Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was Is there something missing?

I went for Todd Terry's 1996 remix of Everything but The Girl's Missing, Dub Syndicate, Joy Division's transition into New Order, Durutti Column, R.E.M. and The Clash. The Bagging Area Oblique Saturdays squad went into overdrive and came up with late period New Order without Hooky, The Verve without Nick McCabe, Elvis Costello, Janis Joplin (whose vocals were missing from a song she was supposed to record the day she died), Julian Cope and Peggy Suicide, The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, Wire, The Stranglers, Tindersticks, The Bad Seeds, Andrew Weatherall's Music's Not For Everyone radio shows, Athletico Spizz and R. Missing. Thank you Chris, Beerfueledlad, Rol, Khayem, C, The Swede, JC and Walter. 

Peggy Suicide Is Misisng closes Julian Cope's 1992 opus Jehovakill, a forty two second burst of notes and noise and Cope, the Archdrude, singing, 'mother, mother, mother...' 

Peggy Suicide Is Missing

This weeks Oblique Strategy card says this- Don't break the silence.

At first I thought I'd turned a repeat Oblique Strategy card but on checking it just seemed familiar- I've had both Tape your mouth and Do nothing for as long as possible before, both of which at first felt like they come from a similar place. I wondered if I should choose again but then the word silence prompted me and this came to mind...

A Life Of Silence (Timothy J. Fairplay's Fall Of Shame Remix)

Released on Andrew Weatherall's Bird Scarer Records back in 2012, a vinyl only 12" series that ran to just seven releases, Tim (Andrew's engineer in the studio in the early 2010s and his partner in The Asphodells) remixed Scott Fraser's A Life Of Silence. Scott was one of the Scrutton Street Axis, one of several artists who took a room in Andrew Weatherall's Scrutton Street bunker complex near Brick Lane in London. They all had to vacate eventually as the forces of free market capitalism decided that an underground bunker complex containing several DJs, musicians and producers making relatively small scale music aimed at a few hundred souls was an inefficient use of property. 'Artists', Andrew said at the time, 'are the vanguard of gentrification'.

Tim's remix is a beauty, a nine minute electronic excursion into early New Order/ music for the Cold War territory, the chuggy drums, Hooky- esque bass, choppy guitars and cosmische synths all conjuring 21st century acid house and images of Warsaw Pact maneuvers, West Berlin and early 80s Manchester. Maybe that's just me. 

I could have left it there. Don't break the silence by adding to A Life Of Silence. There's loads more songs in my collection with silence in the title: The Asphodells only album had One Minute Silence on it,a  John Betjemen inspired lyric (also released for RSD as a vinyl only 12" with a Wooden Shjips remix); I've recently been reviewing and enjoying the new album by Lines Of Silence; Depeche Mode enjoy their silence; Television Personalities had an angry silence; Daniel Avery is Out Of Silence, Justin Robertson has a Cup Of Silence; and Duncan Gray has an imperfect silence. 

More conceptually I then thought of Bill Drummond, never a man to shy away from something grand and important. In 2005 he declared 21st November as No Music Day, a day of silence to draw attention to the cheapening of music as an art form.

'I decided I needed a day I could set aside to listen to no music whatsoever. Instead, I would be thinking about what I wanted and what I didn't want from music. Not to blindly – or should that be deafly – consume what was on offer. A day where I could develop ideas'. 

A day of silence in other words. He chose 21st November as it is the feast day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. 

Cecilia

Simon And Garfunkel's Cecilia, a hit from 1970 with home made, improvised percussion, banging a bench and looping it at a party then recreated in the studio with a piano stool and guitar cases. 

Bill promoted No Music Day for a few years with some take up in the UK press, BBC Scotland and further afield (Sao Paulo in Brazil and Linz in Austria both joined in). 

I don't know how much No Music Day achieved but like many of Bill Drummond's schemes, the concept is the thing. He does something and then he moves on. If music was being cheapened as an art form in 2005 it's even cheaper now- Spotify, Tik Tok et al and advertising use music as content, little more than the backing track to the product they are selling. Spotify's rates of pay for musicians are appalling. Mark Peters, a guitarist from Wigan whose music I've featured here a good few times, recently found out that a piece of his music was used by Facebook in India and had been streamed over 26 million times. For this he received a payment of £40. 

Mark's most recent release is Shadow Quarter, available at Bandcamp, four songs each one done in two versions. 

Feel free to make your own Don't break the silence suggestions in the comment box. 

Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last Saturday's card said [blank white card]. I went into my downloads folder and selected at random the first songs that came up with those three words in the title- Blank Stare by Pye Corner Audio, White Shirt by The Charlatans and Master Card by Mogwai. 

Liz Ard suggested the deep listening trilogy/ meditation on death, Triloge de la Mort by Eliane Radigue and in a weird coincidence, Radigue died a couple of days later aged 94. Koume, the third and final part is here. RIP Eliane Radigue. 

Jase suggested, quite rightly, Going Blank Again by Ride (and that had been my second thought for the entire post but I went with my first). Ernie went for an index card related track by Khate and JC from The Vinyl Villain suggested The National's Blank Slate, The Associate's White Car in Germany and The Card Cheat by The Clash. 

Today's Oblique Strategy card reads as follows...

Towards the insignificant

|

|

|

|

|

|

|

'Cease to exist/ Givin' my goodbyes/ Drive my car/ Into the ocean...'

Wave Of Mutilation (UK Surf Mix)

|

|

|

|

|

|

|

'I lost you/I have found nothing/ That I did not know/ The nothing I have found/ Makes me strong/ 

Nothing

|

|

|

|

|

|

|

'I liked you before/ I liked you before.../ Clutching insignificance/ Dancing with me'

Clutching Insignificance

Pixies, Julian Cope and Tim Burgess, dancing with death, finding nothing, heading towards insignificance...

Feel free to drop your own suggestions and responses into the comments box.

Christmas Eve Trio

I was going to start off this post by saying I've been trying to feel a bit more positive towards Christmas this year, having not found much to enjoy in it for the last three, but the songs I'm about to post would suggest otherwise. It's good to be on holiday though and to have some time to socialise and spend time with people and it's good to be feeling a little bit more positive about it as an event. 

Over at My Top Ten Rol's been wondering whether some Christmas songs should be cancelled. Rol and fellow bloggers dissected A Fairytale Of New York here and then Do They Know It's Christmas? here. 

In place of the awful annual succession of Christmas songs you can currently hear being piped out in shops and on TV here are a trio that give a different slant on the festive season.  

In 1978 Tom Waits released Blue Valentine, an album which included the song Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis, a first person sketch which revels in the low life street level characters Waits loved and wrote about and which comes with a lyrical twist at the end. 

Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis

In 1988 Julian Cope added a fourth song to his Charlotte Anne 12" single, the sparkling pagan psyche- pop of Christmas Mourning. 

Christmas Mourning

In 2000, as they prepared for the release of their third album This Is Happening, LCD Soundsystem contributed some songs to a Ben Stiller film, Greenburg. Oh You (Christmas Blues) is a raw and distorted blues song, sounding like the result of a collision between 70s Pink Floyd and James Murphy coming down hard at the end of a very long session. 

Oh You (Christmas Blues)

Raise Your View Of Heaven

There's nothing like coming back to a grey northern English August to bring a holiday abruptly to an end but as people say, 'don't be sad it's over, be happy it happened'. Italy was a delight in every way from the busy streets of Napoli to the epic nature and scale of Pompeii, the Bay of Naples and everything around overshadowed by Mount Vesuvius, to the beauty of the Amalfi Coast and its seaside towns. The picture at the top of the post was our view for five days, across the valley from or accommodation on the hillside in Pukara, Tramonti, the road to Maori way below us. 

Naples is a busy city with an energy very much its own. It's also filled with reminders that their football club, SSC Napoli, won Serie A in June, only the fourth time they've done so. Two of the previous championships were in the 1980s and due to the feet and brains of Diego Maradona, a man who has attained the status of deity in Napoli. 

Rock Section (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

In 2014 Julian Cope wrote some music to go with the fictional bands in his novel One Three One, 'a time shifting, Gnostic hooligan, road novel', set partly at the Italia '90 World Cup. It's a brilliant and wild read. The fullest realisation of the music came with the track named after the book's main character, Rock Section, which came with an Andrew Weatherall remix as a result of Weatherall's status as artist in residence at Faber and Faber, a post created for him by Lee Brackstone. Weatherall and Cope- what's not to like?

Rock Section was credited to Dayglo Maradona (a cover of a 1979 song by the also fictional Skin Patrol). For that name alone, Cope is a genius. The remix is one of those ones from his purple patch in the 2010s with Tim Fairplay as assistant knob twiddler and engineer. Faber and Faber released 250 copies on white vinyl. It's very rare but there's a copy on Discogs currently priced at £164.95 (plus shipping). Synth arpeggios, motorik drum machine beats, endless forward progression.

I could write about Pompeii and Herculaneum at length- maybe at some point soon I will. Both are awe inspiring places and to stand in their streets, at the shop counters, in the entrance halls and rooms of the villas and houses, to walk up the steps of the theatre and stand in the Forum, is to feel a direct link with the people of two thousand years ago who were surely just like us in many ways. They worked, they went to the shops to buy bread, spent their money on entertainment and wine, and if they could afford it bought paintings and pictures for their walls. The sheer scale of Pompeii is on its own mind blowing. We spent four hours there, wandering round the streets of the city and found something to discover on every corner. 

After a couple of days on the outskirts of Napoli we rented a car and after a stop off at the two Roman sites drove south to the Amalfi coast. Driving in Italy is not for the faint hearted and the roads over the mountains to Amalfi are an experience in themselves. Maiori and Minori are seaside towns, popular with the Italians as holiday destinations and we loved both (Maiori was closest to us and our main base for five days). I could have stayed longer- much longer. Italy is a beautiful country. 

More to follow. In the meantime this record celebrated thirty five years since its release this week in 1990. Thirty five years is ridiculous isn't it? It sounds too modern, too recent, to be three and a half decades old. And if you want to really fry your head thirty five years before that, it was 1955- the dawn of rock 'n' roll. 

Raise was the debut release by Bocca Juniors (and there's another Napoli/ Maradona link- Bocca Juniors are the Argentinian club Diego played for before his move to Europe in 1982, first to Barcelona and then to Napoli). The musical Bocca Juniors were Andrew Weatherall, Terry Farley, Pete Heller and Hugo Nicholson with vocals by Anna Haigh and a rap by Protege. 

Raise (63 Steps To Heaven) (Redskin Rock Mix)

Raise is summer of 1990 writ large, a huge dance tune with massive piano riff (cribbed from Jesus On The Payroll by Thrashing Doves but I think that that riff was re- purposed and beefed up from elsewhere, a house record whose name I've temporarily forgotten). Weatherall wrote the lyrics, partly borrowing from Aleister Crowley- 'do what they wilt shall be the whole of the law'- and partly a stand up and be counted throw down, 'Raise your hands if you think you understand/ Raise your standards if you don't'. It's a fantastic, huge sounding, grin inducing record. Bocca Juniors would go on to make another single, Substance, in 1991 and then Andrew split, deciding to go it alone and 'not make records by committee', choosing a different, less well trod and less well lit path. Not the last time he did that.

 

Monday's Long Songs

Hugo Nicolson's return to musical action has seen him land at Brighton's Higher Love Recordings, a thoroughly reliable source of Balearic and electronic music. His new EP, Black Stick, came out last week, three tracks, all over seven minutes long and all first rate. The lead track is Little Kind, nine minutes of acid madness with burbling 808s and crunchy drums, a seabed- depth bassline and some of those wiggy melodies that send dancefloors off into orbit. You can get all three at Higher Love's Bandcamp. 

The two that follow- Spanner and Zombie- are equally good. Spanner is percussive, thumpy and has a voice talking about destiny. Zombie is swampy and tribal, lots of FX and a squeak at the top end. The descending synthline sounds a little like a distant relative of Don't Fight It, Feel It, a record Hugo produced with Andrew Weatherall many, many moons ago. 

Back in 1991 Hugo remixed Julian Cope's Beautiful Love, a track that came out on bright pink vinyl. The drums are a slowed down sample from a jazz record- someone told me which record once but was ages ago and I've forgotten. Hugo drops in a wobbly bassline, some FX and gets Copey into a very '91 groove. 

Love L.U.V. (Beautiful Love)

Forty Five More Minutes Of Edits

In recent weeks I've done two Sunday mixes made up of edits. Part One is here and Part Two is here. Today is Part Three, another forty five minutes of edits, this one largely dancefloor oriented and with an 80s feel. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Edits Mix Three

• Can't Cope (Cotton Bud Re- Master)
• No- Thing
• M&M Hardway Bros
• Swamp Shuffle
• Never Let Me Down (Hunterbrau Edit)
• Jackie (Cotton Dub)
• Longed

Can't Cope is from Jezebell's Jezebellaeric Beats Vol. 1, a dubbed out and spaced out way to enter into the mix, our friend the Archdrude Julian H. Cope sent spinning even further out into the cosmos than he was previously. Safesurfer is from 1991's epic Peggy Suicide, the start of Julian's imperial period. Swamp Shuffle is also from Jezebellaeric Beats Vol. 1, the closing track, this time David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison and Chris Frantz given the treatment by Jesse and Darren. 

No- Thing is from Resident Rockers, the in- house edit team at Eclectics. Heroes. Twin Peaks. Moby. Acid. No- thing will keep us together. 

The M&M Hardway Bros edit takes Sleaford Mods Mork and Mindy, a song from 2020's Spare Ribs, with Billy Nomates on guest vocals, a tale of a childhood spent in colourless suburban council estates, Action Man and Cindy and mum and dad being out, long afternoons with nothing to do. Sean monkeyed about with it and turned it into an ALFOS at The Golden Lion moment. 

Hunterbrau's edit of Depeche Mode's 1987 classic Never Let Me Down came out on Paisley Dark, dark disco/ slowed down sleek goth.

Rich Lane's Cotton Dubs are second to none. His edit of Sinead O'Connor's Jackie (from her debut, the Lion And Then Cobra) repurposes Sinead with an 808 while losing none of her power. 

Longed is an edit of All Day Long from New Order's 1986 album Brotherhood. The chopped, looped and edited version here, largely instrumental, is from an intriguing project I was tipped off about on Bandcamp, a highly unofficial edit service by Follytechnic Music Library. Longed is from a collection of New Order edits called Ordered 86- 93 but there's waaaay more there than just one album of nine New Order edits. Have a dig around, see what you can unearth. 

Won't Somebody Sign My Release?

Julian Cope's non- stop creative motion continues not just with a stream of albums but with his series of booklets called Cope's Notes. Each one focusses on a specific album or period, is packed with Julian's memories of the time and explanations of what he was doing and why he was doing it, along with photos, pages from notebooks and memorabilia, plus a CD of new/ extra/ unreleased materials. They are a treasure trove for the Cope fan. Cope's Notes #5 was a 48 page booklet and CD titled How I Wrote The Modern Antiquarian... And Why and was followed in the summer by Cope's Notes #6 Jehovakill. 

In 1991 Cope was at the crest of a wave. Peggy Suicide was a hit and a long world tour with a full band had seen some incredible performances. Julian was in creative overdrive and on finishing the tour was desperate to keep moving and head straight to record more songs. His band and roadies had become hyper fixated on krautrock the longer they'd been on the road and Julian was grabbing moments in hotel rooms with Dictaphones and portable recorders to get songs out of his head and onto tape. Cope's energies had been supercharged by the opposition to Thatcher's poll tax, his giant green alien outfit Sqwubbsy, not to mention his new and deeply felt attachment to Britain's neolithic past and in 1991 the birth of his daughter Albany. Jehovakill is a sequel to Peggy Suicide, the second part of a trilogy, and very much an album from a purple patch in Julian's recording history- even if Island disagreed and rejected the first version an eleven song album called Julian H. Cope, 'the most sonically unappealing album I've ever heard' according to managing director of the record label Marc Marot. Undeterred Julian, Donald Ross Skinner, Rooster Cosby and guitar tech Rizla Deutsch kept going, channeling krautrock, dark folk and pre- Christian themes into the sixteen track opus that is Jehovakill, a mysterious and occult record. Hugo Nicolson (Hugoth), 'fresh' from being Andrew Weatherall's engineer and co- producer of choice and Primal Scream's synth and samples operator on stage, plays synth. 

Rizla Deutsch by the way, fired a toy rocket into a hotel air con unit in Japan that got Cope banned from ever performing in the country again. 

The CD that comes with Cope's Notes #6 is full of nuggets and versions, some reocrded onto Walkmen, some at Holt Studios and Shaun Harvey's, one for a radio session in London, some while on tour in Chicago and Los Angeles. It's a mini- Jehovakill in its own right and finishes with a version of Upwards At 45 Degrees, a key Jehoakill song. This version was recorded live on stage at Elephant & Castle while preparing for the Jehovakill tour with a field recording of a downpour made on a beach in Lanzarote by Rooster. 

Upwards At 45 Degrees (Version)

There are still some copies of Cope's Notes #6 left at Head Heritage. 

CCFO

Yesterday brought with it some good news- finally- with the departure of Boris Johnson from Number 10 Downing Street. On Wednesday night he seemed to have gone into full on bunker mentality, hiding in a hole in the ground, last days of Der Fuhrer madness, claiming to have a mandate of fourteen million (that's not how British politics works) and determined to plough away and 'get on with the job'. Then, on Thursday morning, he was announcing his resignation. In the words of Ernest Hemmingway and a quote I've seen in a few places recently, from The Sun Also Rises, a character named Mike is asked how he went bankrupt. 'Two ways. Gradually', he says, 'then suddenly'.

I didn't feel the jubilation I thought I'd feel at seeing him go, not last because his departure speech was spectacularly charmless- it's all everybody else's fault. That's been his default position throughout life. He was never fit for office in the first place and there's no surprise that a man who's been sacked for lying previously should eventually be got rid of for lying. What happened in between- illegally proroguing parliament, repeated misconduct in office, £850 a roll wallpaper and undeclared donations, the deaths from Covid of all who died due to him locking down too late in March 2020, spreading infections through the Eat Out To Help Out campaign and 'saving Christmas' later that year, Partygate, presiding over an administration that received over 120 fines for breaking lockdown rules, intentions to break international law over his own Brexit deal and the Northern Irish border etc etc- was all par for the course for someone who believed that the rules that others abide by didn't apply to him. But in the end, the lying got him. Lying connected to sexual misconduct and cronyism, aptly. He wants to hang on as caretaker according to reports yesterday because him and Carrie have planned to have their wedding reception at the PM's official residence Chequers which seems completely fitting for the pair of them. I look forward to the public inquiry into the his handling of Covid. His supporters keep saying he 'got the big calls right' but I can't think of any- in fact, he got them wrong. And any Prime Minister would have done the same with the vaccination campaign. 

Meanwhile, those members of the Cabinet and the wider Conservative party who like Hemingway's Mike, gradually and then suddenly, found their integrity/ backbone can go fuck themselves too. They put him there in 2019, knowing what he was like and what they and we would be saddled with. Over the last few days it's been noticeable how many of them urged him to resign to do the right thing for 'the party and the country'. In that order, always. The survival of the Conservative Party and keeping it in power is the main thing that the Conservative Party cares about. The rest of us are collateral damage in the ongoing Tory Party psychodrama and especially it's relationship with Europe (which is why we're here isn't it? David Cameron called the referendum to shore up Tory party unity. Johnson is a result of that decision). 

The expectation that things will improve now seems pretty naive. They, the MPs and party membership, will elect someone who is a combination of rabid right wing/ incompetent/ over- promoted. Given that the Conservative Party has given us in succession the three worst Prime Minsters in living memory, I don't have much faith in them doing any better this time around. Johnson and Cummings purged all the relatively sensible ones back in December 2019. What's left is detritus floating around after the ship has sunk below the surface. 

Julian Cope recently announced a new song/ single, available from his Head Heritage website as a download (the CD single sold out quickly). It's called Cunts Can Fuck Off and it's more fitting for Boris Johnson today than any other person I can think of. There's no video/ audio of the single version available. Instead, here's Julian at the Dreamland Ballroom in Margate in January 2020, performing Cunts Can Fuck Off live. 

For your download pleasure instead here's the Archdrude back in 2005 on his Citizen Cain'd album and a song that sounds like The Stooges on Gimme Danger. 

I'm Living In The Room They Found Saddam In

Half An Hour Of Cope

Today's thirty minute mix clocks in at closer to forty such is the embarrassment of riches in Julian Cope's back catalogue combined with my inability to rein it in at half an hour- and my decision late in the day that Andrew Weatherall's remix should be added onto the end. This mix jumps around all over Cope's post- Teardrop Explodes career, not doing much more than scratching the surface and wobbles between Julian in stripped down, voice and acoustic guitar mode and some fuller sounding, full band/ remix mode.

The opening song is classic Cope, the Archdrude musing on the role psychedelics played in prehistory and since over organ and drum machine (from Revolutionary Suicide in 2013. It's one of his very best albums I think- CDs on the internet are sold at silly figures so it could really do with a re- issue). It's followed by a 7" only version of Paranormal In The West Country (originally from 1994's Autogeddon), a camp fire recording with children and revellers audible, recorded by the famous Avebury stones. The song was only available on CD single if you'd first purchased the Queen Elizabeth 2 album and sent a sticker from that off to Cope's Head Heritage website. Julian H. Cope is laugh out loud funny, one hundred miles an hour stuff, from 1992's Jehovahkill. I Have Always Been Here Before is a rollicking garage band cover/ complete rewrite of a Roky Erickson song recorded for a tribute album (and since included in the deluxe re- issue of Jehovahkill). Love L.U.V. is a Hugo Nicolson remix of the sublime Beautiful Love (which I really meant to include on this) and Try Try Try was the only single from 1995's 20 Mothers. Self Civil War was the title track on his 2020 album, a folk/ krautrock blast of brilliance. Revolutionary Suicide comes from the album of the same name. Rock Section is by the fictitious Dayglo Maradona from Julian's One Three One novel, a gnostic- hooligan road trip that switches between the neolithic and the 1990 World Cup in Sardinia. You know who Andrew Weatherall is. 

Half An Hour Of Julian Cope

• They Were All On Hard Drugs
• Paranormal In the West Country (Avebury)
• Julian H. Cope
• I Have Always Been Here Before
• Love L.U.V.
• Try Try Try
• Self Civil War
• Revolutionary Suicide
• Rock Section (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

Monday's Long Song

Julian Cope has recently published the second in a series of Cope's Notes, a re- issue of his 1990 album Droolian with the original album on CD, expanded with extra tracks from the sessions and a forty- four page booklet written by Cope where he describes the period and the album. Droolian was written at a time when he was at loggerheads with Island about the release of Skellington, which the record company thought to be too lo- fi. They wanted bigger budget recordings. Julian was back in Liverpool at this time on and off, hanging out with old friends all reeling in the aftermath of Pete de Freitas' death in June and he also fired up by the Thatcher government's introduction of the Poll Tax. If Skellington was lo- fi, what he gave them next- Droolian- was even moreso. Recorded onto C90 cassettes in the front room of Pam Young's house in Liverpool with Donald Ross Skinner producing, over three days using a TEAC four track recorder. The album was mastered direct from the cassettes. In 1990 Julian discarded the leather motorbike clothes and began dressing new age for the new decade, new age hippy clothing, an attitude he said was summed up in one word- loose. Julian's writing in the booklet is characteristically superb, funny and incisive and very much in his voice. You can buy Droolian at Head Heritage. 

Julian said that the lo fi, one take approach was the way forward and that every album he made afterwards was in some way influenced by Droolian and the way he went about it. 1991's Peggy Suicide was a sprawling and brilliant record, full band performances and a big success. Island were pelased. In 1992 he gave them Jehovahkill, a record influenced by his love for krautrock and his newfound interest in neolithic sites. The cover features the Callanish stones, a prehistoric site in the shape of a cross (predating Christianity obviously). With Donald back on board and Rooster Cosby playing he goes full pelt on Jehovahkill- the lyrics are concerned with environmentalism, the goddess, the patriarchy, his desire to destroy mainstream organised religion, and prehistoric sites. There is lots of psychedelia and krautrock, acid (both rock and house), acoustic guitars, electric guitars, drums low in the mix, his voice high in the mix, spoken word sections, tribal rhythms, raves and folk freak outs- all the Cope tropes are being established here. Cope's own A&R man described the song Slow Rider as 'the worst thing he'd heard by anybody, ever'. Copey wanted it as it was. Island refused to release it. Cope recorded a further six songs, making the album heavier and more pagan. It was his last album on Island but if the breadheads at Island had had enough, no one else had- after Peggy Suicide's success the music press lapped up Jehovahkill, lauding it as inspired and a triumph and it sold well. He became a music press regular, front covers and interviews a weekly and monthly event. Towards the end of the album (a three sided vinyl release, side four being an etching of the site at Callanish) is the ten minute song The Tower, an epic tale about the fall of the Goddess and the rise of the patriarchy. 

The Tower

A Cosmic Flash

From his 2020 album Self Civil War, an album still getting replayed round these parts, Julian Cope and a song with a first half that is an instrumental organ- guitars- bass freak out over a thumping motorik rhythm before the man himself joins in on vox. 70s guitar solos and acoustic guitar breakdown, working their way down and down before the drums come back and a dirty fuzz part begins the build to the end. 

A Cosmic Flash

Paisley Dark Is In Your Heart

Paisley Dark is a label based in Leeds specialising in dark, psychedelic electronic music, edits and remixes and original works. Recently I posted the Jesse Fahnestock re- edit of Spacemen 3's How Does It Feel, a deep, dubbed out version of Rugby's finest's druggy gospel sounds. This one, again by Jesse in his 10:40 guise, appeared at the end of May, a skewwhiff take on a hypnotic, slowly building song that sounds like it's come from somewhere else, a radio tuned into another reality- Inner Meet Me from The Beta Band's  second EP, The Patty Patty Sound (from 1998). Those first three Beta Band EPs really were something else. Jesse's 10:40's Outer Hebrides Dub is five minutes of pulsing, trippy sound and can be found at Bandcamp (free downloads available while they last). 

Inner Meet Me

Also out on Paisley Dark is an edit of Julian Cope's Safesurfer, his 1991 ode to contraception. The Jezebell edit is slightly shorter than the Archdrude's original and burns more slowly- descending bassline, hissing hi- hats, swirling, looped, chopped up vocals smothered in echo before Copey's refrain, 'You don't have to be afraid, love/'Cos I'm a safesurfer darling'. I've no idea who Jezebell is but this edit is clearly an act of love. Available at Bandcamp, free download while stocks last. 

Safesurfer (Peggy Suicide version)

Monday's Long Songs

Two long songs today, a bank holiday special, both taken from a 12" single released in 1991 on beautiful sugary pink vinyl from Julian Cope who was at that point at the crest of a wave. Beautiful Love was the first single ahead of the Peggy Suicide album, a trumpet led tribute to Avalon. For the Beautiful Love L.U.V. remix an uncredited Hugo Nicolson loops up various drum parts, handclaps and wobbles, a bass excerpt and some vocal fragments and samples dropped in, a seven minute ride, progressive pop/ house (or something like that). Although it's clearly rooted in 1991's sounds and styles it still works today.

Beautiful Love L.U.V.

If you turned the 12" over- and why wouldn't you?- there was a nine minute guitar led psyche rock, repetition freakout called Dragonfly. Fading in and then driving onward in motorik krautrock fashion, Dragonfly is all heavy Stooges guitars, wah wah organ, a relentless fuzzed up groove cooked up by Cope and Donald Ross Skinner, and some ad libbed vocals and the occasional exclamation of the title. 

Drragonfly

Diego

Diego Maradona died yesterday aged 60. I feared for him a few weeks ago when he was hospitalised with a blood clot on the brain but the surgery seemed to go well. A heart attack did for him in the end. In a way it's a marvel he lived as long as he did. His drug abuse and weight gain is well documented and anyone who watched the short documentary series about his time managing Mexican club Dorados will have seen the damage done to his body, some self- inflicted, some punishment meted out by defenders in Spain and Italy in the 1980s, punishment for being the most gifted footballer in the world, a man who on his day was unstoppable. He was a single handed force of nature. In 1986 he captained his national team to the world cup. In 1986- 7 he led Napoli to their first ever Serie A title at a time when the Italian league was the best and toughest in world football. He did it again and then took them to a UEFA cup win as well. In Napoli he found an underdog, a city and team who were the target of abuse from the northern giants of Juventus, Milan and Inter, emblematic of Italy's north- south divide. Naples and the south are sometimes referred to as Africa by the rest of Italy, which tells you a lot in lots of ways. In Napoli he is revered as a God, the man who gave the city a middle finger, plenty of tears, a week long party following their 1987 scudetto and some incredible football to wave in the faces of their rivals in the more sophisticated north. He also became so deeply entwined with the Naples mafia that his life began to spiral out of control. 

At some point in 1982 I found an Argentina shirt in the bargain bin of our local sports shop. I suspect it was in there due to the sheer unlikeliness of selling it at full price due to the Falklands War and getting £3 for it was better than nothing- but there it was, pale blue and white stripes, embroidered badge and Le Coq Sportif logo, the same as the one Diego is wearing above. I bought it. I was the only person I knew who had an Argentina shirt and to be honest it did wind people up a bit. In a PE lesson a teenage peer stood behind me, gave me a shove in the back and said 'I'll mark Galtieri'. On holiday once some kids threw stones at me. It didn't stop me wearing it until I outgrew it. Diego Maradona's rise and the shirt were somehow tied together for me. In 1984 I was at Old Trafford aged fourteen when United played Barcelona and Maradona. Barca were two- nil up from the first leg and we weren't given much of a chance of winning the tie. Old Trafford was filled that night, fifty- five thousand and the place was bouncing from long before kick off. European football was a rarity in those days for Manchester United fans and I think it was my first night game too, the floodlights giving everything extra drama. United won three- nil, incredibly, and Diego barely got a kick. But I saw him play and I've loved him since around then. 

Englishmen aren't supposed to love Diego Maradona. They're supposed to hate him for the crime of handball in 1986, a goal which played its part in knocking England out of the world cup. Diego said that in South America the art of getting away with it, of fooling the referee and the opposition is part of the game. To northern Europeans, it is cheating and that's that. The second goal he scored that day where Diego spins on a spot and then slaloms his way through the England team beating one man after another before slipping the ball into the net is worthy of winning any game. What the handball clips rarely show is the series of fouls he suffered from a largely prosaic, lumbering England defence and the full elbow in the face he receives. Somehow that was never seen as cheating. 

I loved him in 1986 and the scenes when he lifted the world cup. I loved his return in 1994, the goal against Greece, the run towards the camera and then the disgrace as he failed a drugs test and was sent home. I love the grainy footage of him in Italy scoring goal after goal, outrageous chips and unnatural balance while Italian centre backs try to kick lumps out of him. I love his chaotic life after retirement, the holidays in Cuba at Fidel Castro's house, the carnage of the day out at the 2018 world cup when Argentina played Nigeria, the footage of him dancing in Naples nightclubs in the 80s and training on mudbath pitches. A flawed genius for sure, a life lived at the edge of reason also, but a life lived by a man who rose from poverty in the slums of Buenos Aries to attain genuine greatness, often almost single- handedly. He lit up the lives of millions and football and the world was richer with him in it. 

RIP Diego Armando Maradona.

When Julian Cope published his existential, football hooligan, Neolithic, time travel/ road novel One Three One he created a slew of bands to go with it. The most full realised was the brilliantly named Dayglo Maradona. 

Rock Section (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

Self

One of the albums that came out at the start of the year and was a little lost in the madness of Covid chaos in February and March was Julian Cope's Self Civil War, his 35th album apparently. Cope is so prolific that it's difficult to keep up sometimes. I bought his John Balance Enters the Underworld album, out in 2019, a five track album of instrumentals, and despite its excellence ait didn't seem to stick with me. Self Civil War is a different story,, a return to the freewheeling, psychedelic pop, time travelling Julian Cope, and an album with uptempo ballads about Einstein and Odin, songs with acoustic guitars, piano and horns, ooh ooh oohs and ba ba bas, punning titles such as You Will Be Mist and more self- explanatory ones like My Facebook, Your Laptop and Requiem For A Dead Horse. When he was touring in February, introducing songs with patter that was longer the song he was about to play and just as entertaining, Julian said everyone is engaged in a self civil war- and he speaks from experience. 

The Great Raven

You can buy Self Civil War from Head Heritage. And you probably should. 

The Grey Weathered Stones You Shelter Behind

                                                         Bryn Celli Ddu, Anglesey

One of the side effects of this summer's Covid restrictions has been me dragging my family round a good number of Neolithic sites. These places have several Corona advantages- open air, free to visit, you can go without touching anything and they are crowd free. When we visited Castlerigg stone circle near Keswick in the Lake District (on the way to Scotland at the start of August) my seventeen year old daughter was genuinely surprised to find other people there as well as us. 'there are other people here' she said, slightly amazed, and then followed this with (in tones dripping with teenage sarcasm), 'I thought it was only us who were arsed about stone circles'.

   Castlerigg, Keswick

In the early summer we started by driving to Mellor, in the hills overlooking Stockport, which has an iron age hill fort and down the valley and up the hill a long barrow (the barrow is on private land behind barbed wire sadly). A week later we drove to The Bridestones, a chambered cairn on a hill overlooking Congleton and the Cheshire Plain, no one around. We got out of the car, walked through a field, ate our sandwiches, poked around the site and then went home. In August, before new restrictions were imposed on Greater Manchester, after stopping off at Castlerigg on our way to Scotland, we drove out to Wigtown Bay and up to see Cairn Holy I and II, a pair of magnificent chambered cairns, burial places, from four and a half thousand years ago. Cairn Holy I has some really dramatic upright stones at its entrance. Cairn Holy II has a huge cap stone. There were to our surprise another family visiting this site but social distancing was easy.

Cairn Holy II, Dumfries and Galloway

                                                  Cairn Holy I, Dumfries and Galloway

In Scotland we were also able to visit the Twelve Apostles, a large stone circle in a field just north of Dumfries. This site was were the rest of my parry's enthusiasm faded. Two of them refused to get out of the car, the third said she'd stay in the car to answer some text messages, leaving me to tramp around a slightly wet field on my own.

Since then we've been to Anglesey which has more Neolithic sites than you can shake a stick at- the amazing burial chamber with henge and stone circle Bryn Celli Ddu (pictured at the top of this post. We were down to three members for this visit, one not wanting to join our Neolithic road trip). Anglesey also gave us the three chambered barrow overlooking the aluminium works at Trefignath, the nearby standing stone Ty Mawr (now across the road from a service station) and the burial chamber at Ty Newydd.

Ty Newydd, Anglesey

Last weekend in a desperate bid to have one more day out before September brought us all back into the real world of work, college and increased risk of transmission of the disease, we headed out to Derbyshire and the double treat of Arbor Low stone circle, a large site in the Derbyshire Dales and the neighbouring barrow at Gib Hill. 

                           

                Arbor Low, Derbyshire

 

                                                             Gib Hill Barrow, Derbyshire

I have a genuine fascination with these sites. Their age, four to five thousand years old, is one part of it. To stand at a barrow or stone circle and look at the landscape around them, to stand where our ancestors stood so many years ago, is in some ways magical. The view, give or take a few roads, hedges and fences, and fewer trees, is often what they might have seen. There is a sense of the unknown about them- we don't full know how they were constructed, what their use was, what people did there- and we probably never will. In a world that demands certainty it's good to have unanswered questions. Our Neolithic brothers and sisters had difficult, dangerous lives where starvation and disease were ever present threats but they had a desire to mark the lives of their people, to build and construct, to leave an imprint on the landscape they lived in, to create art of some kind. 

As I walked to and from these stone circles, barrows, standing stones and cairns I often found myself humming this 1992 Julian Cope cover of a 1977 Roky Erickson song, I Have Always Been Here Before. In Cope's hands it becomes an ode to the Neolithic peoples and the monuments they've left behind. He puts in some extra lines and stanzas, lines such as 'Like the grey weathered stones you shelter behind' and he adds an extra section to the start of the song-

'From the long barrows of Wiltshire to the pyramids

From the stone circles that challenge the scientists

And the Neolithics that tread the ancient avenues

And the children that died forever more exist'

I Have Always Been Here Before

Isolation Mix Thirteen

Lockdown ends today- at least, that's how the government and the media have been portraying it with occasional reminders that social distancing and a 2 metre gap might be important. The government have largely dropped the daily infection figures and death toll from their bulletins. You don't want to be depressing people at this stage of proceedings with doom and gloom, not when there are pints to be drunk! The media have been splashing stories about Super Saturday, Independence Day and the End Of Hibernation. It does look like they deliberately chose July 4th so they could call it an Independence Day. Meanwhile, Leicester is in lockdown, the R rate in London is apparently creeping above 1, there are Covid hotspots around the country, the deaths are still well over one hundred every day, and lots of people are talking about a second wave and a second spike without the people in charge actually wanting to do anything about it. We are still shielding, the medical advice we received this week is that due to our son Isaac being in the extremely vulnerable category we should stay in isolation until August 1st. Despite a few minor changes to our lockdown lives, we are still very much in isolation.

This mix is an hour and eight minutes of music with a folky, ambient, pastoral tinge with some Balearica and guitars thrown in, some old stuff and some brand new- some birdsong and synth ambience to start and finish, blissed out tracks from Seahawks, Apiento and Ultramarine, Green Gartside solo and as Scritti Politti, acoustic guitars courtesy of Nancy Noise, Michael Head and Barry Woolnough, some understated brilliance from The Clash and Sandinista!, Julian Cope covering Roky Erickson, Thurston Moore covering New Order and Jane Weaver's cosmic/folky weirdness.

Tracklist-
Stubbleman: 4am Conversation

Seahawks: Islands

Nancy Noise: Kaia

Green Gartside: Tangled Man

Barry Woolnough: Great Spirit Father In The Sky

The Clash: Rebel Waltz

Thurston Moore: Leave Me Alone

Julian Cope: I Have Always Been Here Before

Jane Weaver: Slow Motion (Loops Variation)

Michael Head and the Red Elastic Band: Picasso

Scritti Pollitti: The Boom Boom Bap

Apiento: Things You Do For Love

Ultramarine: Stella (Stella Connects)

Stubbleman: 6am Chorus

Isolation Mix Four

A bit of a change again for this week's hour long isolation mix, this time a trip into more psychedelic and psyche areas, some guitars, a couple of cover versions, some remixes and a re-edit of an 80s alt- classic with an eye, a third eye maybe, on the cosmic and the blissed out. One of the segues is a little bit clumsy but I can live with it. I've had to move the host over to Mixcloud as I'd used up all my available space at Soundcloud without going to the paid for service.



Tracklist-
The Durutti Column: Otis

Wixel: Expressway To Yr Skull (Long Champs Bonus Beats)

Moon Duo: Stars Are The Light

Curses: This Is The Day

Le Volume Courbe: Rusty

Sonic Boom/ Spectrum: True Love Will Find You In The End

Mogwai: Party In The Dark

The Liminanas: The Gift (Anton Mix)

Goldfrapp v Spiritualized: Monster Love

Julian Cope: Heed Of Penetration and the City Dweller Head Remix by Hugo Nicholson

Edit Service 8 by It’s A Fine Line: The Story Of The Blues (Talkin’ Blues)

The Early Years: Complicity

Coping

Julian Cope played the second of two nights at Gorilla on Saturday night, a wide ranging one man show with songs from his back catalogue (from The Teardrop Explodes through to the new Self Civil War) and plenty of story telling and comedy in between. Cope is announced on to the stage by his roadie and appears in Luftwaffe cap, shades, sleeveless hooded top, shorts and biker boots, promising us that he won't talk too much and then proceeds to do exactly that- not that anyone is complaining. Cope is an accomplished raconteur as much as anything else. He kicks off with a long story about buying the title Grand Prince of Pomerania off the internet and then goes into Soul Desert following that with a new one, Your Facebook My Laptop. We get Read It In Books, interrupted by Julian filling us in on the genesis of that song, what he calls 'the writing group' he was a member of (The Crucial Three of legend), the birthplace of both the Bunnymen and The Teardrops, it's riff borrowed from a Fall song (Mark E Smith and Martin Bramah are both nodded to) and Ian McCulloch's role in it, with some gentle piss taking of Mac. It's not nasty or personal- he takes the piss out of himself and out of us too.  All the songs bar one are played on acoustic guitar and fleshed out by FX pedals including an epic Autogeddon Blues, a brilliant They Were All On Hard Drugs (which has a lengthy preamble, as you can probably imagine, which finishes with him describing finding four different types of magic mushroom within a few hundred yards of Stonehenge), Cromwell In Ireland, Drink Me Under The Table, The Greatness And Perfection of Love, a sparkling run through World Shut Your Mouth, and Treason. When all his songs are presented like this, one man with his guitar, they seem more and more part of the same story- there's real no separation between the Teardrops pop hits and his current cottage industry album. He jokes about the Teardrops, that he approached the others about putting them back together but the rest of the band were just too out of it. He jokes about the stream of near hits he had as a solo artist, all of them peaking at number 42. He tells us about painting a Messerschmidt- a model not a real one- and having some deep grey paint left over at the exact moment a brand new Fender guitar is delivered. He then plays the next song with the guitar he painted. He mentions his poor promotion of his new albums and then repeatedly remembers to promote Self Civil War. He reminds us of the criticism that his songs are ba- ba- ba songs, then plays the ba- ba- ba songs, proving what a great songwriter he is. There's a long discussion about folk music and his issues with it and then we, the folk, are encouraged to join in with the 'Oi' backing vocals.  For The Great Dominions he moves onto the synth with his roadie accompanying him and then goes back to the guitar for a marvellous Pristeen and finally a crowd pleasing Sunspots. He hams up the leaving of the stage, revelling in the applause while undercutting it too, and then returns to play Out Of My Mind On Dope And Speed. There's not really anyone else quite like him- so esoteric, so open, so poppy but so versed in the underground. Long may he run.

Autogeddon Blues

Happy Christmas

Diego Maradona and Dayglo Maradona both wish you a very happy Christmas. Feliz Navidad.

Rock Section (Andrew Weatherall remix)