An Elegant Chaos:Julian Cope @ the Barbican.

"Who are you to give my life so much meaning? I can't stand so much meaning. Hold my hand, 'cause I'm not healing. I need to find a way ahead" - The Greatness and Perfection of Love - Julian Cope.

You know when you meet up with an old friend after years, decades even? You know that feeling you get within seconds, that feeling like you've never been away? You know how you start to ask yourself why you left it so long? It's a kind of intimacy. A kind of love even. With its greatness, its perfection, as well as its frustrations and imperfections. Love's never easy.

I realised last night that's how I feel about Julian Cope. When other people talk about him I almost feel jealous. Hands off, he's mine. Although, to be fair, I've not been very committed to the friendship of late. It's nearly twenty years since I saw him parading around in his Daffy Duck boxer shorts in Blackheath Halls and almost thirty-three since, second on the bill to New Order at Glastonbury, he dedicated Reynard the Fox to me and my mate Shep as we drunkenly sloshed around in the Somerset mud.

To be fair, we'd been shouting for it all set and the dedication only stretched as far as "ok, here it is" but still, it meant a lot. Me and Cope go back a long way. When I was an awkward, gauche teenager (before growing into in an awkward, gauche adult) Cope's first two solo albums, World Shut Your Mouth and Fried, were as important to me as The Smiths, Aztec Camera, and The Cocteau Twins.

I'd regularly lie in the dark, under the covers, listening to An Elegant Chaos and Head Hang Low and I'd equally regularly bounce around my teenage bedroom to Reynard The Fox, The Greatness and Perfection of Love, and Sunspots. Singing the refrain "I'm in love with my very best friend" to myself over and over again and thinking what a wonderful thing it would be for your lover and best friend to be the same person.

I was young, I was stupid, and I was romantic (and two of those things haven't changed). It was, in retrospect, amazing. I felt like Julian Cope understood me and unlike, for example, Morrissey he never really let me down. He just got, first, poppier, and then, for the last thirty years or so, weirder and weirder. The thing about catching up with friends you've not seen for decades is that often they've aged badly, lost their hair, put on weight, or (in the case of Morrissey) become right wing fucking nutjobs.

Cope's not done any of those things. He just dresses in a very peculiar fashion. Leather peaked cap, knee high leather boots, and what looked like skintight lycra shorts. It's a far cry from his pop pomp but it's not as out there as playing entire gigs with a flannel on his face or wandering around naked except for a massive tortoiseshell.

The iconography, and the stories that surround him, make for one of pop music's richest cases. But he is, after all is said and done, a pop singer. That choirboy voice has remained as Cope himself has aged and his way with a catchy tune and a singalong chorus has not diminished either. At one point Cope took time out to tell us of a Paul Morley review over three decades back in which he wrote that only Julian Cope ba-ba-bas like he really means it.

It's typical of Cope. For all his oddness and eccentricities he is, at heart, a scholar of pop, a scholar of punk, and a scholar of psychedelia and it's when he weaves these three strands into one he yields his most satisfying and brilliant results. His back catalagoue a rich tapestry that stretches through Sunshine Playground, Charlotte Anne, and tonight's opener Soul Desert.

A track from 1992's Jehovakill seemed an apt way to kick off a reappraisal and, in many ways, a reimagining of his entire ouevre from The Teardrop Explodes days (Treason, Passionate Friend, and The Great Dominions all get a run out, Reward stays in the bank) to Immortal and Your Facebook, My Laptop from last month's new album Self Civil War.

Each song, as you'd expect, is prefaced by fairly lengthy anecdotes, jokes, and (hopefully) unscripted asides that cover subjects like driving in London, getting the last bus home, the current health of former Teardrops member Dave Balfe, scary American evangelical beliefs, megaliths, and the use of psychedelic drugs during the building of the world's great civilisations.

I'd been ready and prepared to laugh out loud at his fantastically titled Cunts Can Fuck Off (and I most certainly did) but nothing could compete with They Were On Hard Drugs. A song that made it very clear that when it comes to taking acid Julian Cope doesn't just lie on the floor and imagine himself to be a city centre, the blood flowing through his veins the traffic passing through, but sees it, and other hallucinogens, as vital to our understanding of the world, our advancement as a people, and our connectivity to each other.

Julian Cope was not afraid to lace his punk spirit with hippy attitudes and drugs long before The Butthole Surfers and The Flaming Lips followed obliquely in his path. Autogeddon Blues paints a picture of Cope perambulating between ancient sites like Avebury and The Rollright Stones while raging against the motor industry. Earning himself the name Arch-Drood and a scholarly reputation as a modern antiquarian at the same time.

The aforementioned They Were On Hard Drugs has half the Barbican intoning "DRUGS DRUGS DRUGS" on the chorus, Sunspots shows Cope at his most playful - making noises of cars going by, and Pristeen, from 91's Peggy Suicide elicits one of the biggest cheers of the evening as Cope amps it up during a set closer.

Ninety or so minutes of one man, his memories, and his guitar (no backing band at all). You need to be both a talented and a varied artist to pull it off at all but to do so with such panache you probably need to have a songbook as extensive as Cope's as well as a nature as warm as his. Julian Cope speaks about spending forty years as a professional irritant, a thorn in the side of respectability, and while those are undoubtedly worthwhile and creditable intentions he's also something of a national treasure.

It's probably not something he ever set out to be or ever expected to be but much like those unchanging megaliths that have overseen so many stony vigils over the British countryside for years, decades, centuries, and even millennia, Cope has seen fashions come and go and though time and tide has weathered him slightly they haven't, fundamentally, changed him. Julian Cope, as much as he is a man of our world and of the world of pop music, is always very much his own man and the purview he generously offers us is his and his only. It resolutely remains as skewed, prismatic, and as trippy as it's always been.

We wouldn't have it any other way. He could have played three hours longer (I'd love to have heard Metranil Vavin, An Elegant Chaos, Bill Drummond Said, Kolly Kibber's Birthday, and Just Like Pooh Bear for a start) but the encore was a quick blast of Out Of My Head On Dope And Speed and it was all over. So we could all get the last bus home. Which I did. Eventually. Full of the joy that comes from hearing great music with great friends performed by a man who may have written a song called Liver As Big As Hartlepool but really does, as his old mucker Pete Wylie would have it, a heart as big as Liverpool.

Thanks to Darren for getting the tickets in for this gig, to him and Cheryl for joining me at the gig, to Shep, Pam, Adam, and Gary for beers and veggie curry in Chutney's beforehand and, most of all, to Julian Cope for just being the very best Julian Cope he can be. That's all we can ask of anyone and Cope never fails to deliver just that. In this elegant chaos I stand to one side.