Julian Cope - Peggy Suicide - Review

Cope was a music press fixture at the start of the 90s, habitually cropping up in pictures on the news pages wearing a papier-mâché head on protest marches. There was a danger of the lovable eccentric eclipsing the recording artist, until the bold and daring Peggy Suicide came along.

Still regarded by many fans as his masterpiece, the 76- minute album found Cope addressing the political, social and ecological topics that had always concerned him, with renewed clarity and vision. The trippy dance psychedelia of Leperskin rages against the poll tax, while Safesurfer is an ominous prog rumination on the ever-present threat of AIDS.

There’s a breathtaking sprawl of musical styles on display, the experimentation of previous albums (Skellington, Droolian) still evident, but tempered with a more accessible and traditional rock blueprint, while the single, Beautiful Love, is arguably Cope at his most commercial since The Teardrop Explodes troubled the charts.

Terry Staunton
Record Collector

Record Collector is the world's leading authority on rare and collectable records. Launched in 1979, it is now the UK's longest-running music magazine.

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