(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

The Teardrop Explodes were one of the leading groups of the Liverpool psychedelic revival of the late 1970s. But theirs was not a simple, calligraphic revival of 1960s sounds. It was rather a fusion of new wave spirit and psychedelic spirit. The result was a song format that was as melodic as it was bizarre. A more formal than emotional affair—though “formal” here in the sense of structural renewal, not imitation of existing structures. Their greatest masters were the Doors, but reinterpreted through the eyes of Television and Brian Eno.

Julian Cope’s Teardrop Explodes debuted in 1979 with two singles that combined Farfisa-band style and a panic-driven sense of primitivism with the obsessive rhythm of dark punk: Sleeping Gas and Bouncing Babies. The material from that period was later collected on Piano (Document, 1990).

The first album, Kilimanjaro (Mercury, 1980), stood out for hypnotic, atmospheric and lush songs such as Treason, Went Crazy, Books, Reward, Ha Ha I'm Drowning, Poppies In The Field, Suffocate, arranged with funky horns, disco rhythms, melodic keyboards and lysergic dissonances; but no less striking were the more experimental pieces, in which Cope’s melodicism and David Balfe’s keyboard lines unfolded into more introspective and visionary harmonic constructions (When I Dream and Thief Of Bagdad, and the Fall-like punkabilly of Brave Boys).

Cope’s mannerist and neo-romantic psychedelia also left its mark on the gems of Wilder (Mercury, 1981): Passionate Friend, Bent Out Of Shape, and Great Dominions.

After the band split, following a third unfinished album, Everybody Wants To Shag (Fontana, 1990), Julian Cope would go on to fully unleash his eccentric personality.