Remembrances of a Fried Friar in OUTSIDELEFT

JULIAN COPE
Friar Tuck
Avila In Albicella
(Head Heritage)

Cope Covers There’s a quote from a Fried Priest (Sweet bassist Steve) on Brian Connolly in ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’. Referring to the state Connolly was in after multiple heart attacks and years of alcoholism, he memorably said: ‘You can’t unscramble an egg’. Connolly had been captured by a Rock Fate. A Fate which hasn’t befallen Julian Cope. He’s here with a new album, despite being Fried four decades ago (posing under a turtle shell), and followed this with a career inspired by his obsessions: The Can, The Fall, the stones. He’s created his own sound and revisits and builds upon his many phases in the enjoyable Friar Tuck.

Friar Tuck follows last year’s Robin Hood and was released at the same time as Avila in Albicella, a Mellotron sleep aid created 25 years ago for Cope’s infant daughters. His family were bothered by noise pollution and, well, Cope took action. Avila is worth buying if you need a sleep aid and enjoy the Cope family narrative. The sleeve notes are lovely and show his softer side. It is good to be reminded of this side because of his sometimes-inflammatory quotes on religion, revolution and terrorism. Everyone knows he cares, but using a Robin Hood and Friar Tuck guise makes more sense. The lack of fanfare for their releases have added to the mystique. Perhaps that is his Rock Fate – releasing and recording at his own pace (while keeping his fanbase) – and his (ahem) Reward.

Opener Too Freud to Rock n’ Roll, Too Jung to Die (an old title from a 2003 Brain Donor LP) continues his willingness to reference psychology, and use dream interpretations, archetypes, and free association. It recalls Jethro Tull’s Too Old to Rock n’ Roll, Too Young to Die (1976), a song for times in which Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and now Oasis thrive in defiance of their advancing age. Their survival is helped by an Internet allowing them to Live Forever, allowing for autumnal releases to be consumed alongside the magic sound of their youth.

Friar Tuck hasn’t been available online. It’s only available on CD. There’s no vinyl release nor accessible streams. This is a shame as there is something for every Cope fan here. Done Myself A Mischief is a quaint song reflecting on a fall in the dead of night, or is he mulling over choices which sidelined him from the gravy train that enriched many who he inspired? This and other songs investigate alternative states, histories, and consciousness: I expect he has a well-thumbed copy of The Red Book (and possibly The Black Book) by his bedside.

Cope has been accused of making ill-advised songs about Judaeo-Christian religions and their followers, and Four Jehovahs In A Volvo Estate sounds like it could be in that vein, but is instead a childlike remembrance of playing Subbuteo with friends from a Jehovah’s Witness family (who may have ruined his set prior to moving to Scotland). A remembrance from childhood that uncovers his playful yet competitive impulse in full effect. Four Jehovahs recalls, to me, Mozart Estate’s recent ‘Four White Men in A Black Car’ and Cope’s own Four Mohammed’s and a Funeral (on Robin Hood), but Cope’s titles often disguise what lays within. Four Mohammed’s was a diatribe against Chinese communism and the alleged destruction of Uyghur mosques, sung to a tune that echoed Can’s Mother Sky. Four Jehovahs is about Subbuteo!We also have Me and The Jews, which recalls The Fall’s Various Times with “Right, we’re gonna go back”, a song that starts in 1940 Berlin where jews are suffering unspeakable horror. Where does Cope go to? To a place and time where Jesus is petitioned every night. Where, as narrator, he is one of the people - who cannot read or write. He sings “What are those marks that are placed on the paper?” “Who makes the ink that they spill?” Why, after so many years of trade, do we rely on them still?” It isn’t an attack on a people, rather a reflection of an outsider considering All. A voice of someone born into penury – who may call for a Robin Hood, or a Friar Tuck. You can see why he takes on this role. It isn’t a castigation; it’s a dream like observation. In one part, he imagines himself in paradise sat in peace with jews and Armenians: but in true Cope style, he brings his musing down to earth - claiming his rock star ‘discharge’ had helped the Berlin Wall fall.

The Fall are never too far from his work. As a rock excavator he’s quoted the link between Tangerine Dream and the main riff in ‘Repetition’, and in Friar Tuck he references original member Martin Bramah in the sleeve notes (‘Bad Education’), just as he did on Autogeddon (‘The Only Way Out Is Up’ (Dumb Magician)). The Fall and Blue Orchids’ use of magic realism, hermeticism, and neo-psychedelia has always appealed to him, and though it’s not so evident here – it can be discerned in Sol Invicto, a deity from which we cannot escape: ‘Now you see me, now you do’.

It isn’t only the Gods he admires. His love of dumb, primal, minimalism have always been upfront in his work and evidenced in You Gotta Keep Your Halfwits About You. We have historical fiction in 1066 And All That, a tune that may be based on Seller and Yeatman’s satirical rewriting of conservative views of British history, but which recalls Cope’s softer tunes from the end of the last century and continues his more recent references to Cromwell in Ireland.We move to the modern day with a romanticisation of his time in Liverpool in the late 1970s with Pete Burns In Spungent Mansions, an ode to a man with few answers but whose quest for stardom saw him hang out with those who “glowed like the sun” and lived in ways that “were not the ways for you and me”. Sharing cheap accommodation (“seven rooms for fifteen quid”) with people whose garbled conversations live on to confuse their hosts. People who glowed briefly but brilliantly under the sun.

And we also have R In The Hood which brings us back to Brian Connolly. The song borrows a line from The Sweet’s 1975 ‘Action’ (‘We all want a piece of the action’). He questions what the homophone of piece (‘peace’) could mean: A long and everlasting peace? The ceasing of industry? Or the silencing of war? The complications of peace are laid out simply here.Friar Tuck continues Julian Cope’s excavation of his past, returning to past glories and sounding spritely with it. I haven’t even mentioned the well-constructed A Shipwrecked Song’s folk pop melodies, with its Eno-esque Another Green World tinge, and call for deliverance from mighty forces (the arms of the giant waves), which could well be a crowd favourite should he tour again. Where is he now? Not shipwrecked and hopefully ready to build on his use of Merry Men (`People?) to reflect more on his styles and produce positive songs. Perhaps he will use Little John next? Maid Marion? Hmm. That we’d love to see.