Pulp, the legendary band fronted by Jarvis Cocker, have revealed that they’ve signed a new recording deal with equally legendary independent label Rough Trade. Although they formed in Sheffield in 1978, when Cocker was 15, Pulp’s biggest success – and it was very big – came in the second half of the 1990s, with smash hit singles such as ‘Common People’ and ‘Disco 2000’, and albums including ‘His ‘N’ Hers’ and ‘Different Class’. They broke up in 2002 but have reformed, on and off, for celebratory live appearances since 2011. But the Rough Trade deal is the first sign of new songs for 22 years. Pulp are back. This is very good news.
Who cares? We could really do with new Pulp songs
Nostalgia and remembrance of one’s teens – what is now called ‘catalogue’ by the labels – powers a large part of the pop music industry. But Pulp are a lot more than that. Pop music that actually improves with age – its age and your own age – is rare, and maybe even counterproductive for a medium that’s all about youth and immediacy and the moment. The news of Pulp’s return sent me back to their catalogue, and I’d forgotten quite how good they were. They were an oddity at the time, but now it’s their peers who have dated, the other records of the time that sound quaint.
Cocker is a peerless lyricist, combining the mundane and the profound, and finding a bit of each in the other. Pulp’s success spawned a slew of imitators; none of them came close, because his use of humour and incidental detail was not, unlike theirs, a campy device but an anchor for emotional truth bombs and yearnings of all kinds.
What particularly struck me on my revisit to Pulp was their songs’ confessional – sometimes staggeringly frank – capturing of masculinity and male sexuality. So many of the hot potatoes of our time – voyeurism, pornography, sexual jealousy – are on full and open display. There is, obviously, a lot of pop music made by heterosexuals. But there is not very much pop music that’s actually about heterosexuality, and from a man’s perspective. Some of Pulp’s disclosures make your hair curl when viewed through a 2020s lens.
‘You started getting fatter three months after I left you,’ Cocker snarls in ‘Razzmatazz’, a song about an ex that is quite venomous and cancellably sexist by modern standards. ‘This Is Hardcore’, the funereally paced and chorus-less seven-minute title track of their 1998 album, is a self-disgusted, spent, dried splotch of a song about porn addiction and what Angus Wilson called ‘the horrible horn’ that was, incredibly, released as a single. Infidelity, shame, aggression and obsession abound.
This dark matter clashed with Pulp’s use of 70s monophonic synthesisers, stylophones and radiophonic workshop bleeps and bloops. At first exposure they could seem almost a comedy act, like the Velvet Underground playing the theme of Robin’s Nest. Listening again today, I had to jump over the same hurdles – why do they sound like that? – as I initially did back in 1992. And Cocker’s very unclassical singing voice, often pushed crazily high and beyond its limits, also took a bit of reacclimatising to. But when those factors clicked again, the rewards were great. ‘A Little Soul’, for example, is a straight-up country and western ballad about estranged fatherhood sung from the father’s point of view. Yes, you can imagine it being sung technically better, but not with the guts and anguish Cocker brings to it.
There was, no doubt, anguish around when Pulp became big in 1995. There was a period when Cocker was crazily famous in a way that nobody is, in quite that particular manner, any more. No wonder it sent him a bit funny. Their follow-ups to the mega success of ‘Common People’ and the infamous Michael Jackson Brit Awards stage invasion – one of the funniest things ever to happen – seemed almost calculated to self-destruct. The following record was far darker, avoiding the obvious choices for singles, as if they wanted to push people away for getting too close. The final Pulp album ‘We Love Life’ slipped out in 2001, was undersold and underselling. It’s a melancholy, autumnal record that’s beautiful but often almost unbearably sad.
The tragically early death of Pulp’s guitarist Steve Mackey last year may have concentrated minds; you only have a certain amount of time to mount a reunion, after all. Whereas many pop returns feel awkward or opportunistic, the prospect of new Pulp material feels exactly right. It is appropriate that a band always so out of time – Cocker, who is now 61, was very late to success, a good ten years ‘too old’ for pop stardom in 1995 – should return at pensionable age. Signing to Rough Trade in 2024, 42 years after they should by rights have done so, is perfect for them. In a strange way, Pulp have always been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But who cares? We could really do with new Pulp songs. We need that edge, that fun and those acid drop tunes again. Let’s all meet up in the year two thousand and twenty five.
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