The Teardrop Explodes - Treason (It's Just A Story) 12”

The Story Behind The Song

Liverpool, November 1977. Local outfit The Mystery Girls are onstage at Eric's, the nightclub venue situated close to the famous Cavern. It's their first - and last - live performance. Although the group members include Pete Burns (later of Dead Or Alive) and Pete Wylie (later of Wah!), our focus is on the bassist, Julian Cope. Almost a year later, in a first floor bedsit in Liverpool, Cope and several mates are discussing names for their new group. Wanting something "far out" that bucked the trend for short, dour names, they settle on A Shallow Madness unless something better can be conjured up. As they talk, keyboardist Paul Simpson flicks through an old issue of Daredevil, a Marvel comic which had been left in the flat by a previous tenant. He is taken by one page which depicts a burning sky using psychedelic artwork. In the middle, inside a bubble with serrated edges, it reads: The Teardrop Explodes. Simpson holds up the page: "What do you think of this for a name?" Cope thinks it is psychedelic brilliance, but what does it mean? "It made no sense," he recalled later. "The story made no sense at all. We tried to figure it out and we couldn't." Although it was almost impossible to fathom from convoluted comic strip plot, a teardrop-shaped spacecraft had exploded over Central Park, New York. "But it was a great name for a group. I loved it. It was like The 13th Floor Elevators or The Chocolate Watchband. And no-one had a name like that." And so a shallow madness had spawned The Teardrop Explodes.

A few months later, in early 1979, the music newspaper Sounds ran a double-page spread on "The New Merseybeat" featuring Echo And The Bunnymen and OMD as well as The Teardrop Explodes. "Suddenly out of the depths of obscurity," the newspaper reported, "The Teardrop Explodes have become the most talked about new band in the North West." But in terms of visible success, they languished in obscurity for another two years. The first three singles - including Treason - failed to chart. The breakthrough came when the maniacal Reward cracked the Top Ten in early 1981. Treason was re-released and it peaked just inside the Top Twenty. It was as upbeat as Reward but more anthemic - a pulsar of acoustic guitars. Catchy and invigorating, it would have been a hit in any era from the 1960s onwards, the hallmark of a timeless pop song. But what of the lyrics? These are unfathomable in many Cope songs, and this one appears no different. They pivot around the unusual contrastive "Is it real? Or is it treason?" Although it hints at some kind of equivocal reaction that might be due to betrayal, we are none the wiser. Perhaps we should heed the chorus and realise "It's just a story".

Treason was the second single released from the highly-rated inaugural album Kilimanjaro; Q Magazine placed it on its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums. When originally released, its artwork depicted a moody photograph of the group lit by different colours, reflecting their psychedelic origins, but this was soon changed to – cliché warning – an image of Mount Kilimanjaro. With a herd of staring zebras in the foreground, it looked like a still from David Attenborough documentary. If there was a list of the 100 Most Banal Album Covers, it would be a contender for No. 1. For a group inspired by psychedelic artwork in a comic strip, it was tantamount to – pun warning – artistic treason. Thankfully, for the later CD release, the original design was used. The single sleeve shows an image of a butterfly in African art. Or at least we think so – the design appears as impenetrable as the lyrics.

The Teardrop Explodes - Reward 7”

What an absolute banger of a single. Nuff said really. Not so sure about the B’side though.

Wilder

Behold the greatest dysfunctional family in pop. The Gallagher brothers might dislike each other, but unlike The Teardrop Explodes, they never chased each other around the hills of Wales with loaded shotguns. A leaf through Julian Cope’s autobiography will show you what precious, vindictive scumbags Liverpool’s abiding gift to psychotropic pop were. That from such a primordial, seething soup of bile and chaos they managed to produce two of the defining albums of their age is a measure of their brilliance.

After a trio of mesmerising indie singles, the Teardrops signed for a major and, fuelled by LSD psychosis and mutual loathing, they went to Wales to make their psychepunkefunkedelic thang happen. The result was ‘Kilimanjaro’. Restored to twice its former glory, with bonus tracks and the reinstated original (crap) sleeve, it’s as frazzled as it was in 1980. Copey loved his hypnotic bass thud, as ‘Poppies In The Field’ and ‘Sleeping Gas’ attest, but he couldn’t quite lock the big chorus out of his head. Hence the glorious ‘Treason’, the, erm, dreamy ‘When I Dream’ and ‘Brave Boys Keep Their Promises’, which sounds a lot more like Wham!’s ‘Young Guns’ than the Modern Antiquarian would care to remember.

One huge hit single (‘Reward’) later and the Teardrops had it all to do. Their second album was set to be the smash of 1981, but as their crusading pop army dissolved into petty squabbling, it never quite happened. ‘Wilder’ bombed on its release, but it’s the 360-degree sound sensation that justified Cope’s delusions of grandeur. Wilful, unfocused and gloriously sloppy, Cope out Arthur-Leed Arthur Lee to make the Love album that never was. Two awesome singles (‘Colours Fly Away’ and ‘Passionate Friend’) colour the medieval darkness but the lumbering closer, ‘The Great Dominions’, saw the Teardrops make their final meander into genius.

A stillborn third album followed and then they were no more. A few years back, keyboard player and Food Records boss David Balfe allegedly invited his former bandmates and Liverpool cohorts to his celebrated ‘house in the country’. Not to celebrate old times but to show them a bank statement that proved he had £2m, before throwing them all off the premises.

Like the great love affairs, the greatest hatreds last forever.

Jim Wirth

Everybody Wants To Shag…

The title was originally intended for the band's debut, but attaching it to the long-unreleased third and final Teardrops album, an expansion of the four-track You Disappear From View EP, is as good a use as any. Cope trashed these sessions shortly after they were completed, but admitted years later that it wasn't all that bad. While this is a Balfe album more than anything else (he's credited with all the arrangements) with Cope on vocals, the rapidly collapsing band, augmented by a variety of other players, still manages to get in some good work. Cope certainly sounds like he's not entirely there at points; particularly on the lengthy opening number "Ouch Monkeys," where his voice is mixed in the background while Balfe's lounge-styled lead keyboards play against spectral choir sounds and echoed drums. Much of the percussion is a combination of Dwyer's suddenly arena-scaled pounding and rhythm box pulses, which combined with the lack of guitars on all but two songs often transforms the Teardrops into something approaching New Romantic synth rock! "You Disappear From View" sounds like a reject from Spandau Ballet's early days. Often cuts sound like demos for fuller arrangements, which turned out to be the case for two of the songs, "Metranil Vavin" and "Sex (Pussyface)," which Cope recut on his solo debut World Shut Your Mouth. When Cope is fully engaged in the material, like on the charging "Count to Ten and Run For Cover," or the gently mysterious flow of "Soft Enough For You," it's a gentle revelation. A ringer concludes things; "Strange House in the Snow," an off-kilter, wigged out 1980-era cut with Gill on guitar.

Kilimanjaro

Armed with trumpeters Ray Martinez and Hurricane Smith who add soaring flourishes and energetic blasts throughout Kilimanjaro, the Teardrops explode in a torrent of creative, kicky and often downright fun songs that hotwire garage/psych inspirations into something more. Julian Cope is already a commanding singer and front man; his clever lyrics and strong projection result in a series of confident performances, whether he is trading lines with himself on the motorbike chug of "Sleeping Gas" or his yelps on "Books." For all the bad energy between himself and David Balfe, the two sound like they're grafted at the hip throughout; the latter's keyboard washes and staccato melodies adding the fun, nervy vibe. Gary Dwyer's spot-on drumming keeps the pace, while both guitarists, Mick Finkler and his replacement Alan Gill, don't drown the band in feedback to the exclusion of everything else. One listen too many of Gill's pieces, on songs like "Poppies," and Cope's oft-stated claim that early U2 was trying to rip off the Teardrops and other Liverpool/Manchester groups makes sense. Though it was assembled from a variety of different sessions Kilimanjaro still sounds cohesive. Perfectly hummable choruses, great arrangements and production and Cope's smiling vibe all add up with fantastic results. 

The 30th anniversary reissue of the Teardrop Explodes' Kilimanjaro recently spurred one heritage-rock magazine to ask the band's former front man Julian Cope if he would ever return to writing pop music. It seems a fair enough query given Kilimanjaro's success: it spawned a top 10 hit in Reward, spent 35 weeks on the charts and displayed such commercial promise that both U2 and Duran Duran apparently considered the Teardrop Explodes their only real competition. Cope told the magazine, he'd just written a pop song, inspired by the mid-60s baroque style of the Left Banke, a band not so wildly removed from the kind of influences that powered Kilimanjaro – the blasting brass arrangements of Forever Changes-era Love, the Seeds' reedy garage rock, the sunshine pop of the Turtles. "It's called," he added, "The Cunts Can Fuck Off."

It's hard to reconcile the Julian Cope of today with the 22-year-old you hear on this 3CD deluxe reissue of the first album he made. There's something very  fresh-faced about the music on Kilimanjaro, which replaced the murky, shaky, spindly sound of the Teardrops' early indie singles – collected on CD2 – with a sound that tapped into 60s psych's sunny optimism, rather than its creeping disquiet. Equally, though, there's something rather gimlet-eyed about it. Indeed, the Teardrop Explodes had a weird tendency to combine the wide eyes and the will to power in the same song. "Bless my cotton socks, I'm in the news!" opened Reward, while the faux-naif title and jaunty tune of Brave Boys Keep Their Promises cloaks a load of surprisingly Duncan Bannatyneish stuff about fighting your way to the top.

Five of Kilimanjaro’s 11 songs were released as singles in one form or another, and listening to Treason or Bouncing Babies, you can see why Duran Duran got the fear. The tunes are uniformly fantastic (fantastic enough to overwhelm the production, even when it tends to early-80s chart-bothering smoothness), the words intriguing: long before he actually did create his own unique universe of megaliths, Odinism and krautrock, Cope was cramming his lyrics with enough off-kilter references to suggest he already had. And the sense of swaggering confidence never abates. It sounds like that most beguiling of things: a band at the top of their game. It sounds like a band that could have had it all. As it turned out, that was the last thing their front man wanted.