1976–77: Early bands In July 1977, Cope was one of the founders of Crucial Three, a Liverpool punk rock band in which he played bass guitar. Although the Crucial Three lasted for little more than six weeks and disbanded without ever playing in public, all three members eventually went on to lead successful Liverpool post-punk bands—singer
Ian McCulloch with
Echo & the Bunnymen and guitarist
Pete Wylie with the Mighty Wah! Post-Crucial Three, Cope, and McCulloch initially went on to form other short-lived bands UH? and A Shallow Madness (Cope had also spent time with Wylie in another short-lived band, Nova Mob). When Cope sacked McCulloch from A Shallow Madness, McCulloch went on to form Echo and the Bunnymen.
1978–1983: The Teardrop Explodes In 1978, Cope formed
the Teardrop Explodes The album includes a song called "
Bill Drummond Said" about Cope's
A&R man at
WEA, to which future KLF star Drummond responded with a song titled "
Julian Cope Is Dead", pondering how much more famous Cope might have been had he been shot at the height of his fame. The commercial failure Skinner, Rooster Cosby,
Ron Fair and former
Smiths drummer
Mike Joyce all contributed to the record, as did a new sidekick in the shape of future
Spiritualized lead guitarist Michael Watts (better known as Mike Mooney or "Moon-eye"). Although the album produced another well-received single ("Beautiful Love") In 1992, Cope released another double album.
Jehovahkill, on Island Records. Musically, the album reflected his interest in
Krautrock (though in a more electro-acoustic based form) and his teenage fascination for Detroit hard rock. (A deluxe edition, with a disc of extra material, was released fourteen years later in 2006). Lyrically, the album was fiercely anti-Christian, with such songs as "Poet is Priest", "Julian H. Cope", and the single "Fear Loves This Place" espousing Cope's Paganesque perspective and being highly critical of the established Church. During this period, Cope began his work as a writer, completing the first volume of his autobiography and beginning to research works on Krautrock and Neolithic architecture. Cope had also parted company with his long-term foil Donald Ross Skinner during the recording of
20 Mothers, although the parting was relatively amicable. Having been dropped by Echo when he refused to visit the US, Cope then signed to
Cooking Vinyl and delivered the
Interpreter album in 1996. This continued in a similar but more disciplined vein to its predecessor, with stronger elements of techno and humour (as exemplified in songs like "Cheap New Age Fix") among the more serious topics, such as those inspired by Cope's attendance at the Newbury Bypass protests. {{Quote box The first Head Heritage release was 1997's
Rite 2, Cope's follow up to 1993's
Rite (with Thighpaulsandra taking over from Donald Ross Skinner as creative foil). It was followed in the same year by the second Queen Elizabeth album,
QE2: Elizabeth Vagina, which expanded on its predecessor's cosmic rock experiments. Thighpaulsandra would then follow Michael Mooney into Spiritualized (as would Cope's string arranger Martin Shellard), once more depriving Cope of a key collaborator. In 2000, Cope released another solo album –
An Audience with the Cope. While appearing to be pitched as a retrospective live recording, it consisted of a series of newly written psychedelic studio jams. Since 1998, Cope had developed a parallel reputation as a serious
antiquarian. This resulted in his 2001 album
Discover Odin being a limited-edition tie-in with a talk he had given at the British Museum, featuring a mixture of spoken-word tracks exploring Nordic mythology and various musical tracks including a Cope setting of the epic Norse poem "
Hávamál". In the same year Head Heritage released the first two Brain Donor singles, "She Saw Me Coming" and "Get Off Your Pretty Face", followed by the début Brain Donor album
Love Peace & Fuck. Cope, Doggen and a returning Thighpaulsandra also teamed up as the drummer-less psychedelic/meditational heavy metal group L.A.M.F. who released the
Ambient Metal album the same year. Brain Donor's "Get Back on It" single followed in 2002, as did the third album in Cope's
Rite series,
Rite Now. In 2003, Cope performed at the
Glastonbury Festival as well as launching his own three-day ''
Rome Wasn't Burned in a Day event. A tie-in album, also called Rome Wasn't Burned in a Day
, was released to mark the event and included an "eight-minute long Armenian epic" called "Shrine of the Black Youth (Tukh Manukh)". The album was recorded by a trio of Cope, synth player Christopher Patrick "Holy" McGrail and Donald Ross Skinner (returning to work with Cope after seven years). The year also saw more Brain Donor activity via the "My Pagan Ass" single and the album Too Freud To Rock'n'Roll, Too Jung To Die'' and an appearance on
Sunn O)))'s collaborative album
White1 with Cope reciting occultic druid poetry on the opening track, "My Wall". Cope released two more albums in 2005. The first of these was the long-delayed ''
Citizen Cain'd, an album which Cope had promised for several years and now delivered as a short double album (71 minutes over two discs) sold at a single album price. (According to Cope, the two-disc format was due to some of the songs being "too psychologically exhausting" to fit together onto a single album). The second album, Dark Orgasm'' was a forthright hard-rock exercise which Cope described as "a violent sequence of outcast broadsides leveled at the coming new 21st-century conservatism." Meanwhile, Brain Donor (proving to be an enduring Cope project) was presented to America via a self-titled compilation album. Plans to tour the United States were dropped because the
INS refused to grant Cope a visa. 2006 saw the release of the third proper Brain Donor album (''Drain'd Boner
) and the fourth album in the Rite
series (Rite Bastard'').
2007–present: Black Sheep and beyond Cope's 2007 album,
You Gotta Problem With Me, was something of a return to his early solo material: more post-punk styled, and featuring swathes of
Mellotron and orchestral percussion. Conceptually, it continued his attacks on religion, bigotry, corporate greed and environmental destruction. As with ''
Citizen Cain'd'', Cope divided the fifty-six minutes of material across two CDs and also included lavish packaging including printed poems.
You Gotta Problem With Me was followed by 2008's
Black Sheep, which Cope described as "a musical exploration of what it is to be an outsider in modern Western Culture" and which featured his most outrightly anarchic pronouncements to date. Dominated by Mellotron, hand drums and acoustic guitars, the album also featured Doggen and McGrail plus new recruits Michael O'Sullivan and Ady "Acoustika" Fletcher. In November 2008, Cope released the
Preaching Revolution EP, mingling acoustic protest songs with rockabilly pieces: along with material from the unreleased
Diggers, Ranters, Levellers EP, these songs would be reissued on Cope's limited-edition Cope solo album,
The Unruly Imagination. Cope, McGrail, O'Sullivan, and Acoustika went on to form a new ten-piece Cope side project (also called Black Sheep) which included new cohorts such as drummer
Antony "Antronhy" Hodgkinson, "Fat Paul" Horlick and former Universal Panzies leader Christophe F. To date, Black Sheep has generated two further albums, both released in 2009 –
Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse and
Black Sheep at the BBC. 2009 also saw the release of a fourth Brain Donor album (
Wasted Fuzz Excessive) and a live Queen Elizabeth album
Hall, recorded in 2000. ==Writing==