This interview with Julian Cope, avant garde composer, author and 20th Century Visionary, was done just after the release of his musical creation 20 Mothers, a follow up and response to his "end of the world trilogy" Peggy Suicide, Jehovahkill, and Autogeddon.

In addition to recording, directing and producing 20 Mothers, the quintessential Cope has been exercising his "magic muscle" by penning a book on the standing stones of Britain entitled, The Heads Guide to Ancient Stones. Evolving beyond the media assigned labels of musical genius and radical anarchist, Julian has visited over 500 sites, walking in the footsteps of his ancestors. Traveling these ancient trackways, the honey-voiced baritone says, "I don't sit around with a guitar. I walk on the sacred landscape with a dictaphone and I sing my songs straight out as the Spirit moves me. That's an artist's duty--to recognize what flame moves within him and I recognized a totally different flame." In the following interview, Julian discusses his bardic adventures of getting stoned while doing the Mother's work.

I wanted the same unbalanced mixing and production as Autogeddon, but I wanted to use sounds people would immediately recognize. I wanted them to be able to pick up on that and really get into the enjoyment of the song. There is so much to take in with 20 songs. I wanted 20 Mothers to be a reaction to the way song artists always say, "Well these songs are all my babies." These songs are not my babies at all. They are my Mothers.

Everything but four. What I normally do is I spend ages getting musicians into the right state. Once they are in the right state, then we record it straight away. On first take we'll put down vocals, guitar, synthesizer and drums. Then maybe I'll add bass and sometimes mellotron. We add some backing vocals and that's it. Because all of my arrangements are head arrangements, the group is normally playing off me. My songs are simple; I just say groove. Sometimes the arrangements even come on first takes. That way, it keeps them on their toes and also, I find if you want to put let's say a string quartet on top, you could orchestrate a mistake. You have to make sure that you recognize which mistakes are mistakes and which are just perfect moments.

In a basic way the phases are lunar. I liked that because it was simple and female, but more than anything, I like it because it is good psychology. On a practical level the artist has a job to get people to be insidious, to get them into his trip without making it difficult for them. What I did is I put the songs into four phases and then it's like a good old fashioned double album.

The reason I write so many songs now is I don't have a hell of a lot to do with the song writing. A lot of it just passes through me. I am director and I'm the one who chooses which instruments to use, but I never used to write songs like this. I've been writing songs for 16 years and for the first 11 years, there was a lot of intuition, but it was from the spirit within me. This isn't from within me; this is the spirit.

Yeah, it's totally the light within the land. I write on the land. I just walk. Normally it all comes at once. I've walked over 1500 miles in the last 8 months, always on the neolithic trackways. The whole Avebury system is this huge grid of neolithic trackways, ceremonial trackways. Whenever I am reenacting these walks, I am reenacting the walks of people who repeated these ritual walks for 1500 years. I am now able to descend into the mist, into the other dimension. I can now go for weeks on end, and then go back and go directly into the mist again.

Completely. I've been drawing a diagram to describe the way I've changed. I used to be a lean upward facing arrow going 45 miles an hour, now I'm about 20 times wider. I'm a big fat, slow moving arrow going five miles an hour. I'm cutting through in a far different way. My trip is a holistic trip and some of it is right in the very center of art, like pop music. But some of my voice is out in the corners, in the underground. My job is to reconcile the underground with the center, to bring certain things out of the shadow--to shine a light on the shadows.

One of the reasons I feel so empowered by walking on the land is because I realize a lot of my fans in Britain are now into the ancient stones purely because they went somewhere near them and felt them. These sacred places grab you so quickly. Now my fans send me things and say, "We have found this stone circle, a very obscure one. Have you been there?" They will tell me things like, "We want you to put this one in your book because it's so fantastic." It's such a Gnostic Odyssey. It's managing to reconcile people to the land without them even knowing they are being healed.

Yeah! Whenever you put a new road in, you destroy thousands of years of somebody else's culture, and that always hurts. The ancient landscape is so living and vibrant you only have to go to those power points. The power points were all defined about 3000 B.C., with chambers and standing stones and circles just to remind us. As we found out as we got into a technological age we forgot. But it's still just below the surface. Everyday when I'm not working, I go to The Polisher. A focal point for the Avebury culture, The Polisher is a stone which has a basin in it and five deep polished grooves.

That's right and it was used for 1200 years. It's important people visit this stone just to get a grip on the fact that something is only as sharp as it is because it was used for so long, and that means father to son, mother to daughter, for so long. We need to get that back into our psyche. We need to understand these deep tracks of time beyond the intellectual.

That's it. The thing is this landscape is so central to all of British mythology. You can walk a half a mile and you can be in place of an entirely different legend. Just south of The Polisher is the valley floor where the stones of Stonehenge and Avebury come from. So I go there all the time because there is a natural effervescence in the land. I go onto the valley floor and the cosmic effervescence there is so powerful, I've had what I term as displays of earth magic. Sometimes it's a humorous thing. It's almost as if the Earth is just showing off. You think you understand something and it's saying, "Well get this."

It's true. It's as if it is saying things like, "You think you understand dimensions, well here's another one you didn't even dream of." One of the things I hate is the whole greedhead society attitude in the city. It's a post Judeo-Christian thing where dominion over the land in the Christian way has now been adopted by scientific man and we've actually got an excuse for it. The tragedy is you get these high-powered greedhead assholes who are used to working at ridiculous levels, where workaholism is absolutely acclaimed and worshipped. When it comes to having a vacation, the only way they can possibly do it is to stay at such a ridiculously high level that now you get these assholes who advertise, "We will take you into war zones. We will have you hand gliding in Tibet over the Chinese." What I find so wonderful about the mystic and about the true Gnostic Odyssey is that I only have to go out and walk for a mile and I go into more dimensions than anyone could ever see, and it's in my backyard. The only way the British ever appreciate their own land is you see a couple of witches from San Francisco doing a ritual at Avebury, and you realize these people have traveled seven thousand miles.

I got so sick of traveling to places and the only thing anybody knew about it was it was 104 meters across. I'm trying to invest Britain with all this power by going to all of these places myself and writing about only the places I've been to. We've been to about 500 sites so far. I'm picking the best 250 and I'm making a cosmic guidebook.

Yes, the great thing about the people who set up these sites is they had time, and they enhanced the pilgrimage at all points. For example, as you approach Avebury from the south, people who would have been traveling for days would suddenly see something about 4 miles from Avebury that was like a mini-analogous monument. It would be something to get their psychic hackles raised and ready. The thing with Britain is it's ancient-ness is so just below the surface that's it's kind of shocking. You can still travel all the paths from Avebury to Stonehenge. It's a healing process, and I am try to turn it into a practical thing, to turn it on to other people so it's a sustainable trip.

The most extraordinary experience that I have ever had was at Fyfield Down at a stone, a huge stone which appeared to glow from right inside. As it was glowing from deep inside very strong, and I kept saying to a friend that was there with me, "It's not glowing here in this dimension." So foolishly I put my hand very close to it. My friend came up behind me and just as I put my hand on the very tip of the stone, the energy shot up my arm, down my arm, and flung my friend about 8 feet back.

I traveled to a neolithic cairn on North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, about a hundred miles off the North of Scotland by Callanish, and I heard the classic music. I suddenly heard what everybody always terms "The Music," and I saw the glow in the most cliched way. You also experience such extraordinary time shifts if you're frequently around the stones. The most archetypal things are there. When you descend below the mist, it's all there and it's never the same again.

It would be a village society linked by single-track roads. It would be an artist lead community. The scope of the creativity I have seen in the ancient landscape is so outrageous that anything my dream could ever be is so far below what they achieved. That's what my life is about--to discover and get even the merest glimpse of what they achieved and tell people. If I can open peoples' minds that much more, their mouths will fall open. It's what I said on 20 Mothers. It's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

Part of me was actually dragged by the countryside. I've said to my wife, Dorian, I just hope the Goddess is not some reactionary force because sometimes I feel like I've been so close to her that to have that extraordinary relationship, it leaves you canned (cairned) by it. I was burned by it. I have the most awesome respect for it. That's why to try and do anything in rock'n'roll is a bizarre thing. For some reason, I feel it has a Gegenschein potential.

I practice whatever comes through. My wife and I are both Goddess worshipers. I see the light of the Goddess dancing in all the women who have anything to say. When I talk to them it burns so brightly, and when I talk to men it also burns very brightly in a lot of them. When I see it as a collective, like in an audience, then I see an absolute. God! it's something to see. That's why I was doing a three hour show because I was basically greedy for seeing it. I wanted to scoop it up and say, this is for me.

Yeah! In 1991, for about 6 months I went through a phase of astrally projecting. It was BOOM, like a rocket, out of the canopy of the Earth, way out into the stars. That's when I realized the whole Judeo-Christian system was nonsense. It's like a lower God had come along and put some kind of fog over us.