JULIAN CALENDAR
What else is going on in Cope’s world
“IDON’T talk to the press at almost any time. What made the Teardrops successful early on was Bill Drummond saying, ‘You’re not playing in London until you’re headlining the Nashville.’ Robert, my literary agent, he’s the same – he’s quite dynamic. He only does what he terms ‘singular authors’, people like Michael Palin and Ray Mears, and he’s in charge of Stephen Hawking’s estate. He says, the less [press] you do, the more people think it deep.
“At the moment, we’re totally hanging fire on what can be arranged to celebrate the 25th anniversary of The Modern Antiquarian. One thing I don’t want is for the 25th-anniversary edition to come out and I’m like a tired old cunt – ‘Oh no, I can’t believe I said that in the first version…’ Nothing like that. I’d rather stand by what it was, or make it more magnificent and more singular. When it came out, I tried to make it look like the most rock’n’roll book you could ever get, because I didn’t want it to belong to some kind of fake Celtic revival that I didn’t believe in. I wanted it to be for fuckers.
“I’ve got another thing I need to do before I die, and that’s to put together all my field research for Aberdeenshire and Sardinia. Because I’ve been to 65 different tomba dei giganti [giants’ tombs] in Sardinia, I know the archaeologists there and I know that they haven’t really been to many of them, because they’ve not been in a position to. In Aberdeenshire, I’ve been to 107 of the remaining stone circles, and I’m now old enough to be thinking, ‘You know what, I have to put this shit together, because I’m not here forever.’ It’s quite a weird feeling, you know?”