The Alternative Number Ones: Julian Cope’s “Charlotte Anne”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for subscribers only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

The world wanted Julian Cope to be a rock star. It seemed like a no-brainer. Here, you had this guy with impossible cheekbones, theatrical sensibilities, and a sonorous Bowie-style baritone, coming along at a time when those three things pretty much guaranteed you chart success, at least in the UK. Cope had big musical ideas. He came from punk, but he revered the adventurous '60s psych-rock that so much punk existed to repudiate. Tons of label people looked at Cope and heard the cha-ching noise go off in their heads. But there was one big problem: Julian Cope didn't want to be a rock star, at least in any conventional sense of the term. Instead, he wanted to become chaos incarnate. For most of his career, that's what Julian Cope has been.

Over Cope's long career, the successes almost feel like accidents, or like moments when Cope lost battles in his perpetual war against record-label pressures. In the late '80s, Cope had one of those moments, and then he spent the next few decades distancing himself from whatever he'd achieved there. "Charlotte Anne," Cope's one and only #1 hit on any American chart, does not sound like the work of an acid-fried rebel who lived to give his label reps headaches. Instead, it sounds like a really great late-'80s British alt-rock song. Even today, Cope peers are headlining nostalgia-fests on the back of songs not too different from "Charlotte Anne." But that's not Julian Cope. He's off on some other shit.