Pulp - More

Do you remember the first time? Isn’t that the question that’s implied in every reunion tour, comeback album or immersive holographic experience? This summer you have the opportunity to see Oasis, AC/DC, the Kinks, ELO and 5ive for maybe the last time, each offering the promise that they’ll recapture something of their elusive 20th century magic and the slim chance they might transport you fleetingly back to your long lost youth…

You can’t blame audiences for seeking nostalgia, nor can you begrudge musicians the chance to enjoy a late career victory lap and one last pay day, but unsentimentally you can count the number of bands who have reformed to significant artistic effect on the fingers of one hand. Madness with The Liberty of Norton Folgate? The Specials with Encore? Suede with their bruised midlife quartet?

It’s an exclusive club that Pulp now join with some aplomb on More, their eighth and finest album. It should be no surprise that they’ve taken their own sweet time in delivering their masterpiece. Over almost half a century they’ve been an object lesson in a band slowly discovering their strengths, honing their craft, biding their time. They’ve matured - not like a fine wine, but maybe like a magnificently ripe Wensleydale. 

But initial signs were not hugely promising. The comeback single “Spike Island” scattered syndrums like hundreds and thousands over a slight fairy cake of a song, even as Jarvis promised, like a member of the 1982 England football squad, “this time I’ll get it right”. Funnily enough, the video, a disturbing experiment translating the black and white cut outs from the Different Class cover through the distorting mirror of AI, was more promising, demonstrating some curiosity in how a group forged in the long, dark 1970s might find a fresh context amid the pixelated nightmares of the 2020s. 

Things take a friskier turn on “TINA”, which finds Jarvis returning to the dank jumble sale of the heart, a bituminous seam of inspiration that shows little sign of exhaustion. We find him daydreaming of “screwing in a charity shop on top of black bin bags .. / The smell of digestive biscuits in the air”. It’s a richly self-parodic fever dream in a lushly orchestrated litany of teenage kinks. But it gains some poignancy through spelling out the acronym in its title: “there is no alternative”. Pulp were born at the dawn of Thatcherism, and through several decades of spying, screwing, shouting and pointing, Jarvis has comically documented how economics has formed and deformed the English soul. In its furtive, funny, intimate way, More is a last stand, after four decades of neoliberalism, of a certain strain of defiant northern dreaming.

“One last sunset, one last blaze of glory” Jarvis yelps on “Grown Ups”, desperately searching for a way out, upon realising that the reality of adulthood, after the countdown he once breathlessly anticipated as a kid, is a dreamless planet, populated by folks like Jeremy Sissons who “lives near the motorway because it’s good for commuting”.

He finds it, in the unlikely setting of “Farmers Market”. It’s a lilting piano ballad, stirred by the wistful evening breeze of Emma Smith’s violin and Richard Jones’ sublime arrangement, which opens on Jarvis “stalking the labyrinth of my own myth / Searching for clues with a fading glo-stick” and somehow stumbling open love among the carrier bags of groceries in a suburban carpark at sunset. 

Jarvis found renown as the poet laureate of infatuation and lust, only acknowledging, way back on “F.E.E.L.I.N.G.S. C.A.L.L.E.D. L.O.V.E.” a dirty, furtive emotional “animal that only comes out at night”. His solo albums came fitfully alive in seedy fantasies, and on “After You”, the sole new song to come out of the first Pulp reunion in 2013, he seemed to imagine life as an remorseless slog “from disco to disco,  from Safeway to Tesco / shopping around from the cradle til death row”.

Even the title of “Farmers Market” invites the accusation that this is Jarvis finally succumbing to the smug married, Year-in-Provence organic satisfaction he once mercilessly skewered. And the accusation might have some bite if it wasn’t, along with “Slow Jam”, “Partial Eclipse” and the furious disco stomper “Got To Have Love”, one of the finest, funniest, most heartfelt songs of his career. Should it be a surprise that a performer so adept at the bathetic tragicomedy of adolescence turns out to be a dab hand at the pathos and bathos of middle age?

Pulp is now a blended family, comprising Candida, Nick and Mark, along with members of the JARV IS band, but maybe it’s only through reuniting with the principal members, easing back into familiar roles, that Jarvis has been able to rediscover that peculiar Pulpy frontman voice, capable of leaping from seductive pillowtalk to sardonic wisecrack to festival singalong within a single couplet.

Or maybe it was the commission from playwright Simon Stephens to write some music for his 2019 play Light Falls? “Hymn for the North” was the first new song the reunited Pulp played together in 2023, and Jarvis credits it for opening the creative floodgates that led to More. The song started out as a song from a parent to a kid embarking on adulthood, asking that as they row off on their adventures, they “please stay in sight of the Mainland”. 

Throughout the play the song builds from the shy soliloquy of a dying housewife lost in a supermarket, to a bittersweet anthem of solidarity, uniting stray family members cast across the north of England. This dramatic context seems to have stirred the shaman/showman/tragi-comic national dramatist in Jarvis, something that we’ve sorely missed since Pulp first called it a day back in 2002. 

There’s a dark background to More, the deaths of both Jarvis’s mum and of the much-missed Pulp bassist Steve Mackey, to whom the album is dedicated, as well as the sudden illness of producer James Ford during recording. But on songs like “Got to Have Love”, “Hymn of the North” and the closing “A Sunset” he seems to be singing himself back to the spirit of his 1960s childhood, before his Dad left and the Beatles broke up - sarky but optimistic northern singalongs about the unlikely redemptive power of love. “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” he mutters ruefully at the end of the record, “but I do not have the voice”. On More he rediscovers a voice that he misplaced for 24 years and, corny and sentimental as it may sound, it’s even better than the first time.

Jarvis Cocker on love, corniness, and ongoing adventures

Congratulations on the album - you must be proud of it?

I am very happy with it. It's weird, actually having to talk about it. We recorded it really quickly, in three weeks in November and December last year, and James Ford the producer was a big part of that. 

We'd made a kind of arrangement that we wanted to do it quickly. When I first floated the idea of doing an album, everybody was worried it was going to take as long as This is Hardcore. I don't blame them for not wanting that traumatic experience again. So I did everything that I could to try and avoid that. I pretty much wrote all the words before we went into the studio.

James sent us mixes on Christmas Eve and then on Boxing Day, he was admitted to hospital and was diagnosed with what turned out to be leukaemia. He had to undergo quite a lot of treatment and so we had to work with the engineer to finish the record. Thankfully James seems to be on the mend now. But it was a very, very strange experience. The fact that we got it done and were happy with it, we kind of thought - maybe we don't have to release it? Maybe we should just keep it to ourselves? It seems like a magical thing to have done in some way. 

There's a cliche that musicians get an entire lifetime to make a debut album, and six months to make the follow up. Was taking 24 years away from Pulp a perverse way of saving up material?

I hadn't thought of it in that way. But I definitely had more experience. I got married, and I moved to Paris, and my son was born. I have done music, obviously, but I did feel like I had to kind of do some living in some way. Because Pulp becoming famous was my fantasy. And then I got it, and then the fantasy didn't live up to what I thought it should be. It was my fault really, that I just couldn't take much pleasure in it. You know, if you've achieved your lifetime’s ambition and you didn't like it, you've got to really kind of look at yourself and think, Well, what's going on? You know what do you actually want? 

In a funny way it’s an album about overcoming your embarrassment about writing love songs…

Yeah that was one thing that I had to learn how to do. I always had trouble with the word love. I never used to use it. I remember, when my mother had to have a heart operation. It must have been 20 odd years ago. I went to the hospital to see her, and as she was being taken away to be operated on, I found that I couldn't tell her that I loved her. I was embarrassed to say it. 

What started me writing songs was the fact that when I tried to have love affairs, the words of songs I've listened to as a kid didn't seem to communicate what I was experiencing. So yeah, I'd have some issues with that. A very important thing was meeting my wife. I'd had a long time term relationship, and they had fallen apart and and I thought I'd fucked up. I thought that's it. I thought maybe you only get to experience true love one time in your life. And then eventually I managed to find it again. And I was very, very surprised by it. I'd kind of almost given up on on it, you know? We got married last year, so, you know, in a corny way, I am quite happy. It took me a long time to come around to, I suppose.

“TINA” and “A Sunset” seem to be about a loss of alternatives in modern life and  modern politics… 

I've been thinking about it, and especially with what America is now. Is there an alternative that you can think, oh, yeah, that's the way I'd like to live? You know, rock music came from America. America was very inspirational and the most modern country in the world. And now that isn't the case, or it's in the process of not being the case. We've been brought up in a time of extraordinary stability, really, and that's going. It's going to be interesting, but also quite upsetting. I've never liked change. I've always wanted things to say the same. But obviously most Eastern religions tell you that the only thing we can rely on is change. So we better learn to handle it, I guess?

Is Pulp now an ongoing project once more? Is there more to come?

Well, at the moment we're just trying to get ready for these shows and integrate the new songs with old ones. I don't know really, after that, we'll have to see. It's in a state of flux, but it's good. I just felt good that, you know, after 24 years, we got together and we were able to do the record, and it wasn't in any way stressful. I mean, it was stressful when we found out that that James was ill. But it was a pleasure to do it. And maybe, having found that out, I'd like to do that again?