Julian Cope @ Gorilla, Manchester, 10 Feb
Taking to Gorilla’s stage – itself formed from rags and patches of what look like safety deposit boxes – like the sole survivor of a nuclear war (military hat, leather waistcoat, combat cut-offs), Julian Cope at 60 remains a force to be reckoned with. The audience, squashed squeezebox style into a less than capacious space, treat him like an old friend; they want to find out what he thinks about Trump and May and the state of the world – and, of course, Copey is happy to oblige. “I promised I’d talk less tonight,” he says about 20 minutes in, “so I could play more of the hits. Or the not-hits. The not-quite-misses.”
He’s relaxed, though. We get new cuts from his latest opus Drunken Songs, like As the Beer Flows Over Me: a song he wrote because he couldn’t find any songs that were good enough to be played at his funeral (“Not that I’m going to die any time soon, ladies and gentlemen”). We get dyed-in-the-wool classics like Grand Dominion and The Culture Bunker, from The Teardrop Explodes’ Wilder. And we get vintage Copey in the shape of Autogeddon Blues, which opens the show after a rant about smart motorways (“what the fuck is a smart motorway?”), Fear Loves This Place and They Were On Hard Drugs, the latter from 2013's Revolutionary Suicide and inspired by his research for the book, The Modern Antiquarian.
You come away from a Copey gig feeling blessed by the liveliness of his engagement with the world and bathed in the Moog-like drone of his mind (and the Moog-like drone of his Moog); glad that he isn’t Mark E Smith and understands that, you know, sometimes people just want to hear the old favourites – and that’s alright. Just so long as it’s accompanied by high-spirited rants about Bob Geldof (accused of calling a field of fans tramps – “I mean, for fuck’s sake!”), ephedrine (discovered in a field near where the stones that made Stonehenge were taken) and, yes, okay, Donald Trump (“Does he know that his surname is what we call hot air passing over shit in this country?”). Legendary.