Julian Cope, the former lead singer of the chart-topping 80’s pin-ups The Teardrop Explodes, is playing a secret solo show in the back room of a community arts centre in the Berkshire frontier town of Aldershot. Union Jacks flutter in all the pubs. Cope’s hair is, by some margin, the longest in the surrounding area. Onstage alone in a floppy hat and sunglasses, Cope surveys the small but swollen space and modestly takes stock of the situation; “”I know I’m not current,” he laughs, “And I don’t believe I’m timeless. But I am in my forties, and I’m in sight of fifty. And once you’re over fifty, sixty’s not far away. And then you are allowed to be legendary. So I just have to keep my head down and keep working. And then I can be legendary.”

To many, the antics that characterise Cope’s career are already the stuff of legend. Cope famously appeared on the cover of his second solo album wearing only a turtle shell, protested against the Poll Tax dressed as a giant baby from space, and is currently winning new fans in America with his super-dense, ‘ambient-metal’ project LAMF. To most people, Cope admits, he is “that World Shut Your Mouth guy”, best known for the anthemic smash hit to which even Terry Wogan succumbed in 1986. But perhaps his strangest achievement is the completion of two heavyweight books on Prehistoric Archaeology, the second of which, The Megalithic European, is published this month.

1998’s The Modern Antiquarian, a colour coded gazetteer of British prehistoric sites was the answer to a prayer for those of us who’d spent years trekking across moors to stone circles on advice pieced together from quasi-mystical pamphlets or dry academic tomes. Stand at the centre of the Orkney mainland with The Modern Antiquarian in your hand and lost civilisations rise up around you in three dimensions. Now Cope has applied the same utilitarian ethic to the monuments of the continent in The Megalithic European. At his home in the Wiltshire countryside, within striding distance of the stone circle of Avebury, Julian Cope holds forth.

“My job is to make un-cool things seem cool,” he says, his foot up on a kitchen chair like a rock star bestriding a monitor. “If you can find a way of presenting these things correctly, people will get into them. And if you can get people out of believing that stone circles are about Wellington boots and anoraks, that they can be elegant, why not do it? When I put together my Scott Walker compilation album for example, he was so in the boneyard, he was just though of as a git, but I am a total field worker. I get into things and go to places, and see if they do it for me, and if they are going to do it for other people. Is there enough remaining above ground? Or if the thing is underground, is it superbly underground? Is it the mother of all underground temples? Is it a hypogeum from hell? Can you go in and lose yourself?” Initially, I’m uncertain whether Cope is using subterranean prehistoric temples as a metaphor for the 60’s balladeer Scott Walker, or whether he is actually talking about subterranean prehistoric temples. Then I realise, it’s both, at the same time. Cope in conversation doesn’t so much free-associate as make entirely unrelated ideas occupy exactly the same space. And he’s barged into the world of archaeology with the open-minded enthusiasm of the very gentlemen amateurs whose work the science was historically built on. Has he been welcomed?

“There’s two types of Archaeologists,” Cope explains, putting down a toy wooden guitar which he is making for his ten year old daughter, who wants to attend the local Halloween event as Angus Young from AC/DC. “The older guys are pleased to be able to debrief to someone. They’re like spies with all this information so they can afford to be generous. Aubrey Burl, who writes books with flat names like “The Stone Circles Of The British Isles.”, and I get on really well. I can call him up and go, “Aubrey I think I’ve found a new stone circle.” And he goes, “I suppose it’s quite possible but don’t tell my wife because I am too old to start visiting there now.” If I’ve ever had a problem it was with Archaeology’s middle management, who felt we should have taken more official routes to publish that sort of book.” Invited to lecture at the British Museum in 2001, Cope chose the subject of The Norse God Odin in Christian symbolism. “I went from Odin to Christ via the various pagan pre-cursors of Christ. The very nice old guys at The British Museum in dicky-bows had been saying, “You’re not the normal kind of person we have here, but you do it the way you want.” So I did the lecture in full face-paint and five inch platform shoes, two nights, sold out. It was amazing!”

In The Modern Antiquarian, Cope’s analysis reflected his own performance background. Stones with quartz in them would look great glittering in the moonlight if you were a prehistoric audience on mild natural hallucinogens watching the prehistoric equivalent of Julian Cope. At the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, earlier this year, Cope’s own persona seemed influenced by his archaeological imaginings. In psychedelic combat clothes, giant shoes and face-paint, Cope became an absurd and impregnable priest-clown figure, and spent most of his two hour set in the audience, declaiming over a wilfully-primitive punk-metal backdrop. “Being on stage, dealing with an audience, with hysteria, with a really barbarian art-form, is the closest you get to a religious experience,” he concludes. “The shaman and the showman are inextricably linked. Little Richard recognised that. Jerry Lewis was damned from the moment he opened his mouth. Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele, however, were never in any danger.”

The Aldershot show was supposed to be a low-key date, re-acquainting Cope with live performance after months of writing. But with Cope, nothing is ever low key. The fanatical fan-base are out in force, undiluted by the less evangelistic onlookers present in bigger venues. Cope is derailed by enthusiastic interjections from proprietary fans and the show lurches from one interruption to another. There’s a section of every Cope crowd that think he is their own private cult figure, a rock legend they can still reach out and touch, insult or fondle at will. Tonight, guitar in hand, Cope appears happy to indulge this clammy notion at close range. But there’s a mighty Four Wheel Drive in the car park waiting to whisk him back to Wiltshire, where, one suspects, he is already planning his next great adventure. “I’m in a unique position,” he had said, earlier, “but through luck, not judgement. There are people from my time, like Billy Bragg or Nick Cave, still doing everything with real dignity. But they have their feet in the officially straight world. There might be a South Bank Show on them. But me? I’m doing an Ambient Metal installation in a Greek Art Gallery. And writing about Ziggurats.”