LIKE many men in their sixties, Julian Cope is looking forward to getting out in the garden at the weekend. He’s got two sheds to erect and – naturally – an underground city to excavate.
“I’m digging a copy of one of the streets in Pompeii,” says Cope, with typical enthusiasm. “Let’s see, it’ll be about 12-feet wide, with little kiosks, ’cause in Pompeii they had, like, noodle parlours on either side. Where we live is the perfect place for civil engineering works like Avebury, because you’ve just got unbelievably strong upper chalk…”
Cope and his wife Dorian have been in their rural Wiltshire home for almost 30 years now. It remains the perfect base for them: it’s remote enough that they won’t disturb anyone or be bothered, and there’s even an impressive psychedelic bounty in the grounds.
“This is such a mushroom area that it’s very easy to dose yourself just in our garden,” Cope explains. “For The Modern Antiquarian, I went to the valley that was the ur-source of the Avebury stones. I found 27 different types of mushroom, including four different psychedelic ones, in one hour! I think Robert Graves makes a bit of a jump in The White Goddess when he says that Mycenae came out of a mushroom cult, but if mushrooms did lead to that level of culture, then it would be like, ‘Well, we’re all on mushies from now on!’
“Mycenae,” he continues, “has got a back entrance that’s almost like an asshole! It’s like they were bringing in something that nobody really wanted to talk about… It’s like the dealer’s entrance, like Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had a guy turning up with some coke!"
Excavating his replica Pompeii aside, Cope has a lot on at the moment. There are preparations for this year’s 25th anniversary of The Modern Antiquarian, his impressive guide to Britain’s megalithic heritage. He’s “always” working on new music and on his Cope’s Notes essay series that accompanies his older records: “I’m doing [] at the moment, so I’ve been listening to stuff that inspired that – like David Peel, rowdy, street music, and I was always a cunt for Amon Düül I.”
