which is the best Julian Cope album?

I think of Cope's career as starting with Peggy Suicide, so I have voted for that.

I had a quick trawl through the Cope threads before posting this poll and frankly I am surprised that people really don't seem to like Autogeddon at all. I was listening to it this morning and I think it's great! I don't know if I will choose it though.

I do understand however why people don't rate My Nation Underground. Cope himself doesn't like it and so it is not too much of a surprise that I have never seen him play any song of it live. I believe he saw it as an attempt to push him in a more commercial direction. I think the only really good song on it is Charlotte Ann. There are some things about it that exasperate - cover Five O'Clock World or I Know A Place by all means, they are both fine songs, but don't do a confused medley of the two!

I like the one I have, a CD i made from a "Julian Cope Demos" cassette I found in a record fair inamongst some duller cassette promos. Turns out it had at least one song totally unreleased (even now), majority of the rest very similar but not the same, versions on the released album, and a couple tracks as off the CD. Peggy Suicide.

Jehovahkill for me. 'Upwards at 45 Degrees' slays all.

The one-two punch of Peggy Suicide and Jehovakill is difficult to downplay. These best capture his delicious nougaty combo of pyche/groove/drugged-out mind jams with his penchant for paleo-leftisms. Most of his earlier titles are far too sugary for my tastes- and surprisingly so for a guy so blotto'd. Instrumental material such as the RITE series and Odin can certainly take one on a mind-trip and are almost of a different category and/or artist altogether (the concept for which, is absolutely fantastic). Reward can be found virtually everywhere in Cope's catalog but the two main albums of my affection capture some of his most effective works (major props to DR Skinner) and also sport some of the snarkiest of titles. Making a choice from this point is difficult and based solely on the merit of an individual track -- and i can think of no greater, more fully developed and complete track than Jehovakill's "Fear Loves This Place". The mood's like soup, drude, and while the last thing it attempts to do is impress us, it's exactly that which it succeeds in everytime i hear it. It's not showy or ostentatious, it's not chock-full of fuzzy distortion or even rollicking licks, and it's seemingly devoid of giddy yelps and/or quivering shrieks. Not that there's anything wrong with all those things, FLTP is just one of those tracks that requires no additional salt (and the FLTP E.P. is extra extra special by including the venerable Gogmagog). So, in a spilt-decision, I’ve gotta go with Jehovakill.

...I am surprised that people really don't seem to like Autogeddon ... I think Autogeddon is just fine, until i hear "Paranormal in the West Country", at which point i remember just how great Cope can be when he really nails it.

Mark G. -- I'd love a copy

'Upwards at 45 Degrees' slays all -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB3FJWYoEr0

Lots of great stuff in there, yes, but really -- could it honestly be anything other than Peggy Suicide?

btw guys Citizen Cain'd has some really, really killer stuff on it, kinda like Cope doing "Cortez"-era Neil Young superlong desert tunes. Hear "I Will Be Absorbed" and "Feels Like A Crying Shame" if you can.

Fried, I think.

Interpreter. I can't say why except it's ulta-engaging, has only maybe one weak song and numerous brilliant ones, it's both amusing and serious and I like the subversive way it wholeheartedly embraces commercialism to sell it's iconoclastic agenda. Denim On Ice came out around the same time and shares these characteristics.

...mostly though, I just like the songs.

The first alb isn't going to get many votes I guess but it's the one I've come back to most recently - really odd, weedy candyfloss production but a lot of good ideas and very haunting moments and funny jokes too (cow on the grass!), and actually I wish he'd done more with the drone-synthpop sound he'd got on that and Everybody Wants To Shag The Teardrop Explodes: "Kolly Kibber's Birthday" would be my dark horse pick in a favourite tracks poll, possibly.

christoff otm about Jehovahkill.

I honestly have a hard time listening to anything of his post-20 Mothers. I mean, I keep dutifully buyin' em (no small feat, being that they're all imports now), but I just don't feel compelled to listen to them in the same way that I still listen to Peggy Suicide and everything that precedes it.

No question that this will be perilously split between Peggy Suicide and Jehovahkill - wish I had time to listen to both a lot before closing and decide. But I'm sure I'm far from alone in not having heard a note of anything since Interpreter (except half of Live Japan '91 on a car stereo via iTrip, once) (and the first Brain Donor album, of which I loved the singles) - he's really priced himself out of even the affectionate fan market, which is sad.

Incidentally, how come Rites 2-4 are on the poll but #1 isn't?

Although, fuck, I'll be in England for three weeks from next Thursday - it won't actually feel like I'm paying A$50 apiece if I buy in local currency (or scour Camden 2nd-hand shops, more like)

I lost my ILX pwd years ago but re-registered just so I could vote for Saint Julian! A near-perfect album, maintaining some pop swagger from the Teardrops but liberally shot through with the Copey mystic weirdness that dominates the later stuff. The fact that JC could make a rock record this good makes me wish he'd made more. "World Shut Your Mouth," "Trampolene," "Eve's Volcano," "Shot Down," title track, and "Pulsar" all indisputably classic, and no weak songs at all.

Peggy Suicide is one of my favorite albums, period, full stop. But there is so much good stuff scattered throughout his catalog, I won't be upset if something else took the top spot (surprised, but not upset).

The first ten years of his solo stuff is pretty fantastic. I'm like Alex in not really caring for much of the later work, though I have grown to really like Citizen Cain'd and his silly Brain Donor project.

"Fried", just because it was my first Cope album.

Oh, "Fried" absolutely.

I won this in a "Jamming" magazine competition, you had to describe Julian Cope in four words. My winning entry was "Throat Parachute Knife Morning". Someone else also won with "He is quite good"

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I might have put Skellington right after St. Julian. Unstoppably great. Sort of Guided by Voices - like in the sense it gives that the author has the power to sit down and spit out tossed-off popcraft, two minutes at a time, until there's no more room on the record.

2005 Dark Orgasm 0
2006 Rite Bastard 0
2005 Citizen Cain'd 0
2004 Live Japan '91 0
2002 Rite Now 0
2001 Discover Odin 0
2000 An Audience With the Cope 2000/2001 0
1999 Odin 0
1997 Rite 2 0
2007 You Gotta Problem With Me

so basically, 10 of his last 11 albums got *ZERO* votes?

2003 Rome Wasn't Burned In A Day 2

yeah. okay.

dude needs to pack it up already!

I'm coming to realize that Fried is just one of those rare perfect pop records.

opened this thread hoping the bump was for fried, has aged supremely well

so has Jehovakill.

although Jehovahkill might be a more stunning achievement, Fried is, as you say, complete in achieving its aims and instantly evocative of a place outside time

wow xp

Yeah, the all time keeper Copes, for me, are Fried, Peggy, Jehovah and the weirdly overlooked (well, not weirdly, it just got lost in the welter of late Cope indie releases) Citizen Cain'd.

st. julian reissue looks bloody ace.
the extra disc is chocka full of perfection.
am i the only person to ask just when will the man come to his senses and make a proper rock/pop return ..
surely given the revival circuit he could make a f*ckin' killing with a few of his old live band crew ..
f&ck unknown krautrock b-sides and for a few weeks revel in the majesty of your own brilliance.
(i fully understand such hopes will never happen .. this is just a cry out from a deserted fan to an old musical hero .. )

The second disc on the "St Julian" reissue is pretty much identical to "The followers of St Julian" Cd that came out in the late 90s. Still nice to have it all in one place, "Disaster" and "Umpteenth unnatural blues" and "Mock turtle" are all classics imo (even if the latter is just a rewrite of the Teardrops' "Flipped out on LSD").

Now if they were to do something similar for "My nation underground" - a poor album but some cracking b-sides, admittedly written a long time before like "SPQR" and "Christmas mourning" and "Crazy farm animal"...

I like the one I have, a CD i made from a "Julian Cope Demos" cassette I found in a record fair inamongst some duller cassette promos. Turns out it had at least one song totally unreleased (even now), majority of the rest very similar but not the same, versions on the released album, and a couple tracks as off the CD. Peggy Suicide.

― Mark G, Wednesday, 10 October 2007 13:55 (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

About a year ago, someone did an article about this exact copy of the demos cassette in Record Collector magazine.

The point was made, that this would have been a much better 'extras' disc for "Peggy Suicide"

The funny thing was, JCope slagged RobSmith's 'extras'/Demos included in the Cure reissue series, in the "why issue less good versions of songs?"

See, what I can tell you is that Julian Cope's songs are pretty much perfected before getting anywhere near the studio. It took a JC expert to tell me that all the tracks on that cassette were proto-versions, not the actual tracks from the CD. (apart from one, which was kept from a radio session apparently)

am i the only person to ask just when will the man come to his senses and make a proper rock/pop return ..

Citizen Cain'd was a rock album! Think 'Cortez the Killer' rather than 'Sunspots' but a rock album surely. With hooks!

somehow i’d never listened to jehovahkill and even after but 2 listens i love this groove so hard and so much

:)

it is miraculously good

I had the reissue on shuffle and the 20 min poet is priest was going on and on and on and the whole time i was “THIS IS THE KRAUT U WAS SEARCHING FOR AND U MISSED IT”

Funny thing is, much as I love Peggy Suicide & Jehovahkill etc and value JC in his Krautrock-endorsing, Paleolithic-investigating, left-field drood-dom, my pop sensibilities also allow some love for My Nation Underground. I understand why he disowns it (or seems to) but it's not a bad collection of songs, played and produced in what is, I concede, a style removed from his then-prevailing sonic trajectory.
If you think of it as an album by a different artist then it can be abstracted from the Cope discography and enjoyed.

One of my favorite pop approximations of Neu! and Can.

welp as a dude who had “to the shores of lake placid” zoo sampler in 85, and mainly knew him thru teardrop and wsym era, but then ignored him in the 90s except for peggy suicide, this is an expansion i shoulda been there for. whatevs, this album is so me from 2007+. But at the time it dropped i was doing other bullshit musically, and maybe wasn’t ready.