Julian Cope

By 1994, Julian Cope was the modern equivalent of the free-thinking British eccentrics of old -- a guitar-toting H.G. Wells with melodic gifts and a potty mouth. Cope's beliefs about the state of the world are firm, but what really matters is the songs -- and they're great. There is new tension between Cope's pop gifts, his desire to tell stories in song and his ever-increasing weirdness (be it from decades of drug use or a professorial study of ancient sites, religion and outsider art). There is more going on in one Cope song, like "Don't Call Me Mark Chapman," than on most albums.

"I shit on your reason/Your rose is my thorn," rails Brit eccentric and ecowarrior Julian
Cope on Autogeddon's title track. Third in the apocalypse trilogy that includes Peggy
Suicide and Jehovahkill, this chapter fuses techno-horror imagery (automobiles
spontaneously combusting) and whisper-to-a-scream musical dynamics in an attack on the
"greedhead" cabal that Cope blames for trashing the planet. Taking refuge in qua... More >