From the October 10, 2004 Sunday Times of London
Pop
Romancing the stones
Julian Cope, former rock god and pagan poet, has an oddly Establishment sideline–he’s a whizz on archeology, as his latest book proves. By Stewart Lee

Julian Cope, the former lead singer of the chart-topping 1980s pin-ups the Teardrop Explodes, is playing a secret solo show in the back room of a community arts centre in the Hampshire frontier town of Aldershot. Union Jacks flutter in all the pubs. Cope’s hair is, by some margin, the longest in the surrounding area. On stage, alone, in a floppy hat and sunglasses, he surveys the small but swollen space and modestly takes stock of the situation. “I know I’m not current,” he laughs, “and I don’t believe I’m timeless. I am in my forties, and in sight of 50. And once you’re over 50, 60’s not far away. And then you are allowed to be legendary. So I just have to keep my head down and keep working. Then I can be legendary.”

To many, the antics that have characterised Cope’s career are already the stuff of legend. He appeared on the cover of his second solo album wearing only a turtle shell, protested against the poll tax dressed as a giant baby from space and is winning new fans in America with his “ambient metal” project, LAMF. To most people, Cope admits, he is “that World Shut Your Mouth guy,” best known for the anthemic smash hit to which even Terry Wogan succumbed in 1986. But perhaps his strangest achievement is the completion of two heavyweight books on prehistoric archeology, the second of which, The Megalithic European, is published this month.

Its predecessor, 1998’s The Modern Antiquarian, a colour-coded gazetteer of British prehistoric sites, was the answer to a prayer for those of us who had spent years trekking across moors to stone circles on advice pieced together from quasi-mystical pamphlets or dry academic tomes. Stand at the centre of the Orkney mainland with The Modern Antiquarian in your hand and lost civilisations rise up around you. Now Cope has applied the same utilitarian ethic to the monuments of continental Europe. At his home in the Wiltshire countryside, within striding distance of the stone circle at Avebury, he holds forth.

“My job is to make uncool things seem cool,” he says, his foot up on a kitchen chair, like a rock star bestriding a monitor. “If you can find a way of presenting these things correctly, people will get into them. And if you can get people out of believing that stone circles are about wellington boots and anoraks, that they can be elegant, why not do it? When I put together my Scott Walker compilation album, for example, he was just thought of as a git. I am a total field worker. I get into things and go to places and see if they do it for me–and if they are going to do it for other people. Is there enough remaining above ground? Or, if the thing is underground, is it superbly underground? Is it the mother of all underground temples? Is it a hypogeum from hell? Can you go in and lose yourself?”

Initially, I’m uncertain whether Cope is using subterranean prehistoric temples as a metaphor for the 1960s balladeer Walker, or whether he is actually talking about subterranean prehistoric temples. Then I realise that it’s both at the same time. Cope in conversation doesn’t so much free-associate as make entirely unrelated ideas occupy exactly the same space. He has barged into the world of archeology with the open-minded enthusiasm of the very gentleman amateurs on whose work the science was historically built. Has he been welcomed?

“There are two types of archeologists,” he explains, putting down a toy wooden guitar he is making for his 10-year-old daughter, who wants to attend the local Hallowe’en event as Angus Young from AC/DC. “The older guys are pleased to be able to debrief to someone. They are like spies, with all this information, so they can afford to be generous. Aubrey Burl ‚Äî who writes books with flat names like Stone Circles of the British Isles–and I get on really well. I can call him up and go, ‘Aubrey, I think I’ve found a new stone circle.’ And he goes, ‘I suppose it’s quite possible, but don’t tell my wife, because I’m too old to start visiting it now.’ If I’ve ever had a problem, it was with archeology’s middle management, which felt we should have taken more official routes.”

Invited to lecture at the British Museum in 2001, Cope chose as his subject the Norse god Odin in Christian symbolism. “I went from Odin to Christ via the various pagan precursors of Christ. The nice old guys in dicky bows at the British Museum had been saying, ‘You’re not the normal kind of person we have here, but you do it the way you want.’ So I did the lecture in full face paint and five-inch platform shoes–two nights, sold out. It was amazing.”

In The Modern Antiquarian, Cope’s analysis reflected his own performance background. Stones with quartz in them would look great glittering in the moonlight if you were a prehistoric audience on mild natural hallucinogens watching the ancient equivalent of Julian Cope. At the Lyric Hammersmith earlier this year, Cope’s own persona seemed influenced by his archeological imaginings. In psychedelic combat clothes, giant shoes and face paint, Cope became an absurd priest-clown figure and spent most of his two-hour set in the audience, declaiming over a primitive punk-metal backdrop.

“Being on stage, dealing with an audience, with hysteria, with a really barbarian art form, is the closest you get to a religious experience,” he says. “The shaman and the showman are inextricably linked. Little Richard recognised that. Jerry Lewis was damned the moment he opened his mouth. Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele, however, were never in any danger.”

The Aldershot show was supposed to be low-key, reacquainting Cope with live performance after months of writing. But with him, nothing is ever low-key. The fanatical fan base is out in force, undiluted by the less evangelical onlookers present in bigger venues. Cope is derailed by enthusiastic interjections from proprietary fans and the show lurches from one interruption to another. There’s a section of every Cope crowd that thinks he is their own private cult figure, a rock legend they can still reach out to and touch, insult or fondle at will. Tonight, guitar in hand, Cope appears happy to indulge this. However, there is a mighty 4WD in the car park, waiting to whisk him back to Wiltshire, where, one suspects, he is already planning his next adventure.

“I’m in a unique position,” he had said earlier, “but through luck, not judgment. There are people from my time, like Billy Bragg or Nick Cave, still doing everything with real dignity, but they have their feet in the officially straight world. There might be a South Bank Show on them. But me? I’m doing an ambient-metal installation in a Greek art gallery and writing about ziggurats.”

The Megalithic European is published by Element on October 18

COURTESY R. TURNER!