Julian Cope
Friar Truck

The sweet sojourn of a light just born and already dying.

Like a timid and newborn caterpillar, already trapped in the webs of a spider.

Among shrubs and ancient oaks, among eyes that have watched over fleeting scores of that Eternity.

The deep and timeless flow of Life.

In the silence, the beating and the trampling of the brambles of that emerald green forest. Wandering among the paths of that Wood, for there as in the Heavens, there are answers.

All this and much much more of the arcane in the magical and minimal sound of Friar Truck, the latest page of Saint Julian Cope. Or explained in the alchemist mode of the Archdruid «The music of a parallel universe suspended in time and played on a very old radio». Indeed, our storyteller wishes to remind us humans, with his essence scattered multi-laterally among the rocks of the ancient county of Nottinghamshire, among the imposing millennia-old cromlech at Stonehenge, among the forgotten cults of pre-Nuragic religiosity, among the spatial glows of the Carousel Lens, to still be among us, despite everything.

12 essential gems retracing back the Genesis, the youthful turmoils with Ian McCulloch, the early post-punk splendors with the Teardrop Explodes, the unripe Kate St John on oboe and English horn and Skinner on guitar, that nonchalant shake of sixty folk with garage rock. That irresistible and whimsical songwriting with psychedelic and Kraut matrices, that sweet snap of the fingers that transforms the Toad into the Prince of Major Pop Rock, that world that only needs to shut its mouth and stick its head in the clouds. The brilliant hallucinations of Droolian and Skellington, Julian like a toXic Barbie capable of perfectly calibrating mental derailments and pop dynamics. The impatience towards the ancien and the nouveau regime, that of Thatcher and that of the Majors. And from here the more experimental Cope, the dark and avenging angel; one who steps out of the furrow, out of the furrow where seeds are planted to germinate. Outside that furrow, only unpredictability can germinate, which is the Floored Genius. Madness. The art that is so extreme it is no longer such, because it is now a house that encloses suffering, without doors and windows. The art condemned to deny itself, tending towards silence or the final epilogue.

And from that silence, the renewed canticle in 12 new essential gems, re-establishing a bridge with our storyteller's old creative concept with the opener folk ballad Too Freud to Rock n' Roll, Too Jung to Die (an old title of an LP by his band Brain Donor from 2003), a revisiting of the classic riff typical of Interpreter of The Dogshow Must Go On.

It is indeed true Saint Julian.

We who pain has made travel in our soul in search of a place of calm to lean on, in search of stability in evil as others in good, we are not mad, we are wonderful doctors.