Track of the Week: The Teardrop Explodes: Reward (1981)

“If The Teardrops had not been composed of three (or more) certified screwball sociopaths, they might have been bigger than The Beatles.” Melody Maker

That The Teardrop Explodes actually managed to hold it together for as long as they did is something of a surprise; even more bizarre is the fact that they managed to create some great music and even have considerable success in the charts. Julian Cope, the band's leader, vocalist and bassist, was a student at Liverpool spending most of his time and money on records as diverse as The Seeds and The Doors through to Krautrock and the first tremors of post-punk. At least, when he wasn't generally causing anarchy with his mates. After hanging around in imaginary bands with various future members of Echo and The Bunnymen and The Wah!, Cope eventually got his act together with equally deranged characters, eventually settling on the line-up of Gary Dwyer on drums, Alan Gill on guitar and David Balfe on keyboards. They recorded the brilliant debut album 'Kilimanjaro' and a string of amazing singles before they started taking industrial quantities of pretty much any drug that came into their path, started behaving even more crazily and after the unfocused 'Wilder' album, split up. Julian Cope would go on to have an erratic yet compelling and often brilliant carrier, similarly defined by his musical eclecticism and his wayward behaviour. Seriously, it's worth tracking down a copy of 'Head-On', Cope's memoirs of the punk era and his time in the Teardrops, for the unbelievable lunacy that these guys got up to on a regular basis.
The Teardrop Explodes' music was a bizarre manic synthesis of all of Cope's musical influences, but this was often what made them brilliant, if also providing their Achilles Heel. The 1981 single 'Reward' is perhaps their finest moment. Driven by a Bond-theme bass line and punching brass, and filled out with psychedelic keyboards, it sounds like nothing else, and is certainly miles away from the monochrome austerity of the post-punk movement. It also contains perhaps the greatest opening line of any song ever, in Cope's cheekily sarcastic 'Bless my cotton socks I'm in the news!'. The lyrics continue in typically daft Teardrop fashion, but who cares when the music's this good? Julian Cope was never a strong singer, but by the this stage he had achieved a weird kind of charisma by almost willing himself to be a star, and his sheer force of personality manages to make up for his limited vocal range. The band's performance is excellent, with everyone but the rhythm section and spooky keyboards cutting back for the verses, until brass swells lead everyone into the rowdy chorus. The energy spills right over at the end, with a fantastically unhinged trumpet solo. The song's catchiness meant that it became a hit, and the band got to play it on Top of The Pops, turning this group of warped eccentrics briefly into huge stars. It couldn't last, of course, and the Teardrops story very quickly descended into madness from here on in, but at least Copey's solo career has provided consolation for the Teardrops' early demise - some 24 years after the band's dissolution, he has continued to make music as bizarre, indulgent, manic and often as brilliant as his first bands', whilst continuing to champion outsider music and pursuing an interest in megalithic history. He is one of pop music's true great eccentrics.