july 30, 1999

Julian Cope - The modern antiquarian

book launch/talk
dingwalls 25th jan '99

text: Stu

taken from Dream Creation Magazine, issue 23 march/april 1999

Just before goingto India I noticed an interesting event listed in Time Out. Julian Cope was to give a spoken word performance at Dingwalls in Camden on the day after I was due to return to England. That’s weird! I put it to the back of my mind as I concentrated on getting my flight and visa organised. It was not until I returned on the sunday, after a two week long cosmic adventure that I was again reminded by nigel who had discovered it independently while I was away. One more coincidence to add to the list and I knew I was meant to get my arse down there for another piece of life’s puzzle to be tossed in my direction. The known and the unknown swirling in a semi pre-ordained cauldron of alchemical gloop. Thankfully Nigel took care of the blag on the door, bringing two tickets triumphantly into the cafe nextdoor as I drained what remained of my hot chocolate and watched the previously huge queue finally get swallowed up by the venue. It was almost time.

All I really knew about this talk was that after many years as an eccentric acid head singer, known for his bizzare on-stage antics, Julian Cope had got seriously into studying stone circles and had decided to write a book about it, on which he’d no doubt talk tonight. "Ok julian" I thought to my self, " just what have you discovered? what’s happening man?"

"Books! Books are happening. So I got this idea to turn the heads on and then turn everybody on, so even the "shallow" people can get into it. You don’t even have to read it or anything. Just leave it lying around. The 14 year old son will pick it up and say: What’s this about? Strange fluorescent orange cover!" I am a pragmatic artist and do everything to be understood. Late sometimes. Now I figure I’ll just keep writing 438 page books to be understood. The artist weighed down with responsibilities, a head’s get together and like it or not the book has already been a success. Thank you all. I love you." "The whole point of this book is diagnosis and navigation. We can see as we near the end of the twentieth century that something is really wrong but that there are still beacons shining all over the world. What is wrong is so big that you’ve got to have somebody with a lot of time to deal with it. Alternatively if you had a lot of people doing it collectively it would be easy."

"In the book I talk about what I know (from my own experience) and shut up about what I don’t know. I’m going to become a colossal repository of pure experience. You can’t write a book about fantastic things unless you’ve had fantastic experiences." He gets back to the point, fixing his gaze on his audience. "At the end of the ‘60s charlatans said ‘no way can we navigate’. ‘Let’s just party’. But the gnostic in the artist is always looking for strange co-incidences and talking about them. They start happening really often. Then you get over the shock of it and delve behind the lines and learn to navigate. Why do we feel removed? We have to go back to the first experiences. When we first started that psychological tweak to be freaked out about sex in the west. We are still a little confused by it because we are still in this post christian state. It’s what we know. We need to investigate the rest of the world and look back at Britain. I did it.”

(voices from tape kick in)

"Crass use of low vocals in the background has been scientifically proven to be emotionally evoking". He’s still very much a performer. "After travelling to various parts of the world I found myself strangely enjoying returning to Britain. Stonehenge! My navigation started there." He pauses for a moment. "There were definite times when we changed. Let’s start at 50000 years ago when man appeared. Give him a shave and apart from his shambling gait he would pass unannounced on the streets of London. Avebury was only built 5000 years ago. We’ve had 50000 to get used to this form."

"Until 5000 years ago we were quite happy to worship sacred waterfalls, stones and Ewe trees. Then came a change. Negative awareness came with the beginning of agriculture. Tied to nature’s apron strings brought out resentment. A handful of seeds and up sprung ‘agriculture’ and with it ‘control’. And up to the great stone that we worshiped all these years we build an "avenue." Temples changed to a new consciousness, one of the self and self adornment." "Neolithic humans were the first punk rockers, pointy and tall. Then the Romans kicked in and so of course did the Christians using the distribution of their hefty and therefore impressive book - the bible to help their case for global indoctrination." "We are experienced. Experience!"

"It's all women's stuff that we find buried in the ground around these ancient sites. It makes no sense to our ancestors if a cloistered scholar cut off from a fertility based life does not bother to record it. This is the point where experience comes in. There is a correlation in experience." "What it was about was that this culture should perpetuate this whole harvest thing in a very fertile way. You didn’t used to have to go inside this tiny church to worship and cut yourself off from everything outside calling everything in God’s acre outside profane."

(switches on tape of low voice accompaniment)

"It separates until there is no love left... However, when the world is not profane everything is sacred, and when everything is sacred you don’t need a roof over your temple. The sky is your roof. You don’t need walls, because the horizons are your walls. You’ve got a landscape temple. Also this whole deal with the heathens, heathen means simply "of the heath". It’s time to decorate the landscape. Everything is fantastic, everything is announced. Nothing is profane." "The people coming down the spines of land could see other people coming down other spines of land taking in the awesome natural views. A psychic pessery."oooh" for everyone involved. “Landscape temples are not to be judged in linear time. Considering that in 1981 I was in Dingwalls experimenting with LSD. Its obvious that our world is far more open now thanks to people using Es, LSD and marijuana than it was 5000 years ago. So now is the best time for us to judge this part of our history. We can look at the landscape temples and see them differently. One element of the book is that it is designed to encourage people to go and travel (the often relatively short distances) to these ancient sights even just on the level of getting cheap (family) entertainment.”

"Its because its 1999 that its a good time to change." (see "how to create world peace in 15 minutes" elsewhere in this issue - Ed’s note) I mean, the millennium dome is so underachieving. Its no more than the acoustic tent in Glastonbury. They still had the same obsessions back then, that’s where our obsessions began. The development of the self. There is so much going on under the surface. You’ve got to have so many experiences." "Sweden and Northern Denmark had a big culture of landscape temples. Odin Was the northern (Norse) god and the great thing about a god like Odin is that Noddy Holder fits in and so does Dave Hill. So does Alex Harvey come to think of it. Odin is always saving the world but the strange thing about him that we find is that although he’s violent, crusty and determined, he also occasionally wears a dress. Perhaps he wants to hoodwink somebody? I get the impression he is wearing the dress too much. So I look back and I find out that he’s also known as the "all father", "the old father", so central to northern culture that even in Russian the number one is ‘odin’. When you are so far in, so far down then every sound has a meaning. About a thousand years before Odin there were "Odd", "Ode" and "Oder", a trinity of ancient gods.

Weed out and look through so you can navigate. Within the language of Britain extending out into the endo-european theatre of life everyday we evoke ancient deities in our language. This is actually real. There is so much evidence, there is so much to see. Actually 2000 is a good time to be in Britain." (further low voice accompaniment to imprint new information on a deeper level). "Over a church, a squatting Saxon goddess, with legs open and labial lips parted ready to deliver a baby the size of a football over a church in Wellbeck in Hereford in Worcestershire." Then with a startled expression. "Where was the priest when the stonemason had this flight of fancy?" Somewhat out of the blue. "The pragmatic artist has to do things on his own doorstep."

"Words have a pattern. The word tool, my dick is my tool but looks like nothing in my toolshed. It is simple enough to be an old word. It must go back to a time when tools looked simple enough to look like my dick. Look back to the idea of hiding, not to be seen or to put on or ‘wear a hide’ so you can sneak up." "Ancient humanity was metaphorical. When you get down to the simplest words with common meaning in the different languages you get to ‘the keystones to all of culture’. For this reason it appears as though ‘words actually have a sacred value’.

On the Goddess Brigit "I was reading the story of Brigit who sounded \wonderful and worthy and was born on the doorstep of a druids house. How could she be the goddess of Britain and I couldn’t find her in the history books? Then I found this old book ‘Ancient Anglesea Restored’ - the Brigantes, the people of Brigit or O’Brigante the o prefix meaning ‘being of’. Bride and breed and Brigit, the river Brit and the river Bride are right next to each other, where you find the swans of britain, the swan goddess or brig, the belly of the ship, to breed, the lower reaches." "I’ll sod off now and get out of your hair." But not before a few promotional poses and ballet-style jaunt accross the stage. He’s done his best to tell us what he can in the short time available, there’s obviously a lot more he’d like to say. Which is why you should purchase his excellent book. You never know it might get read by the whole family. Let’s hope so.