Ask me about cult heroes, and I can already smell the dust. Because cult heroes always seem to belong to the past, don’t they? It’s a musky old business, like an archeological dig in a giant record crate: we rummage around looking for neglected names to excavate and re-evaluate with the benefit of hindsight. There’s an undeniable whiff of history about the whole thing.
But I don’t think you always need the safety net of elapsed time to spot a cult hero. They’re here right now, in their prime, walking and working among us – even if they’ve fallen between the cracks. Mine is Tahita Bulmer, lead singer of NYPC. In 2005, NYPC – or, as they were called then, New Young Pony Club – were monstrously hyped. In the past 10 years, they’ve slowly slipped out of mainstream favour. And yet, she and her band have carried on just the same, making music that’s ridiculously smart, fun, inventive and ambitious; the type of pop music we always say we crave. It baffles me that more people don’t seem to notice.
Some people will dismiss NYPC as a once-trendy new rave band. But there’s a stubborn subversiveness to Bulmer, and her lyrics in particular, that seems to whoosh over people’s heads. Kim Gordon’s recent memoir Girl in a Band was a depressing reminder of how dimwitted the hoary old goats of rock culture can be, while Björk’s statements following the release of Vulnicura, which saw her male collaborators given as much credit as her for her own record, reiterated how hard female artists still have to work to get due respect.
That fight has always been part of Bulmer’s lyrics: listen to NYPC’s debut single Ice Cream, released 10 years ago this month, and she meets it head-on. Hidden among all the naughty, confectionery-based come-ons (“Drink me like a liqur/ C’mon and dip your dipper”) is her belief that brains trump beauty every time. “I can be the sauce you crave,” she brags. “I can spell what you can’t say.” It’s an idea that crops up on 2010’s gloomy, glistening Before the Light, too, when she insists she should only be judged by her smarts rather than looks. “Don’t look at me now,” she sings. “Look at my intellect. The things I leave behind for footsteps.” Pop stars are supposed to wax lyrical about how desirable they are, but few have done it by comparing themselves to a walking dictionary. In the strange, superficial world of pop, it felt – and still feels – like a radical stand.
Like all the best cult heroes, Bulmer always seemed like a strange outsider, or a nerd who discovered the secret of being cool. When I first interviewed her, in 2010, our whole chat was based on Greek mythology, and even though I spent an evening swotting up on The Iliad, I still couldn’t keep up. Peter Parker got bitten by a radioactive spider and developed freaky web-slinging powers; Bulmer found Talking Heads, the B-52s and Blondie, shaved the side of her head and became a pop star instead. In 2005, she and NYPC didn’t seem to fit anywhere. They were too arch for Klaxons and CSS, but too playful to waft around dribbling about Kubla Khan like the Libertines. Instead, on 2007’s debut LP Fantastic Playroom, she came on like a gobby schoolgirl: crude, rude but smart – and devilishly proud of it. “Suck me in and spit me out … mark your sordid X on me,” she teased on the coquettish rattle-and-hum of Jerk Me.
In hindsight, being sucked into new rave was a hindrance rather than a help. It’s hard to shake the feeling that it could have been different if they’d been positioned more carefully, and Fantastic Playroom had been presented for what it really was – a smart disco-punk synth album rather than electronica-inspired indie. It also feels like luck’s conspired against them since – and yet they keep going.
Their old label, Modular, told them it didn’t have enough budget to promote their second album, The Optimist, delaying its release (on their own label The Numbers) until 2010, when it was dreadfully overlooked. It’s less clever-clever than Fantastic Playroom but no less sharp. The way opening track Lost a Girl in particular skids and struts and then explodes into its chorus feels like seeing the black-and-white of Kansas give way to the Technicolor world of Oz.
It’s possible, too, that, after the tongue-in-cheek shtick they made their name with, it was too bleak – but there’s something that breaks my heart, every time, when I hear Bulmer sing: “I want to pretend/The shape of the past can walk in the present tense.” It’s the perfect encapsulation of maddening denial and the fruitless hope of trying to recapture a dying spark. Likewise, 2013’s NYPC – on which Bulmer and multi-instrumentalist Andy Spence worked as a two-piece – was minimal and more edgy than it had any right to be. The austere steeliness on You Used to Be a Man, with its cold drums and icy synths grinding oddly against a human narrative of dashed hopes and fallen idols, sounds like disco beamed from the future.
It’s remarkable, really, for someone to shrug off the knocks and keep pushing, keep reinventing, keep being brilliant: an artist who’s never got her due or recognition, but carries on marching to the beat of their own idiosyncratic drum regardless, just waiting for everyone else, at some point, to realise that she had the rhythm they were looking for all along.
