"I'm wearing these bondage keks because I'm a Promethean figure, a bound figure," says Julian Cope, possibly with some irony. Cope, one of British pop's few great eccentric survivors, has reinvented himself in the years since his last tussles with the charts.
As well as publishing books on krautrock and paganism, he's one of the few pop stars to have released their own material with some dignity. He has always been a slightly ridiculous caricature - a crazed, wide-eyed mystic with the voice of an ageing public school boy preaching the shamanic properties of rock'n'roll. You might imagine him being played by Bill Nighy at his most deliciously hammy. Cope has been peddling this shtick for some time. Unfortunately it has worn a little thin and carries a faint, very English, whiff of embarrassment.
There are two sets, separated by an appearance from San Francisco's Comets on Fire, one of Cope's "favourite bands of recent years", who play a dumb but entertaining Stooges-derived stoner thrash with considerably more spirit than the not dissimilar noise churned out by Cope's band. There is something sad about watching a man in midlife presiding over shoddy bar-band approximations of the music you imagine him loving as a callow teenager.
In Cope's case, it is the Doors, Motörhead and the Stooges. The same descending bass riff, borrowed from the Stooges' I Wanna Be Your Dog, seems to resurface in several guises and as if to underline how second-hand the idiom is, Cope frequently sings in a nasal American accent. The pop sheen of older material barely survives this mauling, Cope sounding uncommitted and often struggling to hit notes. The new songs are simply witless, particularly World War Pigs, which, however well meant, has the political and musical subtlety of a football chant.
How much longer Cope's legend can be sustained by this farrago seems moot: "I don't wanna listen to Lynnyrd Skynnyrd," grumbled one punter on his way out.
· At the Liverpool Academy tonight. Box office: 0870 771 2000.
