Julian Cope – Floored Genius 2 - Best Of The BBC Sessions 1983-91 (1993)

The first episode of Floored Genius, released the previous year, was pretty much a best of Teardrop Explodes and Cope's solo work up to then, while this compiles a series of BBC Sessions, mostly from 1983-6, the earliest days of Cope's solo career, with a couple of later ones tacked on the end.

This had sat on the CD racks at Oxfam in Market Harborough, hopelessly overpriced (more than double the Discogs median price) until a reduction forced it into my grubby mitts.

So, let's go chronologically (as the collection almost does). We start with a 1983 John Peel session, introducing the joyous early single The Greatness & Perfection Of Love, the slower Head Hang Low (both to later appear on the World Shut Your Mouth album) and Hey High Class Butcher, an altogether more experimental minimalist outing.

He's back with Peel a little over a year earlier, with the same formula - a bright single Sunspots, a slower album track Me Singing, and something minimal, which never made an album, the short, pleasant Hobby.

For the Jensen session of 1984 (actually a couple of months before the Peel) he's far more experimental, with the upbeat, frankly bonkers 24a Velocity Crescent (b-side to Greatness & Perfection) before a couple of tracks from Fried, Laughing Boy, O King Of Chaos and getting more lively, Reynard The Fox. These are nice, but don't add anything to Fried.

In the run up to Christmas 1984, Cope did a session for Janice Long, Kicking off with a plodding version of Pulsar (to appear on the Saint Julian album a couple of years later), followed by two songs which don't seem to have seen the light anywhere else, the mysterious Crazy Farm Animal and the unremarkable Christmas Mourning, and there's a track from a second Long session, a couple of years later - Planet Rider: Transmitting, a glorious mess, melding a gentle song into an understated guitar riff and some old fashioned rocking.

But perhaps the highlight is the 1991 Peel session and the Soul Medley, a crazy psychedelic confusion of Funkadelic's Free Your Mind, the Mothers' Are You Hung Up, before Cope's own Hung Up And Hanging Out To Dry. It's a fantastic, sprawling eight minute mess, followed by You, from the fantastic Peggy Suicide album, the album ending with a fine version of Double Vegetation.

All in all, while this is a decent snapshot of Cope's output in the first few years of his solo career, none of the album tracks here feel like they're adding anything, making their release a bit superfluous, and of the non-album tracks only the Soul Medley stands out. nevertheless it's an enjoyable listen, but I'll probably stick with the studio albums, which are ace!

Link to album tracks

3* - decent performances of these songs, but nothing really added to the Cope legacy here.