Julian David Cope (born 21 October 1957) is an English musician and author. He was the singer and songwriter in Liverpool post-punk band The Teardrop Explodes and has followed a solo career since 1983 in addition to working on musical side projects such as Queen Elizabeth, Brain Donor, and Black Sheep.
Cope is also an author on Neolithic culture, publishing The Modern Antiquarian in 1998, and a political and cultural activist with a public interest in occultism and paganism. He has written two volumes of autobiography, Head-On (1994) and Repossessed (1999); two volumes of archaeology, The Modern Antiquarian (1998) and The Megalithic European (2004); and three volumes of musicology, Krautrocksampler (1995), Japrocksampler (2007); and Copendium: A Guide to the Musical Underground (2012).
Life and career
Early life
Cope's family resided in Tamworth, Staffordshire, but he was born in Deri, Glamorgan, Wales, where his mother's parents lived, while she was staying there.
Cope grew up in Tamworth with his parents and his younger brother Joss. He played Oliver in Wilnecote High School's production of the musical. He attended C.F. Mott College of Education (now Liverpool John Moores University), and it was here that he first became involved in music.
1976–77: Early bands
In July 1977, Cope was one of the founders of Crucial Three, a Liverpool punk rock band in which he played bass guitar. Although the Crucial Three lasted for little more than six weeks and disbanded without ever playing in public, all three members eventually went on to lead successful Liverpool post-punk bands—singer Ian McCulloch with Echo & the Bunnymen and guitarist Pete Wylie with the Mighty Wah! Post-Crucial Three, Cope and McCulloch initially continued together in forming two other short-lived bands, UH? and A Shallow Madness (Cope had also spent time with Wylie in another short-lived band, Nova Mob). When Cope sacked McCulloch from A Shallow Madness, McCulloch went on to form Echo and the Bunnymen.
1978–1983: The Teardrop Explodes
In 1978, Cope formed the Teardrop Explodes | width=20% | align=right
In 1983 Cope began recording the songs for his first solo album, World Shut Your Mouth. Although the album generally retained the uptempo pop drive of the Teardrops, it was also an introspective and surreal work with many references to childhood. Former Teardrops drummer Gary Dwyer, guitarist Steve Lovell and The Dream Academy oboist Kate St John all contributed to the album, which was released on Mercury Records in March 1984. World Shut Your Mouth was seen as out-of-step with the times, gained poor reviews and sold indifferently. A single from the album, "Sunshine Playroom", featured a disturbing video directed by David Bailey. During a concert at Hammersmith Palais on the subsequent promotional tour, Cope slashed across his bare stomach with a broken microphone stand in an act of frustrated self-mutilation. Although the wounds were superficial, it shocked the audience and resulted in another memorable addition to his reputation for bizarre behaviour. The album includes a song called "Bill Drummond Said" about Cope's A&R man at WEA, to which future KLF star Drummond responded with a song titled "Julian Cope Is Dead", pondering how much more famous Cope might have been had he been assassinated at the height of his fame. The commercial failure Skinner, Rooster Cosby, Ron Fair and former Smiths drummer Mike Joyce all contributed to the record, as did a new sidekick in the shape of future Spiritualized lead guitarist Michael Watts (better known as Mike Mooney or "Moon-eye"). Although the album produced another well-received single ("Beautiful Love")
In 1992, Cope released another double album. Jehovahkill, on Island Records. Musically, the album reflected his interest in Krautrock (though in a more electro-acoustic based form) and his teenage fascination for Detroit hard rock. (A deluxe edition, with a disc of extra material, was released fourteen years later in 2006). Lyrically, the album was fiercely anti-Christian, with such songs as "Poet is Priest", "Julian H. Cope", and the single "Fear Loves This Place" espousing Cope's Paganesque perspective and being highly critical of the established Church. During this period, Cope began his work as a writer, completing the first volume of his autobiography and beginning to research works on Krautrock and Neolithic architecture. Cope had also parted company with his long-term foil Donald Ross Skinner during the recording of 20 Mothers, although the parting was relatively amicable.
Having been dropped by Echo when he refused to visit the US, Cope then signed to Cooking Vinyl and delivered the Interpreter album in 1996. This continued in a similar but more disciplined vein to its predecessor, with stronger elements of techno and humour (as exemplified in songs like "Cheap New Age Fix") among the more serious topics, such as those inspired by Cope's attendance at the Newbury Bypass protests.
The first Head Heritage release was 1997's Rite 2, Cope's follow up to 1993's Rite (with Thighpaulsandra taking over from Donald Ross Skinner as creative foil). It was followed in the same year by the second Queen Elizabeth album, QE2: Elizabeth Vagina, which expanded on its predecessor's cosmic rock experiments. Thighpaulsandra would then follow Michael Mooney into Spiritualized (as would Cope's string arranger Martin Shellard), once more depriving Cope of a key collaborator.
In 2000, Cope released another solo album – An Audience with the Cope. While appearing to be pitched as a retrospective live recording, it consisted of a series of newly written psychedelic studio jams.
Since 1998, Cope had developed a parallel reputation as a serious antiquarian. This resulted in his 2001 album Discover Odin being a limited-edition tie-in with a talk he had given at the British Museum, featuring a mixture of spoken-word tracks exploring Nordic mythology and various musical tracks including a Cope setting of the epic Norse poem "Hávamál". In the same year Head Heritage released the first two Brain Donor singles, "She Saw Me Coming" and "Get Off Your Pretty Face", followed by the début Brain Donor album Love Peace & Fuck. Cope, Doggen and a returning Thighpaulsandra also teamed up as the drummer-less psychedelic/meditational heavy metal group L.A.M.F. who released the Ambient Metal album the same year. Brain Donor's "Get Back on It" single followed in 2002, as did the third album in Cope's Rite series, Rite Now.
In 2003, Cope performed at the Glastonbury Festival as well as launching his own three-day Rome Wasn't Burned in a Day event. A tie-in album, also called Rome Wasn't Burned in a Day, was released to mark the event and included an "eight-minute long Armenian epic" called "Shrine of the Black Youth (Tukh Manukh)". The album was recorded by a trio of Cope, synth player Christopher Patrick "Holy" McGrail and Donald Ross Skinner (returning to work with Cope after a seven year absence). The year also saw more Brain Donor activity via the "My Pagan Ass" single and the album Too Freud To Rock'n'Roll, Too Jung To Die and an appearance on Sunn O)))'s collaborative album White1 with Cope reciting occultic druid poetry on the opening track, "My Wall".
Cope released two more albums in 2005. The first of these was the long-delayed Citizen Cain'd, an album which Cope had promised for several years and now delivered as a short double album (71 minutes over two discs) sold at a single album price. (According to Cope, the two-disc format was due to some of the songs being "too psychologically exhausting" to fit together onto a single album). The second album, Dark Orgasm was a forthright hard-rock exercise which Cope described as "a violent sequence of outcast broadsides leveled at the coming new 21st-century conservatism." Meanwhile, Brain Donor (proving to be an enduring Cope project) was presented to America via a self-titled compilation album. Plans to tour the United States were dropped because the INS refused to grant Cope a visa.
2006 saw the release of the third proper Brain Donor album (Drain'd Boner) and the fourth album in the Rite series (Rite Bastard).
2007–2015: You Gotta Problem With Me, Black Sheep, Psychedelic Revolution, Revolutionary Suicide and beyond
Cope's 2007 album, You Gotta Problem With Me, was something of a return to his early solo material: more post-punk styled, and featuring swathes of Mellotron and orchestral percussion. Conceptually, it continued his attacks on religion, bigotry, corporate greed and environmental destruction. As with Citizen Cain'd, Cope divided the fifty-six minutes of material across two CDs and also included lavish packaging including printed poems.
You Gotta Problem With Me was followed by 2008's Black Sheep, which Cope described as "a musical exploration of what it is to be an outsider in modern Western Culture" and which featured his most outrightly anarchic pronouncements to date. Dominated by Mellotron, hand drums and acoustic guitars, the album also featured Doggen and McGrail plus new recruits Michael O'Sullivan and Ady "Acoustika" Fletcher. In November 2008, Cope released the Preaching Revolution EP, mingling acoustic protest songs with rockabilly pieces. These songs would be reissued on the limited-edition Cope solo album, The Unruly Imagination (along with material from the unreleased Diggers, Ranters, Levellers EP).
Cope, McGrail, O'Sullivan, and Acoustika went on to form a new ten-piece Cope side project (also called Black Sheep) which included new cohorts such as drummer Antony "Antronhy" Hodgkinson, "Fat Paul" Horlick and former Universal Panzies leader Christophe F. To date, Black Sheep has generated two further albums, both released in 2009 – Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse and Black Sheep at the BBC. 2009 also saw the release of a fourth Brain Donor album (Wasted Fuzz Excessive) and a live Queen Elizabeth album Hall, originally recorded in 2000.
In 2011, Cope released the mostly-instrumental The Jehovahcoat Demos, containing fifteen previously unreleased tracks written and recorded by Cope throughout 1993 in direct response to having been dropped by Island Records in October 1992. Two further Cope solo recordings followed in 2012. Psychedelic Revolution was a song collection described as "eleven epic examples of the Archdrude’s most scrupulously-written balladry... tales of insurrection, tales of building new cultural traditions and tales of sexism, racism and even species-ism." The album featured two "phases", each dedicated to a different revolutionary (Che Guevara or Leila Khaled). Woden was an "ambulant meditation" album featuring a single long-form track which Cope referred to as "one enormous meteorological cloud of music originally conceived as a vast and atmospheric seventy-two-minute-long follow-up to [the] Ur-vocal masterpiece Odin". Performed on VCS3 synthesizer and Mellotron, the album also featured field recordings taken from the Neolithic landscape around Cope's Avebury and Silbury home neighbourhood, plus a recording of bellringers from Yatesbury.
In 2013, Cope released the Revolutionary Suicide album. As well as returning to the revolutionary pagan folk which he'd explored during the previous decade with Black Sheep, the album referenced or cited American revolutionary voices such as those of Huey Newton and Hunter S. Thompson. It also extended Cope's attacks on religion to include jabs at contemporary Islam, and explored other new Cope preoccupations including the Armenian Genocide and Terence McKenna's "stoned ape" theory of psychedelic substances directly influencing human evolution. Two years later, the 2015 release Trip Advizer – The Very Best of Julian Cope 1999–2014 compiled sixteen tracks from the first fifteen years of Head Heritage releases, while the companion Trip Advizer EP provided three non-album tracks from the Head Heritage archives, one of them a re-recorded "Psychedelic Evolution".
2017-present: Drunken Songs, Skellington 3, Self Civil War, England Expectorates, the Robin Hood albums, the Dope project and others
Cope's next album was 2017's Drunken Songs, a collection of newly-written drinking songs written to celebrate and explore alcohol, drunkenness and liberation. Inspired by Cope's return to drinking after two decades of abstinence from alcohol, the album also explored Ireland (and aspects of Cope's own Irish heritage) through an alcoholic lens, referenced Cope's Liverpudlian connections and reinforced his preference of Northern European culture (represented by beer) over Southern Europe (wine). The next two albums revisited familiar Cope stylings - 2017's Rite at Ya revived the Rite drones for a fifth time, while 2018's Skellington 3 was the third in Cope's intermittent series of "acid campfire songs" (consisting of twelve "orphan" songs that he'd spontaneously recorded on his phone over the years but never released).
In between these albums, Cope began to release recordings by yet another project: the "symphonic No Wave" band Dope, which he also described as being a "dark groove-based thing, monotonous mainly, and highly drug-informed." Founded in 2015, the project also included Holy McGrail and "Fat Paul" Horlick of Black Sheep plus newer cohorts Christopher Holman and Philippe Legènde (both of whom had contributed to Rite at Ya and Drunken Songs). No fewer than five Dope albums appeared during 2017 and 2018 - Dope feat. Julian Cope, Guerilla Grow, Dope on Drugs, Village Idiot Dope and Seven Disquieting Dirges (attributed to "Dope feat. Fuck Authority" - the latter being an alias for Bristolian engineer/electronic musician Gareth Turner - and as being "performed by sub bass madmen and throwback f.x. contrarians"). The 2019 album John Balance Enters Valhalla (a mostly instrumental pagan tribute to the late John Balance of Coil) began as a Dope project, but was eventually released under Cope's name. Two further Dope albums followed - 2019's Black Math and
2020's Semi-Legal on the Edge of Culture - the latter presented as a "lost" release of the very earliest project recordings.
Cope then entered another phase of song-based solo releases, beginning with 2020's Self Civil War, the first release in an intended series called "Our Troubled Times" and one which provided a by-now rare Cope single (the latter's title, "Cunts Can Fuck Off", showing that he'd lost none of his counter-cultural stubbornness). 2020 also saw the release of the first Teardrop Explodes album for a long time: Cold War Psychedelia was a compilation of 1982 Teardrop Explodes instrumental demos, eight of them overlaid with Cope's early vocal drafts for the text of his 1989 autobiography Head-On.
The next album, 2022's England Expectorates, was summarised by Cope as "thirteen feel-good songs for feel-bad times" or "thirteen keenly constructed missives to help get us through this ropey fucking situation." Featuring Cope's familiar mixture of garage rock, "mantric powerdrive" and Mellotron psychedelia,
2024 also saw the revival of Cope's Queen Elizabeth project with The Corpse of Queen Elizabeth (released in line with the death of Queen Elizabeth II) and the release of another item from the Cope archives; Avila in Albicella, a sleep-aid piece Cope had produced for his young daughters in 1999 and now described as "a chorale of Mellotronics from the 1990s sleep chamber". The Corpse of Queen Elizabeth was soon re-released as part of a further slew of Cope-related releases in late 2025, collectively described as "Head Heritage’s 2025 Ambient Autumn". The other releases in this set were another Queen Elizabeth album called Now That I'm Different (covering the full fifteen active years of the project between 1990 and 2005, and featuring contributions from SunnO)))'s Stephen O'Malley),
a reissue of L.A.M.F.'s Ambient Metal,
and two Julian Cope albums - I Dream the Cosmos Atavistic (described as "next-world ambient music that challenges time itself") and E-Man Groovin (a piece building on recovered recordings of a lengthy celebratory jam from the end of the Peggy Suicide sessions). 2025 also saw the twentieth anniversary reissue of Citizen Cain'd; released in parallel, Cope provided the compilation album On the Road to Citizen Cain'd, pulling together various songs originally intended for Citizen Cain'd but redirected to other projects.
Writing
Music commentary
Cope has long been an avid champion of obscure and underground music. While still a member of the Teardrop Explodes, he was instrumental in the critical rehabilitation of the reclusive singer Scott Walker, compiling Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker for release by Bill Drummond's Zoo Records. This sparked renewed interest in the work of Walker (although years later Cope commented that the singer's "Pale White Intellectual" outlook on life no longer held any fascination for him). Released in 1996, Krautrocksampler covers the German bands of the 1970s dubbed "krautrock" by the British music press. A Rolling Stone review praised the book as "a work of real passion and scholarship". NME agreed: "This is a superb book ... this is an extraordinary book." Mojo went further, writing: "Brilliantly researched, Krautrocksampler abounds with revelations, and Cope's enthusiasm verges on the lethal ... a sort of lysergic Lester Bangs." In the Sunday Times, the reviewer wrote: "German 1970s minimalism is invading the British rock scene ... an Englishman is to blame ... Krautrocksampler is a lively history of a fascinating period, half encyclopedia, half psychedelic detective story."
Cope's writing has also won respect in academic circles. His second work as a musicologist, Japrocksampler – subtitled How the post war Japanese blew their minds on rock and roll – was published by HarperCollins in October 2007.