Head On/Repossessed Book

It's a long time since Julian Cope had his 15 minutes of mainstream fame, fronting the Teardrop Explodes with their brassy, extravagant masterpiece Reward. But over the last two decades he has maintained an impressive cult following, largely due to his mesmerising live performances--and more to the point, maintained an undiminished sense of his own importance, which has led to two, bulky volumes of his autobiography. Head-On: Memoires of the Liverpool Punk Scene and the story of the Teardrop Explodes (1976-82) was published, acclaimed and lost to posterity in 1994; now thankfully it's been republished, back-to-back (literally--this is a book you can finish, turn upside down, and start again) with a sequel: Repossessed: Shamanic Depressions in Tamworth & London (1983-89), which leads us through his 1980s solo career. As the grandiose subtitles indicate, Cope writes on an epic scale, but his terms of reference are unapologetically personal. Much of Repossessed deals, bizarrely, with Pete De Freitas (the Bunnymen's drummer) weaving his way across America, not chemically unaided--a story which is relayed via transatlantic phone to Cope ensconced in Tamworth, like some postmodern, virtual Kerouac. Non-Cope devotees might find some of this rather allusive, not to say elusive, but there's no doubting the man's power with the pen, and soon enough you'll be there in the front row, throwing your knickers onstage. Or the literary equivalent. --Alan StewartRead More