The Pulp of their 1984 debut, It, aren’t the Pulp for any of us. And It’s Jarvis Cocker isn’t our Jarvis Cocker, either. He’s a gawky, fresh-faced and strangely earnest young thing, messing about with cheery folk music and wishy-washy new wave, mooning over puppy love and magical lighthouses and other such nonsense. No, no: let us go then, you and I, whizzing past It and on to 1986’s Freaks instead, where the real Pulp begin to take shape. Post-It, Cocker was so disgruntled that he considered giving up on pop music in favour of going to university. But after meeting violinist and guitarist Russell Senior, he began spinning a new vision for Pulp instead – darker, weirder, more experimental and with more bite – that would exorcise their old, insipid ghost. Freaks isn’t perfect but it’s a start, and on songs like Master of the Universe, you can hear a strange and special band starting to emerge. It’s a spooky, sordid ditty, like a sleazy take on Hammer horror with its hammy synths and Cocker sounding like a dirty viscount. “Raise your eyes and graze your knees / Oh for your master is displeased,” he leers, and if he’s not yet the witty, winning charmer he’d later become, he’s at least a long way evolved from the milksop of before.
My Legendary Girlfriend is Pulp’s very own Big Bang: the perfect explosion when all that promise and potential combusts in a brilliant Technicolor flash until, six-odd minutes later, all that’s left is a wonderful pop band. Originally recorded in 1989 for third album Separation, a mix-and-match LP with one side devoted to conventional songs and another inspired by acid house, it didn’t limp out until 1991, but it was still enough to jump-start Pulp’s career. Its genius lies in its fusion of elements; the way different atoms collide and spark weird chemical reactions, from the menacing, club-like groove and creepy keyboards of the verse to the glittery synths of the chorus that fizz and fade like roman candles. Cocker refuses to stay rooted in the same spot, switching from naughty whisper to frustrated yelp as he spills the beans on a one-sided affair gone wrong. “Creeping slowly past the cooling towers … Deserted factories, looking for an adventure,” he says, trying to bring some gritty romance to their moonlit stroll. But there’s not way of prettying up the squalid truth: “My legendary girlfriend, she is crying tonight / Oh no, she doesn’t feel right / She’s got no one to hold.” A sly, seductive and splendid treat.
Ah, schadenfreude. Every line of Razzmatazz twitches with sly victory – and every line’s a classic, too – as Cocker, cast as a luckless loser who’s been dumped by his girlfriend for not being glitzy enough, finds himself crowing over their reversal of fortune. It’s the little flourishes that make it all so delicious: just witness how, in the second verse, he starts to scatter the details that suggest how pedestrian and predictable her life has become. “You started getting fatter three weeks after I left you,” he tells her, scornfully. “Now you’re going with some kid who looks like some bad comedian / Are you gonna go out, or are you sitting at home eating boxes of Milk Tray / Watch TV on your own.” She ditched him for excitement and glamour; she’s settling for EastEnders and coffee creams instead. “I saw you at the doctors, waiting for a test,” he sings later – and by this point, however wronged he feels, it’s hard not to feel a smidgen of sympathy for his down-on-her-luck ex, considering how rotten things have gotten. “You tried to look like some kind of heiress, but your face is such a mess / And now you’re going to a party and you’re leaving on your own.” A supreme pop single with its spinning, dark disco-charged melody, flavoured impeccably by Cocker’s witty, withering vinegar.
4 Babies
What makes many of Pulp’s finest singles so enchanting is that they unfold like little short stories, full of odd narrative bumps and lovable characters, with Cocker coming on like some sort of northern JD Salinger. Take Babies, the standout track from 1994’s brilliant breakthrough His ’n’ Hers, and one of Cocker’s best ever yarns: a seedy but sweet tale of a perverted boy who’s obsessed with listening to his friend’s sister have sex, until he’s so transfixed he starts sneaking inside her wardrobe so he can watch, too. “She came home ’round four,” sings Peeping Jarvis over that gorgeous, glistening melody with its glammy guitars. “And she was with some kid called David, from the garage up the road.” And then it all twists and turns into some farcical triangle between Cocker, his disapproving friend and her nymphomaniac sister: the older girl spots him spying from the wardrobe, they start to get hot and heavy, and then they’re rumbled in the act. “We were on the bed when you came home / I heard you stop outside the door,” yelps Cocker. “I know you won’t believe it’s true / I only went with her ’coz she looks like you.” It’s less a song than it is a mini pop-opera, or an awkward kind of Bildungsroman: a coming-of-age story full of lust, betrayal and remorse about one youth’s transition from sex-struck fledgling to guilty cad.
A precious gift from His ’n’ Hers that’s proof of all Pulp’s power beyond the hits. And on an album that’s often so cynical and arch, from the messy tangle of Do You Remember the First Time? to the lost seduction game of Lipgloss, it’s unashamedly simple: lovely and lonely, as Cocker sings from the perspective of a young girl who’s had her heart smashed to pieces for the first time. Musically, it sounds like some sad fairytale, all crashing cymbals and shimmering keyboards like a theme for a Disney princess trapped in her Sheffield bedroom, while Cocker’s lyrics capture that mixture of life-and-death teenage angst and trying so hard to be a grownup that only comes with your first proper breakup. “She likes to watch the moon as it travels through the sky / ’Cos she’s heard that it’s romantic, though she really can’t see why,” he sings. But this witching-hour heartbreak is strangely comforting compared to the misery of the daytime: “The sun made it hard to get through and the radio only played love songs so she cried,” he adds, and you’d have to have a heart of miserable stone to not be swept under, too.
It’s the done thing, now, to dismiss Britpop as a time for luddites just mindlessly twanging guitars, like gormless apes puzzling over how to use their opposable thumbs to form a barre chord. But Pulp, and songs like Mis-Shapes, are a reminder that lad culture, ’avin it large and the rest were just a nasty coda, and that before it got all swallowed up in the belly of the boorish beast, there were glorious paeans to outsiders and weirdos. Here, on the opening track of 1995’s Different Class, is Cocker’s manifesto for the awkward: an anthem for the freaks and geeks who can’t go into town lest they “end up with a smash in the mouth just for standing out”. It comes on like a tongue-in-cheek musical number, with its rousing, romping riffs. “Brothers, sisters, can’t you see? The future’s owned by you and me,” declares Cocker, before taking aim at thickos and thugs with a rallying call-to-arms: “We want your homes, we want your lives, we want the things you won’t allow us / We won’t use guns, we won’t use bombs, we’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of – that’s our minds.” It’s an intellectual putsch, a nerdy spring, and it’s still as convincing today as it was back then.
7 F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.
Different Class didn’t just turn Pulp into one of the mainstream’s biggest bands; it turned Cocker into a beloved celebrity, too; the down-to-earth wag who’d make fun of uppity folks wherever he found them, whether they were rich tourists from Greece or pop stars with messiah complexes living in Neverland. But for all its fun, from the snarky satire of Common People to the comedown humour of Sorted for E’s and Whizz, there’s moments of bitterness, too. Underwear, for example, is one of the saddest, unsexiest songs about shagging ever, a sordid and limp lament to dampened loins and fizzled passion. And the magnificent F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E. is Cocker at his most wretched, fallen so low he can’t even make fun of himself or anyone else. Like lots of Pulp’s best songs, it looks far beyond standard guitar pop or indie for inspiration. It’s not lovesick but sickened by love, switching queasily between those grubby, gaudy keyboards that crawl along like the ascent of a rickety rollercoaster, and then that sudden swoop into the chorus. Cocker doesn’t sound much healthier, either. “I’ve got a slightly sick feeling in my stomach,” he murmurs creepily. “Like I’m standing on top of a very high building / All the stuff they tell you about in the movies / But this isn’t chocolate boxes and roses.” He’s right: this is real love, and it sounds like hellish fun.
Yes, it’s a frightfully predictable choice. But leaving out Common People wouldn’t just be contrary and try-hard, it would be flat out wrong: it’s Cocker at the peak of his powers, disguising biting social commentary and class observations with wicked humour and one of Pulp’s catchiest anthems ever. As a single, it’s faultless: that cheesy, power-charged keyboard melody; the bawl-at-the-top-of-your-lungs wallop of a chorus; a classic opening line (“She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge / She studied sculpture at St Martin’s College”) that’s as firmly embedded in the brain as “Call me Ishmael” or “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. But perhaps the biggest testament to Common People’s power is how it has transcended Britpop, or the 90s, and is just as relevant today as it was back then. In fact, this song is needed more than ever, now, as gentrification and regeneration spread, and communities and cultures are eradicated by wealthy poseurs who want to play at slumming it. “But still you’ll never get it right,” seethes Cocker, “’cos when you’re laid in bed at night, watching roaches climb the wall / If you call your dad he could stop it all.” It’s an immortal riposte to the ruling classes born of righteous exasperation: you might not ever be able to make the blindly ignorant see sense, but you can still take them to task and ruthlessly take the piss.
Pulp’s masterly ploy to lose fans and alienate the Britpop cattle, This Is Hardcore was too much to swallow for many who’d been won over by Different Class. It’s darker, uglier, seedier and more experimental. Or, as Cocker has it on opening track The Fear: “This is the sound of someone losing the plot / You’re gonna like it, but not a lot.” The title track, in particular, has none of the cheeky romance of old, and having Cocker be so sleazy is like catching your favourite uncle in the act of surfing smutty websites. “It seems I saw you in some teenage wet dream / I like your get-up if you know what I mean,” he letches, over piano and cinema strings that could have been lifted from something X-rated. There’s an easy parallel to draw, too, between the grotty reality of pornography (which “men in stained raincoats pay” for) and Cocker’s own disillusionment at pop stardom and his public persona. “Put your money where your mouth is tonight / Leave your makeup on and I’ll leave on the light,” he says, and then boasts: “This is me on top of you / And I can’t believe that it took me this long.” It’s not about sex but power, narcissism, performance and ego, and it’s as grim as they come.
10 After You
The naysayers, no doubt, will scoff that After You isn’t of the same gold standard as Pulp at their alchemic best, and less worthy of inclusion here than, say, Disco 2000 or Lipgloss. But this isn’t about sound, it’s about spirit – and Pulp’s 2013 comeback single, released 10 years after their original breakup, rings with the same adventure, ambition and fearlessness that made them so beloved in the first place. We Love Life, the 2001 Scott Walker-produced follow-up to This Is Hardcore, was the band’s last album, and they stayed dormant until reforming as a live band in 2011. Those reunion shows were magical and miraculous, and for most bands that would have been enough. There’s no need, after all, to sully the nostalgia and goodwill by trying something daft. But this is Pulp, a band whose raison d’etre is to try something risky when others would cower and conform. And so, with After You, Pulp take a song they’d first demoed more than a decade previously, but give it a 21st-century twist, with LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy producing a demented warehouse banger as Cocker preaches of a debauched doomsday in east London. “On the last night on Earth when the horses run free / The scriptures foretell of a party in Hackney,” he sings. “In a dimly lit room crammed with loathing and hate / They’re selling their souls and I just can’t wait.” Even now, 30 years since their debut, here Pulp are: always looking forward, always sounding special.
