which is the best Julian Cope album?

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.