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

[Jon Jarrett]

        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)