Album Review: Julian Cope, "Saint Julian"

For a few brief moments around the "Turn of the Eighties," THE TEARDROP EXPLODES seemed like an interesting and promising band. Cool name anyway.

But, let's face it, the competition was pretty stiff, so no surprise that they faded, leaving a vague feeling of unfulfilled promise that lingered longer than it should have. This fed into the myth that Cope was some “underrated” and unjustly forgotten genius of the 1980s. A typical comment from a typical music forum:

“I agree that Cope is underrated although he does follow a wilfully singular path and has never really courted any kind of mainstream success.”

Yes, you over-commercialised bastards, it’s your fault his light has remained under a fucking bushel!

This feeling even cost me a few pounds many years later when I shelled out on what was supposed to be the strongest solo album of Teardrops front man JULIAN COPE "according to the experts." Sadly, Saint Julian, which came out in 1987, proved that Cope -- and thus the Teardrops -- had always been somewhat overrated rather than underrated.

The album also sold itself on Cope's trademark arrogance, something that bands like OASIS later mimicked with much greater justification. Surely something this cocky must have something to it, the thought whispered. But an objective listen proves quite the opposite. Brash, yes, but largely sterile and unimaginative.

The leaden drumming (by Chris Whitten who also nearly fucked up the WATERBOYS hit Whole of the Moon), the hamfisted production (by Warne Livesey who ruined MIDNIGHT OIL's career), and Cope's caterwauling singing style quickly squish any musical ideas that seem promising.

The much-lauded World Shut Your Mouth is a typically dull and unpleasant listen.

Perhaps the track that lives best with the deficiencies of the musicians is Pulsar but this "peak" hardly reaches the nadir of millions of other albums.

Julian, shut your mouth! OK, I'll allow you one track, then you have to fuck off!

Colin Liddell
Revenge of Riff Raff
30th June, 2019

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!