The Author Explodes - Julian Cope Interview

“I am visionary and I can live in a permanent state of visions,” says Julian Cope. “It means it’s hard to drive so I don’t drive as much as I used to.”

A conversation with the former Teardrop Explodes frontman is peppered with such statements, to which you’re not sure if the desired response is a sage nod or hearty laugh, so you smile politely instead.
The self-professed ‘most psychedelicised western artist’ is shooting the breeze with Hot Press over lunch about his first fictional outing, One Three One. A ‘gnostic hooligan road novel’ set on the island of Sardinia, where a British football fan, Rock Section, returns to right the wrongs carried out on he and his fellow football supporters during Italia 90, it is at once Neolithic historical fiction, a discourse on rave culture, a modern travelogue and much more.
“I’ve been ecstatic over the generosity of the response!” he grins enjoying his quiche and vino. “I really do feel like the book could be just lost because it’s really fucking crazy. But I also did suspect that it was really fucking good because I don’t mess around; I don’t tell stories that I don’t think are essential.”
Cope has quite a number of tomes to his credit, two volumes of archaeology (The Modern Antiquarian and The Megalithic European) and three volumes of musicology (Krautrocksampler, Japrocksampler and Copendium – an alternative history of music, the idiosyncratic, unconventional and overlooked) and his massively entertaining autobiographies Head On and Repossessed.
“I wrote the story of Japanese rock but I’m not a Japanophile and in many ways I think Japan is fairly shit,” he explains. “But I honestly believed it was a really essential story and really inspirational. In Japan they hated their culture and needed to kick against it and used music to do that.”
So how did Julian find the transition to fiction?
“At times the world that I know is erring on the side of fiction in any case,” he muses and then veering off subject continues: “I came into rock’n’roll at a time…. if I’d come in five years earlier I couldn’t have been this person. I couldn’t have been in rock’n’roll, the people and the spirits that generated around music wouldn’t have been big enough to accept me.”
Luckily, in Faber editor Lee Brackstone, Julian found a spirit big enough to shepherd his fictive endeavours (no easy task I imagine, given his charming habit of bolting off topic).
“He kept on me, he really did,” says Julian. “There are so many things that I have to say in my life and I’m really on what I term a righteous trip. Not a self-righteous trip. I have to account for what I do so Lee was really good because he signed me for One Three One and he kept coming back to One Three One. In the end I said ‘yeah man’, so he made it happen.”
The narrative jumps from 10,000 BC to present day to 1990 and earlier. Given his predilection for vintage army attire, we wonder in which time period does Julian feel most at home?
“It’s always now,” he states assuredly. “There was a moment when they finished Newgrange and they stood back and went ‘holy shit’. Humans have always been exactly the same, they have responded to the main current distraction or attraction. So it’s always now.”
Over the years Cope has been to Ireland many times. As he probably knows more about Irish pre-history than many people on the island we wonder does he have a message for us?
“That you’ve got loads out of the European Union, now fuck them off!”
Then he swerves back to literary time travel: “I really wanted to write 10,000 years ago as now as it would have been. I knew I could do 10,000 years ago because I know enough about it, I just had to make sure I didn’t invent extraneous technology that archaeologists would spot. I just had to avoid a lot of technology and bring in animal husbandry on the level that they would have used it. They always say write your first novel on what you know and I knew all this weird shit.”
The book’s protagonist, Rock Section, bears more than a passing resemblance to the author, in his physical description and the fact he fronted a successful 80s band. So was the book cathartic in any way?
“Massively so,” he says. “ I took so long to research it because I didn’t want to be thinking about it halfway through the book, I just wanted to dive in. It drew down through me and I turned into an absolute old sod at the time. I put huge amounts of weight on, but it didn’t really matter because I’m quite a shapeshifter in any case. I always think that’s part of my job, to be able to prove evidence of being a big hulk and then a skinny minny. I wrote it in an extraordinary state.”
Talking of shapeshifting, which of his many roles (author, expert on Neolithic culture, post-punk icon) does Julian most identify with?
“It’s an unfolding, I can’t dismiss any of it,” he states. “The only thing the Teardrops did wrong in my book was we had a hit without having any idea why. We didn’t form to have hits so I would really have liked to have had hits maybe two years later when I got a grasp of what I was doing.
“But then again, I wasn’t one of those people who had to work for ten extra years and get into my early 30s to discover that doing Top Of The Pops was a complete let-down so I’ve been very blessed like that.
“I didn’t want to be like, say Steve Winwood,” he adds. “Steve was a psychedelic keyboard player, a flower child. Then when he had hits he decided to cut his hair and that everything’s going to be together and he’s in denial of the past. I’m an accumulative being, I’ve been inhabited since 1957 so I am the results of all that.”
So what next for Mr. Cope?
“I think the most important thing is to continue to be demanding,” he states. “When I went to Harper Collins to do the The Modern Antiquarian I told them what it was going to be and said, ‘Look, I know this sounds really uncommercial but if you want it great’. They were reluctant but in the end they went for it and the book sold shedloads. So I set precedents and I would always try to keep setting new precedents. I get the most out of everything as possible.”
Then he leans towards me, pawing his mass of facial fuzz.
“By the way, do I have crumbs in my beard? Okay, I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t crumby.”
And with that he departs. A legend and madman.

One Three One is out now published by Faber