Pulp have lost touch with the common people

In 2023, Pulp reformed, almost a quarter of a century after they released their last album and subsequently disbanded. Now the new music is coming. In April this year, they released ‘Spike Island’, a single which has the anthemic feel of their most famous song, ‘Common People’, from their fifth album, the Mercury Music Prize winner Different Class (1995). This week, their new album, More, arrived.

Both single and album are a return to the original Pulp sound – minus bassist Steve Mackey, who died in 2023. They are exactly what a band with an impressive back catalogue and a 61-year-old vocalist might produce in order to remain dignified, while unmistakably ancient. Cocker sings: ‘I was born to perform / It’s a calling / I еxist to do this / Shouting and pointing.’

This is the reason for the return – to entertain. To do what Cocker envisaged doing as a 15-year-old Sheffield schoolboy in 1978, when he mapped out the Pulp masterplan in a beige exercise book during an economics lesson. The vision came to fruition with the formation of Pulp. Success arrived later, after a series of false dawns, and peaked with the renowned ‘Common People’. The song was inspired by Cocker’s stint as a student at Saint Martin’s School of Art, during a sabbatical from the group at the end of the 1980s.

With this career being his calling, it was unlikely that Jarvis Cocker would disappear when Pulp disbanded, despite his ambivalent response to fame when it finally came in the mid-1990s. He has hosted radio shows, authored the memoir and Sunday Times bestseller, Good Pop, Bad Pop (2022), and released solo albums. His hair is now greying, he’s close to pensionable age. The signature spectacles remain, as does the lanky gait that contributed to his image as a gangly, quirky frontman rather than a controversial one.

The drug references in the 1995 single ‘Sorted for E’s and Wizz’, and on the accompanying sleeve, may have led to a Daily Mirror campaign to ban the single. But Cocker was no provocateur. The following year, when he jumped on stage at the Brit Awards and disrupted Michael Jackson’s performance, he garnered support from the very same Daily Mirror. The newspaper organised a ‘Justice for Jarvis’ campaign following his arrest by the police. The stunt was a prank, rather than a protest or a political statement. The attention the event attracted led to him disappearing from the public realm into the recording studio to compose the darker songs on This Is Hardcore (1998).

Ahead of the release of More, Pulp did make a stab at contemporary relevance. The band added its name to the petition defending the ‘freedom of expression’ of rappers Kneecap, after counter-terrorism officers began investigating the Irish trio when footage emerged of them shouting ‘up Hamas, up Hezbollah’ at a gig, and urging fans to kill their local MPs. The petition signing was the type of performative activism more associated with some of Cocker’s fellow musicians, a few of whom make strange bedfellows in their support for Kneecap (Paul Weller, Massive Attack, Thin Lizzy).

The politics of some of Cocker’s pop peers are as predictable as they are inevitable. Signing a petition to prevent a pro-Palestine rap group from being censored is a safe move, compared with, say, speaking up for people who have been cancelled or arrested for speaking out against Islamism or the transgender lobby. The signatories seem to imagine that Kneecap are akin to the Sex Pistols, when they are probably closer to Chumbawamba. For elder statesmen of the music industry, Kneecap’s existence reignites the ‘activism’ of their youth before the world changed but they didn’t.

Although there have been two reunion tours in the intervening years, along with the single ‘After You’ in 2013, this is the first new album from Pulp since the Scott Walker-produced We Love Life in 2001. Cocker and his bandmates are now in the twilight stage of their career, heading towards the demographic he sings about in ‘Help The Aged’ (1998): ‘One time they were just like you / Drinking, smoking cigs and sniffing glue.’

Pop music is now in its dotage and has seen it all, and seen it repeatedly. So what do the practitioners of this elderly art sing about when composing pop songs in their golden years? ‘Are there unique qualities of perception and form that artists acquire as a result of age in the late phase of their career?’, asks Edward Said in On Late Style (2006). Published after the academic and critic died aged 67, the work asks if artists acquire a new idiom in later years. ‘But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all?’ Said brings in Beethoven and Wagner to back up his contention. But is this equally true of pop musicians that came to prominence in their twenties? Do they develop an idiomatic late style while keeping the music going in their sixties (Paul Weller, Jarvis Cocker, Morrissey) and even their seventies (David Byrne, Neil Tennant)?

Not in the case of Pulp. Just as their sound feels like the hits of the past served up in the present, the lyrics on the forthcoming album are a return to similar territory. The titles ‘My Sex’, ‘Grown Ups’, ‘The Hymn Of The North’ could have appeared on the 1994 breakthrough album, His ’n’ Hers. Back then Cocker sang about joyriders and leisure centres, with a crude and juvenile approach to sex throughout this and the albums that followed. On ‘Acrylic Afternoons’ he sings: ‘On a pink quilted eiderdown I want to pull your knickers down / Net curtains blowing slightly in the breeze / Lemonade light filtering through the trees.’ Four years later on the single, ‘This Is Hardcore’, sex keeps its furtive, youthful allure: ‘It seems I saw you in some teenage wet dream.’ It’s all in keeping with the experience of a boy who came of age in England’s former ‘Steel City’ in the 1970s, and fits with a peculiarly British mood and sensibility.

Pulp’s return comes as those collectively classified as ‘Britpop’ back in the 1990s have also re-emerged. This pop-musical trend was part of the ‘Cool Britannia’ moment that coincided with Labour reacquainting itself with power after 18 years in the wilderness. Then prime minister Tony Blair, erstwhile guitarist and vocalist in rock band Ugly Rumours, courted the Britpoppers at Downing Street soirées.

The unholy alliance of musicians with New Labour was even less likely than that which occurred in the final decade of old Labour, following Michael Foot losing an election with a manifesto described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. In 1985, musicians calling themselves Red Wedge, including the likes of Paul Weller, united in an attempt to take on a Tory government in its second term. The campaign galvanised student activists who discovered the punk phenomenon years after the event, and who were no doubt radicalised by a Billy Bragg B-side. With a ‘Rock Against Racism’ badge pinned to their t-shirt-coated hearts, they took to the Red Wedge tour like Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace. In doing so, they played a small part in keeping the Conservatives in power following the 1987 election. It took another 10 years for a rebranded Labour Party to finally make it back to No10, just as Britpop was heading up the charts to No1.

In December 1996, Cocker received a telephone call from a Labour apparatchik, close to the Islington set that circled the leader. Would he publicly endorse New Labour? Not only did he agree, he also delayed the release of the song, ‘Cocaine Socialism’, because he felt it might deter voters from voting Labour and bringing it to power, such was his deluded belief in his pull and influence at that point. It was released in 1998, a year after Blair was safely home and dry in Downing Street.

Now the Labour Party has returned to power after a shorter stay in the wilderness (a mere 14 years). And the original reluctant heroes of Britpop have resurfaced. Blur emerged with a new album in 2023. Suede have been in and out of pop’s consciousness throughout this century. The announcement that Oasis were to get back together and tour this summer was hardly unexpected. Since the band split, the singalong songs from their high season have remained on the lips of fans in pubs, on stag nights and in football stands. Many a male Oasis devotee has matured into a husband and father, rather like the heavy-drinking, hard-living brothers they idolised at the time of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?.

The bands with Brett (Suede), Damon (Blur) and Jarvis to the fore were perhaps of a different ilk, with a more alternative following. The Christian names of the men were a clue to the artiness associated with parents who were perhaps less culturally working class than those of the Gallagher brothers. Jarvis Cocker’s father deserted the family to become a DJ in Australia; his mother sent her son to school in lederhosen, and raised him on a diet of BBC programming, refusing to let her children watch ITV.

Despite coming of age in a home in which adverts and the Rovers Return were absent, Cocker’s lyrics were nonetheless inspired by the lives of those who watched commercials and Coronation Street. He invested provincial places and events, along with artefacts and disposable consumer durables, with a potency and even a poignancy. History, culture and England were here. But it was a more comical and Carry On take compared with the melancholy ache evident in the songs of, say, the Smiths; that longing for a lost England we wanted to escape at the time but embraced when it was gone. The author Olivia Laing has written that in composing songs about bus depots and corner shops, sexual fantasy and sexual failure, Cocker ‘imbued the Sheffield suburbs of Catcliffe, Ecclesall and the Wicker with the same seedy glamour as Serge Gainsbourg’s Montmartre’.

Eventually Cocker embraced the city of Gainsbourg, after marrying the French fashion stylist, Camille Bidault-Waddington. A far cry from the suburb of Intake, South Yorkshire, where he spent his formative years in Bavarian shorts. He remained in Paris after separating from Bidault-Waddington in 2009, and later raised his head above the parapet and aired his views on politics and current affairs. What stirred him was not developments that put Paris in the headlines, such as the Islamist terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan theatre in 2015, but the result of a referendum on EU membership in Britain in 2016. ‘I was very vocally against that and still think it’s one of the most pathetic things ever, especially now’, he said in 2020. ‘There’s freedom of movement in Europe and it’s so sad that we’ve chucked that away. I’m a little bit bothered about people knowing that I’m English because it’s a bit embarrassing at the moment because of this psychotic thing we’re doing.’ The previous year he compared Brexit to having a record that failed to reach No1:

‘I’m mentioning the pop charts because I actually think they do shed some light on Brexit. And particularly on the validity of a second referendum. Because that referendum result is the equivalent to a single entering the UK Top 40 at 19.’

In these and similar interviews he failed to elaborate further on the rationale behind his stance on Brexit. Just as he failed to explain his support for pulling down statues and attending a Black Lives Matter march.

Although politics has not hitherto been dominant within Pulp’s output, class certainly has, ever since ‘Common People’ took them to the top end of the charts. The song was a response to the middle-class students Cocker met at art college, who wanted to ‘live like common people’. Much later, during an alfresco interview in Holland Park, when Cocker had left France, the reporter notes that his interviewee ‘doesn’t like the middle classes, so the Kensington mums are anathema to him’. Yet Cocker seemed to have little problem with the middle-class legions that jumped up and down on Black Lives Matter marches, pulling down statues, and dismissed those who voted to leave the European Union as ill-educated proles who didn’t have a university degree or attend an arts college.

During a speech at the NME awards in 2015, Cocker informed those assembled: ‘A long time ago, last century, we made a record and it was called Different Class. It wasn’t called working class, and it wasn’t called upper class and it wasn’t called middle class. It was called Different Class because, let’s get over that and move on to something else.’ But the middle and upper classes he once sang about have not got over it or moved on. Nor have the Labour Party people who once courted him in the 1990s or, indeed, those he recently aligned himself with in opposition to Brexit, and marched alongside on BLM protests. But they have certainly changed. They no longer want to live like common people, or sing along with the common people, because there is so much they now loathe about them. Notably, the very Brexity things.

Pulp are back, then. But while they were popular once, they now seem adrift in the populist age.

Michael Collins is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. He is the author of The Likes Of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class.