The goalkeeper's fear of infinity

Of all the admirably barking pop stars thrown up in the 50 or so years of rock & roll history, in Britain we can proudly claim more than our fair share of moon-shouters. What’s more, wheareas American musicians tend to go in for gun-toting (Phil Spector, Ted Nugent) or public breakdowns (Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey), over here we tend to serve up unclassifiable eccentrics such as Vivian Stanshall and the self-designated third Earl of Harrow, Screaming Lord Sutch.

Alas, both are now dead. The mantle of oddness falls on the likes of the KLF’s Bill Drummond (who, these, days exhorts people to do pleasant subsurrealist tasks like bake cakes and deliver them to complete strangers).

Head and shoulders above any others, though, is the ‘drude’ himself, ‘Saint’Julian Cope. Literally head and shoulders, as it happened, during the Poll Tax riots, when our Jules reputedly wandered among the rioters dressed as a giant.

Cope came to notice in the early eighties with The Teardrop Explodes. It was only later, after going solo, that he went all interesting, becoming a devotee of prehistoric Britain. This culminated in his lavish and useful guide to visiting megalithic sites around the country (and included some particularly joyous essays, including “Why the Romans were so heavy”).

It’s nice to see Julian is still on top form, causing the evacuation of the British Museum. My eye was caught, however, by his theory of the goalkeeper as shaman. As any fule kno, goalkeepers are always themselves deeply eccentric. Cope suggests that this is not because they are peculiar loners, but because they’re channelling the goddess.

“All those people gathered in an unroofed stadium [is] not unlike what must have gone on in pagan sanctuaries. The goalkeeper is the ultimate shaman, guarding the gates to the underground, wearing the No 1 jersey in a different colour and not seeming to be part of the team.”

So that explains it. It’s because he’s protecting the underworld that, on Sunday last, David James looked as though he wanted the earth to open up swallow him up.