Julian Cope
Drunken Songs

Year 2017 of the Age of Donald Trump. Welcome.

Today we talk about the latest album by Julian Cope, 'Drunken Songs', released via Head Heritage and containing - as the author himself pointed out - six drinks that will warm your soul during sunless days; six tales of drunkenness, which will be told to you while the druid performs in your imagination moving between the tables of an ancient tavern of the old British Isles.

The album, presented as a breath of fresh air in these difficult times and with a clear reference to Donnie's election as the new President of the USA, is conceptually built on a song written by Julian Cope for his own funeral, ‘As The Beer Flows Over Me’, a song already present in the 2012 double album 'Psychedelic Revolution' and which celebrates Northern European culture and invites listeners to spread beer instead of grapes in southern lands. Then we have 'Liver Big As Hartlepool', a homage by Cope to his adopted city and a sort of wordplay referring to liver cirrhosis and finally a response to the song by one of his old travel companions, Pete Wylie, titled 'Heart As Big As Liverpool'. The 19-minute epic of 'On The Road To Tralee' which - literally - 'concludes the album with 20 miles of drunken memories, picturesque observations, and rustic incidents.'

Essentially divided into two parts, the first containing five songs ('Drink Me Under The Table', 'Liver Big As Hartlepool', 'As The Beer Flows Over Me', 'Clonakility As Changed', 'Don't Drink And Drive (You Might Spill Some)') and the second entirely dedicated to the very long 'On The Road To Tralee', 'Drunken Songs' was released by Julian Cope (who on this occasion plays all instruments and is also the producer) last February.

As described according to those same tracks that Julian Cope wanted to provide us, the album can be considered as a kind of homage to 'beer', evidently recognized as a peculiar and fundamental element of that Northern culture to which he, as an arch-druid, can only be devoted as well as a profound connoisseur from the heights of his historical and archaeological knowledge.

Visionary and at the same time ironic, musically close to some of the works released by Cope over this decade, like the aforementioned 'Psychedelic Revolution' from 2012 and 'Revolutionary Suicide' from 2013, 'Drunken Songs' is a collection of psychedelic and hallucinatory folk ballads that seem to come directly from a distant time wrapped in the ancestral mists of Her Majesty's islands.

Of the two previously mentioned albums, which instead dealt with more elevated themes, 'Revolutionary Suicide' opened with a true hymn dedicated to Odin ('Hymn To Odin'), and were characterized by the length of the individual songs as much as the overall works (we are talking in both cases of a double LP), this album here seems almost to be a kind of appendix. As if our favorite archeology professor wanted to take a break between lessons and invite us with him to the pub for a beer, rightly taking the opportunity to impart some lessons on Northern culture and sing timeless old folk ballads with us.

Musician and literary author and poet, gigantic literary critic and main responsible for the rediscovery of kraut music, but also of the Japanese rock scene of the fifties-sixties, expert in antiques and archeology, aficionado of ancient and prehistoric art but clearly especially of Nordic and pagan culture. Devoted to the God Odin, keeper of the secrets of the runes, Julian Cope stole poetry from the giants, masters magic, and moves along the roads like a pilgrim, disguising his appearance and true nature.

Every now and then he evidently stops somewhere to drink, before resuming his journey.