My school friend Drew Heald came into class one day, assuring me Reward by The Teardrop Explodes was a great song. Drew and I shared many tastes, though mostly (ahem) this kind of thing, and I had to let him know that this enthusiasm for pop music — for I'd heard the song on the radio — did not reflect well on him. Another time he told me about this band called U2, whose album Boy was really good. By then I think we'd fallen out over his defence of Ultravox's Vienna as a 'classic', and I just ignored him. Though, lest I should come across like a closed-minded pubescent curmudgeon, I did champion Japan's Tin Drum. But that's a story for another day.
It was almost two decades before I thought about The Teardrop Explodes again. It was all prompted by reading Julian Cope's memoir of that era
, which I must have mentioned at least five times already, and I'm unapologetic about that because it's, by turns, funny, dramatic and profound, and just about redeems the sorry genre of autobiography. It's always frustrating to read the story of a band and an album without hearing how they sounded. However, the music is no match for the story. And I can't help feeling that that goes for most of Cope's career: the collateral material, from The Modern Antiquarian to the whole drude/ur-pagan persona, is more consistently interesting than the songs.
Given the choice between spending an hour with a brew and either Julian Cope or Ian McCulloch, I'd definitely take the former. But I won't ever be given that choice. I just get to choose between Julian's albums and Echo and the Bunnymen, and the latter suits more of my moods.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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