Julian Cope – Tamworth demos (1982-83) (Part 1)

After the split of the Teardrop Explodes, Julian Cope retired to Tamworth. This is his recollection of that period:

‘I hadn't written anything that people had actually liked since `You Disappear from the view' almost a year earlier. In later Teardrop sessions, I'd play a song and it would be listened to and then dismissed. I kept playing the songs on acoustic guitar, but Balfe's comments still rang in my years. I had played him a song called 'Bandy's First Jump' for the third album, but he'd hated it. By that time, he seemed to hate anything with guitars in it.

‘With Dorian away, I was forced to keep busy. I couldn't drive a car so I was stuck. Stuck in this house with songs that no-one likes. I recorded them on to my ghetto blaster and listened back. I played electric guitar along with the songs and they sounded good. I should do something, really, I reasoned. But I was in Tamworth and this was nowhere. For a few days, I was frustrated, but the mood wouldn't go away.

‘I didn't know how to book a studio; that had always been done for me. But I had to record. It was the first time in ages that I'd felt that way. My mother told me about a teacher she knew. He had a studio. I thought it was probably a crap studio. A teacher? I'll ring him in a day or so. I sat in the Mill Lane house with my Dinky Toys book and some pot. Dorian was in New York and I knew I had to make the phone call.

‘What a snob I was! I went to the studio and it was brilliant. I was sooo surprised. The guy who ran it was called Steve Adams, a junior school teacher and ex-weirdo. The local taxi took me to this tiny cottage in Birchmoor, a village on the other side of Tamworth, near to Glascote Heath where I'd grown up. Birchmoor was a heath of great desolation and remove. As a child, my father had taken me on walks there, but I had always seen it as being "Beyond" my area. It was untamed and heathen, and the tiny houses squatted upon the moor.

‘[…] Steve Adams expected me to be big time and know about VU and all that studio stuff. I faked it for a while to make him feel better, but soon we were recording really fast and easily. I wasn't bothered about the sound. I put the drum-machine of my Casio into the Vex AC30 amplifier and played the song on acoustic guitar over its dry thumping. The song was a beautiful major-chord thing called `Strasbourg' whose current arrangement was only one minute and 40 seconds long but featured a repeated Glam Descend link of considerable charm. Listening back to the empty song, I considered what Troy Tate might have contributed and set up the amp in a way that made me feel Troy-like as I recorded. I added a tight fuzz theme and distorted early Teardrop-type keyboard, then tightened the whole track up with tambourine. Ey-up, I was a bloody one-man-band. Balfe had made me terrified to pick up a guitar or bass anymore. Now look! And listen to this stuff ... it's a moving fucking thing.

‘I was ecstatic. This was the sound I had wanted for the third Teardrop album, instead of those dumb programmed synthesizers. Synths should fart and squeak, but Balfe had kept his on Rhythm/Dribble. Fuck that!

‘I made a list of all my songs, things that I'd been scared to try. I'll try them! I can play! I can play! When Dorian rang me, I played `Strasbourg' down the phone for her and she loved it. She loved it. I'm alive! I was dancing round the room. I played it to her again and a third time and danced all the time she listened.
In my sudden realisation that I could still be capable, we seemed suddenly so much closer and so much stronger that the most powerful lyric of the new song pulverised me with its truth:

"If I were France, and you were Germany, What an alliance that would be."

‘[…] I continued to record at Steve Adams' studio. I suggested he change its name to The Drug Attic, but he politely declined. The songs were coming thick and fast by now. I had hit upon a formula - just put everything on to tape that you can. I never gave Steve much time to sort out sounds; it would go down before we had a chance to get bored with it.
I had handpainted the little Casio keyboard that Balfe sold me. Dorian and Joss [Julian’s brother] painted little scenes all over it, and it had become the basis for all my songs.’

(Julian Cope, Repossessed, 9-13)

Among the songs recorded in Tamworth there were:
- Strasbourg
- Death Mask (Quizmaster)
- Head Hang Low
- Blaze Star
- Holy Love
- Bill Drummond Said
- Mik Mak Mok
- The Bloody Assizes

Strasbourg, Quizmaster, Head Hang Low would figure on Julian Cope’s first solo effort ‘World Shut Your Mouth’ (1984). Bill Drummond Said, Holy Love, The Bloody Assizes featured on Cope’s second album ‘Fried’ (1984). Mik, Mak, Mok would be the b-side on the Sunspots EP (1985).

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