Avebury is the perfect English village – pub to the left, neolithic ley lines to the right, and a handful of genteel tourists making hay in the sun. I'm waiting for a fey man who I half expect to turn up dressed in a pixie hat and jester's boots. My memory of Julian Cope is selective – the pop star responsible for brassy postpunk hits such as Reward and Treason with the Teardrop Explodes, the whimsical historian who went on to become a modern antiquarian and wrote a book of the same name, the supreme eclectic who also knocked out books on krautrock and Japanese rock. For 30-odd years I've been singing one of his most tender songs, Tiny Children, to myself ("Oh no, I'm not sure about/ Those things that I cared about/ Oh no, I'm not sure/ Not any more.")

Across the road, a monster of a man stands out – huge, sleeveless black leather jacket, thigh-length black leather boots, jodhpurs, black gloves, shades, menacing military cap, blonde hair streaking down his back and a beard that could be made of barbed wire. He looks like the biker from hell.

Julian Cope walks over and shakes my hand, fiercely. Crusher Cope. "Let's go to my place," he says. We walk for a few seconds until we come to a tiny gingerbread cottage of a home that Cope can barely squeeze into. It's 1pm, and he warns me that he has to head off to Manchester by 6pm. Cope doesn't do things by halves – from drugs to stone circles to interviews. The thing is, he says, once he's started talking, he really does talk. "I find it hard to back off." He sticks his hairy mush straight into mine.

Cope has just written his first novel. As fans might expect, it's expansive, taking in time travel, LSD, football violence, the history of rock'n'roll, Sardinia's 131 highway, CS Lewis, DH Lawrence, paganism and much more. The name says it all, really – One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel. Its characters have a Falstaffian largeness, Beckett-like absurdity and a bonkersness that only Cope is capable of. In his review for the Guardian, Toby Litt called it "one of the most brilliant, serious, funny, life-crammed novels any reader is likely to lay their mitts on".

Cope puts on the kettle before realising he's underdressed. He returns with a huge pair of gauntlets. I ask how clothes-conscious he is. "I'm besotted with making the image … correct. The most important thing for me is to be almost unnoticed." Eh? He smiles. "To look so bizarre that you're unnoticed."

I give him a look, and he says, no, he's being serious. "It's like a cloak of invisibility." He says English people pride themselves on dressing unobtrusively. "Well, this is maximum ostentation, isn't it? It keeps the pseudo-intellectuals down." Because he seems to be screaming for attention, they refuse to give him the satisfaction. "'Don't notice him, don't notice him. Who does he think he is?'" And that suits him perfectly, he says, enabling him to quietly get on with his business. When he does approach people, he says, they are disarmed by his charm, and open up. "I get the truth out of people." When he was touring Europe, researching his book The Megalithic European, he says, any number of old biddies would invite him in for a bite to eat, and before he knew it he'd be introduced to another stone circle.

He's chatting away, supping his tea in shades and gauntlets. Within 10 minutes he has given me a potted history of US abolitionist John Brown ("one of my heroes"), mystic George Gurdjieff ("another of my heroes"), Armenian genocide, Wishbone Ash, the Zapatistas and the history of the swastika. Cope has an astonishing mind, full of knowledge, making connections between the most unlikely things, and sometimes not even bothering with the connections. I tell him to slow down, my head's hurting. He apologises. "My mind's like a repository, and at times it's just unnecessary shit. But it does mean I can access anything." Do his wife, Dorian, and their two daughters, Albany and Avalon, ever tell him to give it a rest? "Yes, all the time! I was banned from even using the word krautrock for about five years after the krautrock book. My youngest remembers arriving at a stone circle and my eldest going, 'No stones! No stones!' Then I was banned from saying, 'I love these stones.' Oh yeah, it must be hard work being married to me." He adores his family, and is forever namechecking them – Dorian is an anarchist, Albany a yoga specialist, Avalon edited the novel, and his octogenarian mother-in-law buys all his clothes.

Cope was born in South Wales to a schoolteacher mother and a father who worked in insurance. His parents had plans for him. "I was going to be Dickens or Shakespeare. Either. I couldn't be John Webster, I had to be Shakespeare, and I couldn't be Mrs Gaskell, I had to be Dickens. Anything below didn't count."

He grew up in Tamworth, Staffordshire, moved to Liverpool to do teacher training, got obliterated on drugs, and became a pop star. His acid consumption is legendary. Cope says his agent only takes on "singular" talents, and singular is the perfect word for him. He is fabulously weird. Gentle, romantic, obsessed with violence and proper scary. "I was the product of very sweet, social-climbing, working-class people … my parents brought me up to be so open-minded that they couldn't bear the result. "

He has said he is a militant pacifist, which makes perfect sense. He would happily kill for peace. He says he had to be tough as a boy because of his middle-class name. "I had violence forced upon me very early on because I was brought up to be posh in a place where we clearly weren't posh, and they called me Julian, so you can't back off. I used to get pummelled, so I got used to pummelling." In his teens he was invited to rugby trials for Staffordshire. "I never played because they told me I was too psycho." A while ago, he was set upon by half a dozen men, and saw them all off. He can't abide state violence, but on an individual level, as a way of getting back at bullies and the badly behaved, he can't recommend it strongly enough. "I was known as being a psycho rather than hard, because I was never a macho man. I was too off my head, falling out of limos and things like that. I was happy to come over violent, because I am violent."

Does that worry him? "No. I'm absolutely at peace with it. Because I'm so far away from violence with people who are in any way decent, but if my psychic hackles rise up … " What raises his psychic hackles? "Racism." Actually, any kind of prejudice. He calls himself a totalitarian socialist.

We head off for the wonderful stone circles across the road. Cope explains that he's living temporarily in the tiny cottage so he can be near the stones for a new book he is writing, but actually he lives in "quite a posh house" a few miles away.

I ask him about the cap. "It's US Air Force. The hat I wear normally is a big postwar Luftwaffe one. I want to do photos in USAF because they are the current bad boys." Why does he want to look like them? "I got into rock'n'roll to be a perpetual windup of people." Does he ever take his hats off? "No, not in public. There's nothing worse than hat hair." I want to see if he's a baldie underneath.

He chats away about the stone circles, and his excitement is palpable. Such an act of faith, he says to lug them from wherever and shape them in a circle, and still nobody knows how they did it. "I just love the need within a human to do it, the compulsion." I ask if he believes in God. "I think I'm a polytheist, in as much as I believe in multiple divinities." One divinity he relates to is the Norse god Odin, who also liked a scrap. "Odin is the giver of the ode, the bringer of the poem. Odin's a very powerful god, but he's got an extraordinarily gentle heart."

Cope still makes music, but his 1980s chart days were fleeting. The Teardrop Explodes were over and done with in four years. "I'm proud that we fucked off. Most people promised that they'd fuck off but didn't. They just kept it together," he says dismissively. He made the top 20 as a solo artist with World Shut Your Mouth in 1986, but that was pretty much it for hit singles.

Did he enjoy being a pop star? "No, I hated it. I hated the assholes. And I hated the fact … it's what Smithy [Mark E Smith] said himself, that all the English bands act like peasants with free milk." What did he mean? "All their belligerence went and they turned into forelock-tugging gruelheads as soon as they were around record company types."

Does he think his brain has been mashed by acid? "Well, there's a Princeton professor of neurology who says a certain amount of brain damage is essential, and I'd always quote him when my mother-in-law was going, 'Julian, I'd really like you to stop taking LSD from the point of view of my grandchildren'. She thought they'd be too messed up by it."

Did he trip most days? "In the Teardrops I lived off acid. We put it in a dropper and we'd drop it into our eyes. It goes straight to your brain, you're tripping within 15 seconds." After the Teardrop Explodes disbanded, he returned to Tamworth, locked his door and didn't open it again for months. He was too wrecked for human contact.

For a long time he didn't take hallucinogenics, then a few years ago he had a bad trip. He wanted to take something that would help him understand a time-traveller in his novel. Sure enough, salvia did the trick. Only too much so. "This drug picked me up and threw me into the bushes. Really awful bramble bushes. I went in and disappeared from the world to such an extent that I just became salad with attitude. I couldn't drive for four months."

How did Dorian cope? "My wife is very understanding of things. She was pleased I had interfaced with Thor on the north Wiltshire Downs … " Could she cope with his behaviour? "No, she was on the edge of losing it." Were the kids scared? "Yes, because Dad wasn't like Dad. I went to live in the annex round the back of our house."

Does he think he's as crazy as many people do? For once, he shakes his head. "I don't think people think I'm crazy any more. I think sometimes they think I'm a genius, and the difference between a genius and bonkers is that bonkers tends to not conclude a project very often. That's why I think people are more generous with their estimations now, because at least I finish them."

Does he think he's a genius? "I think I'm totally visionary because I live in a visionary state. I think I've created works of genius."

As he's having his photo taken, his wife and daughters pass in their 4x4. He waves ecstatically at them. "There's the battle bus again … horraaaaaay! It's got the name Vincebus Eruptum. That was the first-ever heavy metal album, in 1968, by Blue Cheer, teenagers from LA."

We head back to the cottage. Cope says he thinks a lot of people don't like him because he knows what he's about; he has a mission in life. What is it? "To educate and edify, but to hoodwink people into thinking they're only being entertained. So I'm a sneaky motherfucker." He never did complete his teaching degree, but in a way he says that is what he's become. "I'm just disguised. The reprobate image allows me to be more full-on and say things that are more dubious than if I was just wearing country casuals."

We're sitting in the kitchen, drinking another cuppa. To the side are a load of his CDs, propped up by the window. He says his favourite Teardrops song is Reward. I love it, too. It's got one of the best opening lines ("Bless my cotton socks I'm in the news") but I haven't got a clue what it's about. So he explains: "It was written for John Peel. We had a session on his show – Bless my cotton socks I'm in the news, as in, 'We've made it.' I didn't have big dreams."

I ask him about the works of genius. Nothing musical, he says. "The Megalithic European is a genius book because it brings forth stuff that 10 years later, nobody in Europe has approached." He pauses. "131 might be a work of genius."

It's time to leave, and sure enough it is getting on for 6pm. I ask if he'll take off his cap, and he does. There's loads of flattened, sweaty hair underneath. He looks even more feral. He gives me a huge hug, and says nobody asks him to take off his hats. "I'm a fucking wild beast," he says with delight. "Aren't I?"

One Three One by Julian Cope is published by Faber and Faber. Buy it for £11.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk