologists?
Aubrey Burl, who is eighty five. He’s way ahead of everybody. He does book titles like “The Stone Circles of the British Isles” and he goes off and visits 800 sites, and thirty three years later, he writes the book. He and I got on amazingly well. I’ve been doing some long-term studies of monuments in Sardinia, I could call him at any time of day. He never lost the enthusiasm.
Are you doing another archaeological book?
I have a long-term book on Sardinia. I have three books out in Italy, I have a really good Italian publisher. My novel is coming out first in Italian. The only person to write a really good book on Sardinia in the last hundred years was D.H. Lawrence. So I’ve also been spending a lot of time in D.H. Lawrence’s childhood home, but you know my thing about the itinerant poets being perfect to interface with the temple. I took a massive amount of magic mushrooms at Lawrence’s childhood home in Eastwood, a little mining town in Derbyshire. Went down into the basement at 3am, going, David Herbert, I’m here! And what I learned was that if you greet the ancestors in a real obvious way, in a place that’s served the dead for like four thousand years, you can go anywhere with it. You can reach in to those moments. I was thinking, well, he’s the king of punk, isn’t he, D.H. Lawrence.
Can I tell you something heavy? I had a vision of Allah. You know that I talk about religion… and I’m writing an epic poem, a rock opera called A Dick in The Afterlife, and one of the recurring themes is that this Metaphysical European Man is coming together, and he’s having a problem coming together. So there’s this twenty five minute Sob Song, the centre piece of the work. There’s the composite parts of the European Man, the dancing feet are Spanish, and your heart is French.
What’s the English bit?
Well, the most important part is, with what will you defend yourself? Of course you will defend yourself through your tackle, so the name of the overall song is How German is Your Helmet? I bought this old M40, you know the old German hats, and it it – you know I do Reynard the Fox, death and resurrection, and in it the character holds out the helmet, and he pisses into the helmet and douses himself, but anyway, after this Festival Hall show, I did this whole anti-Allah thing. Who was it who did Can You Hear Me, Mother? (George Formby) I did this, Can You Hear Me, Motherfucker? Well, that night at a very very weird motorway hotel, I had this vision of Allah, this almost Blakeian vision, this enormous hand coming out from Mecca, hovered over London, searched down, pointed down at me, through the roof, and I’ve never been so close to having a heart attack in my life. I was sure I was gonna die. I was burning up with fear, but I started to realise that if I didn’t die, I would be stronger. It was so metaphysically enormous, and so pointing, and as it started to recede, after what seemed like about an hour and a half, over the horizon, it occurred to me that I am of no use to a desert god, and I’m actually really worth squashing. I was thinking for ages that I wasn’t worth squashing.
What sort of a state were you in when this happened?
When I first started to experience visions, I likened it to being anally raped through your third eye. What’s so weird about it is it’s so fucking clichéd. And also, as a good Western boy, the part of you that is purely intellectual is laughing his head off, even while you are pinned. But this was the first time I was taken right out of my experience. This is not something for you to write up, but I don’t think my life will end all sweetness and light, so if anything really horrible and vile happens, it doesn’t really matter, because I’ve been granted this astonishingly wonderful and fertile life. But ultimately, I haven’t interfaced with the gods, and I really believe that they exist. That’s what makes me so genuinely scared.
You had the misfortune to see the Sex Pistols and people are still mad at you for it. This is the problem with religious cults. They don’t’ believe that it really happened, it needs to have happened in some bigger mythological world. This is one of the reasons I’ve been able to continue. In some ways I’m really fucking straight, but there’s also a part of me that is so… was it Mahler who said that it was enough merely to have lived this life? That’s how I feel. It’s enough to have lived this life. Everything is so mythological to me. I think I got it from my mum. For my mum, everything was poetic. Not only the poetry, but the manner in which the poet lived. But when I became a poet, it was too much for her. The working class are okay, but my mother was one of those working class who became middle class, and the middle classes are the most removed from the arts. So I think that, coupled with the fact that Morrison did such a good job on me with the Mother I Want to Fuck You thing, that I could be whatever I wanted to be. It meant that, say when I was doing a big Paul Morley interview for the NME, and immediately I had to talk about all the drugs I was doing, because I knew my mother wouldn’t read any of it, because in her eyes it was all bullshit, I was Mister Tommy Steele in her eyes.
Are you playing Black Sheep live?
I’m starting to, but I’ve got a drummer who is part Sioux, and it enables me to say I’ve now got a World Music Ensemble: someone from Derbyshire, someone who is part Sioux… Black Sheep is good enough, they’re good solid songs…
I like the theme of it, the Black Sheep, the outsider, is very important…
It’s very obvious in a way…
…and there’s the slightly ridiculous element too, which I like, the Bad News Tour element…
Definitely.
…which I like because it means you’re not being cool. A lot of the music I like is uncool and stoopid, even though it now seems to be very cool, like 96 Tears
It’s strange, cos I’ve got teenage daughters, and I’m talking with teenage guys who are talking about bands I’ve worked with, and they’re like, were they just the coolest people in the world? If I could only explain just how uncool, but then they’ve got to be what you require. There’s no point in making them look uncool, cos it makes you look like a churl, or worse still, didn’t get it.
Going from Krautrock to Axis rock, was that just a natural progression?
It started from trying to understand the British world view, which is really the English world view, a true world view? I just did a tour of Japan, and realised that it was just an island world view. If an island is a big success, and it’s context is that it’s near a big continent, once they’ve had that success they’re going to feel that they are marooned in a sea… that’s what is different. Once I started realising what made the Japanese so different, it was useful for me, as a Brit.
This came up in the punk era, one of the big books of 1976 was the one about Unity Mitford, the dark Mitford, the stalker of Hitler. It’s an incredible book. And then there was Philip K. Dick, The Man In The High Castle. We grew up with top quality science fiction, and we had an idea of the future, that wasn’t Marinetti, and it wasn’t the lame early 80s stuff, but now everyone seems to be terrified of the future.
I think the last signpost was 2001, and now we are adrift in a rudderless boat. That’s why we need the new myths, but with regard to the swastika, I think we had to go through it for the simple reason that when I was a kid… did you make model aeroplanes as a kid? British model makers were the most accurate people in the world, and the planes didn’t have swastika s on them. I thought, they wouldn’t leave that out when it was so important, and I became rather obsessed with the swastika, so when I saw the picture of Siouxsie with the swastika, it was something that was so demanding of investigation. It was a killer. You know the Germans never called it the swastika? They called it the hooked cross. Going through the whole swastika thing when I was thirteen, I found my Nana’s stack of Christmas cards, and one from her mother, in 1913, had a swastika on it. I asked her what it meant, and rather than explaining it, she just went, oh, that old thing, and ripped it up in front of me. But it was an old religious symbol, swastika is a Sanskrit word.
We’re getting to the point where wearing taboos is a really important thing. One of the things I wear because it transgresses, especially in PC Land, is the Legs of Man. It really winds people up, cos from a distance it looks like a swastika.
But you wouldn’t wear a swastika?
No no, because I thing the swastika is evil, it’s become evil. I don’t think you could ever redeem the swastika, could you? It would be pointless. You’d have to be a real pseudo-intellectual to feel the need to.
What has happened is an absence of transformation. If the shaman does not transform, he is not a shaman. Frank Zappa could be the most talented musician, I didn’t like his music, but I can see he was very talented, but he did not declare himself as a shaman. Jim Morrison could be one of the most inept people in the world, but he declared himself a shaman. You’ve got to declare it.
And I quite like that the Doors are a bit vulgar.
Me too, and that’s why I write songs like How German Is Your Helmet. They’re gauche. It’s got to be a bit beery and belch.