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.

Julian Cope was born in Wales, and he mostly grew up in the small English town of Tamworth. In the '70s, Cope went off to college in Liverpool, and that's where he found punk rock. From 1977 on, Cope and his friend Ian McCulloch played in a bunch of bands that maybe played a few shows before disbanding: Crucial Three, UH?, A Shallow Madness. Eventually, Cope and McCulloch fell out, and that's what led to McCulloch founding Echo And The Bunnymen. (Ian McCulloch will eventually appear in this column.)

In 1978, Julian Cope and a few friends started a band called the Teardrop Explodes. They made a bugged-out form of post-punk that drew on the psychedelic pop of the '60s, messing around with horns and organs. I find a lot of their music to be actively irritating, though I'm sure it was exciting if you were there to witness it firsthand. The Teardrop Explodes had an unstable lineup, and Cope was one of their only constant members. The band only lasted for a few years, and they only released two albums during their lifetime, with a third lost album coming out later. But the Teardrop Explodes definitely made a name for themselves, and they reached the UK's top-10 singles chart with 1981's "Reward." That song is pretty good.

The Teardrop Explodes broke up in 1982, and they've never reunited. By that point, Julian Cope was developing a reputation as an acid-fried weirdo, and his early solo music doesn't really do much to combat that impression. But Cope kept working. He struck up a partnership with the teenage guitarist Donald Ross Skinner, and he came out with his solo debut World Shut Your Mouth in 1984. On that record, Cope steered into the image, making music that sounded like a more hopped-up take on solo Syd Barrett. I'd never listened to early Julian Cope stuff before working on this column, and I'm guessing I won't go back to it again.

For a little while, Julian Cope feuded with Bill Drummond, the former manager of the Teardrop Explodes and future founder of the KLF; Cope and Drummond released diss tracks aimed at each other in the mid-'80s. (The KLF's only hit on the Billboard Alternative chart, the 1992 Tammy Wynette collab "Justified And Ancient," peaked at #21. Over here, the KLF did a lot better on straight-up pop radio.) Cope lost his deal with Mercury Records when his first two solo albums didn't sell, but he landed a new contract with Island, put together a new band, and made the relatively straightforward rock record Saint Julian. Just like that, Cope's career was back on track. His kickass track "World Shut Your Mouth" -- which, confusingly, has nothing to do with the World Shut Your Mouth album -- became Cope's biggest-ever solo hit in the UK, and it also became his only single to chart on the Hot 100, where it peaked at #84.

Cope's new band broke up almost immediately, but the man finally had something resembling career momentum, and he recorded a follow-up album pretty quickly. At Island Records, Cope's A&R rep was Ron Fair, the man who would later sign and produce Christina Aguilera. These two guys must've made for a strange pair, but they worked well together for a time. Fair produced and played keyboards on Cope's 1988 album My Nation Underground, which might actually be the least underground album that Cope has ever made. That's the record that gave us "Charlotte Anne."

"Charlotte Anne," like "World Shut Your Mouth," is the rare Julian Cope single that sounds like it was made with some hope and expectation of commercial success. It could easily be mistaken for something from Cope's former bandmate Ian McCulloch, and not just because the two of them both have stentorian baritones. "Charlotte Anne" has the rich textures of so much sweeping, goth-adjacent late-'80s Brit-rock, and it's genuinely catchy. The drums sound huge. The synths and guitars interweave delicately. There are tiny hooks all through the track -- a tumbling keyboard line here, a tootling flute there, a Farfisa note or a drum-thwack that hits at just the right moment. It's not original, but it's gorgeous.

I love the way Julian Cope sings "Charlotte Anne." He's foxy and dramatic in the same ways that contemporaries like McCulloch and the Psychedelic Furs' Richard Butler had already taken to the bank. On the chorus, Cope yelps the word "Charlotte" against the beat, like he's in pain, and then the "Anne" comes out as a long sigh -- an intoxicating one-two punch of strength and weakness. We only get some sense of Cope's deep and abiding strangeness during the spoken-word bit, where he orates grandly about an open fire beneath the sky. Even there, though, he sounds fully at home in an era when art-rock weirdos were regularly devising new ways to smooth their styles out and crash the pop charts.

"Charlotte Anne" comes disguised as a love song, but it's not about an actual woman. Instead, it's Cope's meditation on his own artistic shortcomings and the compromises that he can't forgive himself for making: "My splendid art/ Oh, my sad profession/ Now stick with me, and I'll betray you." Cope imagines himself in his casket, and he worries that his splendid art will lose its luster if he ever shakes his "bad depression." He seems to dismiss his own music: "The sound you bring is an antiquated thing, so please don't look to me for guidance." The song's title is almost certainly a play on the word "charlatan," which means there's a good chance that "Charlotte Anne" is Julian Cope lambasting himself for his willingness to record songs like "Charlotte Anne."

"Charlotte Anne" probably had no real shot at becoming a crossover hit, and its video, full of way-too-tight close-ups on Julian Cope's face, is a piece of crap. But the song itself is genuinely stunning. I've never been a part of the Julian Cope cult, and I only have the vaguest memories of ever hearing "Charlotte Anne" on alt-rock radio, but the song's arch prettiness hits me right in the chest. That theatrical faux-Bowie style probably sounded hopelessly trendy at the time, but it has aged beautifully. I wish Julian Cope had more songs like this. As far as I can tell, he does not.

At home in the UK, "Charlotte Anne" was a minor hit, peaking at #35 on the singles chart. On the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, "Charlotte Anne" spent weeks at #2, stuck behind R.E.M.'s "Orange Crush," before finally ascending to the pinnacle for a single week, becoming the "Bad Guy" to that song's "Old Town Road." Cope followed "Charlotte Anne" with his cover of "5 O'Clock World," the great proto-bubblegum garage hit that the Vogues released in 1965. Cope's version has a lot of horn-stabs and an interpolated bit of Petula Clark's "I Know A Place," and I don't like his version anywhere near as much as the original. (Cope's "5 O'Clock World" peaked at #10 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. It's a 6.)

My Nation Underground might've gotten decent college-rock airplay for Julian Cope, but he hated the album, and he felt that his compromises hadn't gotten him anywhere. Cope quickly recorded two lo-fi follow-up albums, and when Island wouldn't release them, he put them out himself independently. This led to all sorts of standoffs between Cope and Island, but everyone eventually figured that it was OK for Cope to release his own anti-commercial stuff without Island's help. During that stretch, Cope also got really into staging attention-grabbing stunts at anti-government UK protests. Finally, he returned to the Island fold for the 1991 double concept album Peggy Suicide. The single "Beautiful Love" made it to #4 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. (It's a 6.)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=qpHrSA2mLtg&ab_channel=The90s%2CADecadeofMusic%28MasterNoisein60fps%29

Ron Fair didn't produce any of Julian Cope's albums after My Nation Underground, but he kept playing on Cope records up to and including Peggy Suicide, even though he'd launched a full-on pop career by then. (In 1990, Fair was an executive producer on the Pretty Woman soundtrack.) I wonder what that friendship was like. A year after Peggy Suicide, Cope released another double concept album on Island. That one was called Jehovakill, and it reflected Cope's growing fascination with krautrock. (Cope wrote the 1995 book Krautrocksampler, which basically cemented the idea of krautrock as a culty critical phenomenon.) Jehovakill didn't sell, and Island dropped Cope.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=RoIVj20_76U&ab_channel=The90s%2CADecadeofMusic%28MasterNoisein60fps%29

Julian Cope hasn't been on the Alternative chart since 1991, when his "East Easy Rider" peaked at #25. But Cope moved on to release a couple of mid-'90s albums on Rick Rubin's American Recordings, and he was still landing minor hits on the UK singles chart up until the mid-'90s. Eventually, Cope removed himself from the larger music business, and he continued to function on his own, putting out an insane number of records on his Head Heritage label while he also published books about music and neolithic cultures. His music got really, really weird, to the point where Cope was happy to release entire LPs of ambient drones and ritualistic chanting. He'll still sometimes come up with a catchy tune, but it'll always arrive in subversive form.

Julian Cope seems perfectly comfortable with outsider status. He's been out there, thriving, for decades. Cope might deserve credit for becoming an early music blogger in 2000, when he started writing an Album Of The Month column on his website. He kept that column going for a decade, dedicating much of that space to reissued psych-rock obscurities. He also championed way-out metal and psych bands like Acid Mothers Temple, the Boredoms, OM, and Comets On Fire. In 2003, Cope recited gnostic poetry on "My Wall," a 25-minute track from drone-metal titans Sunn O))).

Julian Cope is still at it. He looks like a wizard, and his Twitter bio contains the word "Archdrude." Just a few weeks ago, he released an album called Robin Hood, which isn't on any of the streaming services and which you can only get, as far as I can tell, from his website. (Sample song titles: "Julius Geezer," "Charles The Turd," "An Oral History of Blowjobs (Medley)," "I Was A Punk Before You Was A Hippie.") Cope's flirtation with modern rock radio stardom didn't last long, and it must seem like a different lifetime now. But that flirtation did leave behind at least one banger, even if it's a banger about the corrupt machinations at work behind the production of bangers.

GRADE: 9/10

BONUS BEATS: Here's audio of Robyn Hitchcock, an artist who will eventually appear in this column, covering "Charlotte Anne" at a 1989 live show: