Read it in Books:Head-On:Memories of the Liverpool Punk-scene and the story of The Teardrop Exlodes; 1976-1982.

"I've seen it in your eyes and I've read it in books. Who wants love without the looks?" - Read it in Books.

When I kicked off the Read it in Books strand of my blog with an assessment of Peter Ackroyd's London:The Biography it hadn't occurred to me that, soon enough, I might be reviewing a book by the co-author of that song. Julian Cope co-wrote the song with Ian McCulloch a very long time ago and it appeared on the debut albums by both men's bands. The Teardrop Explodes' Kilimanjaro from 1980 and (as a bonus track only) on Echo and the Bunnymen's Crocodiles from three months earlier that year.

Odd really, Cope's highly regarded Head-On:Memories of the Liverpool Punk-scene and the story of The Teardrop Exlodes; 1976-1982 had been on my bookshelves for some years and, though I've often flicked through it, I'd never given it a thorough reading. With my first Julian Cope gig for years in February (it was great and not just because I got to enjoy his new ditty Cunts Can Fuck Off) I realised the time was long overdue for the book to be given my full attention.

I expected stories of out of control acid trips, bitching about other bands, and possibly very of its time treatment of female members of the entourage. I'd mistakenly thought there was a section in the book that painted Courtney Love in an unflattering lights that might, now - twenty-six years later, reflect more badly on the men involved than the young woman.

I don't know where I got that from though as Courtney Love is not mentioned once in a book that was engrossing, often hilarious, and occasionally touching. A book written from the view point of a very specific mind at a very specific time. The first chapter (if you can call them that, some are only a page long), DOPLHINS - ON THE BRINK OF A DOUBLE BUMMER, is set in St Ives, Cornwall in the summer of 1976 and the title alone lets us know we've firmly entered the world of the arch-drude, the man who recorded Kolly Kibber's Birthday, Reynard the Fox, and Out of My Mind on Dope and Speed. In it he describes a dolphin his brother Joss strokes as "a long suede submarine" and the whole experience as a "trip".

Of course. For Julian Cope, it seems, everything is a trip. Often an actual acid trip. Later on in the book, when the floors start to feel like trampolines and women look like hammerhead sharks, Cope, of course, becomes an enthusiastic user and advocate of LSD. Perhaps his most famous trip takes place in, of all places, Yeovil while he lies on  the floor - and imagines himself to be a 'city centre':- "a centre designed to control the traffic's flow. My heart was sending the blood out of the main veins and out into the suburbs".

But, back in St Ives, the eighteen year old Julian from Tamworth had just failed his A-levels and ruined his chances of getting into Oxford and becoming Charles Dickens. Shattering his parents hopes. Not, you imagine, for the first or last time. He wasn't so bothered. He had, his teachers had told him, "potential" but he "wanted only to play music and hang around with the freaks". 

Something it's safe to say he managed reasonably well. Cope's story begins, as many do, with a burning desire to escape a small town. In his case, Tamworth ("population replaced by clones" who called him "queer"). Each week him and his mate would study the Melody Maker looking for news of Patti Smith, The Ramones, Tom Verlaine, and, er, Hall & Oates! Tamworth disappointed. But so did college on the outskirts of Liverpool where everybody wore Fruit-of-the-Loom sweatshirts and real ale badges (back when that was a bad thing).

Cope may start the story around the time he moved from Tamworth to Liverpool but it's not long before he's jumping back to his childhood. Born in the small mining village of Deri, near Caerphilly, in 1957 (his mother had returned to her parents to have him), Cope grew up with a nice posh name (Julian) and a nice posh accent in Tamworth. A confident singer of songs but scared to be parted from his mum even at the age of five.

A role as Oliver Twist in a school play, aged twelve, endears Cope to his teachers, his parents, and the girls at school. But makes him a target for the bullies who, of course, tease him for being gay and ask him for a kiss. When he finally gives in and kisses a bully three years older than him the bullying stops immediately. They're now scared of the weird kid.

It taught him there was a power in being weird and gave him the confidence to be crazy. It was, he relates, a moment that changed his life. As did his later, college years, introduction to the music of Can, Faust, Love, The Doors, Country Joe & The Fish, Tim Buckley, Funkadelic, Nick Drake, Traffic, The Modern Lovers, and Prince Far I. Most of whom were soon deemed "muso", "reasonable", and "hippies" and traded in for punk bands like Television and, with a degree of doubt, The Sex Pistols. Later, The Vibrators and Ultravox will be given much shorter shrift

Cope meets and befriends punks, he gets his right ear ("the gay one") pierced, he shits in a shower he's sharing with a male friend (and breaks it up with a female friend's toothbrush so it goes down the plughole), he enjoys platonic friendships with girls, he pisses in milk bottles and drops them from eighth floor windows, gives and receives head from Julia ("more like a little animal than a young woman"), and goes to see The Damned at Eric's.

Which he loved. The DJ played King Tubby, Jonathan Richman, Patti Smith, Howlin' Wolf, and Captain Beefheart and Cope, the self-proclaimed 'farm-punk', loved being around people even weirder than him. One of whom was the seventeen year old Pete Burns. Described, initially, by Cope as "the faggiest guy I'd ever seen".

A cut above "the weekend dickheads with white suits and old Steve Harley albums". Cope and his friend Hilary start hitching to gigs in Leeds, Birmingham, and London. They hang out in Geoff Davies' Probe Records (Geoff memorably refuses to sell a heavy metal kid a Rush album - "where d'you think you are? Virgin Records?), and he witnesses Ari Up from the Slits kick a beer-hound in the throat for shouting "show us your minge" at her.

The Slits were supporting The Clash (Cope surprised himself by thinking The Clash were "fucking epic") and it was also the first night Cope got to speak to Pete Wylie, a man he'd seen on the scene and, due to a legend on his leather jacket, was known as the Rebel Without a Degree. Wylie had a mate called Duke who looked like an awkward Joey Ramone with shapeless hair and white ankle socks and, laughably, wanted to be David Bowie.

Duke McCool, as Cope misheard the surname, turned out to be Ian McCulloch. Wylie shepherded the three of them into a group, Duke the singer of course, and once McCulloch had got rid of the stage name Arthur Hostile, "it's crap", they became The Crucial Three.  At 2am in the morning, the first time they ever met. Wylie didn't even know if Cope could play an instrument.

What Cope liked about Wylie and McCulloch, and what the three of them shared, was an "unreasonable attitude". They all loved The Velvet Underground but Cope thought Bowie was shit. McCulloch liked Bowie but thought, ironically in hindsight, that Jim Morrison was a "pretentious turd". Their own first song, Salomine Shuffle - with its lyrics about 'zits', doesn't sound great and the only other one they had, ' I'm Bloody Sure You're on Dope', seemed to be nothing more than a title.

Which didn't seem to matter anyway as McCulloch seemed more interested in lounging around on a sofa than actually singing. When they played their first gig at Eric's with Pete Burns singing and their name changed to The Mystery Girls, Cope was on bass and Pete Wylie had a toilet seat strapped to his back. They supported, of all people, Sham 69, "the latecomers of the revolution" and split up immediately. Cope was turning twenty and considered himself way too old to be starting out. No future!

Elsewhere in Liverpool, mostly in Eric's or the Probe record shop, we're introduced to a pre-Frankie Goes to Hollywood Paul Rutherford and a pre-Siouxsie and the Banshees Budgie (sharing the stage as part of Liverpool's first punk band The Spitfire Boys), Les Pattinson (bassist for Bunnymen but then lead singer of an imaginary group called The Geoffs and then known as "guy with the Thunderbirds head"), and Bill Drummond who had just formed Big In Japan. A young Holly Johnson performs with that band with 'Dogsex' written in his bleached blond hair.

Mark E Smith of The Fall writes letters to Cope in which he addresses him as Jules Verne and tells him leather jackets are out and v-neck sweaters are in. Cope considers Smith a genius and Una Baines an improvement on Mo Tucker. In 1978 alone, Cope went to see The Fall twenty-eight times. He even played MES his tapes while McCulloch, either shy or worried about appearing uncool, hid in the bogs. Them and Pere Ubu start to become his key influences although Nova-Mob's (Cope's new band) headlining appearance at Eric's (after Penetration failed to live up to their name and pulled out) consists of one fifteen minute song about being "in love with mental health".

A disappointment. McCulloch hated it. Both Cope & McCulloch realised it was time to start writing some songs so McCulloch nicked a bit from The Fall's Stepping Out and Cope added a Stooges riff and they had Read it in Books. The band UH? perform another song, Robert Mitchum, live and Cope (looking like Justin Hayward in a "shit anorak" and McCulloch (wearing a coat given to him by MES) support Wylie's band Crash Course. Both of them rip the piss out of Wylie's choice of band name but McCulloch bottles out of singing and Cope takes over on vocals.

Performing covers of Louie Louie, they change their name to A Shallow Madness. Cope meets David Palmer who's into bands as uncool as The Boomtown Rats and The Adverts and takes him under his wing. Soon David's into The Doors, Pere Ubu, Suicide, Love, Captain Beefheart, Can, and the 13th Floor Elevators. Cope schooled him well and also felt that Palmer would have no friends if the punks didn't look after him. Wylie nicknamed Palmer Yorkie because he was "good and rich and thick" and, better still, his mum (who shrieked like a Monty Python character) had a basement they could rehearse in - and even brought them tea and toast!

Joining The Fall in the new wave of unarguably brilliant bands were an unlikely looking lot from Manchester. Joy Division had previously been Warsaw and nobody, except Will Sargent, had rated them at all. But signed to Factory and playing Shadowplay on Tony Wilson's Granada television show, something had changed. Everybody noticed they hadn't just improved. They were amazing.

Dalek I Love You didn't go on to achieve the same level of success as Joy Division but they had sofas and lamps on stage and sound like fun and they did bring the likes of David Balfe and Andy McCluskey (later of OMD) to the story.  They lost points for having a member with a moustache though. Not cool. Cope's new frenemy Dave Balfe wasn't popular either because he exaggerated his lisp to impress women and, worst of all, it actually worked. It was okay for Wylie to shag every woman on the scene but not Balfe. He was an "ugly plank" and even Jayne Casey, who was sleeping with him, called him "Smurf".

McCulloch, too, becomes far more focused on getting laid than making music. This, along with his constant tardiness and mardiness, irks Cope and he asks McCulloch to leave the band. After a series of woeful names Cope settles on The Teardrop Explodes (from a DC comic story that made no sense whatsoever) and McCulloch and Will Sargent ("the two most emotionally autistic guys") bond over rejection by Cope and get on with forming their own band. Echo and the Bunnymen would support The Teardrop Explodes at a private party in Eric's that November. Debut gigs by both bands.

Within three months The Teardrop Explodes had recorded their first single, Sleeping Gas, and Balfe was sniffing around the band with intent of getting in on the action. Cope hated Balfe and Balfe thought Cope couldn't sing but it seems everyone thought Cope couldn't sing. It didn't stop the band getting single of the week in NME and Sounds and an invite from Tony Wilson to appear on television in Manchester.

There, they're given a tour of the Coronation Street set and Cope and Wylie are excited to meet Geoffrey Hughes who played Eddie Yeats, Stan Ogden's binman sidekick, at the time. Later that evening they supported Wire at Eric's for a princely £5.

Soon the Bunnymen release their debut. The Pictures on my Wall gets single of the week too and the bands start touring together, alternating headline slots. Balfe's finally brought in to The Teardrop Explodes. He's great on keyboards but Cope still hates him. Andy McCluskey, "a hippy that we all called Leo Sayer" forms Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark and Cope suggests he was "jumping on the long name bandwagon" and then Cope marries his girlfriend Kathy partly, it seems, to thwart Balfe who keeps telling him it won't last and partly because, among all the homosexuality and promiscuity of the Liverpool scene, it seems the most non-conformist thing he can do.

Second single, Bouncing Babies, also gets single of the week, they get the cover of Sounds, and they start playing The Factory in Manchester (once supported by A Certain Ratio - "crap but unusual"). Things are moving astonishingly quickly already but soon there's another great leap forward. Seymour Stein of Sire Records wants to sign the Bunnymen, Cope's super jealous and bitter. His wife tells him to improve his look, Bill Drummond tells him to move around more on stage, and Cope rages about Paul Morley's new post-punk bands (the scene he was in) by telling The Monochrome Set to "fuck right off".

Eventually, the Teardrop Explodes go to London to record their third single, Treason. Cope's over the moon but The Bunnymen are getting even more attention and this rankles badly. When Bill Drummond nicks Cope's 'scrim and camouflage' idea for a Bunnymen stage set, Cope wishes "evil and mayhem and destruction" on each Bunnyman individually. A rage made impotent by the fact they were completely unaware of it.

For Cope and The Teardrop Explodes, the tours get bigger (in Glasgow they're supported by Aztec Camera (whose singer, they're told, is twelve years old), the reviews get better, and the fan base keeps growing. But in the midst of all this Ian Curtis of Joy Division kills himself. Cope, on the shocking news:- "one of our peers. He can't die. That's fucking ridiculous".

Depression did for Ian Curtis but the use of drugs in the music scene does for others. Cope starts off so anti drugs that when he spots Mick Finkler smoking a joint he panics that he's in "the Grateful Dead or some shit" like "bloody Hawkwind". On the band's first trip to New York he's the only one who doesn't hoover up a few bags of bugle in JFK airport. But when new band member Alan Gill, a man Cope adores so much he lets him call Julie and doesn't even mind that he has a moustache, offers up him a joint because he's so tense the result is revelatory.

Cope likes himself for the first time in his whole life, all his little devils flew off, and, immediately, it seemed, he wanted more. Which, of course, he got. All the references to LSD in reviews of their music got him interested in trying some acid and it wasn't long before Balfe had scored some and the band convened for their first trip together.

Soon Cope was staring at a milk bottle:- "the milk scared me, it clung to the sides of the bottle and I knew that if I looked away, we'd be in terrible danger" - and beating a pillow to death. Cope and Gary Dwyer become scared of Yul Brynner's tunic in Attila the Hun, "too bright", and hide behind a sofa, Cope pisses in Dave Balfe's baked beans.

When they first appear on Top of the Pops, it seems they're all tripping off their nuts and dancing round Spandau Ballet's Tony Hadley in the corridor, watching "Toyah lisp her way through some piece of kack" and gushing around like "in-breds at a New England dinner party".

On an American tour in Albany in upstate New York, Cope fixates on a beautiful girl in the audience with pink high-heels and pink ankle socks over her stockings. She looks fifteen. When she comes backstage she looks seventeen. Her name's Dorian and Cope has found his ideal woman. Pity he's already married. The band drive back to Manhattan and he knocks one out in his hotel room.

Once he's told his wife about the affair that develops (not an easy task and one Cope mentally struggles with) he's free to be with Dorian and, despite shagging, or rather being shagged by, Lydia Lunch and doing fifteen tabs of acid on a van trip between San Francisco and Boulder, that's what he does.

That trip, in both senses of the word, involves flying VW beetles, a man turning into a dog, and a church sized fibre glass brontosaurus in a town called Dinosaur, Colorado. That last bit being the only thing that existed outside of Cope's acid fried mind. Later trips will include a monkey in a cage playing the drums for the TV Personalities at the New Cross Venue and, most dangerously of all, an occasion when Cope finds himself wanting to join the band Buck's Fizz.

Back in Britain, Cope is repulsed by his fame and his new found audience of "stupid ickle teeny-girls fussing and a-fainting and a-paying no heed to the single-mindedness of our one chord space-grooves". It's one of the rare times in the book he comes across as unlikeable and ungrateful. I suspect he doesn't particularly like himself at this juncture and is merely trying to be honest about the arsehole he was becoming and, sure enough, his out of control behaviour starts to take its toll on both his health and the band's success. When the single Colours Fly Away only reaches number 54 and The Teardrop Explodes don't get invited to play Top Of The Pops, Cope starts to see that his plan to piss of and alienate his teenage fans is working, and he finds he doesn't like it.

The rest of the book follows Cope and The Teardrop Explodes to their inevitable break up but even when describing what sound like pretty heavy scenes Cope's turns of phrases are often exquisitely funny. The conurbation of Whiston was set out "like a patient etherised upon a table", a local thief "looked like one of those Scots footballers who play for Man United", London punks have "johnnies hanging from their ears" and he accuses them of "getting more Rocky Horror and less Stooges every day", and "the October sun would teem through" Cope's "skylight and scatter restlessness on" his "sleeping form like the magic sprinkles from the wands of Disney witches". Finding himself back in his childhood bedroom pondering a failure of the band he describes himself as feeling like "an empty cathedral, after a coronation".

They're very English too. A back-woodsman type he meets in Long Island is "built like a brick shithouse", Queen fans who bottle The Teardrop Explodes during a stadium support slot are described as "heavy-metal bum-boys" who, with no sense of irony, shout "fuck off you queer" at Cope (almost everything was filtered through a homophobic lens in the early eighties), and "plank" is used an insult. One I've not heard much since school. Sometimes they are so peculiar they feel as if they've come out of the mouth of a Chris Morris character. At one point he's "thrust into a dungeonous club full of hip knobhounds".

But he can turn the mood on a sixpence. Following a brief consideration of how wonderful his mother was, he abruptly describes how the Aberfan mining disaster (166 small children killed when a colliery spoil tip collapsed on to a school, just four miles from Deri), which took place on Cope's ninth birthday, turned him into a very serious and sad child. Life, in Cope's words, became "a dreadful and serious thing".

There's also a lovely, unexpected, moment when Cope, after describing the terrible 'fuck off' arguments and terrible break up sex with his first girlfriend Jane, tells her he stills love her. Wherever she is. When he describes the first time he falls in love, and makes love with, his now wife Dorian it's tender and touching and just a little bit funny. Not least when they do each other with their free hands while riding along in her silver Mustang.

The book made me cry tears of sadness (when Mick Finkler is sacked and Cope relates he only saw his former close friend two more times in his life) but, more often, tears of joy. My heart melted when Cope recalls being permanently "drunk with glee" when he was chatting about and making music with his friends. At the same time, I was often thrown back to the puerile, cruel, humour of the school playground. Cope's brother's teenage punk band are called The Flids and have a song called Dirt-Sore-Cat's Fanny and enemies, real and perceived, are often dismissed as bum-boys and knobhounds.

It's how young men spoke back then but, beneath, all the name calling and necking industrial quantities of pharmaceuticals, Cope's passion for music never strays far from the surface and he writes about it way better than most other musicians. Pere Ubu's Final Solution "sounded like it was from deep in the interior of some continent I needed to visit" and The Ramones, quite simply, were "perfect". Like a "paramilitary operation". Or "funny terrorists". The sound of "God" even.

Having, now, read the book I really have no idea why I left it so long. Some sections, incl;uding the final few paragraphs, are extraordinarily powerful, there's virtually no filler, and Cope tells stories in a unique and funny way that makes you feel like (a) you wish you'd been there and (b) you're really glad you weren't there. The book ends with The Teardrop Explodes breaking up and you get the impression that decision may have saved his life. Having seen him put in such a great gig in February I'm more glad than ever he did. So much more interesting than those knobhounds with johnnies hanging from their ears.