Julian Copes Fried is punk in approach but prog in outlook

After having moved on from The Teardrop Explodes, Julian Cope released his second solo album, Fried, in 1984. It was received with bewilderment and confusion by many, but in 2014 Prog argued that it should be seen as a rewarding – if flawed – prog-pop experiment.

After a whirlwind four years fronting psychedelic-loving post-punks The Teardrop Explodes, and a level of LSD ingestion that could only be described as heroic, Julian Cope was living in the Staffordshire village of Drayton Bassett, wide-eyed, paranoid and nurturing an obsession with accumulating toy cars. Rock music had gobbled up another young soul.

Or so it seemed – in fact, he was of a sterner disposition, and way more than the drooling eccentric and/or preening narcissist dismissed by the press. While his contemporaries fed their egos with stadium rock and philanthropy, Cope burrowed deep into the subjects that actually interested him. Those included mythology, paganism, krautrock, psychedelia.

He had looked into the abyss and seen Bono’s puckered face staring back at him, and now he was a man on a mission to show the world he meant business.

The world, however, took one look at the cover of Fried, beheld an emaciated Cope crawling through the dirt wearing nothing but a turtle shell – and needed some convincing. “Nothing I do is ironic,” Cope has since said. “Irony is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

It sold even fewer copies than World Shut Your Mouth, released six months earlier, and resulted him being dropped by his label. It’s a flawed work, but rich too, and a return visit today is highly rewarding.

Epic, anthropomorphic opener Reynard The Fox (categorically not the Fairport Convention song of the same name) is written from the perspective of a hunted animal: ‘Hey in the pouring rain/When the smell of terror brings a thousand eyes/The red men come again/They kill my children and they kill my wife.’

Featuring a nostalgic Doors-esque spoken-word mid-section about Cope’s beloved Warwickshire countryside, and a conclusion that alludes to the singer’s propensity for self-abuse, this is the music of mythical England at its bloodiest.

Meanwhile, the barbed Bill Drummond Says treads that finest of lines between jangly indie and prog-pop, and is inspired by former Teardrop Explodes manager Drummond’s own Julian Cope Is Dead.

With its neat, elegant arrangements, Holy Love is a joyous pop song – Scott Walker reborn as a lanky plank with saucer eyes – and the single Sunspots is a thoroughly uplifting piece of oompah-pop.

And that’s the thing about Fried : for all its obvious signs of embracing cult status, here Cope is a pop fan – albeit the type of skewed pop written by Syd Barrett, 13th Floor Elevators or Love.

With its feet deep in English soil, it’s music that’s plugged into an alternative national grid of stone circles and ley lines, political dissent, wanton hedonism, burned psyches and individuality.

Fried is punk in approach but prog in outlook; it’s earthy, timeless and slightly ludicrous – and all the better for it.