IN brightest yellow, the brochure for the second Harrogate International Festival Fringe bore the bold statement of intent: Be Different.

Different from the main festival, certainly, but as it turned out, also different in its manner of performance. One-time lippy leader of the Teardrop Explodes Julian Cope needs little encouragement to be theatrical, while Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys has made an art of a one-man show that combines whimsy and left-field Welsh wit with sound experiments and beautiful melodies.

Both are a trifle erratic, even eccentric you might say, but that is why they are so suited to the free-form format of a festival gig.

Fringe programme co-ordinator Graham Chalmers brought Gruff Rhys to Harrogate Theatre on what turned out to be Gruff’s 41st birthday midway through the month-long fest.

Gruff had already gratefully received the loan of a melodeon from a local musician in the absence of his own, thinking nothing of having to adapt it to his own sound designs, as he likes a challenge as much as a boffin does, and when Graham produced a cake, Gruff borrowed the world’s tiniest pen knife from the audience to cut slices for everyone. The Fringe environment has that kind of effect.

Julian Cope, signed up for the festival’s last night by Knaresborough’s progressive promoters Kula Productions, needs no invitation to be larger than life. Hair down to his shoulders, he lived up to his old Wilder album title, and to his side was a big bass drum bearing the message You Can’t Beat Your Brain For Entertainment.

Cope’s brain gives him plenty, assisted, by his own admission, by substances that have informed Cope songs both old and new, the latest three-month trip being catalogued in Julian Of The Underworld.

Anti-establishment, anti-Jesus, and now writing a book offering a new perspective on Lives Of The Prophets, he is ever more the outsider at 52, who nevertheless loves his country, or at least his idea of his country.

In two roaming sets, he played predominantly solo, as he switched between glittering gold guitar, wheezing mellotron and agent-provocateur, self-deprecating storytelling.

Steering clear of his biggest hits, he nevertheless cast off his “phobic exclusion zone” of his band past by playing Teardrop Explodes minor marvels such as Like Leila Khaled Said. Who else but Cope would stick Madonna, Margaret Thatcher and Courtney Love in rowing boats in a new folk song worthy of Edward Lear? Cope is a psychedelic national treasure.