The music industry is quick to tell you how piracy is killing them, and it surely is. What they’re not as vocal about is their tendency to kill themselves. This week’s example of the industry’s incompetence: Julian Cope’s 1987 album Saint Julian. It’s Cope’s best-selling album and features his biggest hit, “World Shut Your Mouth.” It’s also currently out of print.

In today’s download-o-rama world, there is simply no excuse for an album like Saint Julian to not be available somehow, someway. If the used-CD sites are any indication, there’s a strong market for Saint Julian — the album is fetching between $25 and $100 on Amazon, Half.com, and eBay — so why doesn’t Island Records send digital copies of it to Amazon and iTunes and make that money themselves? It’s as if they don’t know their back catalogs even exist anymore. Ironic, since those catalogs are what propped them up during lean years in the past (and contributed to the record-setting sales peaks of the late ‘90s), but there you go.

Julian Cope is every bit the stereotypical tortured genius. He once posed for an album cover wearing a turtle shell, and there isn’t a single record label he hasn’t fought with. Back in 1987, however, Cope was feeling especially agreeable, and the timing couldn’t have been better. Modern rock finally gained traction as a scene unto itself in 1986 — Popdoser Will Harris has a rather convincing theory that the soundtrack to Pretty in Pink is where it all started — so when Cope released Saint Julian the following year, he had an audience waiting for him. He quickly became a 120 Minutes darling thanks to the Kinks-like “World Shut Your Mouth” (think “Do It Again” Kinks, not “Lola” Kinks) and the turbocharged “Trampolene,” but it’s the album’s third single, “Eve’s Volcano,” that we’ll be discussing today because, well, it has the best remix. Seriously, this post was originally going to be about “Trampolene,” but then I gave it another listen. Great song, flat remix.

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