So much of what is deemed is great just grates. At least to my ears. I have always had a taste eccentric to the vox populi, preferring and tending to seek out the less well served by collective opinion. I guess as in the same way my favourite dog breed is under. Luckily, courtesy this mouthpiece, my clarion call to the masses, this allows me free rein to inveigle my audience, that's me and my sockpuppets btw, into submission.
The Greatness and Perfection of Love
I bloody loved this album when it came out, World Shut Your Mouth, the first record by Julian Cope after the demise of The Teardrop Explodes. Always prone to overtly english vocals: Syd Barrett, Kevin Ayers, Ray Davies, Cope was another who rejected the standard transatlantic twang most UK singers have always tended to adopt, knowing, I guess, the bigger market. Mind you, I had always been pretty keen on the Teardrops, especially the standout single, below.
Reward
Cope was never going to be conventional. Coming from Tamworth, a desultory town slightly north of Birmingham, it was never going to be his provider, that taking a move to Merseyside where his accent would always have been a sore thumb amongst those around him. And perhaps why and how a young Courtney Love took such a shine to him? When the record came out, in 1984, I really thought he would be a big star. Hell, he was even on Top of the Pops with the title track, confusingly not included on the album, it coming out two years later, sporting his own design microphone stand.
World Shut Your Mouth
In the years since he has built a name for eccentricity, inconsistency and a weird sort of reliability to avoid entirely any kind of pigeon holing, with this not the place to celebrate his increasingly bizarre stylistic ricochets. Well, not entirely and not now. But, should his musical meanderings not prove easy enough on your ear, consider the fact that he is a celebrated author on subjects as unrelated as (am I still allowed to call it, even if he does?) krautrock and ancient monuments.
Elegant Chaos
Lunatic and Fire Pistol
Back to the o.p. and why it is so great. One reason is always within the lyrics; is he really singing "the greatness and perfection of love"? Sounds mighty like the "greatest imperfection" to me, so much so I am not going to check, preferring the incongruity. But it isn't by any stretch the only good track on the album, I being drawn also to the oboe led majesties of Elegant Chaos and Lunatic and Fire Pistol, peculiar whimsies of uncertain provenance. This pair stand out, along with Head Hang Low, at full arms length from the poppier, Teardroppier other songs, betraying his then state of mind.
Head Hang Low
Fast forward and Cope is still around, with somewhere around 20 albums under his own name, more if you include ones his many and varied labels have suppressed or rejected, often sneaking out years later under some arcane imprint. Some are good, very very good, some frankly unlistenable, but always interesting and seldom classifiable alongside his peers. Somehow I think I need to return to his muse another day.
Of course there is nonsense and nonsense. It can vary from, at one extreme, merely that with which you disagree, through entertaining whimsy before finally arriving, quivering and juddering, at the howling at the moon of full blown madness. It is just over fifty years since Roger "Syd" Barrett, onetime face and voice of the then The Pink Floyd, released his first solo record, having been ejected from the band. Having enriched the band with his Edward Lear-like eccentricities of lyrical source material, knicker nickers and the like, this release now gave agonising insight into the perilous state of his psyche.
The reports weren't good. Attendees at his later performances with Pink Floyd would speak of no shows and, worse, shows where he may have been there, but was clearly somewhere miles away at the same time. Drugs, mainly the psychedelics, LSD predominantly, deemed the culprit, either by a de novo tripping of the switch or by bringing earlier to the surface that which lay anyway beneath. I don't suppose we will ever really know, but my view, professional opinion, if you like, as a practising medic, is the latter.
Terrapin/The Madcap Laughs (1969)
I remember well my first exposure to The Madcap Laughs, as the record was entitled. The cover alone was disarming enough, certainly to a 13 year old boy, just beginning a lifelong exploration of music in all its varied hues. In truth, it had been out for a couple of years, so I would have been 15, tipped in that direction by, first, the cheapo Pink Floyd compilation, Nuggets, on the Music for Pleasure label (which also put out similar curiosities by other acts as disparate as the Beach Boys, the Monkees and Donovan), and later by full price immersions in Atom Heart Mother and Meddle. A chum of mine, with preternaturally deep pockets, seemed to able to buy up anything that much cooler and on the fringes than the rest of us. We has also learnt there was a record player in the school music building, and how to get in to it out of hours. He had bought Madcap and the strange Roger Waters/Ron Geesin soundtrack of Music From The Body. The poop song apart on the latter, we agreed it held little appeal. But Madcap was deeply disturbing. None of the songs seemed complete; there seemed often a mismatch between the vocals and the backing, sometimes just with a rambling talking voice taking exit of any earlier structure mid song. And the lyrics? What was this? More a random placement of words than any storyline, words jumbling together based on their sound or upon whatsoever garbled thought processs could conjure up on the hoof, live in the studio. I later, during my psych training, learnt that this freeform word (dis)association, Knight's Move Thinking, can be a symptom of schizophrenia. OK, there were a couple of clearer and more orthodox songs, clamoured towards the end of the second side, dripping with the sense of a necessary medication having taken place. And with some relief, given at an earlier stage, in a segue of live studio tape seemingly just running, you can hear the anguish of a brain frying in real time. Shocking, heady stuff, and deeply disturbing, if likewise compelling. Of course I had to have a copy.
If It's In You/The Madcap Laughs (1969)
Dark Globe/The Madcap Laughs (1969)
"Oh where are you now pussy willow that smiled on this leaf? When I was alone you promised the stone from your heart my head kissed the ground I was half the way down, treading the sand please, please, lift a hand I'm only a person whose armbands beat on his hands, hang tall won't you miss me? Wouldn't you miss me at all?
The poppy birds way swing twigs coffee brands around brandish her wand with a feathery tongue my head kissed the ground I was half the way down, treading the sand please, please, please lift the hand I'm only a person with Eskimo chain I tattooed my brain all the way... Won't you miss me? Wouldn't you miss me at all?"
I later bought his second LP, the less dramatically presented and titled Barrett. A gentler affair, with structure more firmly moulded upon the songs, even if as a later thought and at a latter time. His old buddy and his band replacement, David Gilmour here responsible for gilding the lily and gelding the mania. Some good songs and a smoother ride, that would later be brought back to mind by the closing scenes of the film version of Ken Kesey's book, One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, the sadness of seeing the madness constrained and controlled.
Love Song (Barrett, 1970)
Neither the time or place to reiterate all the later trajectories, all well documented and widely elsewhere. A journey of little sense from nonsense to no sense at all. A tragedy and a majesty combined. The old adage is that genius needs a touch of madness. I don't know about that, and certainly Syd didn't need it, nobody should or would choose psychosis. But we got to get the outcome, and for that I will always be grateful to that legacy being granted us.
And so I move, seamlessly, from one Soft Machine alumnus to another, from Robert Wyatt to Kevin Ayers, together the rhythm section in the original line-up. Kevin is no longer with us, my buddy J.David penning some words at the time of his demise, but he is a fella that gave me great teenaged pleasure, with his uber-cool image, his prog credentials, so important to me at that time, but mainly, through his gloriously quirky and quixotic songs, often exhilaratingly bonkers, as indeed is this. Duck call percussion?
I came to Ayers a little behind the loop, via the teenage prodigy he had earlier hired on bass for his band, The Whole Wide World, one Mike Oldfield. Soft Machine were too clever and a bit old for me, but Tubular Bells was a sensation for me, upon its 1973 release, introducing me to any number of connections, as I perused the back story and looked at the names of his address book, mustered together for the live performances. Whilst I don't think Ayers was involved in the latter, I was particularly taken with his peculiarly english style of singing, espousing the usual transatlantic twang, then and now still so prevalent. It reminded me of another very english vocalist, early Pink Floyd focal piece and front man, Syd Barrett, exemplarised in this later solo track.
What I didn't know was that 'O Wot a Dream' was actually about Barrett, and that, after Barrett's lysergic exit from Pink Floyd, the two actually performed together on the above clip, 'Singing a Song in the Morning (Religious Experience)', the compelling guitar calisthenic being performed by Barrett, I have to say somewhat against the myth around his having entirely lost it. Still, the record company still saw fit to cut the end coda from the original cut, it taking until a re-release for it to see light of day. In this brief interview, a looking seriously out of it Ayers mentions the relationship at the very end of the clip, about 5.25.
As arguably an ill-fitting tribute to both, here is a poor quality recording of a less than 100% Ayers performing 'O Wot a Dream' at a 2007 Syd Barrett memorial concert. I think I probably prefer the duck call on the studio version to the jaw's harp. Finally, in case any might wonder, why the spelling, wy the wot, if you will? Personally I think this just adds to the overall anglocentricism of the song, but, who knows, maybe it was to avoid any confusion with this.
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