Julian Cope w/Comets on Fire, London Royal Festival Hall, 21st January 2005 (long)

[Colin J Allen]

A review that is almost Cope-esque in itself.  Doggen is indeed a truly
amazing guitarist, as well as being a truly lovely bloke.

Julian does indeed have a fine ear for a support act; Litmus supported at
all of the other dates on the tour.

Colin
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon Jarrett" <jjarrett at CHIARK.GREENEND.ORG.UK>
To: <BOC-L at LISTSERV.ISPNETINC.NET>
Sent: Friday, February 04, 2005 9:28 PM
Subject: OFF: Julian Cope w/Comets on Fire, London Royal Festival Hall, 21st
January 2005 (long)


>         Dear All,
>                   I'm guessing some of you might be interested in my
> review of this gig...
>
>         "This was a gig I went to on a whim, more or less. I've been
> meaning to acquire some kind of knowledge of Mr Cope's work for a while on
> the grounds that however unmemorable I've found the very little of his
> stuff I've heard except the comedy tracks he's an archaeologically-learned
> doom-endorsing Krautrock-enthusiast hippy guru figure whom it behoves me
> to be informed about, if only because I'd love to be that if I could get
> away with it. Comets on Fire" being a band whom Doug Pearson keeps
> "championing as the most exciting thing to happen in spacerock for
> years", I thought they probably ought to be seen too. "Obviously he's not
> seen Litmus but I digress. I had been in the Hobgoblin in Brighton the
> weekend before, and Comets were billed as playing there the next
> Tuesday. There was no way I could make that which was a damn shame as
> seeing a band as reportedly spectacular as this would have been pretty
> intense in such a small space. But they seemed to be on tour, so I looked
> this up on t'web and discovered this gig. The Royal Festival Hall's a damn
> good venue and I want them to keep on putting on mad hippies as long as
> possible, so Fate seemed to have struck.
>
>         "So I got along there on Friday, late as ever, and to my dismay
> discovered that a band was already playing even though I was only half an
> hour after doors. I got up to the balcony and was in time to catch the
> last number and a half of the first set. This, I presumed, was Comets on
> Fire, and I was bloody annoyed about not having got there on time as when
> I came in they were playing a fairly bouncy freak-out jam along the lines
> of a slightly tamer Acid Mothers Temple, with one floridly-dressed
> musician playing a double-necked thing of uncertain nature and a gloomy
> black-dressed space cowboy type fellow with what seemed to be a 12-string
> fronting. I gathered from an enthusiastically-dancing man next to me that
> I'd missed five or six songs already and the jam ended quite quickly too,
> whereupon everyone but the drummer changed instruments and a guest bass
> player joined the fray. The gloomy cowboy type now took up a flying-V and
> told us in a lugubrious, faintly Geordie voice, that this next piece was a
> song about mistaking an alien for the Grim Reaper. And it wandered on
> fairly peacefully for some minutes without being very impressive and then
> they went off.
>
>         "Thing is, as you may have guessed, this was actually Julian Cope,
> supporting his own support band, and I cheered up rather when I gathered
> that Comets on Fire were still to come. Sure enough, they took the stage
> and a long-haired Ivy League-student-looking type starting twiddling
> controls on a stack of boxes and producing some quite bowel-lurching
> noises out of what (I had gathered from the web) was an Echoplex. Further
> reading (and experience) reveals this to be little more than a delay pedal
> hooked up to a tone generator but he didn't let it stop at all, and within
> a minute or two the band's other instruments joined the increasing growl,
> twitter and hum and then BANG they were off.
>
>         "Comets on Fire were not really a band but more of an
> experience. You'd have to be a real expert to tell one of their `songs'
> from another, and while they did occasionally drop into tunes or chord
> sequences for parts of a number what they were mainly was intense and
> frantic noise. They had the total reckless energy of a truly incendiary
> punk band but were working in soundscapes rather than snappy songs, and
> even that makes it sound too coherent and deliberate. They weren't playing
> together to achieve an effect, they were all going off on one in the same
> direction with everything they had and though the bass-player and the
> second guitarist spent most of the first number plunging back and forth in
> headbanging unison it didn't seem to throw anything like a riff or a
> chord sequence as far as the audience. Everything was louder than
> everything else, and this meant that it was only by about the fourth
> number I was beginning to work out what was happening and how it
> worked. The two guitarists and the Echoplex boy could not really be called
> technically adept musicians, and they were just playing maximum blitz
> freak-out stuff rather than deliberately musical soloing, though the first
> one, who also occasionally screamed incomprehensible lyrics into the mic,
> did have a sense of how to do this that he sometimes brought into play.
> The other boy (and they did seem pretty young) was just all over the place
> and spent much of the penultimate number rolling round on the floor
> fighting with his guitar as if it was trying to attack him.
>
>         "What was actually happening, I eventually realised, was that the
> bass-player was leading. He was fabulous, with an excellent heavy
> rubberised-sounding noise and a constant flood of notes, and one of his
> amps was pointed back at the drummer who was really not playing rhythm, he
> was another lead player though a far better one than the guitarists. So
> they would all leap off on a piece (and they really could switch the
> maximum intensity on straight away, which was impressive), the bass-player
> would find its tune (for want of a better word) and stand there doing a
> creditable Jah Wobble impression with extra heaviness while everyone else

> fell to bits at maximum speed around him. There were as I say occasional
> tunes and lyrics, but this clearly wasn't what they were about at all,
> just ways to mark one frantic episode out from another and give them an
> idea of when they'd reached somewhere.
>
>         "I thought this was all fabulous, mind, and when a significant
> portion of the auditorium went to the bar as soon as the singer started
> up, I felt as if I'd made a stand. But really, I spent most of the set
> just grinning at how out of control they were. I've seen bands that would
> love to be that far gone. This lot have got it all when they want it and
> can also keep it in check just enough to survive. Musical no, but huge
> amounts of energy and attack. Where a space-rock band of the accepted sort
> would be trying to lift the audience off with them this lot just went for
> immediately teleporting the performance area into deep space by main
> force, and then spent the next forty minutes on a rollercoaster out there
> before one by one stopping and walking off the stage leaving the singer-
> guitarist to thank the audience when he finally let the feedback stop.
> That said, I discovered to my surprise as I headed for the bar that I had
> one of the basslines going round in my head so they must have had some
> subliminal effectiveness.
>
>         "So then, what of the main act? Because Mr Cope did come back on
> again. I don't know his stuff well, as I said, so I won't try and give a
> set-list; he did announce most of them, but I can't say I can remember any
> of them. So an overall impression instead, then.
>
>         "Well, it's an easy job being Julian Cope's drummer isn't
> it? Apart from the fact that it makes you the only member of the band who
> doesn't have to change instruments in the performance, well, the songs
> aren't exactly rhythmically challenging. The rest of the band were working
> much harder to make them interesting, the colourfully-dressed
> guitarist/bassist being quite possibly the best guitarist I've ever seen,
> making a great deal of outraegous noise but all perfectly fitted into the
> gaps, marvellous timing and sense of place, honestly, I've never seen a
> better. The other stringsman was also pretty good but Bari Watts, whom he
> sounded a lot like, would have left him a way behind. When this lad was on
> bass and the extraordinary fellow (whose name I didn't get, his surname
> was two-syllabled and began with `D', something like Daryan?) on guitar
> the resultant groove was monstrous, and Julian Cope's own flying-V rhythm
> parts really didn't make a lot of difference. Any other arrangement worked
> less well, the songs where Julian did the guitar by himself most musically
> underwhelming from an arrangement point of view. There was also a couple
> of electronics players sometimes involved but to be honest what exactly
> they were adding was either too subtle or too mixed-down to be obvious.
>
>         "Mr Cope was however the focal point all evening. He spent a *lot*
> of time at the front of the stage shaking people's hands; he had a real
> cult following down there, people were reaching out to touch him and so
> on, it was something quite close to thaumaturgical from where I stood, but
> he was so continuously verbose and self-deprecating when not singing that
> it all seemed just normal and friendly and something natural to the
> man. I'm still not sure how he did this, though having an adoring crowd to
> start with is obviously going to have helped. He had the guitar on for
> most of the set, but when it wasn't there he climbed things. There had
> been things left on stage for him to climb but this just wasn't enough and
> he was already up and into the boxes nearest the stage inside the first
> two verses of the first number and before the end of the set he'd got into
> the stalls and wandered most of the way round the hall shaking hands and
> being hugged.
>
>         "So he had it easy for coming across as shamanic, but by and large
> he was very downbeat and modest. He was also to all appearances tripping,
> and said a lot about having started on a new psychedelic phase of his
> life, but this didn't seem to make much of a difference to his ability to
> spout vagueness or sing and play in time. He did have to be reminded what
> song they were doing next by his band almost every number, but after
> having to ask three times once apologised to the audience `for my
> momentary lapse of professionalism', and was generally on the ball in
> every other way. Basically, he had an audience eating out of his hand and
> wasn't having to work for it at all, and it was easy to join in the mass
> conviction that there was someone very special talking to us (and he did
> talk a lot) even though I'm not sure he was really by and large doing much
> to justify it except go on about stuff at great length and take the piss
> out of himself. I wish *I* could do that for a living.
>
>         "The last number deserves some description though. Having done the
> wandering through the audience just before, he was sat on the edge of one
> of the boxes, swinging his legs in the air and holding hands with a goth
> while he tried to work out how much time they had left. Then he slowly got
> round to the stage and then hobbled his boots together and picked up a
> German tin helmet he'd brought on to start with. With this upturned at hip
> height, he began to shuffle round stage telling us a story with a slowly-
> developing musical background, about an Englishman stranded in the desert
> with `only this German helmet to piss in', though walking along the front
> of the stage with the helmet where the audience could reach it netted him
> several spliffs and fifty pence, and told us how this wretched man
> eventually gets so worked up as to defy the gods. This left him after
> eight minutes with everything sufficiently worked upthat he could manage
> to be yelling out abuse at the three main monotheistic godheads and
> climbing up on to the stalk affair he'd got set up to hang there with his
> arms out cursing the big gods in a supposedly piss-soaked German helmet
> and a t-shirt he rapidly tore to bits. The frenzy became so much that he
> fell off the climbing stalk and then took it clumsily to bits and waved
> bits of frame at things, but under his command the band eventually
> quietened down one by one until all was calm and nothing had happened to
> the blasphemer at all; `it is done, and God has not said a word!', sort
> of thing. Fairly obvious and laboured point (`you can probably see where
> this is going', he admitted halfway through climbing his tree), but also a
> superb piece of showmanship. There was no encore, and he left the audience
> in raptures.
>
>         "Showmanship would be the order of the night really. I can't
> remember enjoying a gig so much that had so little worthwhile or memorable
> music in it from a viciously critical point of view, but it was several
> splendid shows and I was quite happy with it as a piece of the performing
> arts however you want to define them. The bits off the new album sounded
> as strong or stronger than any of the others but they did get the optimum
> band arrangement so I'm still not sure if I need any of his albums. I'd go
> and see him again like a shot though. He has an effortless stage presence
> I can only envy and does a fine impression of being stoned out of his
> thinkbox on his own wisdom. His band's not bad either, and he has a fine
> ear for a support act. I suppose I've become a fan now..."
>
> --
>                 Jonathan Jarrett, Birkbeck College, London
>     jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk/ejarr01 at students.bbk.ac.uk
>   "As much as the vision of the blind man improves with the rising sun,
>        So too does the intelligence of the fool after good advice."
>        (Bishop Theodulf of Orleans, late-eight/early-ninth century)