Pulp: Part 2 (1994 to Forever?) with Siân Pattenden

So you wanna live like the Common People do? It’s time for part two of the Pulp story in which Yasi and music journalist and Pulpologist Siân Pattenden start back up at the peak of Britpop, tracing how “the great interlopers” of the genre captured the spirit and sound of the time with Different Class, and then soundtracked the comedown with This Is Hardcore — Britpop’s bleary-eyed hangover (or maybe - a conversation with god???). Then it’s into the Weeds: a retreat from fame into nature, the album We Love Life, and the band’s 2000s revival and first new song in over a decade. EPISODE PLAYLIST: Listen to the songs we talk about HERE. CREDITS: Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalek Guest: Siân Pattenden IG: @sian_superman Twitter: @sian_superman Website: Sian Pattenden Producer: Liz Sánchez Audio Editor: Adrian Bridges Additional Production Supervision: Justin Sayles Theme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Speaker 00

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  And I'm Nathan Hubbard.

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• 2:04Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to Bands Plan. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist. Today's episode is once again about Pulp. We're getting into the good stuff now, babe. My guest, again, the wonderful Sean Paton, who has given up one-third of her life to do this. Let's get into the real meat of the story. We're in full Britpop swing. Now everyone's partying. Oasis is out and about. Everyone's here. The table is set. And then we go into 1995 where Pulp is mercifully left out of the Battle of Britpop, which turns the focus towards Oasis and Blur.

• 2:49Yasi Salek?

  And amongst this, while those two are fucking fighting like fools, Pulp is like, "Hey, we wrote a little song. It's called 'Common People.'" "Hey, guys."

• 3:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:00Yasi Salek?

  "Psst, we have a little song for you. It's called 'Common People,' May 22nd, 1995." I think everybody knows the story, but I'm gonna ask you about it. But first, I'm gonna say what Jarvis said about the writing of the song. He said, "I went to the Notting Hill Record and Tape Exchange to the bit that they have secondhand musical instruments in. I sold some records, but they used to have this policy where you could have the money, or you could have twice that value for vouchers, which you could spend in some of their other shops. So I went for the voucher option, and I went to the bit with the secondhand musical instruments, and I bought this Casio keyboard, went home, and I was just messing about on the keyboard. And that's when I wrote the first kind of little riff on it."

• 3:45Yasi Salek?

  "And then me and Steve were doing some rehearsals off Holloway Road somewhere, and I played it for him. And when we'd stop laughing, he said, 'Oh yeah, that sounds like fanfare for the common man,'" or something like that. And I thought, 'Oh, that's quite good.' And that gave me the idea for what the song was gonna be about." Did you meet the Greek girl?

• 4:08Speaker 07

  Me?

• 4:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:13Speaker 07

  I don't think, I know he says the Greek girl existed. I don't think she existed.

• 4:17Yasi Salek?

  But you think she's fake.

• 4:18Speaker 07

  I think she's fake. I think I know what it's about.

• 4:20Yasi Salek?

  Oh.

• 4:21Speaker 07

  And I don't think it's about the Greek girl.

• 4:23Yasi Salek?

  What's it about?

• 4:24Speaker 07

  I think it's about Justine.

• 4:25Yasi Salek?

  I was gonna say.

• 4:27Speaker 07

  And I've always thought it was about Justine.

• 4:29Yasi Salek?

  God, why is she the coolest? I'm sorry. To me, I don't take it as any, I'm like, she's probably like, okay, cool, that's the seven hundred millionth selling album that I inspired.

• 4:40Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 4:41Yasi Salek?

  Why are you guys so fucking obsessed with me? All I did was mind my business and be a rich girl. Okay, sorry you can't handle it.

• 4:48Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 4:49Yasi Salek?

  I love her so much.

• 4:50Speaker 07

  It's very cute of you.

• 4:51Yasi Salek?

  She, I love her so much. Yeah, because I'm like, I'm like, oh, oh, your dig at her is she's rich? Cool. She doesn't care.

• 4:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 5:00Yasi Salek?

  I'm sure she's quite happy to be rich.

• 5:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 5:02Yasi Salek?

  And it's great. She did Dance with Common People. Did you find that she was stuck up?

• 5:09Speaker 07

  Um, no. I met her a few times. She might have been inside and hiding it or something, but yeah, she hung out with loads of different people. Um, to say she was very tall. No, she wasn't stuck up, but she came from a different background.

• 5:22Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 5:23Speaker 07

  That they didn't come from, that Brett didn't come from, that Pulp didn't come from, that most bands didn't. She was really rich. But that isn't also fair on her. It's not her fault. You know, if people are inverted snobs about it. I always thought it was about her, but it, it may have, but it's usually an amalgam of people anyway, isn't it?

• 5:42Yasi Salek?

  Sure, yes, of course.

• 5:44Speaker 07

  There must have been an element to her inspiring something because the background was different and she would have had to hide where the family used to go on holiday and

• 5:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 5:53Speaker 07

  the fact that her dad could buy her stuff and those sorts of things to say that it's not her fault. She was born to that.

• 5:58Yasi Salek?

  It's even more interesting to me as like, just like, because when you, you write a song about someone else, what you're doing is revealing yourself.

• 6:07Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 6:07Yasi Salek?

  You know?

• 6:08Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 6:08Yasi Salek?

  So this song isn't really about even about Justine or whether or not it's a song is about Jarvis.

• 6:15Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 6:15Yasi Salek?

  And how Jarvis at the time still felt and we talked about with his and hers, this outsider element.

• 6:22Speaker 07

  And he's trying to grapple with it too, where he fits and he doesn't want to join, he doesn't want to be a part of the institution. And part of, he doesn't want to join the man.

• 6:32Yasi Salek?

  Cause he's creeping closer to being.

• 6:35Speaker 07

  And he's now hanging out with supermodels and fashion designers and going to people's houses. There's a point where I think. We like, he went for a really formal dinner. It wasn't for Saatchi, but it was like someone really, really fashion-y. That was kept quiet and he was in, apparently he was in a table next to Liam. So I don't know, but he's starting to think, fuck, am I going to become one of these awful people? What do I do?

• 6:57Yasi Salek?

  Well, that's what it, that's what it is, right? It's like, actually, I mean, to be class obsessed is the blood of the UK, but.

• 7:06Speaker 07

  Yes, as we are.

• 7:08Yasi Salek?

  Being a famous pop star puts you right away into an upper class. You, that's a class and that's a high class. And people worship you and you are, you have access now to all the landed gentry of the UK and their little parties. And the Serpentine Gallery or what, you know, like you are, you are boosted up into this place. And if you are Jarvis Cocker, I'm, I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but I can't imagine Liam Gallagher thought twice about it or gave one single fuck about what's happening.

• 7:38Speaker 07

  Oh, they would have absolutely lapped it up. No, that's what they wanted.

• 7:42Yasi Salek?

  Which is also in a way more natural, right? Which is like, and there's a thing that he was like, oh, you want me to be, stay poor? I'm not staying poor. Like you want me to stay in fucking Manchester and go to the chippy? It's not happening bitch. I'm going to go with Kate Moss to this fucking party and I don't care if you like it or not. Which in a way is really like, it's authentic, that's very authentic and natural. But you know, when you've been concerned with these ideas and you're sort of like, that's your preoccupation. And you're inching closer and closer to being sucked up into this world, this rare air. You're gonna start to maybe, I don't wanna say lash out, but it is a little bit lashing out.

• 8:22Speaker 07

  If you have a conscience, you're gonna think, am I becoming a wanker? I hope I don't. I mean, that's what this song is, is I don't wanna be a wanker. And you know what it's like, it's, you know, we, we, we referenced, you know, there's a girlfriend who had a normal job and just thought everyone was silly in music.

• 8:40Yasi Salek?

  You can maybe hear her voice a little bit in this.

• 8:43Speaker 07

  That he is keen to keep some sort of reality, because if he doesn't keep that reality, where's he gonna write songs from anyway? Can't write a song about sitting around the table with John Galliano, can he? Cause no one's gonna buy that.

• 8:56Yasi Salek?

  Also, okay, there's one last thing. If I was Justine Frishman and the Common People looked like Brett Anderson and Damon Albarn, yeah, I'd wanna fucking sleep with them too. What is she, blind?

• 9:07Yasi Salek?

  Can you blame her? I don't think it had to do with their bank accounts. Have you seen those men's faces?

• 9:13Yasi Salek?

  Gorginas, okay.

• 9:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, good point. Yeah.

• 9:17Yasi Salek?

  Thank you. All right, so of the recording of Common People, Jarvis said, we didn't get it straight away. It was kinda sixty percent of the way there, and I remember a look of horror on Chris Thomas's face. This is the producer of Common People and, and, and the album that's coming out. He said, for some reason, I thought it would be useful to play him Mr. Blue Sky by ELO. That song's a bit cheesy, but there's something about the start of it where that piano's going dun dun dun dun. It's quite good, you know?

• 9:53Yasi Salek?

  And Chris Thomas said, they played me Mr. Blue Sky by ELO, and they said, it should be like that. And I thought, Christ. It's fine to tell me this now. He was not, he was not trying to make it sound like ELO. So this song comes out, and I wanna ask you about it, but first I wanna say what Steve Mackey said, so you tell me if you felt that too. He said, there was an exciting mood in the air, which subsequently became Britpop. Blur's Girls and Boys was out, so was Live Forever, and then Common People felt like a song of the moment. We were totally convinced, and Jeff Travis was right behind us, so we made Island release it. Like, so he's kind of saying, like, the timing was perfect with Girls and Boys and Live Forever.

• 10:37Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 10:37Yasi Salek?

  What did you feel of this timing? So we're we're mid nineteen ninety five, May nineteen ninety five.

• 10:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was in the air. It was a zeitgeist thing. It's something that needed to be said, and I think maybe it goes hand in hand with the aspiration that mid nineties. We were being sold a lot of glossy lives in the tabloids and in magazines. There's a lot of drugs starting to go around in certain circles, not mine, but there's an idea that this is a lot of money feels to be it feels as if it's swirling around and you've got loaded magazine, you've got this kind of hyper existence that you're being sold as such, and you've got the word um TV programme and you've got all this sort of idea, you've got Chris Evans, who is this character who you know championed pulp very much after the time. She said.

• 11:29Yasi Salek?

  She was like, you were there at Just Seventeen magazine, okay, when I was interviewing them.

• 11:34Speaker 07

  No, exactly. So it's it. Everything feels quite accelerated and quite big, it's full of bravado, there's quite a lot of male energy going on. And something had to be pricked, the bubble had to be pricked, and that's what this song does. There's a lot of bluster, if you see what I mean, us being sold. It starts to be also music and the culture of the time, and you're talking about the YBAs and you're talking about Kate Moss and all those things, they start to be in the tabloids all the time. And this didn't happen in the early nineties. No one was sort of interested in music culture or that sort of thing. But it becomes this explosion, Britpop as we know, is not just about music, it's about the creative industries that aren't just London, they're Manchester and they're Scotland sort of thing, but but suddenly there's this force.

• 12:18Speaker 07

  But it gets taken over by wankers is the kind of yeah, pricey. And this is pricking that bubble of of Groucho Club and superficiality and all sorts of things underneath the song. It needed to be said and it needs to be said that then at this point in time.

• 12:31Yasi Salek?

  Okay, I see what you're saying. So it's it's kind of like, kind of like what happened with Grunge in America, where like it became a commodity. And people were like, get this fucking shit out of my face. You're trying to sell me Eddie Vedder on Time magazine as and then like Mark Jacobs is doing his like three thousand dollar grunge collection or whatever, and people are like go away.

• 12:50Speaker 07

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 12:51Yasi Salek?

  Can you talk a little bit about where Pulp fit in to, and Jarvis kind of set it for, and you brought it up Loaded Magazine, so I want to talk about like this sort of ladishness. That's also a halt, that becomes sort of a dividing faction of Britpop, right? Where it's like, obviously Oasis is, you know, firmly in the lad camp. And also Blur at this, Girls and Boys is the Fila tracksuit.

• 13:16Speaker 07

  They're starting to court it. And I think probably that to their regret later on, but you're saying that they were art at some point. They're trying to be an art band, but Damon's then taking on different personas. And one of these personas is being a bit of a lad, but he's catching a wave, doesn't realise that this is going to become a bigger thing. This is preloaded, but Loaded takes this and just absolutely runs with it. And we are then sold an idea that if the girls are to join in, they have to copy, is what you're saying, but they're non-muse here. What they're doing, we have a show called The Girlie Show, it's called, where it is all girls drinking pints, going out, taking drugs. It's a magazine show, but it's sort of saying that we're going to do this better than the boys, but it's copying the boys' behaviour.

• 13:59Speaker 07

  And there comes a huge ladette thing that goes on. And as I say, it's a bit ugly and it starts running away with itself. And I think it's very coke-driven. And you've got a character called Keith Allen, who I'm sure that you are aware of.

• 14:13Yasi Salek?

  Lily Allen's father.

• 14:15Speaker 07

  Who's always in the Groucho, always used to take his trousers off for some reason, because he didn't have that much to show. And was trying to be matey with all those people and Pulp are now realising that there's a lot of hangers-on. And there's a lot of people who are taking what they do and making something else with it. They're losing control. And that's what Common People is about too.

• 14:34Yasi Salek?

  And Keith Allen was quite buddy-buddy with Blur, right? He's in their videos and he has a band with Alex, I believe.

• 14:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, it was all a bit vicky. It's all, yeah, it starts to get bitten.

• 14:45Yasi Salek?

  So I bring all this up to see that probably played in, to your point, to the writing of, it's even more alienating for a band like Pulp and a person like Jarvis. Who's like, oh my God, I made my whole, my whole core of my being is not being a lad. Like I'm foppish and I wear these shirts and this is, I am not that. I like what you said, so it kind of popped a bubble by being like, okay, you're getting high on your own supply, guys, let's.

• 15:16Speaker 07

  Yes, it came out absolutely the right moment. A year later, it would have been too late. A year earlier, no one would have got it.

• 15:30Yasi Salek?

  Well, it fucking demolished, you guys. It sold seventy thousand copies in the first week. Here's a bummer. It, that was not enough to get number one because a little song by Robson and Jerome, cover of Unchained Melody, held that.

• 15:47Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 15:50Yasi Salek?

  Oh, poor Pulp. It's really like, you had the biggest song of your career, the biggest and best song.

• 15:55Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 15:55Yasi Salek?

  And then Robson and Jerome were like, no, sorry, we're Unchained Melody cover is gonna... It's kinda good. It kinda works.

• 16:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 16:03Yasi Salek?

  There's a funny story that Jarvis tells where the Sunday they announced the charts, it was presented live in Birmingham, and all the chart acts had to mime their songs. We didn't know what position we were, so we waited in the back room for them to call us. So, so time went on, it got to six PM, and everyone was getting shaky. I went to the toilet to put my contact lenses in, but I hadn't rinsed them properly, so my eye went bright red. Anyway, we had to go on, and I was still in quite extreme physical pain, and my eye was streaming, so people thought I was crying because we were number two. And of course, by that time, my makeup was running and looked like non-set cement. It'd been raining, so there were big puddles in front of the stage, and just as common people reached this climactic chorus, I jumped off the monitor quite spectacularly, as you

• 16:44Yasi Salek?

  do, landed in a puddle, slipped, and fell flat on my ass. So I'm left thinking, fuck me, this is meant to be your ultimate triumph, and you're flat on your back in a puddle, your eye killing you, face falling off, on a wet Sunday afternoon in Birmingham. Not quite what I'd been dreaming about for twenty years. So, Pulp.

• 17:01Speaker 07

  Yes, isn't it just?

• 17:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's perfect. It shouldn't be any different. He shouldn't have had it go perfect and had champagne and models, like...

• 17:08Speaker 07

  He, he's fine. I think Jarvis is fine.

• 17:11Yasi Salek?

  It's just, I mean, it's

• 17:13Speaker 07

  Worst things for to happen, weren't they?

• 17:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's so true. Well, Common People is a goddamn phenomenon.

• 17:20Speaker 07

  Yeah. How big was it in America?

• 17:22Yasi Salek?

  I don't know that it charted in America, if that's what you're, if that's what you're saying, but I do remember it for, for people like myself who were deeply interested in England. This was a big thing. And then it was around, I want to say a little later, but I could be wrong. That things started popping up here, like Britpop nights, where people would go and dance and they would play lots of, loads of Pulp and Blur and, you know, stuff like that. I was still in high school, so I wasn't going, but I know that it was happening. But I, yeah, I remember this being a big K-Rock hit, which was my station. Then a beautiful event happens in June. I suppose you were there, so I can ask you.

• 18:02Yasi Salek?

  But the Stone Roses, who are really taking their time puttering out as a band, have to drop out of Glastonbury because John Squire has broken his collarbone like hiking or skiing or something random. And they tap Pulp to fill in as the Saturday Night Headliners. Did they ask Pulp first? No, they asked Rod Stewart first. And Rod Stewart said no. So then they asked Pulp and Pulp said yes.

• 18:29Speaker 07

  Apparently Primal Scream said no as well.

• 18:31Yasi Salek?

  Oh, amazing.

• 18:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, I read today.

• 18:33Yasi Salek?

  So were you there at this Glastonbury?

• 18:35Speaker 07

  Yes, I was.

• 18:37Yasi Salek?

  Tell me everything. Was it amazing?

• 18:39Speaker 07

  It was, but it was one of those things where expectations weren't massive. For some reason, I don't know why, Saturday Night Thing wasn't still a thing. Glastonbury wasn't what it wa- is now. You would see a lot of bands, a lot of the time they would be fairly dreadful. And the scheduling was all over the place. So it wasn't really refined like it seemed now, where the headline, the headline act. This is what it has to be. And they will get this amount of money and we'll pitch them against that act and everyone will do this, that and the other. It's far more hap- haphazard is how it seems. And also remember this is a time where they haven't built the proper fence and you've got loads of really weird people coming in and lots of people trying to sell you different sorts of drugs and things. It's

• 19:18Yasi Salek?

  That's right. We used to be a proper society. This is how it should be. This is how Coachella used to be too. You could just walk in.

• 19:25Speaker 07

  If you wanted to take a camera to a festival, you would have to go and buy a camera, you know, and then take pictures. You know what I mean? You've not got phones. It's not this stuff. So I I remember there being a sort of expectation, but I don't remember it being massive. So people go and say, oh, Pop will play. Oh, they're playing now. Are they blah, blah, blah? They go and they just absolutely. Blow everyone away who's already played. It was incredible. It was one of those things. Again, it was divinely ordained, the whole thing. It was a zeitgeist thing. I think they surprised themselves that they were so good. There's something about it where they've got to the point. I'm not joking, though, with live shows, they can really capture the crowd, which they wouldn't have been able to do a couple of years before. They weren't that good then, if you see what I mean, live, just getting the audience in the palm of their hand.

• 20:10Speaker 07

  This is the point where Jarvis can do it, and I don't think even he thought he'd be able to do it. It's really last minute. They buy tents at the last minute. They camp backstage. They hang out all the time. So because they're hanging out all the time, you don't, they're not flying in by helicopter or anything special. They're just hanging out and it's the Robbie Williams year and the Oasis year and everyone's a bit all over the place.

• 20:29Yasi Salek?

  This is fat Robbie Williams here.

• 20:31Speaker 07

  This is blonde. I've just, yeah, left, take that. I'm on those drugs.

• 20:35Yasi Salek?

  Track suit, yeah. Iconic, iconic moment.

• 20:39Speaker 07

  So they're all just, yeah, so there's, there's an air of, uh. This sort of a strange sort of normality backstage before they play and then everyone is totally blown away. It was amazing. It was really, really, my friend was on the side of the stage as well. She went, yeah, that was quite good. So thanks. That was quite good. You're on the fucking side of the stage, which I got there. I wish I'd remembered to stand next to you.

• 21:00Yasi Salek?

  Honestly, no, you were probably in a better place. No one ever remembers, no one ever thinks about this, but Side of the Stage sounds the worst. It's the best to be on the crowd. It's cool to be on the side of the stage, but the sound is not as good. I read there was eighty to a hundred thousand people watching.

• 21:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was massive. Absolutely massive and the whole audience was with them. And I'm not joking, the whole audience is just lapping it up. There's not a naysayer in the house, if it was a house.

• 21:26Yasi Salek?

  Even though they were playing mostly new music, right, that hadn't come out yet.

• 21:30Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 21:31Yasi Salek?

  I mean, Common People was out, I guess, for like a month, but only like a month.

• 21:35Speaker 07

  But still, yeah, it did something, just something happened, like it does sometimes, the magic of Glastonbury.

• 21:40Yasi Salek?

  Also, sometime this summer, post-Glastonbury, Mark Weber, who does have a book coming out about pulp, was at the time their tour manager, but also sort of doing musical contribution, doing like guitar in keys, you know, and Russell would play the violin, he played guitar. And while they were making different class, they were like, do you want to just be in the band?

• 22:03Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 22:04Yasi Salek?

  And he was like, yeah, I do just want to be in the band.

• 22:07Speaker 07

  Sweet, yeah.

• 22:07Yasi Salek?

  I know. And then my, my dear friend, who I think is one of the best people on the planet, Richard Priest, is called up to be the tour manager.

• 22:16Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 22:16Yasi Salek?

  Just a little shout out to Richard Priest here, wonderful person. Okay, let's talk about Sordid for Ease and Whiz slash Miss Shapes, a double aside.

• 22:26Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 22:27Yasi Salek?

  September 25th, 1995. You want to talk about Imperial Phase? It's, this is the motherfucking Imperial Phase, babe. It's like, Common People, Glastonbury, Sordid for Ease and Whiz, Miss Shapes. When you first heard the phrase Sordid for Ease and Whiz, what did you think it meant?

• 22:41Speaker 07

  Drugs.

• 22:43Yasi Salek?

  For sure. Sure.

• 22:45Speaker 07

  There's no, there's no, uh, it's, it's direct, it's overt, there's no ambiguity is what I'm trying to say. We know what that means.

• 22:54Yasi Salek?

  Jarvis said that it was a phrase that a girl that he met in Sheffield once told him. She went to see the Stone Roses at Spike Island, and Jarvis was like, I said, what do you remember about it? And she said, well, there were all these blokes walking around saying, is everyone sordid for ease and whiz? And that's all she remembered about it. And I thought it was a good phrase.

• 23:12Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 23:14Yasi Salek?

  He also said, the whole thing it's trying to say is that no matter how great a time you have on drugs, you know that it's been artificially induced. You've introduced a chemical into your brain, and that's what makes it such a hollow experience. Of course, there's that other feeling, the idea that however great you're feeling, you want to make it that much better. You're searching for that illusory thing where you're always trying to get back to that state, but you know you never will. And you start to see through it, notice how it's a bit frayed at the edges. That's what that song's about. Drugs aren't a magical thing, just chemicals that leave you feeling hollow. Again, it's kind of what you were saying, part and parcel, hand in hand with Common People, right? It's being part of this scene for a year and change, where everyone's doing a lot of drugs

• 23:58Yasi Salek?

  and being really cool. And it sounds like Jarvis is a little over it.

• 24:03Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 24:04Yasi Salek?

  It sounds like he's a little like, okay, I've done this and I don't like it.

• 24:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's obviously getting boring for him.

• 24:22Yasi Salek?

  This, I thought was very interesting. Nick Banks said that the song's lyrical matter actually inspired his drumming. He said, "I had the mental image that you were walking towards a rave and you could hear the music. It's quite a low level and your mind can't interpret it right, so it's coming out at a different tempo. It appears a bit slower than normal. That's the idea I had in my mind, but whether it's come across, I don't know."

• 24:45Speaker 07

  I'm glad he's thought about it, though.

• 24:47Yasi Salek?

  Yes, he's come a long way since.

• 24:51Yasi Salek?

  Since he had to be replaced by a drum machine on coverations.

• 24:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, bless him.

• 25:03Yasi Salek?

  Because of the success of Common People and I'm sure the delight around Glastonbury, this single had pre-release orders over 200,000, which I guess is a lot.

• 25:17Speaker 07

  That's a lot.

• 25:17Yasi Salek?

  And by the time it was released, it had hit 400,000 copies. Did it hit number one on the chart? The answer is no because Simply Red's "Fairground"

• 25:30Yasi Salek?

  was number one.

• 25:32Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 25:33Yasi Salek?

  Pulp really just cannot catch a break, man. They are not hitting number one.

• 25:37Speaker 07

  I just think it's not a great tune.

• 25:39Yasi Salek?

  Really?

• 25:40Speaker 07

  I have to say this honestly, I just don't like the melody line so much. Sorry, Pulp.

• 25:46Yasi Salek?

  It's interesting that they did a double A-side, but put "Misshapen" on the second A-side.

• 25:50Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 25:51Yasi Salek?

  "Misshapen" is really good.

• 25:52Speaker 07

  Hmm, hmm.

• 25:53Yasi Salek?

  It's like such an iconic Pulp song to me that really has this.

• 25:58Speaker 07

  It's got all the elements of it, yeah.

• 26:07Yasi Salek?

  Can you talk to me a little about the controversy surrounding this this single?

• 26:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, a journalist for the Mirror said, well, thought to herself that she didn't like it. And I think she rallied around and pushed the paper to do the front page story that says, ban this sixth stunt on it, which I think she, I don't know. It just seems a little bit contrived to go back to that word again. There wasn't really a Ferrari. I think the paper was trying to drum one up. It had a go to do it, but I mean, what to pop expect though? Cause they are calling a song about drugs, a song about drugs, about drugs. If you see what I mean.

• 26:47Yasi Salek?

  And I think it was probably because of that inlay in this, in the pre release single that allegedly showed how to make an origami rap.

• 26:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's marketing, isn't it?

• 26:59Yasi Salek?

  Sure, great marketing, but it will. And I think I read, this is still around the time where a young, every once in a while, a young person dies of ecstasy in the UK and it's a big story. Daniel Ashton, um, he was 17 and he was the 51st person in Britain to die as a result of taking ecstasy. And the Daily Mirror sort of like used this as a thing, but can, and then in people, children are dying and pulp is teaching people how to make origami. When really, again, the song is sort of anti-drug.

• 27:33Speaker 07

  Well, yeah, and the Daily Mirror are trying to sell newspapers. That's what they're trying to do. It's a, it's a cynical thing is, is what it is.

• 27:45Speaker 02

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• 28:27Speaker 04

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• 28:31Yasi Salek?

  You could say there's like two quintessential Pulp albums and it's different class and this is hardcore. Would you agree? I mean, obviously his and hers is a great album, but like the two most like kind of defining albums are these two.

• 28:43Speaker 07

  Yes, I would agree. Yes. Yeah.

• 28:45Yasi Salek?

  It just like struck me after like going through it from every lens and angle that like, I think maybe Pulp is like the ultimate Britpop band. I think Pulp like is the Britpop band.

• 28:57Speaker 07

  And why do you think that? What's Britpop to you now, months after?

• 29:02Yasi Salek?

  I'm like, oh, they kind of like embodied for me, if like you're gonna give Britpop any credence as like a real thing, like so British, right? But in the sense of like coming from the working class, but not from a distance, from a closeness. Having these like this kitchen sink drama aspect, which to me is so British. A wryness and an irony and a humor, which to me the most British thing in the world is humor. Whenever I meet like a not funny British person, I'm like so upset. I'm like, you're supposed to, this is like your cultural heritage. Like you're supposed to be funny and it's crazy to me when they're not funny.

• 29:44Speaker 07

  There are lots of people who aren't funny in this country. The seventy five people.

• 29:48Yasi Salek?

  I don't like it.

• 29:48Speaker 07

  Thirty aren't very funny.

• 29:49Yasi Salek?

  Thirty. So it's less than half.

• 29:52Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 29:52Yasi Salek?

  It's just all those qualities to me. Like it kind of coalesced to me and that's like.

• 29:57Speaker 07

  But how would you feel about Suede? Do they come in a close second? Cause for me, they are very of that.

• 30:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So maybe they're like the yin yang of Britpop, right? Where it's like pulp are sort of the like, I don't want to say lighter, cause it's, they're a little lighter. I mean, they're dealing with a little bit lighter material.

• 30:16Speaker 07

  Less consumption in the corner. Yeah.

• 30:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, exactly. Yes. Woe is me. Um, different kinds of drugs, you know, also.

• 30:23Speaker 07

  They get, yeah, they get up after flailing for a bit and just go to the pub.

• 30:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Speaker 07

  Whereas Suede would continue flailing until someone gave them a hanky.

• 30:31Yasi Salek?

  Well, anyways, now that I've gone off about my theories and, and ideas of, of Britpop, I'm done now. We can talk about different. Class. This is the first album, right, that they have worked with Chris Thomas.

• 30:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 30:46Yasi Salek?

  And you said it a bunch of times with the other albums, they suffered from poor production. Do you feel like one big aspect of this album being successful is like actually really good producer?

• 30:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, and I, I mean, I do think that they'd had a few goes, didn't they, with Common People? And that's actually quite a hard record to produce because it's got to keep lifting and keep lifting and building and building and building and building on kind of the central theme.

• 31:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Speaker 07

  So, yeah, it's not an easy thing to to make into the sort of the banger that it is. Yeah, I would agree. They are hard to. Isn't it funny? Hard to tap into, hard to produce. And here it becomes three dimensional where the the previous stuff. Though his and hers is on route, isn't it?

• 31:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they're, they got, they got much closer. I just like laughing picturing like you've got Jarvis and his like big ideas. You've got Russell coming in with like probably some differing ideas and his violin and he's like, and I want to do this. And the producer's like,

• 31:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 31:46Yasi Salek?

  Wow, what key is that in, sir? And then you've got Jarvis being like, and we love this ELO song. So Chris Thomas probably came and was like, good lord. And this is a little before I think Steve Mackey got really into computers and boop beep beep boop boop. That's a more of a This is Hardcore, but he did a good job. I mean, Chris Thomas is a legend. Roxy Music, babe.

• 32:09Yasi Salek?

  Sex Pistols, Nevermind the Ballad.

• 32:13Yasi Salek?

  Had a few, had a few good things under his belt. I thought it was very interesting that this quote from Jarvis, I want to see what you think, because his and hers is absolutely, obviously pre we've made it. They have not made it. They make it in a sense on his and hers when like Babies is a hit. And they get to go on top of the pops, which we didn't even talk about, which were Jarvis Cocker. I think he had a sign or something that said, I hate wet, wet, wet. This is

• 32:42Speaker 07

  They've been number one forever. And no one liked it anymore. And we all wanted it to go away. It's like sixteen weeks or whatever it was, twelve weeks. I can't remember.

• 32:50Yasi Salek?

  And Jarvis, what was the song? Which wet, wet, wet song?

• 32:53Speaker 07

  It's I Feel It All Around. It's not even their song from whatever stupid rom com.

• 32:58Yasi Salek?

  It became famous then because of Four Weddings and a Funeral, um, which was very funny.

• 33:02Speaker 07

  Ah, okay.

• 33:10Yasi Salek?

  What Jarvis said is, a lot of the feeling on the record, Different Class, I suppose, was having waited such a long time to get people's attention. And once you've got it, you gotta do something with it. Cause they wrote most of the songs after Common People was a hit. Cause Common People was the first song they wrote for the album. And they like kinda rushed to put it out because of that whole zeitgeist-y moment. And then they were all of a sudden, kinda pop stars, right? Like, Common People catapulted them into like-

• 33:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was huge.

• 33:40Yasi Salek?

  And then they wrote an album from that place, which is so, so fascinating, right?

• 33:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, but it's, it's so very his and hers, this album. It's far more his and hers adjacent than This Is Hardcore, I think.

• 33:52Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 33:53Speaker 07

  In that this, you can see that these songs could have been on his and hers, some of them. But then all together, and then with a different producer, they seem to be placed elsewhere. Things called, you know, Misshaped, Pencil Skirt, Disco 2000 even is quite lip gloss, in a way. So they definitely, you know, got their template, and they can write those songs. And they might maybe start writing those songs sort of, you know, in their sleep at that point. But somehow, everything works, I think, through Common People. It gives it a different angle. Cause, as we were saying before, cause Common People is a political song. It is about, you know, how, you know, you've got it lucky, and there's a lot of people that do have to really, really struggle. So yes, it gives it a whole different tone.

• 34:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's the things that kind of like, coalesced for this album. It's, Common People's a hit. Famously Jarvis Cocker wrote all of the lyrics for every song on this album in two days. So the music was kind of done, and then he was like, oh, what should I write about? And so, it's, a lot of it is through that Common People class lens. I mean, it's called Different Class.

• 34:56Speaker 07

  He's basically been to Soho, though, here, hasn't he? He's at Bar Italia, which still exists on Frith Street. And he's walked down, and he sees, you know, Live Bed Show sign. And then he sees, you know, and there's an eye spy, there's obviously some sort of voyeur sort of thing. Someone's in a pencil skirt. It's like, he spent two days on Wardour Street.

• 35:13Yasi Salek?

  You're saying, this is the I Love Lamp? Style of songwriting.

• 35:18Speaker 07

  I get you.

• 35:18Yasi Salek?

  So I feel like Jarvis was very much like, I need to write the lyrics of the song and he took a walk and did a bit of I Love Lamp.

• 35:24Speaker 07

  That was saying exactly that, but he's saying the seedy side of Soho and it's I love lamp. Totally. Yeah. I think so. All of this stuff, you could see it all. You could see it all walking down Soho.

• 35:35Yasi Salek?

  You would know because now you've opened my eyes because now I'm like, oh, I need to go on this. Well, they should have a walking tour. They should have a pulp walking tour of Soho, a different class.

• 35:44Speaker 07

  The pavements weren't so small. They would, but I'm sure you could do it very easily. I'll take you on a tour.

• 35:49Yasi Salek?

  Please, I would love it.

• 35:50Speaker 07

  Go and point at things.

• 35:51Yasi Salek?

  I'll leave some flowers at the Bar Italia. Okay, that makes so much sense. And it's also, you know, from a maybe a deeper place of like, this was post having moved to London and marinated. And he, he said, like, I don't have the exact quote in front of me, but like, obviously like London, you're confronted with all of the rich Greek girls of whatever and these different classes. And also, he had said that like in Sheffield, he was kind of not like upper class at all, but like, art considered like a feat and artsy, you know, whatever. And then he got to London and he was considered like, a miner because of his accent. They were like, oh, this, this bloke over here with the way he talks. And he was like, and he found it.

• 36:36Speaker 07

  It's the whole kind of carrier element, isn't it?

• 36:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it, yes. And he found it quite like, kind of charming and delightful. But also I think he just hadn't been, he, he kind of says that in Sheffield, everyone is pretty much in the same class. He's like, you don't really come across a lot of like, huge class divide. And coming to London, he was like really confronted with this, like, it's like a big thing. And that informs obviously common people, but also like a lot of the rest of the album.

• 37:03Speaker 07

  Obviously, Common People is, as we're saying, it's a political song. I don't know about the rest of it. I think it's personal politics.

• 37:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 37:10Speaker 07

  I don't know that he's writing from a, you know, the, the mining standpoint.

• 37:14Yasi Salek?

  You're right.

• 37:14Speaker 07

  The battle of all grief. These are, you know, the things that happen after dark and the things that happen in people's kitchens, as you were saying, kitchen sink and under the bed covers than that. But the. Certainly, he's still in this album feeling like an outsider, but also wants to be. And I'm not saying that in a superficial way. He needs to be an observer and he also doesn't feel like he's part of things. Even though like we were talking about, he's try, he's starting to be courted by fashion designers and all sorts of poncy people. He's, he always liked shuffling around and looking in secondhand shops. As, as mentioned, and so how you can get kind of lost in, in that and shuffle around some seedy shops at least. It's quite old fashioned still.

• 37:56Yasi Salek?

  You're saying that like, aside from the like common people, very obvious political consideration, the rest of it is more coming from, like you said, a personal political of feeling, feeling outsider-y in a new place. And you, you say you think he enjoys it be- because he doesn't want to be part of the like cool class or whatever, or the upper class or, or the fashion people.

• 38:25Speaker 07

  He's odd in that he started to know lots of fashion people at that time. So like that for the aesthetic sense, but never wanted to be part of that sort of establishment or quote unquote cool. To my mind, he always thought that that was uh not cool. You know, he likes weirdness more than anything else or seeming cool. So he was, yeah, trying to balance his way through it still. And still sort of shuffling around, as I say, he enjoyed a certain amount. It's only when we really get to the big Michael Jackson thing where he becomes super famous.

• 38:57Yasi Salek?

  Oh my god, I can't wait.

• 38:58Speaker 07

  And that was the thing that really was very difficult. Um but here he has still some relative anonymity to be able to walk around and sort of people watch.

• 39:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah. I can't wait to talk about the Michael Jackson thing. Okay, I guess let me rephrase that or let me re revise my, my erroneous class take.

• 39:16Speaker 07

  But he might have been, you know, it might be personal politics while feeling like a miner. Yeah, so you know, while down the pit.

• 39:22Yasi Salek?

  I think maybe down the pit.

• 39:24Speaker 07

  I like that.

• 39:25Yasi Salek?

  He did, he did meet a miner for the first time, and we forgot to say in, in hospital when he was recovering from his um injury.

• 39:31Speaker 07

  Russell was the one who was really big on class war. Russell used to tell me off for things and like. Do you have Artex in Los Angeles?

• 39:39Yasi Salek?

  Artex?

• 39:39Speaker 07

  It's this thing where it it can cover a weak wall or a ceiling and it sort of looks like a whipped sort of icing on a cake.

• 39:47Yasi Salek?

  Oh, we like like we call it cottage cheese ceilings.

• 39:50Speaker 07

  There you go. It's the same sort of thing. I said I liked it and I once got half an hour of a lecture from Russell, who said, well, you're middle class and you're saying you're you know, this is cultural tourism. So it was Russell who had the big thing.

• 40:01Yasi Salek?

  That's an incredibly telling statement, though, because when we're gonna get into spoiler alert, you guys, for a thing that happened thirty years ago, Russell does leave the band.

• 40:10Yasi Salek?

  But you kind of start, you can really see why, yeah. Well, he's the one that put on the Dada Marxist play, you know.

• 40:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. And he was the one that, you know, was had the Cole Knott Doll.

• 40:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 40:21Speaker 07

  Stickers and badges and things and made them go marches or something. He really tried.

• 40:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 40:25Speaker 07

  It's quite funny.

• 40:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think maybe more you're right. It's like a personal thing. And I guess I guess what I'm seeing when I'm looking at like all the collected songs is like, some of them are so much thinking back to Sheffield and then some of them are so much dealing with like being in London. And experiencing these like new things. Okay, like for example, a song that I love quite a bit, Disco Two Thousand, which is one of the more popular songs on here. And this is a nostalgia song, right? This is looking back ostensibly, I don't know if it's a real person or not, but to a past love and what happened to her and we thought I thought we would get married, but you got married and I here I am on the street and, you know.

• 41:07Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:17Speaker 07

  But it's very like, do you remember the first time? As I say, he's still plowing some similar ground here as it is on his and hers. Those sorts of themes of lost love and moving on, all those things.

• 41:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And then he has like his classic, like you said, Live Bed Show, like it's a classic female protagonist point of view, which is a favorite stance for Jarvis with raised by all those women. But I think something changed, by the way, is extremely underrated. I feel like it's very beautiful and it makes me cry.

• 41:45Speaker 07

  It's absolutely. And it was one of those things where when they started to play it live. A couple of years ago, you think, where's this song going? And then suddenly everyone in the room or the arena or the stadium is sort of weeping and flailing and dancing to it. Uh, much more powerful than anyone remembered. It's really lovely. It does make me a bit teary.

• 42:12Yasi Salek?

  Okay, I want to talk to you briefly about underwear really quick. Which is, again, classic pulp about going home with someone, sex stuff.

• 42:29Yasi Salek?

  But here's a quote I wanted to read to you that I feel is extremely British. He said, "See, sometimes it seems like a great thing to do to shag someone you don't know well or care about. It's a mental thing. Your body's saying, go on, do it, just get it done. And in a way, I think there's something enticing about impersonal sex. The only similar thing is having a kebab. Everybody knows that kebabs are a bad idea. They do, really. You can't excuse them on any grounds of nutrition or otherwise, but somehow when you're really pissed, really fucking hammered, you get into that perverse frame of mind where you think, right, I'm hammered, I'm a mess. How can I take it further? And the answer is, I'll have a kebab. So I need to ask you, this is, we don't have that here. So I'm like, what is it about having a kebab that is so further

• 43:14Yasi Salek?

  debasing of the self?

• 43:17Speaker 07

  Well, yeah, he's right. And well, they've, they started doing fancy ones quite recently. So let's not talk about those.

• 43:22Yasi Salek?

  We're just talking street meat. We have that here too. Ours is hot dogs, but it's street meat. It's meat that you buy off the street.

• 43:28Speaker 07

  It's reformed quite a lot of it. It's constituted into a big, kind of enormous, upside down triangle shape, and it's very, very greasy. So you don't know what part of an animal, if it does come from an animal, what sort of animal it comes from. And you have it in your pita bread and you have like bits of lettuce and things like that, but no one really eats the lettuce. They just eat. And but the thing about kebabs is they have lots of sauces. So they have really disgusting, greasy, horrible sauces that are actually quite nice.

• 43:57Yasi Salek?

  Sounds wonderful.

• 43:58Speaker 07

  You often see them just all over the pavement. You know, on a Saturday night, because people couldn't actually, you know, be sober enough to hold them.

• 44:05Yasi Salek?

  Is there any other songs? I mean, did we, did we, we didn't really talk about Miss Shapes.

• 44:09Speaker 07

  Miss Shapes again is good and a very key kind of pulp theme. Although Jarvis didn't like it for a while and he left it out of the compilation tour, just talked to me about it today.

• 44:19Yasi Salek?

  Why do you think he didn't like it?

• 44:21Speaker 07

  Don't know, he just said, I don't like that, I'm not gonna put that on that hit single. Um, but I think he quite likes it now, because he plays it now. One of those things, I mean, it did sort of sum up a lot of. See, Britpop, as you know, became very Union Jack guitar. And it wasn't, it was a load of really weird people, as we're saying, there's an album called Freaks by Pulp, and they turned into Britpop. It was, people had been bullied at school as Britpop, you know, and they went to clubs and they were all absolutely peculiar. So it was quite broad. So I do feel there are these clarion chords that Jarvis still wants to say, look, we don't think we're in the firm, and we don't think we're normal. We're still a load of oddballs who've got no idea what we're doing.

• 44:59Yasi Salek?

  That makes a lot of sense. Oh, Union Jack guitar. He did say that it was actually directly the success of Common People that influenced the lyrics of Miss Shapes. He said, because Common People had been such a hit, I thought, well, having had all this time where nobody was listening to us and feeling really on the margins, I got kind of excited, I got carried away. I thought, yeah, man, this is a chance for idiots such as meself to infiltrate the mainstream in some way to have a go. And I suppose that's where you get the lyrics of something like Miss Shapes.

• 45:26Speaker 07

  Ah.

• 45:27Yasi Salek?

  Miss Shapes are these chocolates, and they used to have them in the sweet shop next to our house. They were the ones that had gone wrong in the factory. They were misshapen, kind of like Elephant Man of the Sweet World. You could buy them in a bag much cheaper than a normal box of chocolates would be, and they tasted as good. It's just aesthetically, they weren't that pleasing. So that seemed like a fairly reasonable metaphor.

• 45:47Speaker 07

  And there's a line in it about broken biscuits. You used to be able to buy big bags of broken biscuits, broken in the factory, for hardly anything. And again, they tasted nice, they were just broken.

• 46:04Yasi Salek?

  Then he said, if I aspire to anything, I'd say that from the days of wearing leader hosen at school, I've always wanted to become part of the mainstream and be accepted, but without changing.

• 46:15Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 46:16Yasi Salek?

  I love that.

• 46:17Speaker 07

  Do we think he changed? He didn't really, did he?

• 46:20Yasi Salek?

  I think, well, you would know better. I don't know this man personally, and I don't want to speculate on people I don't know, even though it's my literal whole job and career, um, to write fanfiction about people I've never met who probably listened to this and are like, what are you talking about? I don't think anyone ever changes, but I think they indulge parts of themselves to lesser or further extents that maybe they have to dial back.

• 46:48Speaker 07

  Well, people are constantly in flux and they react to situations. And when you're in a situation where you can't walk down the street because everyone's shouting your name, you're going to react to that situation, aren't you?

• 46:57Yasi Salek?

  A hundred percent. Also, I'm sorry, if Prada calls me in once, am I going to go to a party? I'm there. How, what time, what time I'll be there 20 minutes early? What do you need?

• 47:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, me too.

• 47:05Yasi Salek?

  The cover of this album is so iconic, and it is a real person's wedding photo. That's a real wedding photo.

• 47:13Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Do we know whose it is?

• 47:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Dom O'Connor and his wife Sharon, two Rs. They married in August of 1995. They were pulling in favors because, you know, they put on their own wedding. And Dom O'Connor's little brother, Ben O'Connor, went to college in Edinburgh and made friends with a guy who was a photographer who had been working with Britpop bands. And they were like, can you do wedding photos? And he was like, I don't think I can because I'm working on some pulp stuff. And then he was like, well, actually pulp are thinking of using photos of real people, including a wedding photo. So maybe I'll come do some wedding photos. And then he did do the wedding photos in exchange for letting pulp use them, use the one on the cover.

• 47:59Speaker 07

  Ah.

• 48:00Yasi Salek?

  Imagine your wedding photo is forever immortalized.

• 48:04Speaker 07

  That's brilliant. I'd love that.

• 48:06Yasi Salek?

  Me too. So I thought that was funny. Jarvis said, this is something I want to ask you about, about the audience for this album. He said, and for Pulp going forward from Common People on, he said, I've been wondering what the audiences are going to be like on this tour. I obviously don't write for townies, but then I don't write for teenage girls either, though they buy Pulp records too. Ultimately, it's probably a good thing to get the attention of people you weren't consciously writing for, because it gives you a chance to say things to them when you otherwise wouldn't have got one.

• 48:38Speaker 07

  I always thought townies was a west country term, but apparently it's everywhere and you can call people that in London. The townies, townies are sort of people from out of town. It's really peculiar and I still don't understand it. They're normal people.

• 48:50Yasi Salek?

  Okay, like normies.

• 48:51Speaker 07

  They're the people that go out on, yeah, Saturday night and get absolutely wrecked.

• 48:56Yasi Salek?

  Bridge and tunnel, which is what they call them in New York.

• 48:59Speaker 07

  Right. Which is quote unquote, normal. Right. Yes, it's that. So for people who are, I mean, it's not a very nice term. And he would be sort of saying for lowest common denominator or people that wouldn't like something slightly arty. Yes. And teenage girls are not townies. They're very different, really. Teenage girls are quite cool.

• 49:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, all the coolest, actually, in setting, setting the tone and trends. But I get what he's saying, you know?

• 49:25Speaker 07

  Yeah, he's saying that he's not one of those. I mean, he's probably saying he's not Oasis in this. It's kind of maybe underneath.

• 49:32Yasi Salek?

  He only ever spoke positively about Oasis. He said he had an easier time talking to them than anybody else, because maybe they're both northern or something. But I thought it was very funny because I was like, oh, okay. But they always seem to say nice things about each other. Like even, even in my Oasis episode album, recalling that like, they slagged off every other Britpop band. I'm using the parlance of your people. Except for Pulp, they were like, yeah, Pulp's good.

• 49:59Speaker 07

  Oh, yes, they must have got on. Yeah, but I don't think Imagine Jarvis wouldn't really like the music of Oasis.

• 50:06Yasi Salek?

  You don't think he's putting on Feeling Supersonic, Give Me Gin and Tonic, just in his free time, while he's walking around?

• 50:12Speaker 07

  Not anymore. He may have done at the time.

• 50:14Yasi Salek?

  The title, Different Class, I didn't realize this, it says, and you might know better, but that's a Sheffield expression that actually means top class.

• 50:23Speaker 07

  Well, it's it's not just Sheffield. I think they can't own that. Yeah, something is of a different class. It's much better than the rest. So it's a class above, yeah.

• 50:32Yasi Salek?

  Oh, so it never would be like, oh, they're a different class, they're a class below?

• 50:36Speaker 07

  No, you wouldn't say it in that context, no.

• 50:39Yasi Salek?

  You don't want to other the below classes?

• 50:41Speaker 07

  But different class doesn't mean posher or richer or something.

• 50:44Yasi Salek?

  Oh, it just means like a cut above, like, oh, that's just like a better thing. Got it. Okay, got it.

• 50:49Speaker 07

  Class. Yeah, it's in a different class. It's like in a different league.

• 50:51Yasi Salek?

  God. Oh, so they were kind of doing like a pun?

• 50:54Speaker 07

  Yes, as they do. Yeah.

• 50:56Yasi Salek?

  I do love it. Look, and now it's all clicking here while many years that I didn't understand that.

• 51:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 51:02Yasi Salek?

  Here's a little interview he gave about the lyrics. He said, they asked him, how long do you work on your lyrics? And he said, usually I'm working on the words right up to the last minute. The big panic time for me on this record is when I had to write all the words to 12 songs in two nights. I sat in my sister's kitchen with this bottle of crap Spanish brandy that someone had given her, and I just kept going until I passed out, obviously recalling his walk through Soho.

• 51:26Speaker 07

  Yes, absolutely.

• 51:28Yasi Salek?

  They said, did you have ideas of what they would be about before you started them? And Jarvis said, the ideas for them had been percolating for about a year and a half. Once I'd decided what my agenda was going to be, it was all right. I'm studying the class system of the late 90s Britain on this album. I've been in some extremely different social situations since I've been living in London, a squat in Myland, and Peckham was pretty bad. Then I found myself at Elton John and Johnny Versace's party the other night. I was standing next to David Copperfield. I saw the wonder of his hair. It doesn't look real at all. It just doesn't move. Probably the most extraordinary magic feat he's ever done.

• 52:03Yasi Salek?

  So, yes, he's, Jarvis has traversed the various corners of the classes of London in his short stint at the college. And I guess that In both personal and non-personal ways is what's informing this album.

• 52:23Speaker 07

  I know, I still think if you look at those songs, they're not about, you know, the big P political.

• 52:29Yasi Salek?

  No, I don't think so.

• 52:30Speaker 07

  I think it's just a bit of covering up there and he's saying, yeah, it's very political. And we're going, no, they're just about underwear and about women.

• 52:36Yasi Salek?

  Because Common People was really, was really popular.

• 52:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's, so, yes, and Common People is also dictating the, um, the title Different Class.

• 52:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, totally.

• 52:45Speaker 07

  A cut above something else.

• 52:47Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 52:48Speaker 07

  A class based pun. But yeah, I still think he's still writing girls.

• 52:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, sex.

• 52:52Speaker 07

  Seedy so.

• 52:53Yasi Salek?

  Preoccupied by sex.

• 52:55Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 52:55Yasi Salek?

  It has been certified four times platinum by the British phonographic industry. And as of twenty twenty, had sold one point three million copies, four top ten singles, a smash on every level.

• 53:11Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 53:11Yasi Salek?

  I think.

• 53:11Speaker 07

  Hmm. Yeah. And it just, yeah, it made them the superstars that they had wanted to be.

• 53:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 07

  It really did take off. He's something just lifts off The Time Is Right, and that was very much that album. And they have such a defining aesthetic, as people say. I mean, you know, there wasn't a band that, lots of copyists, but not a band that looked like them or had the typeface, that neon, whatever they use, you know?

• 53:32Yasi Salek?

  They're also, I don't want to say copyists, but like, you see how like in ways they were really ahead of what would become indie sleaze, right?

• 53:40Speaker 07

  Oh, that's a good, yeah, that has threads in pulp, actually.

• 53:43Yasi Salek?

  For sure. Like so much of the like look, like when I, when I was watching videos of them like performing live at like David Letterman and stuff, and their little like very neat black button up shirts and like sort of like slinky, babe, the hives are coming. You know, like all this like stuff.

• 54:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:00Yasi Salek?

  You really see like they were so ahead of that. And that's all gonna kind of burst in the early two thousands of Franz Ferdinand and, you know, you can, you can.

• 54:10Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 54:10Yasi Salek?

  And not that they're copying them musically per se, but.

• 54:13Speaker 07

  No, but there's a thread.

• 54:15Yasi Salek?

  There's a thread.

• 54:15Speaker 07

  You're right, really is, yes. And you have to be clever to take up that thread and not be pastiche. And some bands would be pastiche of that sort of thing.

• 54:23Yasi Salek?

  Totally. I mean, and also you see, I mean, it's not just pulp, like, for example. The Stone Roses' greatest living legacy is fucking Parkas. Like, I'm sorry, like, it's like, you wanna say it's the album? No, it's Parkas. That, that, that man Ian Brown wore some Parkas. Liam Gallagher's eyes got starry and teary. And the next thing you know, there's just generations of British boys are like, I need a Parka. River Island, nine hundred dollars, please. That's all Ian Brown. River Island should pay Ian Brown every year.

• 54:52Speaker 07

  But that's not a bad thing, is it?

• 54:54Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 54:54Speaker 07

  I mean, just.

• 54:55Yasi Salek?

  Parkas are great. They're gorgeous. I love it. I love when a man wears a Parka.

• 54:58Speaker 07

  Influencing style, he should get an OBE probably.

• 55:02Yasi Salek?

  They went on top of the pops during this cycle, obviously, as well. Jarvis had a new message. Do you remember what it was? The sign that he held up?

• 55:10Speaker 07

  A new one that's not wet, wet, wet. No, I don't.

• 55:12Yasi Salek?

  Viva la revolución. He's really playing into the class that Pulp is a political band now. Maybe, maybe Russell wrote it.

• 55:21Speaker 07

  Yes. What's he trying to do? He's trying to keep to his roots, isn't he? That's the thing. It's when people get famous, they suddenly feel really, really guilty. So they have to do some, you know, working class things.

• 55:32Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 55:32Speaker 07

  Or some revolutionary things.

• 55:34Yasi Salek?

  Absolutely.

• 55:34Speaker 07

  But it is quite cute. Jarvis is quite like it. He doesn't wanna be in the pockets of the man.

• 55:38Yasi Salek?

  Who does, babe? Who does? Some people.

• 55:40Speaker 07

  Some people do. Some people do. Some people do. Let's not name names.

• 55:43Yasi Salek?

  Some people crawled right in there and never left.

• 55:48Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 55:48Yasi Salek?

  This is just a great album, but I'm gonna say it, and I don't know if it's because of my age or my, where I've landed in life or whatever, but when I went through all the albums, This is Hardcore means a lot more to me.

• 56:01Speaker 07

  Really?

• 56:02Yasi Salek?

  We'll talk about it.

• 56:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. I think to a lot of people, this is, as I say, the defining one, the one that you would put on, the one that all the memories come back. This is Hardcore didn't land in, at the time, not really. And still, I think people find it problematic, because it is, it's got in your face, isn't it?

• 56:21Yasi Salek?

  Yes. I wanted to ask you about this one line that David Sinclair wrote for The Times. The Times is very fancy.

• 56:27Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 56:28Yasi Salek?

  Pulp are the great interlopers of Britpop.

• 56:31Speaker 07

  Yes. I, I mean. And yet, they probably, as you're saying, they're more defining of Britpop than actually all of them.

• 56:38Yasi Salek?

  To me.

• 56:39Speaker 07

  The ones that shouldn't be there.

• 56:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 07

  But in a good way, where Britpop is good and it's not embarrassing to say the word, as I say, in this country, people are still very embarrassed about it. So, the idea, yeah, that an outsider or people who aren't part of something can understand more of what is going on in a particular cultural time, that is Pulp. They were outside and they were clever, or they still are, and they had a different insight into it and it wasn't the copyist thing. For them, because they've been going on, on for too long, you had too much of a weird background. I mean, they go on forever and as we know, thousand decades later, they're still claring on with their stuff.

• 57:16Yasi Salek?

  People, as they say, they had the receipts. They could be like, oh, really? Go check out our album from nineteen eighty one. It. Check it out.

• 57:25Speaker 07

  And also, can we quickly talk about the merch?

• 57:27Yasi Salek?

  Please.

• 57:28Speaker 07

  The sewing pattern was really good, which was for Miss Shapes, was it not?

• 57:32Yasi Salek?

  What is the sewing pattern? What are you talking about? I don't know about that.

• 57:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, a sewing pattern that you would use to cut your fabric and then use a sewing machine to do that. They had one for a jacket. And it was from an original pattern because Jarvis and his girlfriend used to go to you know, junk shops and things and buy old, because then you could make something really nice in seventies or sixties. Actually, I've got one, I should sort of wave it at you at some point when I can actually find it. They've got a specific Pulp one and that was sent out with records to journalists and broadcasters and things. So they had really good merch, as I say. And you know, the Pulp people thing was the fan club. They were very, very good. Mark Webber obviously comes from the fan club, you know, and I've got one here.

• 58:15Yasi Salek?

  Imagine, like, the biggest dream of the universe, that you're, you're in the fan club and then you're in the band. That's that's a really, what a beautiful thing.

• 58:23Speaker 07

  But they have this thing, which I'm sure you've read about, a gift for you from the wardrobe of Jarvis, and they cut up one of his suits. And everyone got a tiny bit of the suit and it's le- labelled and numbered. Mine's a hundred and two out of five hundred. There is a little bit of fabric.

• 58:37Yasi Salek?

  Great, you still have it.

• 58:38Speaker 07

  This stuff. Yeah, I've put it up there. I've got the badges. I've got all sorts of weird things and the fanzines and things. And that attention to detail and that idea of being in that pulp club and the pulp club was quite weird, but you could subscribe to this thing. And you would see the promo stuff. They had a book as well that's got a cartoon of them and thing. It's just a promo book, I think, for America called Pulp. All sorts of things they would do and spend the money on. And it just means it makes it that much more special. You know, you really are part of something where I was feeling, you know, we're talking about the pockets of the man. There's not just a promo. Like box of matches or whatever you get with other things. They've really, really thought about it and they did, you know, the cliche, love their fans. They actually really, really did kind of treat them properly and that makes a difference.

• 59:21Yasi Salek?

  I love that you brought this up because one of my deep and most abiding interests is promo items. Of the past. They don't do them anymore. Obviously, there's no money and there's no media, so nobody cares.

• 59:33Speaker 07

  I know.

• 59:34Yasi Salek?

  They're like, for example, on eBay, if anyone's interested in buying me a gift.

• 59:39Speaker 07

  Which I'm sure they are.

• 59:40Yasi Salek?

  There is a mobile. You guys know a mobile, like a little suede suede mobile? That has the like, um.

• 59:48Speaker 07

  I used to have one.

• 59:49Yasi Salek?

  The pig mask guy and the all the characters.

• 59:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 59:54Yasi Salek?

  Oh, it's, I think it's two hundred dollars on eBay.

• 59:57Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 59:58Yasi Salek?

  And I want it so bad. Why do I need it? I don't know, just to hang from my office ceiling and delighted.

• 1:00:03Speaker 07

  Totally, you need it.

• 1:00:04Yasi Salek?

  Um, so I love that. There's like, I I'm constantly searching for them on good old eBay because. Eventually people will post them. Like my friend Ho has a pavement ashtray that I'm very jealous of.

• 1:00:16Speaker 07

  Very nice. I've got a Manic Street Preachers compact, which has you, uh, stay beautiful or whatever it is in the, yeah, in the, in the middle of it. Whatever it was, it's, yeah, it's really cute. It's obviously broken and I used to use it.

• 1:00:28Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 1:00:28Speaker 07

  I would use all my promo stuff, yeah, so yeah, it just looks like rubbish. Um, but it was cute. Those are the things that we do remember and we love.

• 1:00:36Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah, well, Pulp is firing on all cylinders, including merch. I mean, yeah, they they had really nailed their branding by this point.

• 1:00:43Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:00:44Yasi Salek?

  With the like very cool logo of the band name and all the badges. That have that and that pink and black sort of.

• 1:00:54Speaker 07

  Yes, yes.

• 1:00:55Yasi Salek?

  Thing that becomes.

• 1:00:56Speaker 07

  They've got it. They know. They know their visual identity by this point so well.

• 1:00:59Yasi Salek?

  I think one thing that I really appreciate about most, honestly, most cool rock music, even the ones that wouldn't admit it, like grunge, that like the visual aesthetic is so important. It like goes hand in hand. Like rock and roll is a visual medium as much as it's an audio medium. And so I love that they had, they really nailed their aesthetic. Also, Kandita is so cool. It's always, it's just so cool to have a woman in a band. I'm sorry. It's just, it's very cool. You know, feminine energy.

• 1:01:29Speaker 07

  It's the best thing ever.

• 1:01:30Yasi Salek?

  She has a cool little hair, hairdo, little skirt. Okay, great reviews. Simon Reynolds said, forget about Blur versus Oasis. The real battle for the soul of Britpop is Blur versus Pulp. He closes it out by saying, Pulp then, not so much the jewel in Britpop's crown, more like the single solitary band who validate the whole sorry enterprise. Maybe I copied Simon Reynolds' thought on that. Maybe that, that got into my mind. But I just, I couldn't, I, I just couldn't stop thinking of how they had all the pieces. Like Oasis had the like, we're like from Manchester, we're working class, but then their music is so broad, you know, it's so almost kind of timeless, right? Like it could be, it's so Beatlesy and so like rolling.

• 1:02:16Yasi Salek?

  That's the thing, but like.

• 1:02:17Speaker 07

  But he can't copy them very well. And that's all of it. And that's it. Early stuff slightly is a bit like we've rebelled against something. It's very sort of school kids, isn't it? So behind.

• 1:02:28Yasi Salek?

  I do think God touched Noel Gallagher for two albums and then left him behind, but then that does happen. But it isn't like the sound of a time and place where Pulp is so at the sound of a time and place, you know?

• 1:02:43Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

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• 1:03:18Yasi Salek?

  We're flying high, okay? We're pretty famous, but not yet extremely famous as we will be come February 19th, 1996. The Brit Awards.

• 1:03:34Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:03:35Yasi Salek?

  Were you there?

• 1:03:36Speaker 07

  Yes, I was.

• 1:03:37Yasi Salek?

  Wonderful. Let's just paint the picture. This is like the most iconic Brit Awards for many reasons. Cause there's also the whole Other Side Oasis story of like them slagging off. Wasn't Michael Hutchence like onstage like calling him a has been? But anyways, that's on the drama we need to talk about. The drama we need to talk about is Pulp is nominated for four awards. Best album, best group, best single and best video. They lose to Oasis for album, group and video. And to Take That for single. Do you remember what Take That song it was in 1996?

• 1:04:06Speaker 07

  Amazing question, got no idea.

• 1:04:09Yasi Salek?

  Me neither because.

• 1:04:10Speaker 07

  Does it matter?

• 1:04:11Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 1:04:11Speaker 07

  It doesn't. They just got a lovely award.

• 1:04:14Yasi Salek?

  They got a lovely, everyone got awards but Pulp. But don't worry. Pulp didn't get any awards, but they made memories, babe. They go ahead and made memories because I guess, okay, so this, this really sent me. The Brit Awards had invented this new award to give to Michael Jackson, who was at that point 37 years old. So that he would make his first British TV appearance in 20 years. The title of the award was Artist of a Generation. He's there to perform his Christmas number one hit, Earth Song. Haven't heard it ever in my life. Never heard it when it came out. Don't believe this song even really exists.

• 1:04:48Speaker 07

  Yes, it does. I have heard it.

• 1:04:51Yasi Salek?

  So he's there to perform it while he is surrounded by, let me check these notes, a bunch of prepubescent children, a mere two years after he had settled out of court in the sexual abuse case brought against him by the parents of thirteen year old Jordan Chandler. So that's cool, I think.

• 1:05:12Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Yasi Salek?

  Also, I believe the children were not, were they not dressed in like rags and like, like they were like street ragamuffins and he was like their savior?

• 1:05:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think so, because it's What About Us, isn't it, that song? What about us is what they sing.

• 1:05:24Yasi Salek?

  Okay, I do know, I do know the song. I just didn't know it was called Earth Song. Man, I regret to say that song does bang.

• 1:05:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's so off the wall, though, is it?

• 1:05:32Yasi Salek?

  No, no. So, this is all going on. Bob Geldof, speaking of Michael Hutchinson Voliates, gets on stage to introduce, and he says, "When Michael Jackson sings, it is with the voice of angels, and when his feet move, you can see God dancing."

• 1:05:50Speaker 07

  Now, do you think that Bob Geldof said that of his own accord?

• 1:05:55Yasi Salek?

  No, I think someone made him.

• 1:05:57Speaker 07

  Someone made him.

• 1:05:58Yasi Salek?

  They said, "We're gonna take away your knighthood if you don't, um, read this little line, Bob."

• 1:06:04Speaker 07

  Because everybody was made to say, or they thought they were made to say, to call him the king of pop.

• 1:06:09Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:06:10Speaker 07

  He invented that, and he just kind of got a memo that said he's now called the king of pop. Was that, what, we don't want to do that? Because it smashes. Why would we do that? Because the Americans doing that, sorry, I know you're American, but, you know, they're funny like that.

• 1:06:23Yasi Salek?

  Well, all this angered Jarvis Cocker, okay? Pulp had been booked to perform Sordid for E's and Wiz, they're there. He said, "I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. I found it extremely distasteful and crap," because at the rehearsals, he had seen what was gonna happen. And when it was going on, he said, "Something in me just snapped. It really irked me that there were all these people with rags on and him healing them all. He was obviously trying to exonerate himself from the child abuse allegations. Candida egged me on. I said, 'Look, we could do something here, we're really near,' and she said, 'Oh, you'd never do it.'" And then he was like, "Okay, really? Yeah, I will." On stage with Pete Mancell, who at the last minute was like, oh, this is a bad idea.

• 1:07:06Yasi Salek?

  And he didn't fully participate, but they threw up the Vs and then Jarvis, tell me if this is correct. Lifted up his little cardigan.

• 1:07:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, he turned around.

• 1:07:16Yasi Salek?

  He turned around, lifted up his cardigan and just like shook his little ass and that's it.

• 1:07:21Speaker 07

  It should be said, yeah, he did have trousers on.

• 1:07:23Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 1:07:23Speaker 07

  Sounds like, yes, he was fully clothed.

• 1:07:25Yasi Salek?

  Fully clothed. I was looking back.

• 1:07:27Speaker 07

  But he lifts it up slightly and waggles it.

• 1:07:29Yasi Salek?

  I'm like, you went to jail for.

• 1:07:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33Yasi Salek?

  Just moving your little butt in your jeans on stage or trousers or whatever.

• 1:07:38Speaker 07

  But you know that Jarvis was very, very drunk. This is why he did it.

• 1:07:41Yasi Salek?

  Obvious.

• 1:07:42Speaker 07

  He was absolutely slaughtered and I think wished the next day that maybe he hadn't drunk so. Everyone was drunk. They just give you drink at those things. They're so bloody boring.

• 1:07:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Speaker 07

  And they're all just this sort of great big ass liquor thon. And I don't know who enjoys them. I've not met anyone, but some people might enjoy them.

• 1:07:59Yasi Salek?

  When that happened.

• 1:08:00Speaker 07

  People in the record industry.

• 1:08:01Yasi Salek?

  What was like the reaction in the crowd?

• 1:08:03Speaker 07

  It was hilarious. So in the crowd, and it was quite small. It wasn't like a really big event. You could see it really clearly. Everyone just thought it was brilliant. And I remember being on a table with yes, and very drunk people. All thought that's wonderful because we didn't want to sit through the Michael Jackson stuff. It was really odd. So it seemed like, imagine if you're at a wedding or something and someone does that. They're just a bit pissed. They get up and they waggle their ass to like a song they don't like or something. You just go sit back down, you carry on with it. This then becomes a thing. And that was what's so weird about going home. You know, there was a bit of a fuffle or whatever, but you go home, you don't know what's happened. And then the next day it's all over the press and you think. All he did was that, but it's because he did that with Michael Jackson's stage. That's why.

• 1:08:47Yasi Salek?

  It became an international incident.

• 1:08:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's crazy. And obviously immediately regretted it and immediately becomes more famous than he's ever thought possible. And it ruins, ruins him for a bit.

• 1:08:58Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 1:08:59Speaker 07

  He hated it, absolutely hated it.

• 1:09:00Yasi Salek?

  What a like turning point. Yeah, it's bad. Michael Jackson's bodyguard, who was disguised as a dancer, obsessed. Like tackled him and then he was like ushered off, returned to his seat. Nothing happened until he tried to leave the venue, apparently. And then he was detained by police and the Brits organizers in his dressing room and then arrested on suspicion of assaulting the children on the stage.

• 1:09:27Yasi Salek?

  This is just a really aside, but I thought it was really hilarious. Nick Banks said backstage after that, the whole fucking thing went out the window. Jacko's mob was going absolutely mental. Who is this person? How dare he spoil it? It was funny because backstage there was a portalo cordoned off that had a big sign. Mr. Jackson's personal toilet. You could just imagine him in there taking a shit. This is my other favorite part. Okay, I had to look this person up, but I know he's very famous in the UK. Bob Mortimer, the comedian.

• 1:09:54Speaker 07

  Yes, he is very famous.

• 1:09:55Yasi Salek?

  Was completely off his face and Bob's a lawyer and he was going, if you need legal representation, I'm your man, falling about laughing. Our tour manager, shout out Richard Priest, had to go up to Michael Jackson's entourage and got in a shouting match from their top man and just came back and laughed. They were not very pleased. We were just in a state of laughter. Bob Mortimer, the comedian, who I guess had been legal counsel in the legal department at Peckham Council.

• 1:10:25Speaker 07

  But no one knew that at the time. Yeah, he was just comedian. You just thought he's a funny chap.

• 1:10:30Yasi Salek?

  He was Jarvis's legal counsel. He went to the police station.

• 1:10:34Speaker 07

  Isn't that hilarious? It's like Will Ferrell going, hey, I can do this and going to the police station with it like that.

• 1:10:42Yasi Salek?

  Also against not Michael Jackson's lawyers who like clearly has like an insane legal team, given that he's been in court for the last several years and he's one of the most rich and famous people in the world. So that made me laugh.

• 1:10:56Speaker 07

  This is very difficult to explain. I'll try and do it really quickly without any specifics, but I got into a spot of bother by writing something about Michael Jackson. It was at the Earth Song Time. It was a German TV show and I was there to interview another band. I can't remember, but Michael Jackson was also there. I wrote about something that happened in rehearsals, which was just a scratch where he scratched his body. I was told that heads will roll if I put that in the, how they found out about the piece.

• 1:11:23Yasi Salek?

  Did he scratch his nether regions?

• 1:11:25Speaker 07

  Yeah. But you know, like in a really stupid way, when you just scratch your bottom because your trousers are too tight. So I thought this was hilarious. I put a whole paragraph in. Not realizing, right? There's all these kids on the stage. I now know why. They said heads or roll. I now know why I got a call from the head of WA going. If you do this, it's a bit like, if you do this, you will die kind of conversation. You go, I don't understand, but I do not understand.

• 1:11:47Yasi Salek?

  They're like, you're going.

• 1:11:49Speaker 07

  Understand this.

• 1:11:50Yasi Salek?

  Into the Hague. We're we're putting you in a cell underground if you don't take this out.

• 1:11:56Speaker 07

  He just had some glutes that just needed a little bit of a tickle. But you can't say that.

• 1:12:01Yasi Salek?

  Say that.

• 1:12:02Speaker 07

  At that particular moment in time, when he's on stage with a load of kids.

• 1:12:06Yasi Salek?

  Here's what I did get in touch with Richard Priest for an official statement.

• 1:12:10Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:12:11Yasi Salek?

  It's not an official statement. It was just an email.

• 1:12:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Yasi Salek?

  He said, on the night I was in the dressing room when it happened, getting organized for the band's arena tour of the UK that started the following day. I was summoned to the Jackson backstage enclave where various Jackson staff berated me for what happened. Richard didn't even know what had happened because he wasn't like watching. He was like working. He was like, I was clueless still, but it seemed like a very bad thing had happened as these people literally screamed in my face about what should happen to Jarvis. But fortunately, being from Coventry, I give good face of stone responses. But for a minute, it was like a competition between these three Jackson asslickers about who is going to be the most outraged and indignant. Lame, brown-nosing wankers that they were.

• 1:12:54Yasi Salek?

  And I gleaned sort of what had gone on. They said they were waiting for the police to arrive and threatened, obliged me to wait for the police, I guess, to face whatever music they were hoping to orchestrate. I did wait outside the room where all the Jackson extras, the kids, were waiting to speak to the police. They were all being gently coached by a member of the entourage. I won't name, even though I could, but lawsuits in a kind of, did the nasty man make you feel bad? You should tell the policeman how you feel way. Very insidious.

• 1:13:24Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 1:13:25Yasi Salek?

  Certainly, they were all about how bad it had been and amping up the drama. When they realized I was sitting outside listening, they told me to move, to which I replied, I wasn't going anywhere as I was waiting for the police. Apparently, he also said that one of the cops was like, yeah, mate, it's a shame about this. I really like Jarvis, who was a pulp fan, one of the police officers.

• 1:13:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, mountain out of a molehill, let's just say.

• 1:13:49Yasi Salek?

  He went to jail. He was released on bail at 3am. Michael Jackson's statement was this. "Michael Jackson respects pulp as artists, but is totally shocked by their behavior. His main concern is for the people that worked for him and the fact that children should be attacked. He's sickened, saddened, shocked, upset, cheated, and angry, but immensely proud that the cast remained professional and the show went on." He just wiggled his ass. He literally lifted his cardigan and went.

• 1:14:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, because he thought it was stupid, which it was, pompous.

• 1:14:23Yasi Salek?

  Jarvis maybe regrets it, but the one I must say.

• 1:14:27Speaker 07

  Hmm, he really does.

• 1:14:28Yasi Salek?

  It did yield so many good tabloid headlines. Just the headlines. "Jacko's Pulp Friction." "He's Off His Cocker." "Jacko Pulp's Lout Cocker." "Jarvis Soccer." "Pulp Singer Arrested As He Smackos Jacko's Kids."

• 1:14:49Speaker 07

  That's quite funny.

• 1:14:53Speaker 07

  I bet the person who came up with that was so happy for a few days.

• 1:14:57Yasi Salek?

  They deserve a Pulitzer for that, I must say. It's a really good one. But yeah, he didn't like it. It's very bad. He got infamous, I think, maybe in a way that he definitely didn't want to be. His statement was very good, I thought. He said, "My actions were a form of protest at the way Michael Jackson sees himself as some Christ-like figure with the power of healing. The music industry allows him to indulge his fantasies because of his wealth and power. People go along with it even though they know it's a bit sick. I just couldn't go along with it anymore. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision brought about by boredom and frustration. I just ran on the stage and showed off. I didn't make any physical contact with anyone, as far as I recall. I certainly didn't push anyone offstage. I find it very insulting to be accused of attacking children."

• 1:15:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, he didn't attack any children. He wiggled his bottom and then in a drunken way and then got off.

• 1:15:44Yasi Salek?

  No, and then he was actually exonerated in the best way possible by David Bowie. As David Bowie's team was there filming for like a documentary or something that about David Bowie and so they had footage of the entire thing that shows very clearly that actually the only people that knocked children over were Michael Jackson's security people. And so they turned that over to the courts and Jarvis Cocker was vindicated by David Bowie.

• 1:16:14Speaker 07

  Hooray.

• 1:16:15Yasi Salek?

  Thank you, David. But yeah, as he he told the New York Times in 2020, in the UK, suddenly I was crazily recognized and I couldn't go out anymore. It tipped me into a level of celebrity I couldn't ever have known existed and wasn't equipped for. It had a massive, generally detrimental effect on my mental health. Would you say that in like this brief span of Britpop, which as we all know, died in 1997 when Noel Gallagher went to 10 Downing in his fuck ass blazer with his dumb haircut? But we're we're before that now. Do you think Jarvis Cocker ended up the single most famous person in the world of Britpop? Is that a fair statement or is that not true? Is it more of a Gallagher brother?

• 1:16:58Speaker 07

  No, Jarvis, because you know, Miranda might have said her theory about cartoon characters. Pop stars make good cartoon characters. The best ones you can draw, the best ones you know, the best ones you can impersonate or go to a party dressed as one. That's Jarvis Cocker. Whereas Gallaghers, yeah, all right, but they're an everyman.

• 1:17:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:15Speaker 07

  So everybody looks like them. Jarvis was always a cartoon in the best possible sense. So he becomes in that way, really iconic, as young people now say, you know, a pinup for a certain sort of person. That is the the gold standard of how to be an artist or how to be an eccentric person, something like that. So he becomes far more famous, I think. Really household name. People who wouldn't have known who Oasis were would know. He's also called Jarvis Cocker. I mean, how can you forget that stupid name?

• 1:17:44Yasi Salek?

  No, it's true. I mean.

• 1:17:45Speaker 07

  You know, it's amazing. Jarvis Brantzen Cocker. So he becomes.

• 1:17:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Speaker 07

  Yes. Yes, he's striking. It just becomes that face of it. And as he said, it ruined him for a while and it really, really did. He was deeply miserable. That arena tour, he was deeply miserable. He became a very different person, a very introverted person, when that wasn't him naturally at all. And I know people who played with him on that tour, musicians and things like that. And no one could get through to him apart from the tiny, tiny couple of friends, but he couldn't cope with it. He really couldn't. And it it the problem was that it was the thing that he'd wanted all of his life. He wanted that level of fame, not knowing, and he got there and realized that it was nothing what he thought it would be like. He is he is an observer. He likes his freedom. He likes, you know, just sodding about.

• 1:18:31Yasi Salek?

  If your favorite thing in the world is to go to a junk shop and buy some crap.

• 1:18:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's what he does. Yeah.

• 1:18:36Yasi Salek?

  No, this all makes a lot of sense. And also, like, everything you were saying, I mean, I don't think anyone on earth looks like Liam Gallagher. Because this is one of the gorgeous, but I get what you're saying. Like, in general, their presentation is very.

• 1:18:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, it's it's an every man.

• 1:18:49Yasi Salek?

  I just meant because he's very gorgeous.

• 1:18:50Speaker 07

  But I also think that at the time, probably globally, no one knew how to deal with success. But especially British stars, you this, you know, there's no manual, there's no handbook, there was no duty of care. You were just left to be a drug addict.

• 1:19:03Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:19:03Speaker 07

  In a lot of cases, you know how, and I always see the very big American stars and you're Beyonce, Taylor Swift's. And they're the big, they have a small army around them and people to make sure that they're sane now. And that there is time off, there is all sorts of things to buffer the craziness of fame, which is just makes you paranoid. We don't have that here, A, very much, because we don't have that level usually of of infamy or fame. But we certainly didn't have that in the nineties and there were so many casualties in many, many respects. There's nothing that he could have done or anyone he could have gone to.

• 1:19:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:38Speaker 07

  Which is really bad now when you see that in retrospect, but that's what makes a real difference. There would have been no, uh, no one to catch him, if you see what I mean.

• 1:19:46Yasi Salek?

  No, that makes that makes total sense. And it's the intersection of a rock star and a pop star, which is. Taylor Swift's aside and Beyonce's, like, that happened to Kurt Cobain, you know, like, it happened, like, to Eddie Vedder. It's more like that's probably a closer amalgam because like.

• 1:20:01Speaker 07

  Yes, that's, yes, that's a very good point.

• 1:20:02Yasi Salek?

  They're not, they never expected. They they like had the most modest of ambitions of what they meant of success. I think I can't speak for Jarvis, but like I know in studying like Pearl Jam and stuff, it's like they just, to them, success just meant like. I don't have to work four jobs and I can go on tour, like. And then it was like, no, you're on the cover of Time Magazine, you know, like, it's like, I don't want to be on that. I didn't, that's not what I, this is a bit much.

• 1:20:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a good parallel, actually. But I always assumed that they would have some kind of, you know, help, but maybe not, maybe not.

• 1:20:38Yasi Salek?

  I mean, I don't, Eddie Vedder went a little crazy. I mean, he, he managed to right the ship, but there's a lot of instances where he was like, not doing this. I'm wearing masks on stage, like, just crazy, crazy stuff. I mean, most of our American female pop stars are like child, they've been doing that since they were like ten. Doesn't mean that they're not, they're mentally healthy, but at the very least, they're like child soldiers. You know, they were like built to do this and they've had a team who's like, they're like a cottage industry. They're a corporation, basically. Whereas like Pulp is a band that was playing at the fucking, you know, Bath University ten years ago, and now they're like most famous man in the UK. All right. So,

• 1:21:21Yasi Salek?

  Jarvis is extremely famous. There's a piece written in Melody Maker the next month by Dave Simpson that says he is arguably the fifth most famous man in Britain behind John Major, Frank Bruno, Will Carling, and Michael Barrymore.

• 1:21:38Speaker 07

  Peculiar, yeah.

• 1:21:39Yasi Salek?

  I can't speak to that because I wasn't living in the UK in nineteen. Do you feel like that checks out?

• 1:21:44Speaker 07

  Yes, it's a strange, very, very strange bunch of people, but yes, I think that's watertight. It's really peculiar. I'm, I'm imagining you don't know who some of those people are and you shouldn't.

• 1:21:54Yasi Salek?

  No. John Major was a politician.

• 1:21:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, he was the Prime Minister.

• 1:21:59Yasi Salek?

  That I, that I did know. Okay, yes. The rest of them, I'm so sorry. He said, as I write Coronation Street's predatory hairdresser Maxine is eyeing up another victim as Cocker's Common People plays in the background. Hell yeah. Common People made it onto Coronation Street. Very cool.

• 1:22:13Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:15Yasi Salek?

  Because the tabloids had such success with their Jacko Pulp Jarvis soccer, they kept writing about him, right? Even after.

• 1:22:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, when there's no news.

• 1:22:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Like it was saying that the sun was like, why does he drive that old car? And he was like, that's just my car.

• 1:22:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:22:33Yasi Salek?

  It's my car. They're selling papers, babe. Around this time, they put out a compilation album called Countdown 1992, which I think was just like a play to make money, not by Pulp, but by um whoever has the ownership of the first three albums and singles and stuff. So I guess maybe Fire. Then they go on like what seems to be like an incredibly endless tour for different class, like just one of those. This is what happens, right? It's like the one-two punch. They're gonna be like, you're super famous now, so your life is really weird. And also now you have to go on tour for two years. So you don't get to have-

• 1:23:12Speaker 07

  That's the arena tour, some of it, isn't it?

• 1:23:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:14Speaker 07

  Where he was just sort of, yeah, buried away in his dressing room, didn't speak to anyone.

• 1:23:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. He did an interview with Q Magazine around this time, Jarvis. They said, now that you've found success, is it any good? Jarvis said, we never wanted to be a cult band. We always wanted to be a pop band. It's just that we were quite bad at it before. But we've become successful without particularly changing what we did. I count that as achievement. Some bad things come along with it, though. Like if you work at Sellafield, there's radiation to think about. What's Sellafield?

• 1:23:45Speaker 07

  Sellafield is a nuclear power station.

• 1:23:47Yasi Salek?

  Got it. So he's likening being famous to working at a nuclear power station.

• 1:23:51Speaker 07

  It's probably quite a good analogy.

• 1:23:53Yasi Salek?

  I never really realized the importance of having a private life until the end of last year. Newspaper stories about who you're shagging, that stuff's not so great. I'll probably end up like a monk because people will recognize me if I indulge in surreptitious illicitness.

• 1:24:05Speaker 07

  There was one girl who sold her story, A Kiss and Tell. And I think she was promised a few grand. And Jarvis, at the end of it, went, oh, she didn't get enough money. Surely I'm worth more than that. And I don't think they ever used to pay anyway. He was a bit annoyed that he thought it was, you know, he should be worth 20 grand and like she'd been offered three or something.

• 1:24:23Yasi Salek?

  That's so funny. Our tabloids were for a while pretty bad as well, obviously. And they drove some people to death and mental illness. So I'm not saying ours are any better, but

• 1:24:34Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:24:34Yasi Salek?

  Your guys are particularly creative in their heinousness. And they did this to the Gallagher brothers as well, but the Daily Mail hunted down Jarvis's father and interviewed him.

• 1:24:48Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:24:48Yasi Salek?

  And they had not spoken in like, I don't know, twenty years. And they quoted the dad saying that he hoped Jarvis would forgive him like now that he is famous. And they asked him about this in this Q magazine and Jarvis was like, that was a bit of a pathetic one. I even had the News of the World offering to fly me out there and take pictures of me being reunited with him like bloody Sylla Black, surprise, surprise. Sylla Black was a singer, that's a song you guys can look, I had to look that up. I was mad at my dad. It's a crap way to get in touch after twenty years. He could have written a letter. He knows my address. Doing it through a paper with pictures of him gazing into the ocean was a bit spewy. I don't really know what I'm gonna do about it. I obviously can't help but be curious about my father, but for better or for worse, I'm a fully formed adult.

• 1:25:31Yasi Salek?

  And I don't really see how knowing him would make a massive difference.

• 1:25:35Speaker 07

  Hmm. They did that with Meghan Markle though, if you remember and her father.

• 1:25:38Yasi Salek?

  Of course.

• 1:25:39Speaker 07

  You know, it's a similar thing. Jarvis becomes pop royalty, so to speak. And so they just stop at nothing. Doorstep people tap their phones. They, the bands at this time get very, very paranoid because friends who would know who his girlfriend was. Well, yes, and they'd worry that if you knew anything, someone was gonna ring you up and yeah, you go, yeah, for a couple of grand, I'll tell you who she is and where she lives and her phone number. So the bands are really paranoid because the tabloids are so horrible, but most, I mean, everybody wouldn't say, I think it'd be very, people are fairly loyal about pop. And I don't think some of that stuff came out.

• 1:26:14Yasi Salek?

  The thing that really struck me as kind of interesting though was like, how maybe guileless still Jarvis is a little bit, I'm like, but you, you don't have to tell Q magazine this either. Just because they asked, you know what I mean? Like,

• 1:26:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:30Yasi Salek?

  It's nice what you're saying, but you don't have to say how you felt about them talking to your dad or how, you know, like, you could just, it's like, you would think about it now, like, this would never happen now, right? It's partially why like that industry is like sort of dead because like, no celebrity would ever answer that question. No publicist would allow them. They just, they'd stop the interview. You know what I mean? Like, it's too personal.

• 1:26:52Speaker 07

  Interesting, but I mean, you know, years ago, no one had a publicist with them when they were doing an interview. Wouldn't you just go to a cafe with somebody? You wouldn't have someone sitting in unless it was super pop.

• 1:27:04Yasi Salek?

  I read all these things. I mean, these people are very open always, like all these nineties British.

• 1:27:09Speaker 07

  I've got an interview where I did down a kind of cafe with Jarvis, where he talks about taking X C and imagining he's Paul Nicholas, who is the star of many sitcoms in this country. It's absolutely hilarious. I I sometimes see it and forget that we were talking about it. You couldn't write that. You just couldn't. No one would say that now. You would not be allowed to say that. We all thought that was hilarious. There you go.

• 1:27:32Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so in September of ninety six, Different Class picks up the Mercury Prize. That's a huge deal. Major, massive deal. They were up against Artists for War Child help.

• 1:27:45Speaker 07

  Which you're obsessed by, yeah.

• 1:27:46Yasi Salek?

  I'm obsessed by. No one will come on this podcast and talk to me about it. Because I think it's absolutely psychotic that Johnny Depp and Kate Moss come on and do like a little cameo on a song. I think it's crazy that Noel Gallagher and Paul McCartney and some other people do a little super group and just nobody talks about. There's great songs on here. There's this amazing, absolutely coked out of their minds Stone Roses song like there's good stuff and I bet there's fabulous stories and I there must be some really crazy fabulous stories that no one's willing to talk to me about it.

• 1:28:21Speaker 07

  Maybe. I don't know what they are.

• 1:28:23Yasi Salek?

  It's a conspiracy.

• 1:28:24Speaker 07

  Yes, it is.

• 1:28:25Yasi Salek?

  Conspiracy. Black Grape was also nominated for It's Great When You're Straight. Yeah. Peter Maxwell Davies in the BBC Philharmonic, the Manic Street Preachers for Everything Must Go, Mark Morrison's Return of the Mac. Hell yeah. What's the Story Morning Glory? Do you think the judges were like, well, like those Gallagher brothers, we're not giving this?

• 1:28:47Speaker 07

  Yes, I think they very much did. It's not their time. No, they're not allowed. I bet it got very childish.

• 1:28:54Yasi Salek?

  Underworld was also nominated.

• 1:28:56Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:28:56Yasi Salek?

  So, there you go, guys.

• 1:28:57Speaker 07

  It's quite groundbreaking, that album.

• 1:28:59Yasi Salek?

  Very amazing. But it doesn't matter because Pulp won. I think they won unanimously as well. They donated all the money, which is, I believe, was like twenty five thousand pounds to the War Child charity.

• 1:29:11Speaker 07

  You know in the footage when they're, it's announced, who's at the table, Yazzy, who's at the table? Who's having a chat with Canada? Who said, come to our table, have a look. We weren't noticing, then they announce it and we were chatting. Oh, actually, it's the announcement. And they announced it and I was there. And I want a bit of the footage. And it's like, yeah, it looks like I've got pop star friends now.

• 1:29:32Yasi Salek?

  You did have pop star friends.

• 1:29:34Speaker 07

  Afterwards, though. I don't think I saw them for a while. But anyway, that was lovely. Isn't that amazing? That the music industry was so small and not corporate and silly and just sort of slightly, oh, let's have a little bit of wine. Let's forget to eat a bit and let's giggle around. And that's just feels so lovely. It was a nice time and people were friendly. And good to each other and the competition was healthy. Anyway, I'm just saying about, you know, it just gets so glossy and so kind of. You know, status related, the music industry with only a couple of years. And this still felt quite sort of cute and sort of homegrown.

• 1:30:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, everyone was still mates. You could still go talk to your friend at the table. Paul Walsh told me a great story of getting really drunk at a Brit Awards and throwing a come quad at someone. I just feel like it was a better time.

• 1:30:16Speaker 07

  I once nicked a Mercury Prize with Cat and Moran, but that's a very long story. We got in trouble with the police.

• 1:30:24Speaker 07

  But it was fun.

• 1:30:25Yasi Salek?

  You stole one?

• 1:30:26Speaker 07

  Yeah. We thought it was silly because it had been left. She stole one and I stole one and her band, I'm not going to name names, let her get away with it. Although I think she gave it back or it broke. I mean, it'd usually just break, not very well made. And my one, I had the police outside and a car had to be called and all sorts of phone calls started happening and it got heavy. So I had to give my one back.

• 1:30:51Speaker 07

  If not, I would have it here today. It would be on my.

• 1:30:54Yasi Salek?

  You would have Primal Scream's Mercury Prize right there.

• 1:30:57Speaker 07

  It wasn't, it wasn't Primal Scream's.

• 1:30:59Yasi Salek?

  I think they broke theirs, their, themselves, actually.

• 1:31:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, they do. They just fall apart.

• 1:31:05Yasi Salek?

  Mark said that we formulated this there. The Mercury Prize was a curse upon any band that was to win it.

• 1:31:10Speaker 07

  It was known as the curse of the mercury.

• 1:31:12Yasi Salek?

  So interesting. It's like the lot of them.

• 1:31:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was like you really, really shouldn't win it. No one wanted to win it.

• 1:31:17Yasi Salek?

  They said Primal Scream disappeared for a few years. M people weren't that great to begin with. It's mean, but it's not untrue. Jarvis said, it was nice to win the Mercury Prize, but it seemed funny to be winning an award for a record that was basically been out for eight months or something. So it was kind of like, not quite dead, but certainly in the past. But we were kind of pleased. I'd gotten it in my head that there was a curse on the Mercury Prize and I didn't want it to be passed on to us. So it was kind of handy that the War Child record was also up for the same prize. Cause we had a way of giving it away to a good cause. It was like a full stop on the record, really. It was official that it was considered to be all right and we had to try to think about something else then. And they did. The next month after the Mercury Prize, they record Help the Aged,

• 1:32:02Yasi Salek?

  which they had written on tour during sound checks. They also do try to write the next album for a while. And finally, Chris Thomas is like, okay, this is not a waste of fucking time. This is not working. Bye, go away. I'm not doing this with you guys anymore. So that didn't, it didn't work. Pulp then grinds to a halt for a little while. You said you didn't see them after the Mercury Prize. It sounds like nobody saw them. They did basically nothing for months. Nick Banks said, it was probably the twin pressures of not feeling like you've got much time to be messing around with stuff. And knowing that it's on the back of a very successful record, you know that you've got to do better or certainly produce something of a similar sort of standard.

• 1:32:45Yasi Salek?

  Plus, we were all down in London for this and there were a lot of distractions. Jarvis was still probably going out to the opening of envelopes at this stage. And perhaps there were other things to do rather than think about something daft to do with this strange keyboard or something.

• 1:33:02Yasi Salek?

  Jarvis said, "When you go through that sacred portal, when you get right famous, it gets hard to go out. I've always hated being stuck in the house. I can't bear it. But I thought, I can't go to the pub anymore, so I'll go to these parties. That phase, it was crap. I don't dislike myself for the way I behaved. I just feel a bit sorry for myself. I look at things and say, God, you sad get. And sometimes I look back and I'm ashamed or embarrassed. I think I was just a little bit lost, really. I suddenly had access to women I would never otherwise have had access to, and it excited me. I had access to the finest quality fanny available. You guys, at your house in America, you don't know this, but fanny means vagina. It's not butt. It's front, not back. Somehow

• 1:33:46Yasi Salek?

  it didn't seem to be providing the satisfaction I had thought it would. See what I was saying? Maslow's hierarchy. You know, I'd started the group when I was 17 and I had this dream. And when that dream becomes a reality, I thought that I had suddenly had to live my life differently, to go to openings and hang around with a different set of people.

• 1:34:04Speaker 07

  Easily made mistake, isn't it? We all would. Yeah, we'd all be going to this, that.

• 1:34:09Yasi Salek?

  Johnny Versace's party. Yeah. You can't go down the pub. You might as well go to Johnny Versace's party.

• 1:34:14Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:34:15Yasi Salek?

  Have a bit of champagne.

• 1:34:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, bit rubbish.

• 1:34:18Yasi Salek?

  Also, this is around the time Jarvis gets new glasses. Do you want to talk about these glasses? Do you want to describe them?

• 1:34:25Speaker 07

  Well.

• 1:34:26Yasi Salek?

  They're not the old NHS.

• 1:34:27Speaker 07

  They're not, but the old NHS ones come off for different class. They do for his and hers as well, but there's definitely when he gets the floppy fringe, and we have the glossy pop star Jarvis, we have no glasses unless he's out and about in the town. But this time, he suddenly gets a pair of glasses that are very different, almost, well, they're 70s aviators, sort of, this would be a real term for them.

• 1:34:51Yasi Salek?

  A bit tinted as well.

• 1:34:53Speaker 07

  There's something of the uh of the night about them, isn't there? They're quite sleazy and weird in a way. I like them. They're very fashiony, but they are very different. And he's obviously feeling some very different things.

• 1:35:04Yasi Salek?

  It's very visually forecasting this is hardcore.

• 1:35:08Speaker 07

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 1:35:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah, they're a little porny, they're a little porn producer-y.

• 1:35:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:35:13Yasi Salek?

  They're cool.

• 1:35:14Speaker 07

  No one else had them at the time as well. He did, you know, I've never seen anyone in that style until he wore them.

• 1:35:20Yasi Salek?

  He was very ahead. He was, that's like a very two thousands, early two thousands thing to have like a mustache and porn glasses.

• 1:35:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:27Yasi Salek?

  Jarvis was very, he didn't have a mustache, but all this to say is Jarvis is not having a good time from what I can gather. He's going to the opening of envelopes. He's probably drinking too much. I think he said it, so I can say it. He's definitely doing some drugs. Everyone's doing drugs. The vibes are bad. He has the dark glasses on. And finally, at the end of nineteen eighty six, he hits a wall. He's like, I don't want, this is, this is not what I'm, my one wild and precious life. So he decides to get out of London and reevaluate his life by staying alone in the Paramount Hotel in New York City for three weeks over Christmas and New Year's.

• 1:36:04Speaker 07

  I don't know. It's odd, isn't it, evaluating your life at the Paramount Hotel?

• 1:36:07Yasi Salek?

  Over Christmas, by yourself? It's dark.

• 1:36:10Speaker 07

  You think Buddhist retreat or looking at a flower or something would be the ticket?

• 1:36:14Yasi Salek?

  Hundred percent. For me, seaside institution for female hysteria, but like, yeah, this is not what I would do, but I guess it worked. Maybe it was a Dark Knight of the Soul type thing.

• 1:36:23Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:36:24Yasi Salek?

  I did find it very funny because, as I said earlier, when Britpop ends in nineteen ninety seven, for many reasons that we don't have to get fully into, but the Labour Party has hunted Jarvis down in this hotel. No one knew he was there and they're calling, haranguing him for support, according to him. And he was like, Yeah, could you go away? I'm not doing that. Go away.

• 1:36:48Speaker 07

  Oh, doesn't it?

• 1:36:49Yasi Salek?

  They asked everyone. They asked Damon. Damon also wisely was like, go away.

• 1:36:52Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:36:53Yasi Salek?

  Only Noel was like, don't go away. I'll be right there. Here's what Jarvis said. He says, certain things happened to me where I was thinking, is this the kind of world I want to be inhabiting? In the end, it's not saying I'm part of the establishment. It's more to do with what you enjoy in your life. And if you keep doing things that you don't enjoy, you should just stop. What you expect and what you actually get are two totally separate things. There was nothing unfair about it. I was mad for it, to coin a phrase. Of course I was. You have to look at yourself, which is something I don't particularly like doing, and ask yourself why you need fame in your life. And I still don't really know, but there was nothing very unfair about it. It was my own fault.

• 1:37:29Speaker 07

  Very sweet, isn't it? He takes responsibility.

• 1:37:32Yasi Salek?

  Very self-aware. Who amongst us wouldn't get caught up in the fame and glitz and glamour and Kate Moss parties and the champagne?

• 1:37:39Speaker 07

  Well, of course. And especially if you haven't been brought up with loads of champagne and really posh clothes. What are you gonna do? You're gonna want to be around people who make posh clothes and drink champagne. And it's gonna take you a while to realize they're idiots. It's gonna take you a few months.

• 1:37:53Yasi Salek?

  Especially if you're fucking hammered.

• 1:37:55Speaker 07

  And especially if they're being nice to you. I have seen famous people walk down the street and the way that people react and it's fucking peculiar. It must do really, really weird things to your head. It's I've I've met someone who walked into a room and every, you know, at least two people started crying because they couldn't believe that he was in that room. And you just think, oh, this is actually really, really horrible. It's so skewed. So he would have that on a like daily basis. And you just think, bloody hell. No wonder you want to run away to a charity shop again.

• 1:38:23Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. So alienating.

• 1:38:26Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:38:27Yasi Salek?

  Well, he comes right back.

• 1:38:29Speaker 07

  Hooray.

• 1:38:30Yasi Salek?

  To Blighty.

• 1:38:32Speaker 07

  Yes, good old Blighty.

• 1:38:33Yasi Salek?

  Good old Blighty. And right in time for January of nineteen ninety seven for Russell senior to say, I'm leaving, bye. It sounds like it was actually kind of mutual. They put out a joint statement. Russell senior has decided to leave pulp after more than thirteen years due to a desire to pursue new projects. The split is entirely amicable. The band is sad to see him go. Blah, blah, blah. There were a few signs. So like you brought up the Pulp People newsletter. In the Christmas 1996 issue, they asked Russell senior what his greatest regret was. And he said, joining this group, ha, ha. But I don't think he was really actually joking. And also back in 1995, he told Melody Maker, we used to be perceived more as a group.

• 1:39:18Yasi Salek?

  Whereas it's all Jarv these days. That doesn't sound like it.

• 1:39:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, he used to say we're Jarvis's backing band.

• 1:39:26Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 1:39:26Speaker 07

  Around that time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he did not like feeling like that. Whether it was truth or not, that's how he felt.

• 1:39:33Yasi Salek?

  Right. I mean, listen, again, I'm writing fanfic and doing speculation, but I would go ahead and say it's always been Jarvis's band. Just if you had to chart the history in an 180 page Google Doc. Russell said to Mojo in 1999, I'm proud of different class, but when we were doing it, I had a real sense we had lost it. But just managed to hold it together for the album. On the tour, the atmosphere was very cold and I think we got complacent and ended up losing all connection with reality. The politics and hangers on and also three members living in London. It just seemed hypocritical. Oh yeah, Russell never moved to London. And he had a family at this one. He was older. He was like 35. He had two children.

• 1:40:14Yasi Salek?

  He said, it just seemed hypocritical doing all these songs about common people and not being like that.

• 1:40:20Speaker 07

  See, yeah, that's Russell, the political guy.

• 1:40:22Yasi Salek?

  Political, yeah.

• 1:40:23Speaker 07

  Always. But he was really, he did at points really spearhead the pulp identity, the visuals, what they wanted to do. He was really integral to that, made them get up early and did all that sort of stuff, tried to be a bit beefheart for a bit. I don't think he got very far. So it was his band, you know, very, very much.

• 1:40:42Yasi Salek?

  I do find it happens a lot in bands. There's always one person who cares the most. And it's not always the main person. And they're kind of needed to like push things forward.

• 1:40:55Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:40:55Yasi Salek?

  To take it seriously, you know, and I obviously Jarvis took it seriously from the beginning, but like, I think to your point, Russell was really integral there and there's no discounting his contributions to like what Pulp achieved.

• 1:41:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, shaping it.

• 1:41:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. There's a little bit of speculation, not speculation, just direct quote from Nick Banks, who loved to be a messy bitch who loves her drama by saying stuff. He said, Russell's playing hadn't evolved at all since his and hers. He was still kind of playing the same guitar line all the time. And of course, his violin playing never got any better, really. He was never going to be Yahudi Menouhin, British violinist and conductor, who is widely considered one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century. Anyways, he said he's bad at violin and it just caused a lot of friction. And it ended up with Russ sort of saying, I don't want to play anymore. But at the same time Jarvis was sort of saying, I can't stand you playing anymore in a way. So there was a friction on the album and Russell was getting pissed off with the whole thing.

• 1:41:56Speaker 07

  He had a certain view and he was a bit angry after, after Pulp. And I think he continued being angry. I'm not saying it's bad or good.

• 1:42:03Yasi Salek?

  It's completely understandable. It just sounds like they come from ideologically completely different places. Maybe not completely, but at the very least somewhat different places. And fame has different effects on different people, you know? And especially if like your collaborator is now way more famous. And also in a sense has more power, you know? Over the direction of the band. And you have different ideas of what the direction is. And like you said, I mean, I think it's pretty clear, like that Marxist is still there. Like he's, he makes another comment. He said this in 2009, so quite a few years later. For years, we spent a lot of time in transit vans, but suddenly it was all gold discs,

• 1:42:46Yasi Salek?

  condos, famous mates and people whose reality comes from cocaine, telling you you're great night after night. I felt a revulsion for it. We were doing songs about common people and it was Jarvis, Prada's on the phone. They've got your outfit. He makes some good points, but he just makes the points of like, it doesn't even sound like it's like. That horrible, it's just like, do you wanna be in a big, this is kinda what it is in some ways, at a certain point to be in a huge pop band and he just didn't want to, you know, anymore.

• 1:43:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:20Yasi Salek?

  He said something much nicer later in a BBC documentary about how it was the hardest thing he ever did to leave Pulp, but because he loved Pulp and it was a part of him, but he, and he's, it was a very hard thing to do, but I'm very glad to have been in it.

• 1:43:34Speaker 07

  He was very different. He was the one that if you were sitting there after a show would be telling you his recipe for spaghetti carbonara. The others wouldn't.

• 1:43:42Yasi Salek?

  Was he not a partier?

• 1:43:43Speaker 07

  He was, but he really liked his home life and eating properly and his wife and all those sorts of things.

• 1:43:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:50Speaker 07

  He just was that different and it just, everything gets exacerbated as well, the more successful you get. And as we know, bands are quasi families and families don't always get on and they just break apart. So he did have to go, I think at that point and they were, I mean, love you Russell, but they were, the band were really annoyed with your violin playing.

• 1:44:10Yasi Salek?

  It is even when I watched like the Letterman, the Letterman thing, it just, I could not stop laughing that like, there's like common people's going out and then just like every two seconds Russell's like,

• 1:44:22Yasi Salek?

  and I'm like, what are we add, what is this doing here? Like, what is this bringing to the table? It's art, it's art, it's art, of course.

• 1:44:28Speaker 07

  It is, yeah.

• 1:44:29Yasi Salek?

  Love and respect to Russell senior, yeah. You know, once one person is unhappy with the direction of a band, there's gonna be so much tension and friction that just builds up. And once that person leaves, it does feel like the chemistry resets itself in a way. They were trying to write that album, right? And Chris Thomas was like, you're getting nowhere, get the fuck out of here. But then kind of as soon as Russell left, everything got easier in terms of writing the next album, just that next album. Cause they had kind of, they had reached the end of their creative collaboration road, I think.

• 1:45:06Speaker 07

  So, I mean, there is a theory that friction makes for better bands, but I think only at a certain level. At a low level, the idea of competition, people not getting on, you hear this from, you know, from the sixties onwards. But yeah, when the band actually start hating each other, something has to change.

• 1:45:22Yasi Salek?

  Jarvis said in 1997 in an interview, "It was problematic because I hate it when people leave groups and I don't like change." So it was quite a stressful time when he left. And they asked him, "Does it feel like it's a different band now?" And he said, "Yeah, it's different. I'm just hoping it's gonna be different in a better way." But, like I said, it does open up space for like, I read like for Mark Weber to have more input, because now there's just one guitar player. And also for samplers and stuff, because Steve had gotten super into like the comput- I love this quote, "Using computers and stuff." It's like so 1997, just like computer stuff.

• 1:46:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:46:01Yasi Salek?

  And within like a very short time, they have a bunch of demos for the next album. But first, they put out "Help the Aged," November 10th, 1997. Talk to me about your relationship with "Help the Aged."

• 1:46:13Speaker 07

  It's an odd song in that first, when I first heard it, I thought it was dreadful.

• 1:46:18Yasi Salek?

  Did you?

• 1:46:19Speaker 07

  And I'm sorry, Paul, but I thought, "What's this about? What on earth?" But it's one of those ones that they call a grower, isn't it? And actually, it's really rather lovely and rather beautiful. But I couldn't quite understand it. I knew they need- I'm like Jarvis, "I don't want change. What are you doing?" Slightly different sound, slightly different idea. It's contemplative and a little bit depressing, isn't it? But yeah, I think it's amazing. It's quite brave to do. Also, it's the name of a charity shop here, so it's so Jarvis. Totally, "Help the Aged," yet it might be, "Are they still going?" But yeah, you go to "Help the Aged" in Islington, blah, blah, blah, and you, you know, you bump into people that you knew, look at the records and stuff, so.

• 1:46:57Yasi Salek?

  That's very funny. I didn't realize that it was the name of a charity shop. It is a pretty crazy left turn after, you know, hitting the highs of different class and they're, you know, so famous and they have these like dancy fun songs and then they come back with a song that's essentially about getting old and dying.

• 1:47:19Speaker 07

  Jarvis is moving in arty circles and he's got this obsession or this friendship with John Curran at the point. And John Curran was painting older people as well as younger people, but very sexualized images that he paints. And so this is this, you know. Jarvis is trying to take from all sorts of culture here as as well as charity shops.

• 1:47:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:37Speaker 07

  Quite clever, but definitely this is a different path and not pretending to be fourteen year olds.

• 1:47:41Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 1:47:42Speaker 07

  Anymore. Not they were, but they're not writing about that sort of sexuality and that fumbling in the back of a taxi sort of way.

• 1:47:47Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:47:58Yasi Salek?

  There's very few pop songs about the el- there's very few songs in general about the elderly, right? It's like kind of a very overlooked population.

• 1:48:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, the demographic is huge and they buy lots of records. So you think Grindr Man did it on their albums. Nick Cave. A few do, but yes, it's not territory that's well ploughed, is it?

• 1:48:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Jarvis said that that song came from being on tour and having to sleep in these bunks on a couch, which are kind of like the same dimensions as a coffin. So getting in a coffin every night, probably quite pissed, makes you prone to maudlin thoughts. You can get quite morbid. He did make a good point because I was thinking this when I listened to it and I was like, is this a little like, you know, patronizing? And he was like, he said it. He's like, the song's also a little bit cruel. It's just trying to get through that kind of sentimentality where you think of old people as people who are there to give you sweets on a Sunday. Like they're a different species.

• 1:48:49Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 1:48:50Yasi Salek?

  He says, don't put them in a home. He is thirty four years old and he's contemplating his death. Like I need to be.

• 1:48:58Speaker 07

  So young now, don't you think? It's just like, at the point, I probably thought thirty four was so. Old and now I just think that that's just, you've left school at thirty four. It's so young. Isn't it bizarre? And singing songs like that. Thirty four.

• 1:49:12Yasi Salek?

  He said, everyone's afraid of dying. The thing is, you move the goalposts with yourself. I remember when I first came down here to London and started going out to raves and stuff and thinking, fucking hell, I'm getting into raving at 25. I'm past it. What I'm hoping is that I'm not on my own in this sad pursuit of moving the goalposts. People are desperately gripping to their youth into their 30s, which 20 years ago would have been quite unheard of. Babe, I can't wait till you see what goes on in 2025. Jarvis Cocker of 1998.

• 1:49:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, but this is the point. When I joined the music press, you were considered old at 24 and that you wouldn't have a career beyond 26 or 27. And the idea of the, you know, the heritage touring acts. The idea that Blondie would come back and be touring in 2025, you would just laugh. Of course not. The only band that sort of were getting away was still touring was Rolling Stones and they would laugh for that. Yeah. You know, a bit of Page and Plant or something, but you know, really it's not something that you did. And so the goalposts are moving all the time. Yeah, he would laugh now and people considered, you know, in their 60s are fairly young to be still touring again.

• 1:50:16Yasi Salek?

  Well, nobody foresaw that the internet would basically come along and stop time in the weirdest way.

• 1:50:22Speaker 07

  That's my theory as well. Yeah, it just completely messed. Yeah. And YouTube has messed with the chronology of everything. And that you can get music from any particular point. Yes. And so, and the COVID, all these things made time not exist in the same way. And now we live in this universe, which is quite frightening.

• 1:50:37Yasi Salek?

  I think it's also that the internet created and keeps creating in larger and larger ways, way more opportunity to consume than to create. People are just gonna consume. They're not gonna create. And so new things are not coming along the way they did before. Immortalized are the old things. Like, people are still referencing the 90s. It's been fucking 35.

• 1:51:04Yasi Salek?

  This always fucking blows my goddamn mind when I think about it, but I'm like, when I was listening to Nirvana, the Beatles were more new than Nirvana is now to people.

• 1:51:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, that is crazy, isn't it? Yes.

• 1:51:19Yasi Salek?

  So anyways, he's reflective. I think this post-great fame Dark Knight of the Soul in the Paramount Hotel emerged through the other side. There's some reflection going on. There's some, what is it all for? I think that song is fine. It's a nice song. When you hear it, you're like, oh, that's moving.

• 1:51:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's sweet, isn't it? Yeah.

• 1:51:38Yasi Salek?

  The B-side to this single is Tomorrow Never, there's two, but Tomorrow Never Lies, which was originally called Tomorrow Never Dies, as it was trying to be the theme song of the Bond movie, and they did not get the jobs. Sheryl Crow got it, so then they just changed one word and kept it on.

• 1:51:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:51:55Yasi Salek?

  Might as well. You wrote the song. You deserve it.

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• 1:52:59Yasi Salek?

  You guys, don't worry. Do we still hate Morrissey? Yes. Here's a quick quote. You thought that like fame, fortune, success has made you forget about that you hate Morrissey? No. He's telling Melody Maker, "That's why I think people went off Morrissey because he kept writing about how inadequate he was." Which, fair enough. I'm sure he probably was and is, but somehow having a certain measure of success and by dint of repetition, it starts to ring a bit hollow. For me to write about, "Yes, I saw her in the chip shop and I said, 'Get your top off' or something like that would be pathetic because I haven't been in a chippy for ages."

• 1:53:37Speaker 07

  That's wonderful comment, isn't it?

• 1:53:39Yasi Salek?

  He used Morrissey to make his point and well, point well made.

• 1:53:44Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:53:44Yasi Salek?

  This is all to say, A, I wanted to bring up the Morrissey hatred again because I think it's really funny.

• 1:53:50Yasi Salek?

  But B, this is how we get, this is hardcore, right? It's coming from a place of like, "Oh, I'm like you said, I'm not the observer anymore. I'm not, I can't be, I can't observe." He had a good quote about it, but I think he didn't write it down where he was like, "I was obsessed with TV and film and then by the time of This is Hardcore, we had become part of what people watched instead of being the watchers," you know? And I was like, "Oh, that's really interesting."

• 1:54:15Speaker 07

  Well, it is all fascinating and I still, I mean, I'm sure we're gonna get to this. I still don't quite understand it, but This is Hardcore is about pornography being a metaphor.

• 1:54:24Yasi Salek?

  Yes, for fame.

• 1:54:24Speaker 07

  You know, for them. And it's really, really intellectual and sometimes in my mind just gets completely blown about being watched and all those sorts of things. It's really interesting.

• 1:54:33Yasi Salek?

  I think maybe that's why there was so much more for me to dig into.

• 1:54:37Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:54:38Yasi Salek?

  On this one. Also, I really do like the music, but what I gleaned from like various interviews, cobbling them together and also just listening to it and like the lyrics. I feel like this whole album is like about what is, like what's really hardcore? And what's really hardcore is growing up and confronting your own mortality.

• 1:55:00Speaker 07

  It's amazing metaphor and parallel.

• 1:55:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and like-

• 1:55:05Speaker 07

  What's tough, what's difficult, what's hard to watch, what's hard to be in.

• 1:55:08Yasi Salek?

  Realizing that you could be up to your specs in top quality, different class Fanny.

• 1:55:17Yasi Salek?

  Up to your nose.

• 1:55:18Speaker 07

  And drugs.

• 1:55:18Yasi Salek?

  And drugs. And then be like, oh, God, I don't care. I'm not happy. And that, and then you're like, fuck, now what? Now, now I'm not. I got all the world's best fanny and all the world's best drug, champagnes, Prada suit. And I'm still not happy. That's what hardcore is, right? Why is the album called This is Hardcore? This is Melody Maker in nineteen eighty seven? Well, it's not happy hardcore. It's very unhappy hardcore. No, it's hardcore in that for years and years, you sustain yourself with fantasies and dreams for what can happen. Then if success does happen, it's as if the mist's clear. Because people think that it validates you. And generally, I think success has a really bad effect on people. Generally, it means they're on the slippery slope to getting fucked.

• 1:56:01Yasi Salek?

  But in the eyes of the world, it validates you. You're a success. You can walk with your head held high down the street. So you don't have to have this construct or fantasy stuff anymore. And it's weird because then you come up against the essence of yourself. And often you realize that you're a bit of a tit. And I suppose that's what hardcore is about, really. It's getting down to the marrow bone. The essence of what it's about and why you do it and why you continue to do it.

• 1:56:26Speaker 07

  That's very profound. And I mean that, not sarcastically. He is actually really having a go, isn't he? And trying to sort out what is real and what isn't. And that's quite hard. A lot of people don't manage it.

• 1:56:36Yasi Salek?

  It's wonderful. A lot of people do try because there's many post-fame kind of navel-gazing albums, you know?

• 1:56:44Speaker 07

  But a lot of people aren't very clever. I mean, to excuse a lot of people, but they're not. You have to be quite clever to get to that point. To go, actually, this is, this is completely something else. And I know that sounds enormously obvious, but it isn't to most people. Most people are lured by really shit things. A nice Prada shirt and, and you know, someone buying you tea for you.

• 1:57:04Yasi Salek?

  I love a Prada shirt and I would love.

• 1:57:06Speaker 07

  There's nothing wrong with it, but don't think it's, it's not going to bobble like the other shirts. Do you know what I mean? Or if you wash it on the wrong temperature, it's not going to shrink. Things like that. It's just a fucking shirt.

• 1:57:15Yasi Salek?

  Just yeah.

• 1:57:17Speaker 07

  I'm not gonna get my Prada sponsorship deal now.

• 1:57:19Yasi Salek?

  No, you're not. Me neither apparently. Maybe I will.

• 1:57:22Speaker 07

  You will.

• 1:57:22Yasi Salek?

  Because I'm saying how much I love it and I do think, I do think the source of all happiness and fulfillment comes from Prada shirts. So just so you guys know if you're listening. No, I think it's, it's also really brave, right? Like as much as like Jarvis does like to say, like, I don't like to think, look at myself, like, I'm not gonna this or whatever. He obviously was brave enough to do it. I mean, he went in the dark night of the soul three weeks in the New York hotel. Like, that's gotta be fucking hard. I mean, that is, that's essentially going to a Buddhist monastery. Like, to go sit and be, there was no phone, there was.

• 1:57:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, but did you not go out and wander about or?

• 1:57:55Yasi Salek?

  I, he didn't seem.

• 1:57:56Speaker 07

  See friends?

• 1:57:57Yasi Salek?

  I don't think he was like partying. I think he was just like, I mean, I don't know. He does, there's not a whole lot of information for me, so.

• 1:58:02Speaker 07

  It's interesting though, isn't it? These years, we should film about it.

• 1:58:06Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 1:58:07Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:58:07Yasi Salek?

  I mean, I can't even go like one day without looking at my phone, you know?

• 1:58:10Speaker 07

  I can't go for an hour when I look at it. It's really bad at the moment. Yeah.

• 1:58:14Yasi Salek?

  Really bad.

• 1:58:15Speaker 07

  Not good.

• 1:58:15Yasi Salek?

  The like ability to confront yourself in that moment without distractions and to come out the other side thinking about it so deeply that you're able to connect to these like really interesting metaphors. And he did say like, the pornography thing partially came from like constantly being on tour and in hotel rooms, there's always pornography and almost like the like having too much casual sex, right? You watch too much pornography, it probably becomes something else to you.

• 1:58:47Speaker 07

  It becomes sexist, doesn't it? It becomes, yeah, a different exercise. It's about spirituality being lost, isn't it, Yasi?

• 1:58:54Yasi Salek?

  That's why I love it. You know?

• 1:58:58Speaker 07

  I see your point.

• 1:58:59Yasi Salek?

  These listeners know what I, what do I love more? What do I think? I think every good song is about God. And I think this album is definitely, even though Jarvis doesn't. Say it. There's just like one part where he says, the weirdest thing anyone has ever said about this is hardcore so far is that it's really about God. Maybe it's that redemptive bit at the end. But it is about God, right? It's the Jungian thing of like, you have a hole in yourself and you try to fill it. Through validation, fame, success, money, sex. There's a million ways to fill it, right?

• 1:59:40Yasi Salek?

  Shopping, as we said, Prada shirts. I've been dabbled here and there. But in the end, the only thing that fills that hole is God. Whatever your interpretation, no one likes it when I say God. It's become a very dirty word. Something greater than yourself, right? Whether it's like the universe, whether it's the collective of humanity, you know? Something greater than yourself, a connection to that, because that's like the highest self, right? With the capital S. Like, that's the two parts that need to be bridged to feel any sort of peace and ease. And I feel like that's kind of what this album, maybe like very undercurrent wise is about. Do I sound like I'm, have I, have I lost the plot here?

• 2:00:24Speaker 07

  I think I've just converted to whatever religion you're selling me. I think that's right. And I love this idea of transcendence towards the end of Pulp's 90s career as such, that it is about something else and it's about lacking in an absence. And yes, in the, the sense that Jarvis was watched all the time and I still feel quite haunted by the album sleeve. The woman on it really disturbs me, really does. But that's, that's, that's the point.

• 2:00:51Yasi Salek?

  So the cover is designed by Peter Saville in conjunction with that painter, John Curran, who you mentioned earlier. This is not a painting, but he sort of art directed the setup of it to like resemble one of his paintings. It's a, a model on a, I believe it's a couch, right?

• 2:01:10Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:01:11Yasi Salek?

  The model was an 18 year old Belarusian up and comer named Senia Zlobina. It's shot in London's Hilton Hotel, which according to Jarvis Cocker is supposed to be a luxury hotel, but is in fact a bit tacky by the fashion photographer Horst Dicke Gertes. So she's this blonde, beautiful, interestingly like borderline faceless, right?

• 2:01:35Yasi Salek?

  Like it's quite difficult to make out what she really looks like. It's like a beautiful face, but it's a profile. There's not a lot of distinguishing characteristics. You can't even really tell it's a couch. She's naked, but you can't see nipple or anything. And it's only from the torso up and she's laying with her head sideways on this couch. Unclear what's happening outside of the frame, right?

• 2:02:04Speaker 07

  Yes, yes.

• 2:02:06Yasi Salek?

  That's kind of the thing. And then this is, I thought was interesting. After the photos were done, Peter Saville's longtime collaborator, Howard Wakefield, used the Photoshop filter Smart Blur to make it look a bit more like a painting. What do you think? Cause correct me if I'm wrong, but at the time, there was a lot of controversy about this cover. People saying it was like demeaning to women, that it was misogynistic.

• 2:02:32Speaker 07

  It's about a body being objectified. And it's about a body that doesn't look like a body anymore and a body that isn't in control. It's supine. It's, it's just skin. It's not even flesh anymore. And there's something about it. It's obviously a feminine body. And you don't know, say it's in the middle of a story. You don't know the beginning or the end. And that person looks used and it's really hard to look at. I just find it really hard to look at, but that's what it's supposed to be. It does exactly what it's meant to do in that sense. It's meant to make you feel really uncomfortable and it makes me feel really uncomfortable. It's not an erotic image.

• 2:03:08Yasi Salek?

  No, it's absolutely not. Like there's, there's no libidinal energy.

• 2:03:12Speaker 07

  Yes, it's incredible. I mean, it's, it looks like a person who's just about to die, doesn't it? And that's the horrible thing about it. Or he's dead anyway.

• 2:03:20Yasi Salek?

  Or a corpse. Yeah.

• 2:03:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. And with that red and also to be at a level of fame and all sort of power within control, within your record company to say, yeah, that's our cover. You can't mess with us. That's what we're gonna do. Cause a lot of people would not want to put that out.

• 2:03:37Yasi Salek?

  And it's, it's really, it's really genius to be so tied into the theme at it. Like it's, it's brilliant. I think.

• 2:03:45Speaker 07

  And again, it's the death knell for Britpop, isn't it? This is one of the albums that does it.

• 2:03:49Yasi Salek?

  Exactly, because this is not a Britpop album on any level, not sonically, not not tonally, like not preoccupationally, like it's not a Britpop album. Britpop is over. It's actually really reminds me of, and maybe because I just did Primal Scream, but what could I do? I have one mind and it only can think about six things at a time. But the way that Scream Adalica and Exterminator really were like, here's the beginning of the wide eyed, hopeful, optimistic nineties. We're coming in into the rave with our ecstasy. Anything is possible. Anything can happen. Can you believe? And that kind of was what the nineties were like. Nirvana had a number one album. People like Jarvis Cocker were pop stars.

• 2:04:33Yasi Salek?

  Like the nineties made all that possible when it was not really a thing prior to that. Right? It was democratized things in such an interesting way. But by the end, it was empty, right? It was used up. It was hollow. It felt bad.

• 2:04:50Speaker 07

  As we know, commodified.

• 2:04:52Yasi Salek?

  Was commodified, exactly.

• 2:04:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, and it only takes a couple of years for something for the people who want to make money out of something to start making money out of it. And to have a management idea of what a creative endeavor might be. And it's that, it's this, the death of the music industry is what that that cover is.

• 2:05:11Yasi Salek?

  And this is like a, this is a hyper sped up version of what I was saying with the Scream Adalica and Exterminator, but like almost you could say his or his and hers would be a good point, but even different class from that to this is really like, oh, the party's over, babe. Like the lights are on, the sun is up, like someone's jogging past. You need to go home, lay in bed, think about everything bad that you've ever done in your life because you can't go to sleep. Like that's the vibe of this album.

• 2:05:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, or if you get any sleep.

• 2:05:40Yasi Salek?

  If you get any sleep.

• 2:05:41Speaker 07

  It doesn't look like a sleep kind of album.

• 2:05:43Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's the party's over. This isn't what we thought it would be.

• 2:05:48Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:05:48Yasi Salek?

  They wanted to put this on buses, the artwork, and the people were like, we'll put the image? Or we'll put the name. We will not put the image and the name together. That's where like they drew the line.

• 2:06:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:06:02Yasi Salek?

  Here's another thing Jarvis said about the basic message. He said, without wanting to sound try it, I would say that the basic message of this is hardcore is be careful what you hanker after. It may come true and it won't be quite what you expected. And what the hardcore is, it's the hardcore of who you are, because in the end, that's all you've got.

• 2:06:21Speaker 07

  Whoa.

• 2:06:23Yasi Salek?

  Damn, damn sis.

• 2:06:25Speaker 07

  He's good, isn't he? He's good.

• 2:06:27Yasi Salek?

  He's good.

• 2:06:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:06:29Yasi Salek?

  The Fear is such a great first song to kick off the album. Don't you agree?

• 2:06:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think it sets the whole tone. Ob- obviously, you know, this is what, you know, this is what you're in for listeners. This is what's gonna happen.

• 2:06:44Yasi Salek?

  Real statement of purpose, right? Jarvis said, I think the opening lines of The Fear best sums up this is hardcore. We've had our pop moment and this was our evocation of the aftermath. That we didn't flinch from doing that makes me proud. I'll read some lyrics. First one. This is our music from a bachelor's den. The sound of loneliness turned up to ten. A horror soundtrack from a stagnant waterbed and it sounds just like this. This is the sound of someone losing the plot, making out like they're okay and they're not. You're gonna like it, but not a lot. And that's so brilliant, right?

• 2:07:18Speaker 07

  That's great, isn't it?

• 2:07:19Yasi Salek?

  And he was right. People did like it, but not a lot.

• 2:07:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, people just thought, what the hell is this?

• 2:07:33Speaker 07

  It's just got that pulpiness in it. He's managed to mention a bed in it already in my, my line three.

• 2:07:40Yasi Salek?

  The hardcore of pulp is still definitely there, but it's, it's the dark side. Jarvis said, it started out very dark with The Fear, which is about these panic attacks you've no doubt read that I was getting. I would think that I was gonna die, but then it lightens up. What about dishes? What about it took him five albums to figure out that he has the same initials as Jesus Christ? I would have thought that would have come up earlier.

• 2:08:02Speaker 07

  I don't believe that. Surely he knew.

• 2:08:11Speaker 07

  He knew, he just didn't wanna put it in.

• 2:08:14Yasi Salek?

  He held back from putting it in any lyrics. Really brave. With the restraint.

• 2:08:20Speaker 07

  It's funny, isn't it? Because it's also about Messiah complex that people get when they sing in bands, which is hilarious. So he's actually nodding to it.

• 2:08:27Yasi Salek?

  And the Michael Jackson bit, when he was like, being the Christ-like figure, it's like, all comes into this dishes. And the lyrics are like so clever.

• 2:08:37Speaker 07

  And I do like this. They really don't care if this album sells. It sounds like, you know, and it might be a wonderful album, but you're gonna have to give it a few listens and get over the shock of it. There is that confidence in that we want to make this album.

• 2:08:50Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:08:51Speaker 07

  We're gonna do it, whatever, whatever happens. Are we gonna put that on the cover as well?

• 2:08:55Yasi Salek?

  Kandita said they threw out a bunch of songs that were like instant hits in the vein of Different Class, because Jarvis did not want to make another Different Class. And he was like, I don't care if they'd be hits. I don't want to make that again. Which is really amazing. And also, I've seen it happen a couple of times in these arcs where like, some bands get really famous and to their credit, I don't know if it's credit or not credit, but just I noticed that they pump the brakes themselves. They're like, I don't want to get more successful. And I'm, so I'm gonna go ahead and not, not even, not like they're sabotaging themselves, but like, I'm gonna skip the easy, low-hanging fruit that would just.

• 2:09:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's creatively boring, isn't it, to plow the same furrow? And you're clever if you can go somewhere else, but still pull people with you. Clearly, they've just really had enough. They absolutely need to, to make a different statement. And as I said, they just don't care. Don't care if it's a big hit, or they didn't want a big hit anymore.

• 2:09:53Yasi Salek?

  "Party Hard" was the, one of the singles, which is the next song. I love this song. It's got these like kind of vocoter-y singing moments and it feels like very like both pulp, but also modern. They're doing something very different, but you can really feel their DNA in it. I quite like, quite like it.

• 2:10:19Yasi Salek?

  Jarvis said that he got the idea of having two voices singing exactly the same words from the Walker Brothers.

• 2:10:25Speaker 07

  But there's an interval there.

• 2:10:27Yasi Salek?

  Interval, yeah.

• 2:10:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, which is really interesting because double tracking is what people, well, especially do it now more than anything, but to then have something jarring and slightly off.

• 2:10:46Speaker 07

  But it's so true to them as well at this stage. They're just not flinching. He knows, he knows he's been to too many parties by this point. It's as simple as that.

• 2:10:55Yasi Salek?

  I couldn't remember the exact things that he said, but he like pointed to two parties he went to at the end of that before he went on his Dark Night of the Soul in New York that he was like, literally, why am I here? And one was for the-

• 2:11:05Speaker 07

  The Action Man party is one of them. Yeah, yeah. That has been documented. Yes.

• 2:11:10Yasi Salek?

  And he was like, I don't know what Action Man is. I don't care. It's a guy in a costume. Why am I even here? He's like, he had to take a cold, hard look at in the mirror after that. This is hardcore. That was the technically the second single because Help the Age was the first single, but really the first like introduction to this album single, right? And it's, that's a-

• 2:11:31Speaker 07

  I used not to like it. I used to find it really difficult.

• 2:11:34Yasi Salek?

  Because of the lyrics?

• 2:11:35Speaker 07

  It's incredible. Yeah. But also it is, you know, say it's musically slightly different. There's something, well, that's reflecting the lyrics and all those things that it's, it's again, I'm going to use the word unflinching. It's hard, but then when they now play it live, it sounds absolutely incredible. There's more life breathed into it. I don't know now than it seems then, which you're getting also the, the kind of rotting corpse of the cover is infiltrating these songs and how you feel about them. But now it's really, there's something else going on with it now. I'm not quite sure, but more of a life force thing because they got through it. Maybe because they got through it more so happy that- That they did, most of them.

• 2:12:15Yasi Salek?

  I think it's really interesting, and this just occurred to me because I was like relooking over the lyrics of the song, which are quite intense, that like, it is also really like, you said the cartoon thing, right? And like, part of the cartoon of Jarvis Cocker was like, that guy, what is he singing about? Ha ha, sex, hiding in the closet, having sex, you know, under this, but always very like, kind of funny and coy, right? And then he was like, oh yeah, no, I still talk about sex, but I'm gonna, oh, you think I do it only that way? How about this? How about these lyrics? How about, "You are hardcore, you make me hard."

• 2:12:57Yasi Salek?

  That like, kind of playful, little provincial kitchen sinkiness is really gone. It's just, he's like, it's almost like the pornography thing, right? Where it's like, the sexual aspect has almost even been removed.

• 2:13:12Speaker 07

  It's totally perfunctory, it's really porny, is the thing. And that's why it's really quite, I still get taken back by that and those lyrics.

• 2:13:22Yasi Salek?

  It's a really beautiful song, like musically, you know?

• 2:13:26Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 2:13:27Yasi Salek?

  And it centers on a sample from "Bolero on the Moon Rocks" by the Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra.

• 2:13:43Yasi Salek?

  It's written for a 1966 TV sci-fi series called "Rampartui." I can't do German accent, which means Space Patrol. I feel like amongst all the like, sort of shocking pornographic, like, about making a literal porn movie with someone lyrics, these two lines, "You can't be a spectator, oh no, you've gotta take these dreams and make them whole." It's like, it's like, very like, profound little bit, kind of buried amongst this.

• 2:14:22Speaker 07

  It's weird, is I'm going back to that other lyric that you just said, though, and it's also quite funny. If you had it in a completely different kind of context of you're hardcore, you make me hard. It's actually quite a stupid idiotic thing to say.

• 2:14:33Yasi Salek?

  I think it's because of the way that he delivers it in this real ominous, you know, dark tone kind of gives it, but yeah, you're right. When you just say it out loud, which Jarvis Cocker famously hates. He does not think that lyrics should ever be divorced from music. They are not poetry. You should not say them out loud. I think there was a couple of poems where there was like a note, like, please do not read the lyrics while you listen to the song. Like, that's not what they're for. Sorry, Jarvis. He said this about this song. Hardcore pornography is the brick wall at the end of this kind of tunnel. If all the romance is stripped away, it becomes just a physical process. And you realize that in some ways, you're constantly trying to strip this stuff away, all the artifice and the veils.

• 2:15:13Yasi Salek?

  And when you get to the end of it, to the actual thing, you want to put all the clothes back on it, because it's all a bit repulsive in a way. That's really what that song and the record as a whole is trying to get at, that maybe you do have to keep a bit of a distance from things. Hardcore porn has a brutalizing effect. I mean, it's like life itself, if you get down to the basics of life. Eating, shitting, fucking, whatever. If you think of it like that, it's pretty brutal. You have to add a spiritual or human dimension to make it something more. You need to invite God back into the porn.

• 2:15:47Speaker 07

  Never heard anyone say that sentence ever.

• 2:15:49Yasi Salek?

  You're welcome.

• 2:15:51Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 2:15:52Yasi Salek?

  Steve Mackey said that he thought it was the best song they've ever written. Mark Weber said, I was never a very big fan of the song. I can appreciate it's good work, but I never really liked it from the outset. So some differing opinions.

• 2:16:04Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:16:05Yasi Salek?

  He said Jarvis didn't want people to expect an album of common people in Disco 2000. He wanted to redraw the boundaries and recently it's been a case of Jarvis's will overriding everyone else's common sense.

• 2:16:17Yasi Salek?

  And I like to say that that's also how Band's Plan got made, where everyone was like, "You should make it an hour." And I was like, "Sure." And then I just, my will overrode everyone's common sense. And I've made a beautiful podcast because of it, so.

• 2:16:34Speaker 07

  But yes, you have.

• 2:16:35Yasi Salek?

  Jarvis also said, "One of the best things we've done about this song, whether it was worth the grief it took to get there and the psychological landscape I had to inhabit to write it, I don't know. I was losing it. It wasn't a good commercial move. And there was the terrible realization that at this point of psychic and spiritual disintegration, the specter of Paul Daniels appears to haunt you. I got drunk and wrote the words, then looked at them the next day, but couldn't remember having written them. It was the same in the recording studio. I got really hammered and sung it and can't really remember singing it either. It was obviously in me, but it took a lot to get it out. That's what gives it some, something slightly unearthly. It's unhealthy, sort of glossy and shiny, but in kind of a queasy way."

• 2:17:17Speaker 07

  He said it.

• 2:17:18Yasi Salek?

  He said, "Have you seen, you've seen the video?"

• 2:17:21Speaker 07

  I haven't for a long time.

• 2:17:22Yasi Salek?

  Oh, I watched it again this morning. It's crazy because he, he mentioned that Island, he's like, "Island must have been horrified. To their credit, they got behind it. The video must have cost a quarter of a million pounds." And it is an extremely high production value video. It's great. It's directed by Doug Nichols and it's an homage to Busby Berkeley Films, but the actual inspiration was a book that I've never heard of that sounds so cool called Still Life, edited by the actress Diane Keaton and Marvin Hefferman. And it's, they selected a bunch of photographs of Hollywood glamour shots taken on movie sets and they sort of recreated a bunch of those shots in the music video. It's great.

• 2:17:57Speaker 07

  Yes, I do remember. It does look very, very beautiful.

• 2:18:00Yasi Salek?

  It's so beautiful.

• 2:18:01Speaker 07

  Do you think it jars with the, um, subject matter? It's odd. It adds something, but it adds something really strange to it, the idea of artifice.

• 2:18:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, totally. Artifice.

• 2:18:13Speaker 07

  What's going on underneath these almost two dimensional?

• 2:18:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, because one, one scene that sticks out to me that I remember is like, it starts like it's a still of a couple who's having a marriage proposal over hamburgers. It's all old timey, but then as soon as the still is over, the woman stops looking happy and completely looks miserable and looks away. And you're like, oh, underneath the artifice, like you're saying, is this like hollowness and misery? I love A Little Soul. Do you love A Little Soul?

• 2:18:45Speaker 07

  Sweet. It's a funny album, isn't it? There's so much going on. Oh, my God, it's opening all up again.

• 2:18:53Yasi Salek?

  It's a comedy album, do you know?

• 2:18:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:18:54Yasi Salek?

  This, I mean, this is huge. He's not once mined father-son relationship until this album. Until the fucking.

• 2:19:01Speaker 07

  It's in the middle of talking about porn as well. I mean, it's just crazy, but there you go. This has many, many textures.

• 2:19:08Yasi Salek?

  But honestly, what's more hardcore than confronting your father wound? What's more hardcore than that? Certainly not pornography.

• 2:19:17Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:19:17Yasi Salek?

  And in, in the song, it's interesting because he takes on the, the stance of the father. Like he is embodying the father, not the son. I'm speaking as the father. There's the, that lyric that's, you look like me, but please turn out, don't turn out like me. Oh, knife, knife in my heart.

• 2:19:44Yasi Salek?

  He said, the song was written before I met me dad. It was written in the late part of last year and I didn't meet me dad until February this year. So it was weird. As soon as I'd written the song, I knew that I'd have to go see him.

• 2:19:54Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 2:19:55Yasi Salek?

  Did it help me understand myself a bit more? I don't think I'll ever understand myself. It's a nice idea and thank you for suggesting it, but I haven't got a cat's chance in hell of that.

• 2:20:05Yasi Salek?

  I think he did a good job understanding himself via this album. I'm a man is not a song I particularly love just as a song, but on all these songs, I was just so much more interested in Jarvis's thought process and then than I was in the other songs. Cause like the other songs are great, but they're again, like you can kind of sum it up as like quirky observations in many ways. Besides maybe common people. He said of I'm a man, success is kind of a manly thing. You have access then to all the material trappings of a man.

• 2:20:45Speaker 07

  I'd never thought about this before, actually, and I think it's

• 2:20:48Yasi Salek?

  I think if you're talking about success within capitalism, a hundred percent, because capitalism is a

• 2:20:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, I guess, of course, it's status, isn't it?

• 2:20:54Yasi Salek?

  Archetypically masculine. Yeah, these are all masculine.

• 2:20:56Speaker 07

  And there's a, yeah, a wife and kids, you know, success as much as

• 2:21:00Yasi Salek?

  Rolex, a fancy car. Yeah, I mean, if you're talking about

• 2:21:03Speaker 07

  I suppose.

• 2:21:03Yasi Salek?

  the standard definition of success, which is fortune, power, fame, these are all masculine.

• 2:21:12Speaker 07

  I try not to think about them, you see, so.

• 2:21:14Yasi Salek?

  Sure, of course. Who, who wants to? Me, sometimes. We talked about this, but not to forget that this is also on the tail end of the rise of lad culture.

• 2:21:23Speaker 07

  Of course, of course, yes.

• 2:21:25Yasi Salek?

  So, you know, probably Jarvis is dealing with both the fame and success and also all this lad shit going around and him being like, I'm like a skinny little man from Sheffield who's never been considered particularly manly and macho and not just because I have

• 2:21:38Speaker 07

  But Jarvis is a really big fan of Leonard Cohen, and Leonard Cohen is a really good example of someone who isn't a manly man, man, but enjoyed women's company, was liked to be flirtatious with the ladies with his beautiful poetry and stuff. And so I think Jarvis does identify with that sort of

• 2:21:54Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:21:55Speaker 07

  manliness, doesn't he?

• 2:21:57Yasi Salek?

  I think what I would call that is the divine masculine. That's the divine masculine, right? When you're like, because if you're so in touch with your, if you're secure and security is also, I think, archetypically masculine thing, then you don't need cars and watches and friffrif fighting at the football game. Seductive Berry, I'm sorry, not my favorite song, but I do think it's really cool that they put Nana Cherry on it.

• 2:22:25Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:22:33Speaker 07

  Do you think she's happy with it?

• 2:22:34Yasi Salek?

  I don't think she's thought about it once since.

• 2:22:38Yasi Salek?

  I don't wanna put words in her mouth, but if I were Nana Cherry, it probably wouldn't cross my mind, maybe from time to time. I thought it was really funny that he he did say that many of the songs on here were originally called Barry. One song was called Barry Swings. There was another one called Just Barry, and then Seductive Barry. He said, we could have called this record This Is Barry.

• 2:22:59Speaker 07

  This is great. Now that's that's the reissue we need to see. They remaster everything with This Is Barry and Barry Swings on it. It's called, it's called Barry, it says.

• 2:23:09Yasi Salek?

  It is interesting, because this is like a kind of one of those like seductive Barry, you know, probably Barry White is a reference. And then.

• 2:23:15Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:23:16Yasi Salek?

  Wisely Jarvis is like, well, we need to like, change it up. So let's put a woman's voice in there. And that's how Nana Cherry got up. Glory Days, which I actually really like, but I think that other people are not that fond of. What do you think about Glory Days?

• 2:23:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, I didn't. It didn't do anything for me.

• 2:23:34Yasi Salek?

  Too mid for you?

• 2:23:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, I don't know why. Bless it. But yeah, yeah, I'm, yeah, it never really, never really touched me. He mentions the Groucho Club and he did used to go to the Groucho.

• 2:23:44Yasi Salek?

  Sure does, because here's what he said. Before Tony Blair got elected, they kept ringing me up and asking if I could count on their support, which I didn't like. This song Cocaine Socialism came to me one night around that time in the Groucho Club, when everyone was off their heads from snorting loads of coke. They were probably going to vote Labour, myself included, but it wasn't even Champagne Socialism anymore. It was Cocaine Socialism. And where do socialist principles fit into the most egotistical drug that makes you not give a shit about anyone else? You don't even wanna listen to anyone else talk, but I bottled it in the end and rewrote it as Glory Days, which was about nothing, really.

• 2:24:20Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 2:24:20Yasi Salek?

  But he is being modest, because ostensibly this song is about being on the dole in youth, in your glory days. It's very like Mike Lee's Meantime Corps. He talks about like, come and play the tunes of glory, raise your voice in celebration of the days that we have wasted in the cafe in the station, and learn the meaning of existence in fortnightly installments. That's the dole, right? You have to go every two weeks.

• 2:24:42Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 2:24:50Yasi Salek?

  And then there's that verse that he says, and I could be a genius if I just put my mind to it and I could do anything, if only I could get round to it.

• 2:25:05Yasi Salek?

  He talks in an earlier interview about how they asked him, was it hard to improve when no one else was paying attention to Pulp? And he said terribly hard. It's like if you ask someone on the dole to do something for you, it'll probably take them three weeks. If you ask someone who works, goes to night school and has two kids, they'll do it that day because they're keyed up and their brain's working at a certain speed. When you're idling, your brain's neutral. You turn into a fucko. So I feel like that this song is about idling, right? This song is about kind of being stuck.

• 2:25:31Speaker 07

  Of not fulfilling your potential, isn't it?

• 2:25:34Yasi Salek?

  It really reminds me of Meantime, because I maybe because I just watched Meantime, but like Meantime has such a great sense of like no purpose, lost, like this just wayward.

• 2:25:45Speaker 07

  It's just Jarvis projecting, isn't it? Worrying about himself.

• 2:25:49Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 2:25:50Speaker 07

  You know, he's not gonna get there, he's not gonna make this album, he's not going to be able to fulfill that potential. And remembers being on the dole. He was told off when he was on the dole because he'd been on Top of the Pops.

• 2:26:02Yasi Salek?

  Oh, he was still on the dole?

• 2:26:04Speaker 07

  Yes. As I say, it takes a long time for money to come through, especially then. And I remember him saying, they were saying, so you think you still should be claiming, Mr. Cocker? I saw you on the TV.

• 2:26:16Yasi Salek?

  The last thing is the day after the revolution, which I truly love so much lyrically, but I don't, it doesn't, I would kind of wish the music was a bit better. It's like, the revolution was televised, now it's over, bye bye. And it's talking about, you know, how irony is over.

• 2:26:39Yasi Salek?

  The irony is over again. It's the end of the night. Irony is such a nineties thing, right? To me, like I really associate it. And Jarvis said, well, not wanting to get hung up on the millennium or anything, but I think there's no room for irony when you're entering a new era, which I guess Pulp was kind of doing with this album. There's a kind of desperate need for people to sort themselves out. So they're going into a new era with their lives in place. I think that's a good thing. It always got on my nerves anyway when people said Pulp were ironic, because I see the irony and how far short people's lives fall off of their aspiration. That is an ironic thing, but the implication- Is that you're distancing yourself from your subject matter and I never did that. I've only ever been able to write about things that actually mean something to me.

• 2:27:18Yasi Salek?

  And that, that's this hardcore. There's one last song like a friend that they put as a bonus track because they have been written specifically for the nineteen ninety eight film Great Expectations. It's also included in a Daria episode called Depth Takes a Holiday for my Daria fans. It gets pretty good reviews, I think, but doesn't, it doesn't sell well.

• 2:27:37Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:27:37Yasi Salek?

  It hits number one, but in comparison to different class.

• 2:27:42Speaker 07

  It doesn't light everything up.

• 2:27:44Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 2:27:44Speaker 07

  There's a lot of confusion about it. People like it. They say, yeah, it gets good reviews, but. Because it doesn't quite fit. It just doesn't quite fit because no one's got to the point where they're actually being enough, honest enough to say it's all over really. You get subsequent albums like that and subsequent movements where the music changes is different. But here. It's, it's, I hate the phrase ahead of its time, but it, it comes first maybe is a better phrase.

• 2:28:09Yasi Salek?

  I think it did. I think it did for sure. And, and I think, you know, there are people did not want the party to be over, but.

• 2:28:16Speaker 07

  No, no, desperately wanted to cling on.

• 2:28:18Yasi Salek?

  The party was kind of over. Cool Britannia has happened on the Vanity Fair. That also helped kill Britpop. Lots of stuff. It's over. Okay, Pulp disappears for a while. Bye bye. This is hardcore. Goodbye, three years. And then they come back with another album, which I found really interesting. Because I'm gonna be honest with you, Men in Black Brain Eraser. I have no memory of this album ever happening, ever coming out. Heard it for the first time last week.

• 2:28:44Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:28:44Yasi Salek?

  They got Scott Walker to produce it.

• 2:28:47Speaker 07

  Yes. How do you think he did?

• 2:28:49Yasi Salek?

  Um, it's definitely Scott Walker-y.

• 2:28:53Speaker 07

  Yeah. All I really remember is the, is the Trees song I remember and the rest of it just sort of floats by, doesn't it? But they knew at this time it was kind of, they needed a break.

• 2:29:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:07Speaker 07

  And this was the album to announce it, really.

• 2:29:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they were like, oh, here you go. Here's one last little thing, but.

• 2:29:15Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:29:15Yasi Salek?

  Chris Thomas had tried to make the album, but they were not happy with how it was going. And then they ran into Scott Walker. When Jarvis was part of this like. Meltdown Festival that he curated. It's focused on a more organic sound, right? It's an emphasis on nature.

• 2:29:32Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 2:29:33Yasi Salek?

  We're returning to nature. Jarvis Cocker said, I never took any notice of nature when I was a kid. Thought we'd all be living on space stations or floating metropolis's by now. But after this is hardcore, which was a very alienated record. It was time to go back to simpler things like the natural world.

• 2:29:47Speaker 07

  And the trouble was no one was very interested in them going back to. They wanted the nylon back and they wanted the cheeky little comments.

• 2:29:54Yasi Salek?

  They did not want to go into the forest. Nobody wanted to go into the forest.

• 2:30:08Yasi Salek?

  This is just a tea and goss moment, but I'm just gonna say this might have in a roundabout way been inspired by Jarvis's breakup with Chloe Seventy. He said, I don't talk about my personal relationships. Chloe just didn't work out. You can't ever say why and anyway, it's crap to think about yourself that much. I didn't like New York very much. You can't get lost there. The street system is too logical. Not like London, babe, you can get lost there all the time. Not a logical system. So he went back to London and then he said, I was attracted to the countryside and nature because it's a bit dangerous in some ways. So I'm just making a huge leap and saying that this led to this. Everything was, it's a butterfly effect, right?

• 2:30:48Speaker 07

  Yeah. But maybe they were ahead of their time, but by two decades or so, though. Yeah, because everyone started talking about trees and stuff and especially pre and during COVID. People were like, we did this two decades ago. You didn't like it. We could put it out now and it'd be number one. So I bet they were quite annoyed, to be honest.

• 2:31:04Yasi Salek?

  There's even a more ahead of its time lyric on the song Weeds that proto biohacking Maha here, which is this cut price dairy produce that turns our bones to dust. Jarvis, Jarvis is talking about raw milk, babe, in two thousand one.

• 2:31:21Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 2:31:22Yasi Salek?

  So ahead.

• 2:31:23Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 2:31:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, in general, this is an album that is good to like lay and float in a river too, but I there's I don't.

• 2:31:38Speaker 07

  Didn't hit, really, did it?

• 2:31:39Yasi Salek?

  Didn't hit, yeah.

• 2:31:40Speaker 07

  Hit the mark.

• 2:31:41Yasi Salek?

  It's nice, no, it's alright.

• 2:31:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, well done them for getting in the studio and doing some songs.

• 2:31:46Yasi Salek?

  No one really ever goes out on their best album. That's just in my, if I can tell you one thing, unless you're The Laws, who just never made anything ever again.

• 2:31:54Speaker 07

  Well, that's true, yeah.

• 2:31:55Yasi Salek?

  And after this, we we have no time to talk about Jarvis, but just know Jarvis goes solo and makes some music. They put out one super random one-off single in 2013. Do you remember this? "After You", produced by James Murphy?

• 2:32:10Speaker 07

  No, sorry.

• 2:32:11Yasi Salek?

  I didn't either. I went back and listened to it. It's actually pretty fucking good. They wrote it around the time of the Nature album, "We Love Life", which is what it's called, but you can totally see why I didn't go on there, because it's fully dancey. Like, it's like full in-the-club dancey.

• 2:32:35Yasi Salek?

  And then, just mere, mere weeks ago, we got a new Pulp song, "Spike Island", speaking of the Stone Roses.

• 2:32:44Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:32:45Yasi Salek?

  I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna go on record. It's good. The song is good.

• 2:32:49Speaker 07

  It is really good, isn't it?

• 2:32:50Yasi Salek?

  Dare I say surprisingly good, because late-era bands' music.

• 2:32:55Speaker 07

  Now, they've had a nice break, and they've thought, "Let's write some proper tunes", and there we go. Yeah, I really like it. I think it's really good.

• 2:33:01Yasi Salek?

  I can't wait to hear the album. If it's anything like Spike Island...

• 2:33:03Speaker 07

  It took them only three weeks, the album. They wanted it really fast.

• 2:33:06Yasi Salek?

  Really? Oh, that's such a good sign. That's such a good sign.

• 2:33:10Speaker 07

  Wrote some songs and, yeah, isn't it? So, I think, yes, I think it will be good. I bet it will be good. And they're touring from July, yeah.

• 2:33:18Yasi Salek?

  Go Blast Spike Island. It's, for me, the perfect balance between old pop pulp, and pulp is burnt out by, and pulp is back, but we love trees now. It really gets it all, really gets it all in there in the best way. It's like nostalgic but modern. I really like it.

• 2:33:41Yasi Salek?

  And that's it. Yeah. Go see Pulp on tour. We've somehow now traversed six decades. Pulp is still a band. Pulp will be touring.

• 2:33:49Speaker 07

  Yeah. And it only took us five decades to traverse the six, didn't it, Yasi?

• 2:33:53Yasi Salek?

  Help the aged, babe. I, I am now the aged and I need help by the end of this podcast.

• 2:33:58Speaker 07

  Well, I'm enjoying it, aren't you? Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:34:01Yasi Salek?

  Sean, thank you so much. This has been a real treat and pleasure.

• 2:34:05Speaker 07

  Thank you. It's such a pleasure.

• 2:34:07Yasi Salek?

  Come back, you guys, next week for a new episode of the Bands Plan podcast.

• 2:34:19Yasi Salek?

  If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bands Plan. Our guest today was the wonderful Sean Patton. And this episode was produced by Liz Sanchez and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Executive producers for Bands Plan are Gina Delvec and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavon, and graciously recorded by Carlos Delgarza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer emeritus, producer Dylan, AKA Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Sean Fantasy, Michael Hardman, Casey Seivenson, Robert Adler, Leah Edwards, David McDonough, Dana Meyerson, Jessica Hopper, and the fresh spirulina I get from the farmer's market.

• 2:35:02Yasi Salek?

  That's who I am. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bands Plan on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 2:35:14Yasi Salek?

  Not my mom putting the dryer on right now, you guys. Not my, like, as if I'm not recording a podcast. How, this is, is this sound bad? I'm really obsessed, you guys, with my mom who did turn off the dryer and then just promptly started vacuuming. One second. She's sabotaging. Do you think she was trying to sabotage me? Um, just one second. Okay, anyways, let's talk about some of the songs where my mom murders me and kicks me out of the house with my bags because she wants to vacuum.

• 2:35:44Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 2:35:44Yasi Salek?

  Hope she doesn't. Talk, she might. Jarvis, you want to hear about not growing up? I'm 43 and I live with my.