Julian Cope
The Unruly Imagination

I love it. Even more than Polly, which is saying something.

Away from the stolid truzzo/parade of depressing serial defecators, and I’m thinking of all those guys who always do the same little thing, Julian shines like a brilliant star.

Like if I'm depressed, I just need to look at a photo of him, one of those showing him all scruffy in those fabulous star biker outfits.

I look at it and immediately feel the energy flowing. My eyes change, my posture changes. And, if I go out right afterwards, the girls smile at me: the cute ones, the pretty ones, and even those so stunning it’s absurd.

For he calls me to him and reminds me not so much of the vision, but rather how important it is to have one. Which could also mean (and why not?) that perhaps we’d prefer not to have it. In the sense that not having a vision is perhaps the only possible vision.

But most importantly, I know he knows. And he knows the only thing that matters, namely that rock'n'roll holds everything together. To the point that, just to give an example, civil poetry and cosmic poetry go hand in hand with him.

Well, in fact extremely well. Because, except for very bright exceptions, the civil beast and the cosmic beast have always been at odds.

…

"The Unruly Imagination"

And where did this stuff come from? I swear I didn’t know anything about it. And to say that I’m a Coppiano/Coppista not to be underestimated.

So I did some research. And now I’ll tell you what I discovered.

Here we are in Julian's rarities, even in a limited edition.

And that is, in one of those detours that cataloguers archive under trifles or occasional project.

A minor record in short, an oddity that came by chance.

Only that, well, maybe it's an oddity, but minor my ass. Because beyond the holy craziness here there is also quite a bit of brains.

Among other things, our Julian is not alone, but with the Black Sheep, a magnificent company name and not only because it recalls the title of one of his masterpiece albums...

And anyway, come on, Giuliano presents the "black sheep" in "the unruly imagination" is something that alone is worth the ticket price.

Unruly imagination, my god!!!

If I listened to the hyper-enthusiastic jerk that I am, I’d start with one of my rants, but today I'm being good and I'll just say that those two words together can’t help but make an impact.

And I’ll also say that the occasion for this occasional project is an opportunity that has its reason. It would be a day/event (or event/day) dedicated, I quote verbatim, to democracy, protest, and freedom of speech.

Ah, I know, us very wary and very bored old folks, we usually stay well away from this stuff or we draw our guns.

But, if there’s someone who restores meaning to words that were once beautiful and today are discredited, and here I really think this is the case, well, maybe we should throw a party. Old or not old.

And then the album is beautiful, with many cope roads and many cope paths that come together into this new cope idea, which is a kind of vivid and unexpected combat folk, now turned kraut, now rock'n'roll.

...

It starts in cope ballad mode, so British voice, some whistling here and there, an inevitable psychic keyboard and patterns that break at the end…

It continues rock'n'roll with psych blasts, or psych with rock'n'roll blasts…

It follows with an epic cover of David Peel, and damn I should brush up on my cheat sheet, because I know very little about David Peel, but no matter the piece is a scream, the combat folk we talked about with that bit of incongruous Julian always puts in…

And then a tribute to Gang of Four in the form of a ballad.

And a trio of wonderful oddities; krauteries, freakeries, coveries, all terms to be read strictly in French. And an ending that…

An ending I won’t reveal. Because, even if the killer is clear from the start, and it's not the butler, the ending doesn't get revealed.

But you know what the laws of show business are, right? You must know how to start and you must know how to finish.

If then you can manage well in the middle too, and Julian obviously does manage well, the game is done.

Trallallà...