The Cope Smokes Dope?: Withered Hand get weirdest review yet
Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 08:04PM 
Clearly I have gone wrong with my writing style. From now on I will be including a bizarre mixture of praise and personal abuse in each review. Or maybe you have to be arch-drude/nutjob Julian Cope to get away with that kind of thing.
This review of Withered Hand by Cope is probably the strangest thing I have read for a while, in which the Cope calls him a "wimp singer" and says he needs a good slapping, yet appears to rather like him at the same time, saying he is both "heroic" and "a catchy bastard". Read it yourself here (he also reviews WH's mates Paul Vickers and The Leg)
p.s. I will be doing an update on my 100 Days efforts to 'get my shit together' at the weekend.
Update: Following on from Digital Plamf's comment below, here's a song from the Bill Drummond album Cope refers to:
Bill Drummond - Julian Cope is Dead
Reader Comments (2)
Very interesting review. Cope mentions Bill Drummond's LP "The Man" - it was released on Creation nearly 20 years ago, [superfluous fact: I sold my copy last year for (drum roll please) a tenner] - and it wasn't, as Copey puts it, "unfeasibly scotch". I ken the difference between rolled Rs and a Julie Fowlis record (hee hee).
What it was, however, was gloriously eccentric. It had a track on it called "Julian Cope Is Dead" which was based around a scenario whereby Drummond kills Cope in order to gain monolithic legend status for The Teardrop Explodes. The song is very un-KLF. It's a folk number, which starts off with the couplet: "Julian Cope is dead, I shot him in the head". Big of Copey to have the humility to make reference to it imho. I don't know if they're still friends, but I do remember Cope being asked what he thought of the KLF burning a million quid. Cope said "He owed me about half of it".
The Jon Anderson comparison with Withered hand - amusing, but off-beam. Anderson's vox were always sub-operatic, boy soprano stylee. Whereas WH's high register is much more naturalistic, an Anglo-Scots distant relation of Mark Kozelek. or something like that.
Enough from me.
C ya.
DP
Dammit, I hate it when this blog's readers are vastly more knowledgeable than me ;) I've updated the post with the track you mention - needless to say Drummond's KLF were a major influence on Swivel Chair!