by Miller, Andy
Book #42 on the List of Betterment was Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler, a highly personal monograph by the former singer of new-wave group The Teardrop Explodes on the subject of German progressive rock in the late 1960s and early 1970s, bands like Tangerine Dream, NEU!, and Amon Düül II.4 It was the sort of cosmic music I imagined the Silver Surfer might hear as he flew between planets or listened to alone in his bedroom after another row with Galactus. Like the Surfer, Julian Cope was a hero of mine from way back; his music had been the soundtrack to my own rites of passage and still featured occasionally on my commute or around the house; at a young age, Alex had learned to bang his bowl on the kitchen table in time to ‘World Shut Your Mouth’. I had no expectation that Krautrocksampler would be a great book in the way that Don Quixote or Anna Karenina were great books; and the impulse to read it now was, like the impulse to read The Essential Silver Surfer, Vol. 1, backward-looking and self-indulgent. But so what? I had earned the right to a little rock’n’roll fun.
But there was a hitch. I had owned Krautrocksampler ever since its publication in 1995. Now that the time had come to read it, however, the book seemed to have vanished into thin air. I could not find it anywhere. It was not with the row of music biographies on the sitting-room bookshelves, nor the stack of Cope LPs in my office, nor in our bedroom with the first editions of Cope’s other books, Head-On, Repossessed and The Modern Antiquarian, nor lurking at the bottom of one of the still-unpacked cardboard boxes in the loft or orange crates at the storage unit up the road. Oh well, I thought with pleasure, I’ll have to buy another one.
Krautrocksampler, however, was out of print and no longer available in the shops. The cheapest secondhand copy I could find via the Internet was priced at almost £100. Scheiße! I liked buying books but I wasn’t mentally ill. Frustrated, I decided to move ahead to the next titles on the List, which were Beowulf, The Portrait of a Lady and The Handmaid’s Tale, until the safe place in which I had carefully stashed my copy of Krautrocksampler revealed itself.
But the book’s sudden inaccessibility nagged at me like a neurosis. I needed to read it now, I decided, not after Beowulf or The Portrait of a Lady or The Handmaid’s Tale, but right now, otherwise the project would not be following its proper course – perhaps I was mentally ill. I looked up Krautrocksampler in the British Library’s online database. If I took a day’s holiday, theoretically it should be possible to read the nation’s copy from cover to cover at a desk in the St Pancras reading rooms. The prospect of this actually rather thrilled me, in a viscerally geeky sort of way. I had certainly had worse holidays.
Scanning down the Google page of search results for Krautrocksampler, however, my eye latched onto something else. It was a link to the blog of a Julian Cope fanatic whose owner had posted the whole of Krautrocksampler as a PDF file, cover scans and all. I clicked and downloaded the PDF to my hard drive immediately, where it has lived illegally ever since. It is open on my desktop right now as I sit typing these words and listening to Faust. Bloggers, please forgive me. It seems I owe you an apology.5
Rock star, Gnostic, field researcher, peace warrior, astral traveller, cartoon character: if Julian Cope did not exist, Marvel comics would have to invent him – the Wandering Julian. As a matter of fact, The Teardrop Explodes had taken their name from a panel in a Daredevil comic. After The Teardrops’ split, Cope ingested mythological quantities of LSD and recorded three sublime solo albums: World Shut Your Mouth, Fried and Saint Julian. Throughout this period he always had, and understood the importance of, Great Hair. In December 1989, he experienced a series of ‘powerful and extremely positive’ Visions, the effects of which were to prove life-changing. Cope declared himself as a mystic and a shaman – the ‘Arch-drude’. He has pursued this idiosyncratic path ever since, following the Muse wherever She leads – mapping the megalithic sites of Britain and Europe, issuing collections of vocal mantras, ‘meditational grooves’ and ‘ambient metal’ via his Head Heritage website, delivering three-hour lectures at the British Museum in full Odin-inspired face paint, engaging in direct political and ecological protest across the British Isles and, whenever and wherever possible, staying in Travelodges – the UK’s answer to a Motel 6 or Days Inn. Latterly, for reasons of both artistic and follicular expediency, the Great Hair has been surmounted by a Great Hat: ‘Actually, it’s 1955 Luftwaffe; it’s not Nazi,’ he told Jon Savage. ’I put the braids on ‘cos I thought it made it look heavier. I thought, I’ve got to be really careful here, because I’m not a Nazi.’6
Cope approaches everything he does with, in Savage’s phrase, ‘a curious kind of ludicrous rigour’. It was in the late 1980s, around the time he received his Visions, that Cope happened to read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. ‘[It] devoured me and immersed me,’ he later wrote. ‘It was startlingly individual and like nothing else, yet its language spoke across the ages and called out to me as a Universal of Experience. It lay inside me forever and I knew that the rock’n’roll which I was forever seeking out also did precisely that.’ Well, exactly. He continued to expand his mind by reading Gurdjieff and Jung, Lester Bangs and John Sinclair; and books in turn shaped the music Cope was now making. 1992’s Krautrock-leaning Jehovahkill LP came with a subtitle – That’ll Be the Deicide – and a booklet that featured a title page, poetry, photographs of stone circles, diagrams and quotes from writers as diverse as William Blake, George Bernard Shaw and Philip K. Dick.
But the fire sparked by The Master and Margarita fanned out beyond music. ‘1989 had seen a change come over me which was utterly consuming and coupling me with the cosmos,’ Cope remembered ten years later. ‘I had never been a writer or keeper of neat notebooks, yet I now needed to write continuously.’ This compulsion found its outlet in the four extraordinary books Cope published over the next decade: two volumes of gonzo autobiography, Head-On and Repossessed, his bestselling gazetteer of Britain’s stone circles and burial mounds, The Modern Antiquarian, and, somewhere in the middle, Krautrocksampler: One Head’s Guide to the Great Kosmische Musik – 1968 Onwards.
Krautrocksampler is many things – a memoir, a history module, a fan letter, an exegesis, a checklist of records – but to me, reading it off a laptop in the third millennium, it was a revelation. It seemed to me that what Cope was attempting in the book was almost superheroic. Utilising the tools and language the 37-year-old author had at his disposal – a passion for the music, a willingness to dig down and research, his raging infatuation with Bangs and Sinclair, his mission as a self-proclaimed ‘Shamanic Rock’n’Rolling Inner-Space Cadet’, plus a devotional belief in the transformative power of all of the above – he had taken the awe he felt as a teenager ‘lying in a caravan in Tamworth in Staffordshire’ listening to John Peel spin ‘Hallogallo’ by NEU! and transubstantiated it into a sacred text of his own devising, a work of righteous, riotous propaganda, which was intended to speak to Modern Man, right here and right now. And as Cope would say, it fucking Achieved!!! Krautrocksampler was not Beowulf or The Handmaid’s Tale or The Portrait of a Lady but it would not be denied. It was unquestionably a Great Book.
‘I was a teenage Krautrocker,’ Cope stated in his introduction. ‘I wrote this short history because of the way I feel about the music, that its supreme Magic & Power has lain Unrecognised for too long.’ I had thought reading Krautrocksampler to be a backward-looking and self-indulgent act; actually it was neither. As I scrolled through the PDF, I realised that Cope had indeed fucking Achieved!!! Out of his past, Cope had alchemised something Powerful and NEU! and never, ever Düül.
I finished Krautrocksampler in a little under three hours. Then I read it again, this time to the accompaniment of Monster Movie by Can, Affenstunde by Popol Vuh, and Walter Wegmüller’s double LP Tarot: in Cope’s persuasively unscientific analysis, ‘THE SOUND OF THE COSMOS!!!’ Why, I asked myself, was this incredible book unavailable to buy? Surely there was a readership for it? I subsequently learned that Cope himself had taken it out of print. Obeying t
he law of unintended consequences, what he had initiated as a spontaneous act of fandom had inadvertently brought about a Krautrock revival, which had in turn led to criticism from ‘Kosmische Musik’ buffs that Krautrocksampler was not merely incomplete and unreliable but also offensive in its use of the term ‘Krautrock’. In a statement posted on his website, Cope responded thus: ‘I don’t feel like really updating the book much – it’s a period piece written at a time when no fucker was interested and now all these neo-Krautheads are at me saying it’s out of date. Fuck them! . . . Krautrock is about enlightenment, not complete-ism for some bourgeois record-collector to get purist about.’7
Now Krautrocksampler passed from hand to hand on the Internet, from Head to Head, like samizdat or those bootleg editions of The Master and Margarita fifty years earlier. Perhaps Cope preferred it that way. Decoupled from the commercial realm, tantalisingly unavailable yet absolutely free, the book could renew its mission of enlightenment. Abandoned, it drifted through cyberspace, a monolith beaming an evolutionary message to any ape capable of receiving it.
That ape was me.
It was about now that I experienced a life-changing Vision of my own. Krautrocksampler was not the best book in the List of Betterment – that book was still to come – but it proved to be the most inspiring over the long haul. The book you are reading now would not exist without it.
As I said earlier, turning out reviews for the blog had been fundamentally unsatisfying. After all, a series of blog posts was unlikely to become more than the sum of its parts, just as a set of Silver Surfer comics doesn’t add up to a real book simply because you print it as one. I felt, though, that the cumulative effect of all this dangerous reading was propelling me towards something ominous and inevitable and unmistakably like a new book of my own. The writer in me was stirring again, pushing the editor aside.
Krautrocksampler showed the way. If Cope could turn a teenage inspiration into something amusing, audacious and useful, surely I might do the same? Obviously, my life was nothing like the Arch-drude’s nor did I have his gift for heroic overstatement; any book I wrote would draw from a more mundane pool of experience and utilise fewer CAPITALS!!! and Exclamation Marks. But Krautrocksampler certainly proved it was possible to go back to the past, to ‘those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened’, and in doing so, revitalise both the present and the future. And if a list of fifty Krautrock records could do that, then why not fifty books?
So, improbable as it may seem, Krautrocksampler did offer me some kind of an answer – if not to life, the universe and everything, then to my long dark tea-time of the soul. If you squinted, you could just about make out the COSMOS.
Around the time he conceived Krautrocksampler, Cope recorded a shimmering version of Roky Erickson’s ‘I Have Always Been Here Before’, adapting the original lyrics to encompass his recent shamanic Visions, the long barrows of Wiltshire and an essay by Carl Jung, no mean feat in four and a half minutes.
‘The childish man shrinks back from the unknown world
And the grown man is threatened by sacrifice.
Whosoever protects himself from what is new and strange
Is as the man who is running from the past.’8
Here, hiding in plain hearing, was the lesson not just of Krautrocksampler, but of the entire List of Betterment. Do not fear the present or the past; use them both to face the future.
Perhaps the time had come, if not to put away childish things, then to share them with the child who lived in the room next door. I gathered together my stray comics and annuals and The Essential Silver Surfer, Vol. 1 and left them in a pile in the corner of Alex’s bedroom. Let him find them for himself when he’s ready, I thought. They’ll give us something to talk about when he’s older.
Postscript: Be careful what you wish for . . .
I am sitting at my desk, trying to think of a good way to tie up this chapter, when there is a knock at the office door.
‘Dad?’
‘Yes, Alex, what is it?’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Dad, when you were a kid, who was your favourite Spider-Man villain?’
‘Oh I can’t really remember. Name a few.’
‘Mysterio, Master of Illusion.’
‘Yes, I liked him.’
‘The Vulture.’
‘He was all right.’
‘The Kangaroo.’
‘I don’t remember him. Was there really one called the Kangaroo or have you just made that up?’
Alex goes into his bedroom and returns a moment later to show me the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #81, ‘The Coming of the Kangaroo!’
‘He does massive leaps, look.’
‘I can see. Does he carry a little version of himself around in a pouch too?’
‘Dad! Was Galactus your favourite villain in Spidey?’
‘I suppose so. But he wasn’t really in the Spider-Man comics much. He was more in Fantastic Four or The Silver Surfer.’
‘Who was your favourite in Spidey then?’
‘Er . . . I liked the Green Goblin.’
‘The first one or the second one?’
‘Um, look, sorry, can I just get on with this?’
‘Oh sure.’
Later . . .
‘Dad?’
‘Alex?’
‘In The Silver Surfer, is Mephisto the Devil?’
‘Yes. Well, no. Sort of. It’s tricky to explain.’
‘Is Son Of Satan the son of Mephisto?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Is he really the son of Satan, then?’
‘Er . . .’
‘Do Mephisto and Satan ever meet?’
‘Alex, I just need to finish this bit.’
Later . . .
‘Alex, you know you were asking earlier if Mephisto and Satan ever meet? Well, I texted Stewart to ask him because it’s the sort of thing he would know. He says, “Ah. I believe that Satan and Mephisto are two separate entities. Satan is definitely a character and I remember a line that said he is ‘but one of many rulers of various pocket dimensions known as hell’ or something. Hope this helps.”’
‘Dad, when you were a kid, what were your favourite Marvel comics?’
‘Spider-Man, X-Men, Silver Surfer. Fantastic Four. Avengers. I liked them all. I really got into them when I was about your age. They’re one of the things I think of when I think about my childhood. I wonder what you’ll think about when you look back on your childhood.’
‘You writing your book for ages and ages and ages and then saying you’d finished it and then writing it some more for ages after that.’
‘Oh . . . ’
‘But I got to see you a lot, so I don’t mind.’
‘Thanks, Alex.’
And, not for the first time during the writing of this Greatbooksampler, I close the door behind me and weep like Norrin Radd.
Book 45
Atomised (Les Particules élémentaires) by Michel Houellebecq
(Supplementary Books Three to Ten – Whatever; Platform; Lanzarote; The Possibility of an Island; The Map and the Territory; H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life; The Art of Struggle, all by Michel Houellebecq; Public Enemies by Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy)
‘One of the readers’ emails that gave me the most pleasure in my life was one where some guy started relating (not without talent) different anecdotes from his personal life; then he realized that that wasn’t enough, that he should have sketched out his main themes, set out his principal characters, marked out the social boundaries, a whole bunch of things that he was happy for me to do in his place, and concluded with this sentence, which was exactly what I had wanted to hear for a long time: “Thanks for all the hard work.”’
Public Enemies
Another Word of Explanation
Do you recall how, at the beginning of this book, way back in the introduction, there was a
long quotation from the author Malcolm Lowry about a book being like ‘a sort of machine’? It started like this: ‘It can be read simply as a story which you can skip if you want. It can be read as a story you will get more out of if you don’t skip.’ And you read that paragraph and thought, ‘What? What’s that got to do with anything?’ Well, the chapter that follows is what it had to do with. It’s rather weird and confusing and you may want to skip it. Were I the editor of this book, I would have omitted it entirely. But I am not the editor, I am the author. For a little while yet, the author is the one controlling the machine.
What follows is a fan letter that Andy Miller wrote to the writer Michel Houellebecq shortly after finishing his novel Atomised. Like most fan letters it is garbled and gushing and a bit of an embarrassment but it catches something a more elegant or considered appreciation might not: the rush of excitement, the absolute surrender, that occurs just a few times in our lives, when we read a book for the first time and think: yes, the world is like that.
Before Atomised, Andy Miller had read a great many great books; recently, he had even been inspired to start writing a new book of his own. What this letter to Houellebecq captures, however, is the heady intoxication of reading for its own sake. Of course, when we’re intoxicated, we sometimes do things we later regret. In the course of the communiqué, Miller bangs on about Neil Young and muses at length on subjects as diverse as hero-worship, the writer Douglas Adams, the function of art, etc., culminating in a knowingly obtuse ‘cryptographic puzzle’, which the author suggests contains the key to this entire book! As if.
If you do decide to proceed from here, I must remind you of another of the author’s statements from the introduction: ‘I am not urging you to read all the books in this book.’ From its first page, Andy Miller felt that Atomised was a great book, the greatest he had read for years, as you will learn if you choose not to skip this chapter. I agree with him. But you do not need to feel the same way. Like the members of Andy Miller’s book group, you may have read Atomised a few years ago and hated it; or, based on what you have seen in newspapers and magazines, you may feel you know all you need to about its controversial author – tant pis! Try not to let it obscure the point of this bit, which is: never abandon the possibility that, however old you are, there might still be a book out there that will make you gush and garble and do something you might regret. It means you’re still alive.
