Release dates: early March and 9 November
Was I listening to these in the 1980s? Yes.
I begin my survey of 1984 music with Julian Cope’s two album releases from that year: World Shut Your Mouth and Fried. If one were to believe the critical wisdom of the time, Cope’s career peaked with the early singles by the Teardrop Explodes – the ones released on Zoo Records. These singles, ‘Sleeping Gas’ and ‘Bouncing Babies’, were, supposedly, better than the re-recorded versions on the band’s first LP Kilimanjaro, which was in turn better than the group’s second and final LP, Wilder, which was in turn better than Cope’s first solo LP, World Shut Your Mouth. All these successive releases were compared unfavourably in reviews to their immediate predecessors, so that Wilder, dismissed on release, nonetheless became a stick to beat World Shut Your Mouth with.
With Fried the critical trend changed slightly: although for the NME, it marked no improvement on World Shut Your Mouth (and indeed David Quantick’s review contains the expected unfavourable comparison to the previous record, even if he remained dismissive of both), the Melody Maker review by Steve Sutherland was far more positive. That wasn’t enough to help sales though: Cope was dropped by Polygram soon after. He seems to have taken it all to heart, to the extent that World Shut Your Mouth is currently unavailable officially, and for many people Cope’s solo career begins with Fried.
This is a pity. My own personal ranking would be: Kilimanjaro is better than the early singles, Wilder is better than Kilimanjaro, World Shut Your Mouth is as good as Wilder, and Fried is a (small) step down from both. Both of the first two solo albums traditionally suffer, not only by comparison with Cope’s earlier work, but also with Ocean Rain from the same year by his perennial Liverpool rivals, Echo & the Bunnymen. But they are very different records. Ocean Rain is a self-conscious attempt to create ‘THE GREATEST ALBUM EVER MADE’ (as the adverts described it), and if it doesn’t reach those heights, it achieved enough to intimidate its own creators out of attempting to replicate its success for another three years. By contrast, both Cope’s 1984 albums have a dashed-off, spontaneous feel – attempts to shake off the doldrums of the collapse of the Teardrops – but this gives them a real energy. Ocean Rain is stately and self-important, swaddled in strings: World Shut Your Mouth and Fried, recorded much more quickly and for a fraction of the cost, blow a raspberry in its direction.
Consider the following lyrics from ‘An Elegant Chaos’, the first few lines of which are singled out for particular scorn in Barney Hoskyn’s NME review of World Shut Your Mouth:
People I see
Just remind me mooing
Like a cow on the grass
And that’s not to say
That there’s anything wrong
With being a cow anyway
But people are people
With the added advantage
Of the spoken word
We’re getting on fine
But I feel more of a man
When I get with the herd
Sure, it’s no ‘Fate, up against your will’, but it is … well, it’s quite funny. Its silliness makes me laugh – as it's intended to. It also has some clever wordplay.
The lyrics have this kind of loose inventiveness and lack of concern with the singer’s dignity throughout, and the music and production are enlivened with all kinds of playful grace notes: Kate St John’s oboe, a sitar, samples of revving engines and children playing, backwards guitar riffs, and invented historical references in the lyrics (‘Metranil Vavin’, which pretends to be about a Russian poet and reads like a treatise on Gnostic theology). But, in contrast to the lush orchestration of Ocean Rain, the sound throughout World Shut Your Mouth has a kind of fundamental cheapness, which for me is part of its charm. The keyboards and organ are particularly unmajestic, as is the drum machine on ‘Kolly Kibber’s Birthday’.
Hoskyns was not impressed by any of this. From the NME review published on 29 February:
The problem with Cope is that he writes everything in major chords, so that there’s never the cancer-in-the-sugar sensation he demands of music. All is delivered with the same orotund enthusiasm, be it the soft Blondiesque pop of ‘Elegant Chaos’, the forced Matt Johnson-style funkiness of ‘Pussyface’, or the wistful Kevin Ayers of ‘Lunatic and Fire Pistol’. To this day, Cope is singing ‘Baa-Baa-Baa’ and meaning it.
I’m not qualified to say whether everything on the first solo album actually is in major chords, although it surely can’t be true of the mournful ballads on Fried. But I think the obvious rejoinder would be that World Shut Your Mouth is supposed to be an upbeat album – and its success in this regard was the result of some psychic effort on Cope’s part ('I hold on to beauty / If I lose my grip I might fall'). It’s certainly not the product of complacency.
Fried is more of the same from World Shut Your Mouth – except it's gloomier, with less melodic variety and fewer musical or lyrical jokes. Despite the deliberately ridiculous cover image of Cope crawling naked under a giant tortoise shell, it takes itself more seriously: the queasy antics of ‘Reynard the Fox’, which describes a character cutting his stomach open, are diagnostic here – there’s no hint of a wink to soften the horror of this image.
One of Cope’s weaknesses in this early phase of his career was his fondness for minimalism and repetition. In his first volume of memoirs, Head-On, he tells of being mesmerized by a Subway Sect performance in Liverpool in 1977:
Drums and bass started together, a slow mid-tempo beat: Boom-bum-bum-bum, Boom-bum-bum-bum, Boom-bum-bum-bum …
Then a single tiny guitar note: Bow, bow, bow, bow, bow …
For at least a minute, the riff held steady, then the lead singer carelessly turned half round, the mike in his left hand. ... There was no chorus. Just the same riff throughout. I guessed the chorus must be the bit where everyone sung the same word over and over. The song finished and there was polite applause.
The next song was the same. A kind of three-note Stooges thing. But still at 15 mph. This time the guitarist played a chord for most of the song, but when the singer muttered, ‘Solo’ into the mike, the guitarist returned to the steady Bow-bow-bow of the first song.
‘Sleeping Gas’ is an early example of a song written according to this model: the reason I find the Kilimanjaro version superior is that it mitigates the monotonous chant of the lyrics with inventive production that layers sounds to create texture (horns, a double-tracked vocal, etc.). Cope was only a co-author for this particular track, but it seems to serve as a model for too many of the compositions on Fried. I’m incapable of musicological analysis: I just know that as a listener to World Shut Your Mouth, the movement in the vocal line recalls someone excited about what they have to tell you (pace Hoskyns) – and some songs are so bursting with ideas that they change musical gears several times, e.g. ‘Sunshine Playroom’. Conversely, Fried has several songs that not only do nothing to disguise their monotony, but actually emphasise it with a none-more-basic musical arrangement, especially ‘Search Party’ and ‘Torpedo’ on the second side – but also ‘Laughing Boy’ and ‘Me Singing’ on the first: and that’s 40% of the album. ‘Sunspots’ does the same thing, but here, as in the Kilimanjaro version of ‘Sleeping Gas’, we have the clever arrangements and different layers (e.g. tuba, a recorder) that provide the variety missing from the melody.
Finally, despite the caveats above, there is something quite remarkable about ‘Reynard the Fox’ beyond its grotesque imagery (though that imagery is also part of it). Consider the passage where Cope sing-speaks:
Reynard left and went to Warwickshire, to a mound near a railway line, With canals and a freezing swamp. He climbs high up above the countryside And breathes freely. To the south he could see Polesworth, and to the North he could just make out the ruins of the priory where Joss and I Played cricket as children. …
When pop albums evoke place, they usually do so implicitly, by atmosphere or indirect allusion: think the post-industrial landscape of Manchester as mediated by the music of Joy Division. By contrast, this passage from ‘Reynard the Fox’ seems a very modest, literal account, eschewing the kind of poetic detail prized by many critics, but this level of topographical specificity is virtually unprecedented in mid-80s pop (including on the rest of Fried and World Shut Your Mouth). The obvious precedent is The Beatles, in ‘Penny Lane’ (its twin ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is actually far less specific in this regard), but I suspect many musicians deliberately avoid this kind of detail in the mistaken belief that being less specific makes their songs more ‘universal’ and thus easier for listeners to identify with. But a favourite writing maxim of mine applies to songs as much as to stories: it’s always better for a story to be set somewhere rather than nowhere. Hence The Angels of L19 is set mainly within that postcode (and, even more specifically, mainly on South Mossley Hill Road).
It’s perhaps symptomatic that Cope reverts to a speaking voice to deliver this quasi-voiceover narration in 'Reynard the Fox', which offers details from his own childhood (Joss is his brother). It also seems important that this passage immediately precedes the description of Reynard cutting his guts open: it’s establishing the setting for what might now, in the context of this precise invocation of place, be interpreted as a shamanic ritual. This interpretation is partly based on Cope’s notorious stage antics, where he cut his own stomach while singing this song, perched on a custom mic stand named after Yggdrasil, the World Tree on which Odin’s body hung after he sacrificed himself to himself (Odin is hymned directly on Fried’s ‘O King of Chaos’). So perhaps ‘Reynard the Fox’ is the foundational text for Cope’s later interest in both prehistoric archaeology and magic ritual.
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