THE TEARDROP EXPLODES, BUT CAN JULIAN COPE?

THE TEARDROP EXPLODES, BUT CAN JULIAN COPE?

BUNNIES EXPLODE OVER LIVERPOOL!

by

Chris Salewicz

When I meet Exploding Teardrop Julian Cope he isn’t up in his adopted Liverpool. Instead, my rendezvous with the man behind the melancholy, melodic and intangibly mystical music of The Teardrop Explodes is arranged for a pub in North London. This hostelry, however, is set in the Liverpool Road, so at least that bit’s alright.

Julian is in London for a photo session for the English teenybop papers, an apt market for his leather-clad, blond-tressed, sensitively fresh-faced looks, that really place him more in the mold of the 60’s intelligent singing idols like Paul Jones’or Julian’s hero figure Scott Walker than the more threatening role models of the mid-70’s.

The ambitious, innocent Julian bubbles with the passionate naivety of the true pop fan, and continuously gushes forth such a torrent of words he sometimes involuntarily has to gasp for breath in between syllables. “It’s brilliant,” he eulogizes about most things in the Scouse accent he’s acquired since he left his native Wolverhampton , to attend a drama course at teacher’s training college on Merseyside.

Soon after his arrival in the city Julian began visiting Liverpool punk temple Eric’s, the area’s spiritual center for 1977’s musical movement. “I’ve been educated quite a lot,” says Julian, very much the typically “bright” child of the English teacher assistant headmistress who is his mother. “But that didn’t mean that when the punk thing came along I couldn’t totally understand what it was about, and orientate myself to it. What I had to do was gear myself towards it.

“I do know a lot of things, just from the way my parents brought me up. My father was in insurance: I can’t pretend to be a total street kid. But that doesn’t mean I’m a smug, middle-class kid. It’s just that my way of doing things is slightly different, and people are just going to have to adjust to the way/do it.”

Out of his Brady’s experience came Julian’s first group, The Crucial Three, in which he allied himself with those two other Liverpudian examples of large talent and even larger egoes, Ian “Mac” McCulloch, now with Echo And The Bunny men, and Pete Wylie, now of Wah! Heat.

Appropriately enough, The Beatles’ “If I Fell” comes on the pub jukebox and Julian speaks of The Crucial Three in seductive Liverpool tones that tend to lend a potentially droll twist to every word he utters: “We were really just three people with so many ideas we hadn’t got a clue what to do with them. We never played any gigs. We just rehearsed. Just a total embryo band. I remember at the time Wylie saying, ‘Oh, Crucial Three: in a few years time we’ll be being spoken of as a legendary band!’, and in a way we are.

“It used to be a really intense friendship. It’s still alright with Wylie, but between me and Mac it’s a bit weird, although there is a real love there. Mac says he was really pissed off with me for kicking Mick Finkler out of the Teardrops just after we’d signed the deal, but, in fact, I was really pissed off with him for being pissed off with me. Because basically I kicked someone out who wasn’t up to scratch. ”

Eight months after entering teacher’s training college, Julian quit: “Really, I left because the course was so crappy. I’d read most of the plays they were doing: I was really into people like Pinter and Beckett.”

Flirting then with other local outfits, and becoming a firm friend with nearby Manchester’s The Fall with whom he and Mac McCulloch occasionally helped out as unofficial roadies, Julian in early autumn of ’78 ended up in A Shallow Madness which quickly was re-christened The Teardrop Explodes, after an incident in a frame in a 'DC comic.

In early ’79, “Sleeping Gas,” a four track EP, was the first of three independent 45s to be released on Liverpool’s Zoo Records. It was followed by “Bouncing Babies” and “Treason.” By late summer of 1980, The Teardrop Explodes had signed with Phonogram Records.

The group is managed by former stage designer Bill Drummond, a voluble fellow of boundless energy who is one of Britain’s finest creative managers and is possibly also slightly mad. Drummond co-runs Zoo Records with Dave Balfe, keyboard player on Kilimanjaro, the first and only Teardrop album. Drummond and Balfe also comprise the Chameleons, the team who co-produced Crocodiles, the album by Echo And The Bunnymen whom they also manage.

“As a matter of fact,” explains Drummond, his eyes characteristically flashing maniacally, “we only signed with Phonogram because they were offering a good deal, and we had to sign with someone. We were going to have put out Kilimanjaro on Zoo, but we’d run up all this studio time making it, and didn’t have any money with which to pay the bills.”

Drummond, according to Julian, is “massively important” in the general Teardrops’ scheme: “There are elements of totally abandoned genius in Bill. He just thinks so big—that’s wnat’s so brilliant. I’ve got a book coming out, the Bunnymen have a book coming out, there have been films made of both groups..

How correct it is to refer anymore, to the group known as The Teardrop Explodes in currently questionable. In something of a pre-Christmas putsch Balfe and guitarist Alan Gill were replaced by Jeff Hammer and Troy Tate respectively, leaving only drummer Gary Dwyer from the unit with which Julian Cope worked on Kilimanjaro.

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TEARDROPS

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“I couldn’t get on with Dave Balfe,” he says. “We used to fight all the time. It’s a business for him, being in a band, but to me it’s a full-time thing. He was making it very much into a job, and I thought there was no point being in a group like that. It climaxed, really, when we came to try and do the new album, where I felt he was really rushing and pressuring me, and every song was ending up being very much like what a Teardrop Explodes song is expected to sound like.

“The Teardrops’ music,” Julian continues, “should be so open. There is a theatrical side—an element of drama—to it, but that’s not intended to detract in any way from the music.

“To me the whole Teardrops’ thing is very English—I sing in an English accent, for example. But it’s not the trite twee Englishness of someone like Genesis. It’s just that I suddenly realized I was very English. It’s more so, though, in the way that the Englishman abroad is always more English that the Englishman at home.

“I like exotic things. I like these sort of clothes I’m wearing,” he runs his thumbs down the front qf this leather flying jacket, “and I think that’s what the Teardrops is about: a very English attitude towards love. Most of our numbers are love songs. These days you’re not supposed to know what love is, but /fall in love every week.

“People seem to find this embarrassing sometimes. They ask why I use love song imagery. But I use it because it’s often an easy way to convey feelings. What I’m more interested in is songs with weirdness, rather then weirdness with songs. All my favorite bands like the Doors used to write great songs, and when they’d written them they seemed to take them apart and add that edge...

“A lot of the Velvets’ songs were just pleasant numbers. But they had that context, and the context is one of the most important things: “Sunday Morning” next to “Waiting For The Man. ” They worked off that great contrast. ”

Julian Cope is probably the first rock ’n’ roller ever to claim as his weightiest influence Scott Walker, the mystiquesteeped main vocalist with mid-60’s phenomenon The Walker Brothers, who later made a succession of soulful, brooding solo LPs. At one point, Julian seems to become a little excessive in his estimation of this perfect rock ’n’ roll near-tragic figure. He’s talking about poetry: “The whole metaphysical thing is really fabulous. Being a big romantic, I think there’s Donne and Marvel and then there’s Crashaw. Then there’s T.S. Eliot. And then I think of it as Jim Morrison and Scott Walker.”

Julian, however, redeems himself of this possible hyper-estimation of Scott’s talents as he often redeemed himself of seemingly wildly exaggerated statements. He continues: “They all use that panoramic vision that then centralizes down to one particular spot—our second album’s full of those sort of images. It’s going to be called The Great Dominion, and there’s this really empirical thing that dominates it. I love the idea of the massive image centralized down to something tiny—the idea of the macrocosm and the microcosm. It’s so intense. I love it.

“Scott Walker, though,” he adds, “had the most disarming sounds you could hear on his records, with the most beautiful melodies. I’m doing a Scott compilation album for Zoo. I’m freaking out about it: he’s one of my favorite ever-ever singers and I’ve got the chance to compile all his songs! It’s quite a presumptuous, pompous thing to do, but all I’m saying really is that if you didn’t hear them the first time round listen to them now. It’s called The God-like Genius Of Scott Walker!” he smirks coyly.

“I think that retrospective thing is very important, actually. A lot of rock ’n’ roll really works like thaj. Loads of rock bands become lost because they’re at the wrong time, but it doesn’t make them any less great that people don’t realize how good they are until later.

“Last year I wsas catching up on stuff like Love’s Da Capo, and Tim Buckley’s Goodbye And Hello—all that Elektra stuff is really good, some of the psychedelic stuff is fantastic: that’s why I can never deny that I’m into it—I can’t say, ‘Psychedelia, what’s that?,’ because I am aware of it, I am into it. I think Love are brilliant. But we got compared with them, and it was only after that that I got into them. I’ve been into the Doors for ages, though.

“But it was too easy when we got labeled as a psychedelic band. Most psychedelic bands didn’t have strong melodies. I didn’t think of the Velvets as psychedelic. Psychedelia was stuff like 13th Floor Elevators, who were R ’n’ B with added weirdness. Maybe Love was psychedelic, because it was so strange. What I loved was that whole uneasy feeling.

“A reviewer once wrote, it’s about time Julian Cope started writing real acid lyrics.’ So I went out and tried acid. And I thought, ‘Well, that’s what I’ve been writing about all the time.’

“There was no mystery or anything, and taking drugs never had anything to do with the music. It was just pure excitement. The last thing I’d discovered before that had been sex, which was when I was about J5. I’d always kept off drugs via a conscious decision really, because I used to have quite a lot of trouble just existing anyway.

“But then they were suddenly available to me, and I started experimenting with them. It was alright. It was pretty interesting to discover acid so many years after you’ve discovered everything else. There were no elephants climbing through windows. I just spent the first day totally hysterical with laughter. It was no more of a big deal than reading your first Burroughs novel, or whatever.

“I haven’t taken anything for ages now, though, because I’m too excited about the new Teardrops. Just being in a band is incredibly exciting, and as soon as it stops being exciting then I’ll forget it. It’s like a total ego-drug. That is the best drug in the world. Brilliant.”

After the recent drastic line-up changes one wonders whether there is any point, or justification, in continuing under the name of The Teardrop Explodes. Julian even intends to abandon his bass-playing and hire a musician for that purpose: isn’t it more logical just to peform and record as Julian Cope?

“I was thinking of doing that,” he admits, “but I have a lot of pride in The Teardrop Explodes, and the potential of The Teardrop Explodes. I want ot to be remembered as a great band. And we’re not that at the moment. I do want us to be excellent. I do want us to be great. I want it to be a bit more than just people remembering, ‘Oh, Teardrop Explodes: they were a good late 70’sband.’

“I want us to be big, because I think it’s good commercial music that has more going for it than most straight pop. There’s loads of good bands—there’ve always been good bands. But all my heroes were great: they were unpredictable. And when they were crap, they were terrible. Like both Beefheart and Tim Buckley at times. But maybe that’s the way it should be—I’m not bothered about making mistakes, so long as when you’re good you’re amazing. I just think it’s dead easy to put out good material—but I prefer the risk between putting out amazing stuff and dog crap.

“I think the way the new album’s going is it’s going to be amazing. But there is the possibility it could be total dog-crap. In fact, that’s the only thing that keeps it going, in a way.”

It does seem so easy to make safe, “classy” records....

Julian nods: “I’m a total taste freak, and when our album came out I just wanted to throw up at the sight of the sleeve. It’s one of the dodgiest ones I’ve ever seen. It’s a millidn people’s ideas. We’re trying to get it re-packaged.

“Fifty per cent of the new stuff isn’t what you’d think of as Teardrop songs. They use viola and phased trumpets and 2/4 and 3/4 rhythms. I even want to use a girl singer on a couple of songs, because everyone expects to hear my voice.

“I realized at the end of last year that I do want to be big, but it’s incidental to being very, very good. If being big means not being that great, then it’s not that important. Being successful is like a bonus to being really good.

“Mind you, I change my mind all the time, depending on the information I receive. Sometimes I think that’s the only way to be—in a state of total turmoil all the time. I evaluate everything as much, if not more, than most people, but I reach no conclusions. Mark Smith of The Fall slagged me off for being an escapist. From the way he writes he’s suggesting he’s always meeting, the problem head on. However, just by talking about it totally plainly I don’t think you are necessarily meeting it head on.”

People’s opinions change all the time. You can see that on a grander scale in the way in which views of history alter. It’s all a bit of purging process, really...

“That’s it. I got really pissed off because of the massive wordly style in which Mac writes his lyrics. I was going on to Bill about it, saying ‘Oh, I’ve really done so much more than Mac, yet he’s putting this supposedly very important stuff over and still living at home with his mum.’ And Bill said, ‘Yeah, but he’s doing it better than you—he’s writing wordly lyrics and people are believing him.’ And...Yeah: I wouldn’t argue with that, because he does. In the same way that Kerouac wrote most of On The Road at his auntie’s. Does it matter in the end?

“A lot of the time my lyrics are about totally innocent little things thought of when I’m sitting in my room feeling a bit queasy. It’s down to what you do best, and I’ve realized that what Mac does best is the whole enigmatic, worldly figure thing.

“It doesn’t matter to. anybody that Mac doesn’t know that much. Because he does, really, because he’s telling people he does.

“There’s a track on the first album called ‘Second Head,’ which is about the theory that you are who you think you are, who other people think you are, and who you really are. Yet I was thinking most people are worried about the second head: they put this head on for public consumption. I always used to think that clothes were so unimportant.” He motions again to what he’s wearing. “But they’re totally important, because they’re 70 per cent of you to most people. There’s no point in denying it.

“At the moment,” he adds, “it’s very hip to deny knowledge, and to use monosyllables where you can provide really erudite answers. But what does it matter? It must’ve been a real strain on Joe Strummer learning to talk like that.

“I love the idea of the artist. I want to sit at home with my harmonium and viola and acoustic guitar and tape recorder, and loads of records and books. But it’s me who believes that—just, me. I also know that when it comes down to it, it’s just pop music. ' ;

“I couldn’t be enigmatic—it’s too much to work at. I work better when I’m being myself, just enthusing about things. A lot of people get pissed off when they meet me...”

What? They want the moody poet?

“Yeah.” he nods. “I’ve done that sometimes, just to make it easier when I’m on stour, say. People come into the dressing-room and I’m just sitting in a corner, thinking. But what I’m actually thinking is, i don’t want to speak to these people.’ I get all moody, and they accept it.

“What an easy cop-out.”