Pod Insights Bandsplain Pulp: Part 1 (1978! through 1994) with Siân Pattenden About this episode In today’s episode, we trace Pulp's story, starting from high school talent show stars up through the moment they become Britpop major players. Yasi is joined by British music journalist, author, and former Good Mixer regular Siân Pattenden to help red string board the many iterations of Pulp from 1978 through the moment it really clicked with His N Hers in 1994.
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
Transcript 42,706 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Speaker 00 What's up, everyone? I'm Nora Princiotti.
0:05 Speaker 01 And I'm Nathan Hubbard.
0:06 Speaker 00 And we're coming in like a wrecking ball to announce a brand-new series.
0:10 Speaker 01 That's right. It's every single album Miley Cyrus.
0:13 Speaker 00 Deep dive with us into the career of one of our most creative and confounding pop stars.
0:18 Speaker 01 We're starting, of course, with the best of Hannah Montana.
0:21 Speaker 00 And ending with her brand-new album, Something Beautiful, in June.
0:25 Speaker 01 And don't forget about Miley Cyrus and her dead pets.
0:28 Speaker 00 We certainly will not be doing that. So listen now on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:38 Speaker 02 They're running a Cover 2 defense, but you're running to get game-day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's watch party fed with deals from your go-to restaurants. Or stock up with deals on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game-day deals on Uber Eats all season long. It's not football without food. Uber Eats. Order now. Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.
1:08 Speaker 03 Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot, designed to keep you connected, powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.
1:40 Speaker 04 What's with this band, anyway? I don't get it. Can you please explain? Wait, like, "Bandplain"?
1:52 Speaker 04 Never heard this band in my life. Oh, you haven't? I'd love that. Really? Why? Yeah, I love this song. Oh, I don't know that one. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. I really hate this band! Whatever. I'm their biggest fan. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. Bandplain. Bandplain!
2:19 Yasi Salek? Hello and welcome to Bandsplain. 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 about Pulp. You've never heard the music of Pulp, babe. We're gonna live like common people.
2:46 Yasi Salek? My guest today, you guys, is the one and only Sean Patton. And how are you, Sean?
2:52 Speaker 06 I'm good. I'm prepared, sort of.
2:54 Yasi Salek? You guys, I'm really sad you can't see Sean because she's truly one of the coolest looking people you'll ever see. She has pale pink gorgeous hair and a matching sweater and you look so cool.
3:06 Speaker 06 Thank you.
3:07 Yasi Salek? Sorry to
3:08 Speaker 06 Very kind. You're just buttering me up.
3:10 Yasi Salek? That's true. I'm just buttering you up because I've taken you hostage to talk about Pulp. And fun fact for you guys listening at home that don't, might not know this, which I didn't know either until I got knee deep into the research. Pulp has been a band since 1978.
3:31 Yasi Salek? Pulp started two years after Joy Division. So we have quite a lot of ground to cover before we get to those common people, babe. It's actually insane how long this band has been. I mean, they've been 100 different bands, I think, obviously since then. But you don't get that too often where you're like, no, they started in whatever you guys call high school, secondary school?
3:53 Speaker 06 Yeah, secondary school.
3:54 Yasi Salek? Secondary school and just kept it going.
3:56 Speaker 06 Big school.
3:57 Yasi Salek? Big school, big adult school. Before we dive in, I just wanted to say that multiple people did say that you were the exact right person to talk to about Pulp. What is your relationship with this band?
4:10 Speaker 06 Well, A, I'm now really suspicious of what people think of me. For fuck's sake. I'm sorry.
4:16 Yasi Salek? No, you can curse all the time on here. This is a cursing friendly podcast.
4:21 Speaker 06 Good, good. Yes. What are they, what are they actually saying? What does it actually mean?
4:25 Yasi Salek? Well, they said a few mean things about you and then they were like, yeah, she'd be great about Pulp. But I don't have to tell you those things. Those are secrets.
4:34 Speaker 06 Um, yeah, I was there and they were my mates at at some point. I've been um in taxis with Jarvis when he was so poor. I used to do a thing of just bundle people in and I remember him just lying by our feet. We're all in the backseat. There are about four of us in the backseat. He's just lying down hiding in case the police suddenly arrive or something and see there's too many people in the cab. And I remember I was with them all one weekend. We went to Derbyshire and we were in Sheffield and stuff like that. And Jarvis had one p, right?
5:01 Yasi Salek? Like a penny, yeah.
5:02 Speaker 06 Yes, a penny. He had a penny. And so he had drinks and stuff all, he doesn't eat much, but you know, he had drinks all weekend. But he found another penny. So the joke was that he was kind of like a hundred percent in in credit by the end on Sunday night. It was just like he'd made money somehow. This character could always sort of land sunny side up. So that's Jarvis.
5:26 Yasi Salek? He's so tall to to try to squeeze into the bottom of the taxi cab.
5:30 Speaker 06 That's what's what's funny.
5:32 Yasi Salek? Such a large.
5:33 Speaker 06 He knew it.
5:33 Yasi Salek? Praying mantis type person.
5:36 Speaker 06 Yes, it's like a like a very large staple and trying to sort of fold themselves into something that's sort of unfoldable into.
5:44 Yasi Salek? Well, see, then you're now the exact right, perfect person to be here. This is you. This is my Roman Empire. I just need you guys to understand. Like I said this in the primal scream episode, but if I were Jeffrey Bezos, I simply would not spend a small fortune to send several females of varying degrees of whatever it is they do into the space for eleven minutes to do a L'Oréal commercial. I would build a time machine and go back
6:15 Speaker 06 Right.
6:15 Yasi Salek? Right to nineteen ninety one. I mean, I love pulp too, but really probably I would go to nineteen ninety one and take an E from Sean Ryder and hear Loaded in the club. That's that's what I would. That's what I would do with my money.
6:28 Speaker 06 You'd know you're messing with time too much. You might die of a bad E.
6:31 Yasi Salek? That's fine. What a way to go out. What a way to go out. Do I get to have like at least a good trip on my way out and I hear Loaded at the club?
6:37 Speaker 06 Do you have any self-respect, Yazzie? There's a whole life to lead. You dying of Sean Ryder's E early on before your prime strikes me as something that maybe, you know, too low for the bar.
6:48 Yasi Salek? I have therapy today. I'll bring it up. I'll bring it to her.
6:51 Speaker 06 Yeah, please do. Please do. I'm worried about you already. Don't do it. Don't do it.
6:55 Yasi Salek? You're like, I did it, babe. And it was, it's honestly not that great. There's many better things in life.
7:00 Speaker 06 No, they would be cut with very, very dubious sort of detergents and things like that.
7:04 Yasi Salek? What?
7:05 Speaker 06 Yep.
7:05 Yasi Salek? How dare, how dare Bez do that to us? All right. But this is not about Bez or Sean Ryder, although they do kind of come into the story.
7:12 Speaker 06 Yeah.
7:12 Yasi Salek? A little bit later. Let's start with Jarvis Branson Cocker, born September 19th, 1963. He's a Virgo in Sheffield. Sheffield has a small but mighty contingent of famous bands that come from there. Human League is from Sheffield.
7:32 Speaker 06 Yeah.
7:32 Yasi Salek? Of course, the beloved Arctic Monkeys, Pulp, Cabaret Voltaire.
7:38 Speaker 06 Yeah, they're Sheffield. Yeah.
7:39 Yasi Salek? Yeah, a cool place. Also, a cool accent, I must say, if, if you ask me, an American. Jarvis grew up in, is it Intake?
7:48 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's called Intake.
7:49 Yasi Salek? Okay. Famously, I pronounce many things wrong. Here's what I have to ask.
7:52 Speaker 06 Intake.
7:53 Yasi Salek? Intake. I honestly was almost gonna say Intake.
7:56 Speaker 06 Intake.
7:57 Yasi Salek? In the Intake area of Sheffield.
7:58 Speaker 06 It's beautiful there. Yeah.
8:00 Yasi Salek? He had a younger sister, has a younger sister named Saskia. Their mother, Christine Connolly, went to art school, which is where these names probably came from. I think I read Saskia was a painter's wife. I didn't write it down which painter it was. And Jarvis does sound kind of like an arty name.
8:17 Speaker 06 Yeah, you did write it down. It's Rembrandt, isn't it?
8:20 Yasi Salek? Rembrandt, that's right. Okay, yes. So, you know, he, he came from Bohemian stock, Jarvis Cocker. His father, Mac Cocker, was a jazz trombonist and an actor, and later, after he abandoned his family, an Australian DJ.
8:36 Speaker 06 It's not so good, is it?
8:37 Yasi Salek? No.
8:37 Speaker 06 You say jazz trombonist, acting, and you go, Australian DJ.
8:41 Yasi Salek? It really is like a sad ending to the art story. Like, and then you're an Australian DJ. Like, you abandoned your family to become an Australian DJ, babe? You need to reexamine your priorities. Not just me wanting to time machine back to Sean Ryder Z, but...
8:54 Speaker 06 Yes, you can imagine the suit, him DJing in some sort of nylon suit.
8:57 Yasi Salek? Sure.
8:59 Speaker 06 The perspiring to the sounds of whatever he was playing. Ruining the day and ruining a family in the process. But there we go. We shouldn't make light of it.
9:09 Yasi Salek? No, no. I feel, I don't know Jarvis, but he seems like he has a good sense of humor. Matt Cocker was in a band with Joe Cocker, who I didn't realize, I think was also from Sheffield. And they called themselves the Cocker Brothers. I only bring this up to say that there was music in the family. There was always musicians at the house. So Jarvis kind of grew up surrounded by this sort of like bohemian art, music culture. At age five, Jarvis got meningitis and had to be put in isolation in the children's hospital. And for his whole life, he thought that's why he had to wear glasses, because he thought his eyesight was damaged by meningitis. And then later, in a Berenstein Bears type situation, he learned that actually his mom was like, no, you wore glasses before you had meningitis. I don't know what you're talking about.
9:56 Speaker 06 He wanted an origin story.
9:57 Yasi Salek? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I'm like, oh, you were early on, you were myth making for yourself.
10:01 Speaker 06 Yes, yes, it's drama, isn't it?
10:03 Yasi Salek? Yeah. And your mom, his mom was like, no, I'm so sorry. You were four eyes well before the meningitis. So it was, it was 1970 when Mac left the family. And it's implied in the book that I have called Truth and Beauty, that he went to Sydney ostensibly to avoid paying child support. I'm simply reporting what I read in the book. I'm not sure if that's true or not. But as a result of this, Jarvis grew up mostly surrounded by women. Single mother, his sister, and I believe they lived next door to his grandparents. And then his aunts were also around. So it was like a great deal of women. I did think
10:43 Yasi Salek? this was like, a pertinent biographical detail that plays out probably in the kind of artist and lyricist and like, what kind of worldview a person would have as a young boy that was surrounded by female energy. What do you think, Sean?
11:01 Speaker 06 Yeah, it makes sense, doesn't it? There's something about him. Are we going to alight on the word fae?
11:08 Yasi Salek? Yes.
11:09 Speaker 06 Something that he uses, well, that Brian Ferry uses, or someone of that ilk, you know, where there's a sort of poetic, faraway look in the eye. And yeah, and which would the women love? But there's something about that embracing the feminine, in inverted commas, which is enormously attractive, but is enormously, say, beneficial, like you're saying, for lyric writing and for a source of, because, you know, we know that he, he says he overheard his mum talking and his aunts talking and things like that. And that's where he got some lyrical inspiration. So that all makes sense.
11:38 Yasi Salek? Okay, speaking of being fey, he did have a bit of a rough go as a young lad in school. This really sent me to the moon that his mum made him wear lederhosen. Why would you do that?
11:51 Speaker 06 That's just She obviously thought it was fine. I think, and she didn't do it to be horrible. She did it because she thought, well, you know, that's a trendy sort of look. It's the nineteen seventies. He'll, he'll look fabulous. You know what mums are like, though? You just go, you look good in anything. You're so handsome, darling.
12:05 Yasi Salek? Right.
12:06 Speaker 06 You know.
12:07 Yasi Salek? And then you send poor Jarvis Cocker, who's already four eyes, and is already a bit fey, and you stick him in
12:13 Speaker 06 And he's got long hair, hasn't he?
12:14 Yasi Salek? Long hair. And you put him in a little lederhosen, send him right on to school in Sheffield.
12:20 Speaker 06 And I bet he thought he looked lovely. Oh, bless, yes.
12:25 Speaker 06 He trotted that one out. I mean, you know, everyone knew about that story. He wasn't ashamed in the end. I think he rather liked it. It's quite cool, really.
12:32 Yasi Salek? The lederhosen wasn't totally random. Jarvis's aunt married a German person.
12:38 Speaker 06 Okay.
12:39 Yasi Salek? And they would send it over from Germany.
12:41 Speaker 06 Yeah.
12:42 Yasi Salek? He said he went to school looking like an extra from Heidi. That was, um, and this one also, I died. Um, he said, as soon as I entered the schoolyard, the hilarity began, and it only increased when a classmate noticed that there were two zip fasteners on the front of the shorts. A new insult was added to the all-too-familiar four eyes. I was now Jarvis Two Dicks.
13:03 Speaker 06 Yeah.
13:04 Yasi Salek? That was in his own book, so he did report it back. It's very shuffled. Yeah. I say that as if I know anything about shuffle. There's a very bad nodding.
13:12 Speaker 06 It's very shuffle. Yeah.
13:14 Yasi Salek? So as a child, Jarvis Two Dicks over here, he is radicalized by The Monkees. I read, there's a little interview where the interviewer asked, he said, Noel Gallagher said that seeing Johnny Marr on top of the pops crystallized what he wanted to do with his life. Was there any pop star that had a similar effect on you? And Jarvis said, it was probably The Monkees. Although I know that sounds stupid. The only decent records my mom had at home were Beatles records. I think my dad took the good ones with him when he left. Anyway, the rest of it was blood, sweat and tears and crap like that. But The Monkees were on the telly a lot and I used to fantasize about being a pop star. I was already thinking of the advantages. One of them was that you could pay someone to show episodes of The Monkees whenever you wanted.
13:55 Yasi Salek? In a way, I achieved that ambition the last time we toured in America when I bought The Monkees television series box set.
14:06 Yasi Salek? I thought it was interesting that the first thing he was radicalized by was, I want to be a pop star. Not necessarily like, I love the music of The Monkees, but like, oh, I, I want to do this. I want to be on television and I want to be a pop star.
14:19 Speaker 06 But also that Jarvis never shrunk away from the idea of pop music.
14:24 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
14:24 Speaker 06 Whereas lots of musicians will say, you know, like the Johnny Marr quote you just said about Noel Gallagher. You know, they'll go, they'll veer towards rock because that's the thing that's venerated. They'll say they saw the Rolling Stones or it was The Beatles or something. For Jarvis to say The Monkees is so much more important and better. Cause his understanding of what commercial music is and how that's just as much an art form as something is quote unquote allowed or acceptable. And remember, this is years ago when you still couldn't say those sorts of things. You know, you're still meant to, to like the rock greats.
14:55 Yasi Salek? Right.
14:55 Speaker 06 And you know, you, you know, no one would be surprised if you never mentioned woman in any of your inspirations ever. Things like that, all that bollocks, as they say. Um, and so Jarvis could always appreciate pop music. He has, he's a really big, easy listening fan. He has enormous breadth of music taste. I mean, just enormous. And, and that's really, really important. You can hear from the records, but that's what makes him a good pop star as well. And yeah, he wanted to be a pop star.
15:18 Yasi Salek? Totally.
15:19 Speaker 06 Wanted the fame.
15:20 Yasi Salek? I read a good Bobby Kalasbe quote where he said, he was like, you can hear when a band comes from working class roots. Like, there's a hunger and like a desperation to just never be poor again. Whereas, like, you can hear when a band is not as middle class. And I thought that was really interesting. And Jarvis Cocker grew up not an upper-class, rich person. So the desire to be not poor one day is probably very great.
15:48 Speaker 06 Yes, it's where aspirational is good, rather than aspirational being about ego or about money. Aspirational to change your life and to change the way you live your life and to come out of something, but also inspire other people to do that, to not be boxed in. And you know how class obsessed, by now, you know how class obsessed this country is. And so it's really, really important that people felt that there wasn't a mobility as such in terms of, you know, a kind of capitalist mobility, but really a moving out of your class mobility to prove that you weren't tied to anything.
16:21 Yasi Salek? Yeah. All right. Here's a pivotal moment. It's the summer of 1976, and Jarvis's mother takes him and his sister on holiday to Greece. And she meets a new boyfriend, a German scuba instructor named Horst Hosenstein. His name was Horst. That's real.
16:39 Speaker 06 It's wonderful.
16:40 Yasi Salek? So good. It's like, it's like if you imagined, what would a German man who teaches scuba in Greece be named? Of course, his name is Horst Hosenstein.
16:48 Speaker 06 Yeah.
16:49 Yasi Salek? Jarvis said, "He was the first adult I confessed my desire to be in a band to. He told me he used to play bass in a band in his hometown of Hamburg. I confided my secret longing to get a hold of an electric guitar. He actually listened. He seemed to think it was a good idea." So Jarvis's mother and Horst really struck up a real long-distance relationship. And Horst came to visit Sheffield that Christmas, and he brought Jarvis his first guitar, a hop semi-acoustic.
17:14 Speaker 06 And that's perfect, isn't it?
17:15 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
17:15 Speaker 06 He was the father figure that he needed. Isn't it lovely?
17:18 Yasi Salek? I thought it was very sweet. And it was actually very sad because in Jarvis's book, he said, there was like a little sad bit about how his actual father would always like send birthday and Christmas cards that said, "I've put your present in the post, but like, no present ever came." So Jarvis is ready. He's got his semi-acoustic guitar, courtesy of his mother's German scuba instructor boyfriend. And it's right in time for punk to happen in 1977. Changing everything. What was your first experience with punk music?
17:48 Speaker 06 Oh, I was a kid, so I thought it was terrifying.
17:50 Yasi Salek? You were like, what is this?
17:51 Speaker 06 It was the most frightening thing that I have ever seen in my life. And then, you know, it would say, saying seventy six sort of formation of punk, but by seventy seven, it's on top of the pops here all the time. And with these very angry looking bands and you would think, wow, this is another world. It's an entry into another world that I don't quite yet understand. But that I know is appealing and I'm going to get slightly obsessed by. And then it grows and grows and grows. So it was an enormous big deal here. I mean, it was everywhere. It was in the tabloid newspapers. It was on TV. It was the biggest thing ever. And yet it was totally anti-establishment at the same time, which is a rarity. Usually you have to court it somehow. Obviously Malcolm McLaren would try and court.
18:31 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
18:32 Speaker 06 And do his machinations. But as an anti-establishment movement being so mainstream, it's it's pretty up there, isn't it?
18:39 Yasi Salek? It can't be overstated how important this one single, honestly, year, which is like kind of seventy six into seventy seven. And particularly in the UK, to your point, like in America, it's a little different, right? Like, it's not like they were shoving the sex pistols on to, you know, late night with Johnny Carson or whatever, like punk had a huge impact too. But the way that it was like this in the UK is so crazy.
19:05 Speaker 06 It took over. It took over. Absolutely. And I remember as a kid even thinking that it really was everywhere. I mean, it was reported about every day. It was such, it was the fill from the fury. It was absolutely, you know, rocking the establishment and rocking everybody. And people absolutely adored it. And also for output, there's so little real punk out output. It's a couple of singles from bands and then they, you know, the the band lineup change or they just implode or something. And that's what's sort of quite funny about it is, you know, it's not about longevity and all the the stuff that people talk about now. It's not about a six album deal. It's about one single and you've changed the world. Amazing.
19:42 Yasi Salek? Yeah, it it means and and really changed the world. I mean, there's not one single. Of these deep dives that I've done of bands that are kind of come into their own, whether it's the eighties or the nineties, that don't have day zero be seeing the Sex Pistols or seeing The Clash or seeing, you know, like, there is one moment where they're like, and then I thought I could do anything.
20:09 Speaker 06 Hmm, hmm.
20:10 Yasi Salek? It's wonderful.
20:11 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's true. Yeah. But that's obviously of a certain era.
20:15 Yasi Salek? Of a certain era.
20:16 Speaker 06 People of a certain age and then they're gonna be bad and obviously Jarvis is older than some of them. By the time we get to, um, time we get to Britpop.
20:24 Yasi Salek? Yeah, he was a good, nice, ripe, I think fourteen, fifteen, when that hits, perfect timing.
20:29 Speaker 06 Yeah.
20:29 Yasi Salek? He said that he discovered John Peel by accident. John Peel also just what a pivotal figure in all of these stories.
20:37 Speaker 06 Yeah.
20:38 Yasi Salek? He said, "When punk broke, it was easier to read about than to listen to. After the Sex Pistols appeared on the Bill Grundy Show and swore on live TV, it was all over the papers, like you said, The Filth and The Fury, etc., but nowhere to be heard on the radio. Many radio stations actively took a stand against it. They thought it was a threat to the moral fiber of the nation. One such station was Radio Halam. Hallam? Hallam?
21:00 Speaker 06 Hallam, yeah.
21:01 Yasi Salek? Sheffield, I made it Middle Eastern, Halam. Sheffield's
21:04 Speaker 06 It's beautiful.
21:06 Yasi Salek? Intake. Sheffield's commercial radio broadcaster. "I remember hearing Colin Slade, the presenter of the Hallam Rock Show, reassure his listeners that he would not be playing any punk rock on his program because it wasn't real music. Of course, that made me all the more determined to hear some. I went over to the radio and started turning the tuning knob. I was almost all the way to the end of the dial when I stopped. There was a guy singing in a strange, high, whiny voice. The music in the background wasn't loud and aggressive, as I imagined punk to be, but the overall effect was different. I took my hand off the tuner and listened. When that song ended, a deeper voice, one I was to become very familiar with, informed me that I had just been listening to Elvis Costello on the John Peel Show. My musical education had entered its next phase."
21:49 Yasi Salek? I got the chills. First of all, I just like, I mean, we have a small but mighty contingent of like twenty two to twenty five year old people that listen to this show. It's mostly more people that are Gen X. But I'm like, I want these twenty two years to imagine. You wanted to hear something? You read about it. You had no idea what it sounded like. You sat by the radio and turned the tuning until you tried to hopefully imagine.
22:15 Speaker 06 Yeah, it was. I will say, though, there was an approximation of punk on what was allowed on the Old Gray Whistle Test.
22:21 Yasi Salek? Right.
22:22 Speaker 06 So you're gonna get Susie and the Banshees, you got Patrick Smith.
22:24 Yasi Salek? The New York Dolls were famously on the, yeah, yeah.
22:27 Speaker 06 Yes. And so that that would be, but that was obviously tucked away in the schedules. It wasn't mainstream. And it wouldn't have probably touched everything.
22:36 Yasi Salek? Right.
22:36 Speaker 06 But that's why you would have seen it on the TV, but he's right in that it wasn't. It wasn't on, but it was around. I mean, you knew that this music was there. Sex Pistols were around everywhere.
22:46 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
22:47 Speaker 06 And that was true, but maybe there wasn't less radio play, but the name was around yesterday, everywhere. I mean, that's to say, I was terrified of the name. I thought it was akin to sort of saying, I want to murder my mother is a bad name. And I, you know, I was five or something and didn't want to murder my mother at that particular psychological point in time.
23:03 Yasi Salek? Exactly, yeah. That came around like twelve, thirteen. Um, that's just, that's just biology. Anyways. Jarvis said, whenever I'm asked, what's your greatest musical influence? My reply is John Peel. What a gift to have.
23:18 Speaker 06 I did a work experience with John Peel.
23:20 Yasi Salek? You were, you were an intern? You were John Peel's intern?
23:24 Speaker 06 For a couple of days, yes. At school. I wrote him a letter and he rang up and just went, yeah, come in.
23:30 Yasi Salek? What are you saying? You were, you wrote a letter in the mate, in the post to John Peel?
23:36 Speaker 06 I bought a stamp, yeah. I wrote it in my handwriting. So my school are making me do work experience. Have you, you know, can I come in for a week? And he rang up.
23:46 Yasi Salek? What did you do?
23:47 Speaker 06 I didn't do very much. I opened the mail. I listened to John Waters, his producer, talk. I used to go and get John Peel his lunch, which was a Burger King bean burger, but he wouldn't have the chips because he was always worried about being fat. And and I think at one point he'd been bitten by some sort of insect and I had to go and get some anthocyan from boots, which is, you know, if you've got a flare up, you've been bitten by a bee. What what what does it, what things, a mosquito? I don't know what, what bites you these days, but um yeah, that's what you put on it. And I think I was underage drinking. We went for a drink with David Gedge from The Wedding Present in the wine bar around the corner, me, John Peel and Dave Gedge. And I just didn't say anything because I was a bit just awe-struck. One glass of red wine for a teenager and I almost fell asleep for the rest of the afternoon and toddled back thinking, I'm a bit sick.
24:32 Yasi Salek? This is one of the coolest stories I've ever heard in my life.
24:35 Speaker 06 Silly, isn't it?
24:36 Yasi Salek? So jealous. And another important thing about punk, you know, that for Jarvis was that it made it okay for him to be different, stick out. Like as much as like we were just saying, like he brings it up, he makes jokes, Jarvis two dicks, Lederhosen, Four Eyes. Probably at the time it was quite painful. And also like even if those things weren't the thing, like you were saying before, like Jarvis Cocker is like a very tall, very thin, sort of like not a traditionally blokey, if you'll allow my, you know, like he he wasn't gonna fit it.
25:11 Speaker 06 Right.
25:11 Yasi Salek? Yeah, he probably didn't play football, you know, like he wasn't a jock. And so he got this thing, a little wind in his sails, where he could be himself. Although I thought it was very funny that even amongst punk, his very first concert was The Stranglers at Sheffield's Top Rank. And he said, believing in the punk spirit of individuality and self-expression, I went along in a jumbo sail jacket and a blue tie that my mother had crocheted for me. And all these people and Mohicans took the piss out of teddy boys. And that's exactly what they've become, the modern teds. So he got, he also got made fun of by the punks.
25:50 Speaker 06 Hmm.
25:50 Yasi Salek? For his crocheted blue tie and.
25:53 Speaker 06 And yet that's more punk than anything else.
25:55 Yasi Salek? That's, I mean, like anything else, right? In punk, it happened to punk, it happens to everything. It's like eventually they become self policing and you're like, I thought the whole point was, I'm so sorry, did I mistake that the whole point was? And they're like, no, you have, you're wearing the wrong shoes. You need to get out of here.
26:12 Speaker 06 Yeah.
26:13 Yasi Salek? Okay, now Jarvis Cocker, he's 15. He's discovered punk. He's ready to fucking go. Him and his friend Peter Dolly Dalton decide to start a band during O level economics class. They wanted to call it Pulp after the 1972 Michael Caine film, which is about a CD writer of sleazy pulp novels who is recruited by a quirky, reclusive ex-actor to help him write his biography at his house in Malta, in case you guys have not seen the film.
26:41 Yasi Salek? Jarvis was always very interested in the idea, in his words, "The idea that a culture could reveal more of itself through its throwaway items than its supposedly revealed artifacts," which is basically what pulp stuff is, right? It's, you know, pulp books that are written a dime a dozen about detectives or whatever. They're not, it's not War and Peace, it's not T S Eliot or whatever. That's kind of, I think, a lot of what his, his book that I'm holding up for Sean to say with all my little things is about. Quite triggering for me to read this book, I must admit, because his, his whole book was about excavating all his things from, and then I was like, it was like literally five minutes after my house burned down and I was like, "Well, I had things too, Jarvis. I also used
27:25 Yasi Salek? to have things, okay, but now I'm not gonna be able to write a book like this about them because they're all gone. Thanks for rubbing it in, Jarvis." It's fine, we're fine. Who needs stuff?
27:33 Speaker 06 I'm sorry.
27:33 Yasi Salek? I'm a Buddhist now. No, it's totally okay. I've, I've, people have sent me so much new stuff and so many old The Face magazines too. I'll never be a Buddhist.
27:45 Yasi Salek? Okay, so they land on this name pulp, but they decide, "No, pulp not weighty enough. We need something more." And someone in the class had a copy of the Financial Times, which had the Commodities Index and had, in the Commodities Index, Arabicus was there. And so they, Arabicus, and so they called it Arabicus Pulp. It's a terrible name.
28:08 Speaker 06 I quite like it.
28:09 Yasi Salek? You like Arabicus Pulp better than pulp?
28:10 Speaker 06 I like it.
28:11 Yasi Salek? You think they would have made it?
28:12 Speaker 06 In a way, I think it trips off the tongue, doesn't it, Arabicus Pulp? It's rather lovely.
28:16 Yasi Salek? Clearly not for me who can't even pronounce the word.
28:20 Speaker 06 It's beautiful the way you pronounce it. It's much better. Oh, yeah, I do rather like it, but I do think it's amazing that to pinpoint Pulp so early on when he's fifteen. That's his whole M O is reusing old things and going to charity shops and jumble sales. And his songs are all about that and old emotions and, and I mean, it's just really perceptive that he got it immediately. Oh, yeah, they buggered about with Arabicus, but then they've dropped it again. So it's, yeah, it's, it's absolutely insightful. Full marks for that.
28:50 Yasi Salek? Totally. Although I wonder if at some point he was like, I really wish that I had called it a different name. And then ended that band and then started Pulp. Because now there's like five albums of experimentation that we will be having to talk about here. Perhaps he would prefer wasn't part of the Pulp discography, but.
29:11 Speaker 06 Oh, no, I think he's proud of his whole oeuvre. And I think the struggle being and, and the, the, and the fact, the mistakes and the lack of quote unquote success is part of the story. It makes it so much more interesting than if they've been elastic and gone, hey, we've got really, really great songs. Oh, look, we've got an album out and everyone loves us. You know, that's not so interesting. And the interesting thing was him always looking like a pop star and not yet being one.
29:35 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
29:35 Speaker 06 And he did that for decades.
29:37 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
29:37 Speaker 06 And he just looked different. He just looked like he should be there and he wasn't. And I think that what was, yeah, far more fascinating way to go about.
29:45 Yasi Salek? It's such a good, it's really is such a great story. And also like, I've always interested in the stories of like the thirty one year old pop star, right? Which right now thirty one is much, is like young.
29:55 Speaker 06 Thirty one's the new twelve, isn't it?
29:57 Yasi Salek? Exactly. But back then, it's like when, when Debbie Harry was thirty, when Blondie broke and you're like,
30:02 Speaker 06 No.
30:02 Yasi Salek? She was a hundred.
30:03 Speaker 06 Terrible. Yeah.
30:04 Yasi Salek? A hundred years old.
30:41 Speaker 03 Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code "HACK". Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.
31:12 Yasi Salek? All right, so we have our Arabicus Pulp, our new band, which we've made in economics class. Dolly could play keyboards and guitar, as well as xylophone and cornet. And they decide to rehearse at Jarvis's grand's house. Jarvis sings and plays guitar. Dolly played guitar and also Jarvis's grand's organ, which apparently was the only thing that was amplified, so you couldn't hear anything else. And they learn to play "The House of the Rising Sun" by The Animals, followed by their first original song called "Shakespeare Rock". Don't worry, I have some of those lyrics here for you guys. "I've got a baby, only one thing wrong. She quotes Shakespeare all day long. Said, 'Baby, you're ignoring me.' She said, 'To be or not to be.' Shakespeare rock, Shakespeare roll.
31:57 Yasi Salek? Shakespeare rock, Shakespeare roll." There's also a bit about "Baby, you're making me sick." She said, "Alas, poor Yorick." It's good stuff, honestly.
32:05 Speaker 06 Yeah.
32:07 Speaker 06 That's proper poetry, isn't it? It's funny.
32:09 Yasi Salek? It's good. It's funny. It's relevant to Jarvis's interests at the time in which he was appearing in apparently a school production of Twelfth Night and also studying Hamlet. I thought that was very funny. Then they add some members. A guy named David Lockwood, who was known as, everyone has a nickname. He was known as Fungus because his middle name was Angus. And he also, yeah, he had a mustache because he was obsessed with Queen.
32:37 Speaker 06 Yes, well, why not? Before must must, I mean, everyone's got a mustache under thirty now.
32:43 Yasi Salek? Is that a thing?
32:45 Speaker 06 It's a thing. You've got to have a mullet and a must, oh, no, you have a mullet, you have a mustache. And sometimes you have those weird kind of seventies perv glasses. And that's a thing and all young people look like they're just about to be arrested for something slightly indecent. It's very strange, the other trendy ones.
33:02 Yasi Salek? I won't lie, but I guess it's not for me because I'm now elderly and aged out of what young people think is cool, but mustache?
33:09 Speaker 06 Hmm, I'm totally not joking. Lime green and mustaches is.
33:12 Yasi Salek? Oh, no.
33:13 Speaker 06 It's really strange round, round these parts.
33:17 Yasi Salek? Oh, no. I try to avoid young people as much as humanly possible, but I don't know. I don't know what they're wearing. It's none of my business. I find them, I find them quite triggering. Okay.
33:28 Yasi Salek? They also had a song called Message to the Martians, which was actually just Jarvis playing the bassline to New Dawn Fades by Joy Division. While Fungus made alien noises. Great, perfect. Would love to hear that song. And then one called The Condom Song. Edgy.
33:44 Speaker 06 Of course.
33:44 Yasi Salek? Edgy, of course. They have not yet played one single show in August of nineteen seventy nine, but they do decide to make a short film called The Three Spartans. It's four minutes long and it features the band basically fighting each other with garden canes, followed by a funeral scene. And they show it at their school. They were like, hey, guys, we've made something beautiful. Gather, gather in the auditorium.
34:06 Speaker 06 Hmm.
34:07 Yasi Salek? I love the uh self belief. They also made a promo for the Shakespeare song before mentioned.
34:14 Speaker 06 Ah.
34:14 Yasi Salek? Which Fungus, Dixie and Jarvis are playing volleyball with one of Saskia's dolls. Apparently went over well. The school loved it. The kids were like, hell, yeah, this is so cool. You guys are Martin Scorsese. They kick out Fungus, poor Fungus, he didn't last long. They replace him with a guy called Philip Thompson, AKA Pip. And then they become, at some point, I don't have the, I'm not a scientist, okay? At some point they drop. Arabicus and become just pulp.
34:40 Speaker 06 Yeah.
34:40 Yasi Salek? Then they make their live debut nineteen eighty, first ever pulp show, February, March of nineteen eighty. It is at lunchtime at school. So like, get ready, guys. They decide they need pyrotechnics for their school lunchtime performance, and so they commissioned them from the chemistry department. But apparently, it did not go the way they wanted it to. It was a little bit lackluster. Jarvis said it was more impromptu daytime chemistry class than Good Evening Wembley.
35:07 Speaker 06 They just got a bunson burn and lit it or something.
35:10 Yasi Salek? Yeah, it was just a little
35:11 Speaker 06 It's not so good.
35:12 Yasi Salek? And behind them.
35:13 Speaker 06 Yeah.
35:13 Yasi Salek? While they're wearing matching outfits made of curtains. And they got their maths teacher, Mr. Jarvis, no relation, to record it. But they felt it was such an unmitigated disaster, they made him destroy the tape. To this day, we could have had
35:27 Speaker 06 Yeah.
35:27 Yasi Salek? an extant copy of the first ever Pulp Show at the school lunchtime auditorium. And it's gone. And they, this book I read, don't worry, they interviewed Mr. Jarvis. And he said,
35:37 Speaker 06 Oh, yes.
35:38 Yasi Salek? "It wasn't the best of concerts, but the kids thoroughly enjoyed it." They had their own fan base within their own year, anyway. Damn, he said within their own year, anyway. He was like, "At least the kids in their exact class liked them. The other ones didn't care about them."
35:50 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
35:51 Yasi Salek? Only thing I can remember about it was at the start, they were tuning up and Jarvis was saying "E chord bastard" to Peter. They weren't happy with the concert, though. Then they have a real concert at the Rother- Rotherham?
36:02 Speaker 06 Rotherham.
36:03 Yasi Salek? Rotherham Art Center, opening for a band called The Naughtiest Girl Was A Monitor.
36:07 Speaker 06 Mmm, good name.
36:09 Yasi Salek? Great name. I don't know what happened to them, but
36:11 Speaker 06 No, they should come back.
36:13 Yasi Salek? Let's revive The Naughtiest Girl Was A Monitor. Then they answer a call in the local paper to be included on a compilation called Bouquet Of Steel. They do not get a place on Bouquet Of Steel, but they do get included in the local bands directory, which leads them to getting their first actual, real Sheffield gig, August 16th, 1980, at a place called Lead Mills. They were second from the bottom of the bill. And they played a song called Stepping Stone, which is a monkey song. They did the cover. And apparently, the bassist fell offstage during it.
36:47 Speaker 06 Yeah, they always did in those days. It's always someone falling off stage.
36:50 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
36:50 Speaker 06 And sometimes they end up in hospital and sometimes they wouldn't.
36:55 Yasi Salek? Luck of the draw, really.
36:56 Speaker 06 There's a lot of it. Well, we get to people falling out of things, don't we later?
36:59 Yasi Salek? Oh, yeah, we sure do. Precursor. I did also really, when I was studying Blur, that in the beginning, they were always so drunk that they were also always falling off the stage and like knocking off monitors and stuff.
37:09 Speaker 06 Well, he used to climb up things, Damon. Anything that was sort of up there, he'd just try and climb up it. And yeah, drink usually was involved. Yeah.
37:19 Yasi Salek? All right. Someone really important's coming into the picture now, you guys. I just want, I want to point out, we're still in nineteen eighty.
37:26 Speaker 06 Yes.
37:27 Yasi Salek? Russell Senior. He was then nineteen years old, a bit older. He was born May eighteenth, nineteen sixty-one, one day before your friend Yasi. Uh, also a tourist like myself. He was in attendance at that show where they played the monkey stepping stone song and the basses fall off the stage. And he said, Pope Waracus and fun with wit and humor. They did a funny version of I'm Not Your Stepping Stone, the basses fall off stage during it, which was all highly amusing. So he was, he was sold. He was like, I like this man. I want to be part of this.
37:57 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
37:57 Yasi Salek? I guess a part of the reason Russell and Jarvis became friends was Jarvis had become already a minor local celebrity due to his Saturday job as a fishmonger at the local fish market.
38:09 Speaker 06 Oh, yes. Yeah.
38:10 Yasi Salek? Uh, Russell said, he had a very convincing patter for selling fish with lots of sexual innuendo around it. People would ask, have you got any crabs on you, cock? And he'd say, ooh, misses, the trouble with me and scratch himself. Or I've got a lovely piece of tail for your husband, love. He was one of the best performing fishmongers I'd ever seen. He'd charm all these old ladies into buying more crabs than they needed and things. They loved him. He'd be like, would you like an extra claw, Mrs. Hayward?
38:38 Speaker 06 Of course he did.
38:40 Yasi Salek? So the sexual innuendo was there at an early age. That's what brought us together. He was a very good fishmonger. I actually really loved this, besides that it's hilarious, because he's a, he's a, he's a charming performer from day one. Whether he's gonna use it to sell some fish.
38:54 Speaker 06 This is quite interesting. I'm now, I'm now sensing a theme because, you know, essentially rock and roll music is just sort of selling.
39:01 Yasi Salek? Just selling fish, really.
39:02 Speaker 06 Yeah, something off the back of a lorry, isn't it? Um, but in a sense that, I mean, you know, if you're a Welsh artist.
39:09 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
39:10 Speaker 06 Or singer, you're gonna have been, you've gone through the choirs, haven't you? That's why there's so many amazing Welsh singers. And in a sense, if you're a gospel artist, you come from R and B in America or various places, you've been through that kind of church choir thing. And that's part of your training.
39:25 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
39:25 Speaker 06 In England, there are actually quite a few people whose parents or who worked on markets and I'm suddenly seeing the theme.
39:32 Yasi Salek? Wow.
39:33 Speaker 06 Because in that, you know, I don't know if you've read the Lawrence book about Lawrence Exeter felt denim Mozart estate. That Will Hodgkinson has written. It's done very well over here. It's garnered a lot of awards. But Lawrence used to help his dad on Birmingham Market because his dad was a market trader. And I'm suddenly seeing that that element of performance, because he said he loved it and talked to old, older women. And people on the market and selling them things. And often it is that kind of crowd, isn't it? You're getting used to your audience, you're getting used to the patter, that this is something that then trains up. Our very strange pop stars, the ones that only we sort of do, if you know what I mean.
40:12 Yasi Salek? I think you're really on to something.
40:14 Speaker 06 Hmm.
40:14 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
40:15 Speaker 06 I think so.
40:15 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
40:16 Speaker 06 I'm gonna drum up a few more examples and then we've got a.
40:18 Yasi Salek? Then you have an article.
40:20 Speaker 06 We've got a book.
40:21 Yasi Salek? Book deal. Give her a book deal.
40:23 Speaker 06 Yeah, we've got a TV show. Um, yeah.
40:27 Yasi Salek? I really love that. I love that that's the school, the school that the UK pop stars come up in.
40:32 Speaker 06 On the markets, yeah.
40:34 Yasi Salek? Well, then there's the other school of like, I came straight out of my bedroom and I had never spoken to another human being, Allah, Jesus and Mary Chain. You know, there's different ones.
40:42 Speaker 06 There is, yes, yes.
40:43 Yasi Salek? They're like, I don't know actually how to have a social um, connection with any other person besides this guitar and my brother.
40:48 Speaker 06 That's everybody, yeah, that's everybody underneath, yeah, yeah.
40:52 Yasi Salek? But I did, I did like, cause it like, it really is a lot of the elements of Pulp right there, right? It's Jarvis's charm and his, his delight for sexual innuendo. And also like, I mean, selling fish at the fish market is like such a slice of life, British, day to day, seeing the mothers and little families. And I, I'm seeing it. I'm seeing where it's all,
41:18 Speaker 06 where it's all gelling. And the observation, like, he's probably seeing so many
41:22 Yasi Salek? different versions of like, just day to day life of Sheffield denizens.
41:28 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's real life.
41:29 Yasi Salek? Real life, exactly.
41:30 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's not going to the Brits school, or it's not going to, you know, somewhere else like that. This is, yeah. What people are experiencing is, you're saying, day to day.
41:37 Yasi Salek? Obviously, this was also the inspiration for the early Pulp song, I Scrubbed the Crabs That Killed Sheffield.
41:43 Speaker 06 Which is the greatest title ever.
41:44 Yasi Salek? Yeah. This song sounds kind of divo-y. It's kind of a, it's got a little.
41:54 Yasi Salek? They get their first review, Autumn 1980, in a fanzine called NMX. Here's what it says. Their music seems to be a mixed bag of all things modern, as if they listen to the John Peel Show every night in an endless quest for influences, which is not probably too far off from the truth. They look so young, you think they ought to be too busy studying for their O levels to be messing about with these damn pop groups. But I understand one of them works in the fish market. Anyway, they don't appear to have seen enough of life to be obsessed with doom and despair, instead covering more superficial subjects, such as Message from the Martians and Disco Baby. Despite comparatively elementary music ability and a slight togetherness problem, they're a fun band and definitely one to watch in the future.
42:33 Speaker 06 It's a little bit damning, isn't it?
42:34 Yasi Salek? Yeah. Despite a slight togetherness problem. Yeah, well, we're gonna have a bit of a slight togetherness problem.
42:40 Speaker 06 Don't we all?
42:42 Yasi Salek? They enter a band competition put on by the Sheffield star called Search for a Star. The prize was time in a recording studio. Once again, they do not get, they do not win this. But they meet another band in the contest, who was also sort of alternative, called Vector 77, which is where they finally get a new drummer. And this is Pulp 1.0, 1981. They land on the classic early Pulp lineup, which is Jarvis, Dolly, Jamie Pinchback on bass, and drummer Wayne Furnas, AKA Fetus, because he was petite and also 15 years old. Now they're gigging babe, they're gigging all around Sheffield. Tons of, tons of shows. They cut their first demo. The naughtiest girl was a monitor.
43:26 Yasi Salek? Is here recommending that they do a demo with this guy called Ken Patton. Who was a fifty-five-year-old man who had a studio set up in his house. Which honestly is the beginning of a story that would be on like America's Most Wanted. But luckily it didn't go that way. Just, just that fifty-five-year-old guy has a studio in his house and he wants the fifteen-year-old boys to come to his house and do a little recording. It's not a big deal.
43:50 Speaker 06 But there were, there were quite a few places like that. People had weird studios in the back of their houses. It's where the specials, Leamington Spa recorded. And all sorts of strange pop music has been recorded in people's back bedrooms that you would never realize.
44:04 Yasi Salek? Totally.
44:04 Speaker 06 Where it was.
44:05 Yasi Salek? And thank God for Ken Patton not being a sinister, um, individual and send.
44:09 Speaker 06 Yeah, go Ken.
44:10 Yasi Salek? Go Ken. Just a nice man who liked, liked music. He also claimed that he invented the vocoder. There's no way to.
44:17 Speaker 06 Interesting.
44:17 Yasi Salek? No way to.
44:18 Speaker 06 No.
44:18 Yasi Salek? Legitimize that claim.
44:21 Yasi Salek? There's only one excellent bit of this demo. It's the song, What Do You Say? Cause it was included in a compilation called Your Secret's Safe With Us. It's got kind of a ska bassline.
44:39 Yasi Salek? It's their first ever recorded release. Although technically it comes out after, spoiler alert. They do a fucking Peel session. You guys. They've been a band for five minutes. Jarvis is selling crabs at the market. The drummer is fifteen. They've made one single demo. They're so excited. Jarvis is like, oh my God, I listened to the cassette like fifteen times in a row at home. We made it. We made a demo. I want the whole world to hear it. And then guess what? As it does, as fate happens to work, it's October tenth and John Peel has come to town. He's playing a Radio One roadshow at the Sheffield Polytechnic. And Jarvis is like, on my way. And he goes and he gives his demo to John Peel again. You could just go up to John Peel and be like, here's a demo.
45:22 Speaker 06 Yeah, you could. Yeah. And he'd expect you to do it, I think.
45:26 Yasi Salek? You could write him a letter and say, I want to be your intern. And then next thing you're having a glass of wine with David Gedge. Or if you're Jarvis, you hand off a tape that you just made. And then next thing you know, they're like, can you come down to London? We'd like to record you for the John Peel Show.
45:39 Speaker 06 That's what happens.
45:40 Yasi Salek? And they did. They got a telephone call. Jarvis said, we shared a telephone line with my grandparents who live next door. My grandfather had done some kind of creative wiring. So the two houses have the same number.
45:51 Speaker 06 That's quite strange, isn't it? I've never heard of that. Anyone else doing that?
45:54 Yasi Salek? Never heard of that. But yes, so the producer, Chris Lysit, rang and talked to Jarvis's grandma. And he said, being a sharp old bird, she realized the message was probably intended for me. She came around our house and told me all about it when I got back from school that afternoon. I know it's cliche, but it really did feel like I died and gone to heaven. Can you imagine? John Peel wants us to record a session for school kids from Sheffield? I was about to turn eighteen in a week's time, but my birthday present had already arrived. If I had to choose the one event that gave me the confidence to devote my life to music, this would be it.
46:28 Speaker 06 It's lovely, isn't it?
46:30 Yasi Salek? I mean, you can see an alternative universe, respectfully to early pulp albums, all of the love and respect in the world, that if this hadn't have happened, they might have called it quits. Do you know, I'm just saying.
46:43 Yasi Salek? I see, again, all of the love and respect in the world, but I could see a universe where if John Peel had known.
46:51 Speaker 06 The universe. People used to make albums that weren't, with respect to this, very good. And it took them a few goes. It's only recently, in the last, you know, twenty years, that you actually have to do a really good first single and a really good first album. That was unheard of before. Everyone was dreadful for years and years and years before they sort of just got up.
47:11 Yasi Salek? Then there's like weird ones like The Clash where you're like, oh, really? That was your first album? That's cool. That's interesting that you did that.
47:17 Speaker 06 Hmm. But, um, yeah, it's funny.
47:18 Yasi Salek? Teenage Fan Club? Are you kidding? The first song, Everything Flows, that's your first single you ever put out? How fucking dare you? Do you know what I mean? But yes, I I totally agree with you. You used to be allowed to develop as an artist.
47:32 Speaker 06 Yes, indeed, you did, yes. And no one minded and people quite like it. I mean amateurism has a very big place in UK society.
47:40 Yasi Salek? All right.
47:41 Speaker 06 There you go. And some of those records, I mean, with respect to all producers everywhere, but they're produced like that. It's like someone's, you know, I don't know, played it down the phone.
47:51 Yasi Salek? It's Ken.
47:52 Speaker 06 Old records is terrible.
47:53 Yasi Salek? Ken Patton invented the vocoder, so it was just a bunch of Ken Pattons making your album for you and being like, that'll be a hundred quid, please. Well, guess what? It's time for our peel session. I think I'm correct in saying that Pulp holds the record for the longest duration of time in between peel sessions.
48:11 Speaker 06 Oh, what is it?
48:13 Yasi Salek? I don't think they went back on till the nineties.
48:15 Speaker 06 Uh, okay.
48:17 Yasi Salek? So I think it was like nine, eleven years or something insane.
48:21 Speaker 06 Yeah, I think.
48:22 Yasi Salek? Yeah. Don't quote me on that because I didn't write down, but I do think, I don't, I don't think they go back on until like after, like his and hers, maybe. And they also got, I believe, a melody maker right up, which I did dig up. It's Frank Worrell. Do you know him?
48:37 Speaker 06 I don't know.
48:38 Yasi Salek? Pulp proved to be a most bizarre visual proposition. Fronted by Jarvis, the tallest teenager I've ever shook hands with, they flucked around me like curious vultures eyeing up a prey. I'm haunted by splashes of wild color, offbeat clothes and hair and an underlying purity, which doesn't seem to fit.
48:56 Speaker 06 Hmm. Underlying purity.
48:58 Yasi Salek? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it's because they were like sixteen.
49:02 Speaker 06 I guess.
49:03 Yasi Salek? Yeah. And then Jarvis has something I thought that was really interesting, which will probably be evergreen for the rest of their career, which is just because we've got a sense of humor, doesn't mean that we want to be seen as some kind of joke band.
49:16 Speaker 06 Very true, though. They've got an arty sense of humor, haven't they? It's not about sort of being novelty in any sense at all. It's just about this. Very strange idea, which is funny, but isn't it's, you know, it's got that English witch to it.
49:30 Yasi Salek? Yeah, it's arch, right?
49:32 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah, arch is a good way to put it.
49:34 Yasi Salek? Well, I, the thing I like about pulp, and again, we haven't even put out an album yet, it's nineteen eighty one. But you see that the DNA is always kind of there and it just takes a few extra ingredients. And then for time to change, to catch up with them, for it to click. Cause they don't change that much. I mean, they obviously get much better at writing songs.
49:56 Speaker 06 Yeah.
49:56 Yasi Salek? And their instruments and stuff, but the, they're kind of doing the same bit.
50:01 Speaker 06 Hmm.
50:02 Yasi Salek? In my humble estimation.
50:05 Speaker 06 But you have to remember, and I'm sure if people have said is that when you do cite press reviews, they were very, very bitchy, the press.
50:14 Yasi Salek? Oh, yeah.
50:15 Speaker 06 Pick something apart for, for, you know, no reason, just for, you know, the cut of someone's trousers. They are so snide sometimes and so hard to please. Um, you're going to get a lot of sort of just ruminations, just sort of the stroking of the chin, well, it's all right, you know, that kind of thing. And we'll, we'll see that I would imagine here until they're suddenly adored and everyone, yeah, I've liked them forever. I've liked them since first album, which was rubbish.
50:38 Yasi Salek? I liked how much personality was in music writing, particularly in the UK, which has just sort of been extracted.
50:48 Speaker 06 Uh, totally eradicated.
50:49 Yasi Salek? It's right, yeah.
50:50 Speaker 06 But then the, the, the press had so much power, as many people will have told you, so much power in terms of who they could really influence. And you would buy a record because someone, a writer that you like would say it was amazing before you'd heard it often enough. You just have to take a punt on it enormously powerful in that way. It just doesn't exist and it will never go back to that ever again. It just can't because of the internet.
51:12 Yasi Salek? No, we gave that power to TikTok and now our whole society is going to crumble. So, yeah, actually I, I want to go back to Simon Reynolds saying this is crap and me being like, you know what? Okay, I can deal with that.
51:25 Speaker 06 Yeah.
51:25 Yasi Salek? I can deal with him saying the pants are completely incorrect. And sometimes the pants were incorrect and someone should say it. Okay. Now it's 1982. We've played a Peel session. The wind is firmly behind our sails. We're gonna make it as pop stars. We're literal teenagers. We have not left school yet.
51:42 Speaker 06 Yeah.
51:42 Yasi Salek? Russell Senior organizes a show at Bath University where he is studying management studies and puts Pulp on it. Pulp gets asked to contribute a song to that compilation I mentioned, Your Secret's Safe With Us. Other bands on here I've never heard of except for The Chameleons. Nobody cared about this compilation, babe. It was called Your Secret's Safe With Us and I'm gonna tell you, the secret, it was truly safe. It was absolutely safe because no one has heard this compilation. No one cared about it. No one wrote about it. But they are on it. They get a new member. I'm sure there's a support group somewhere, Pulp Anonymous, all the people that have been in Pulp. And one of them is this man. His name is David Hinckler. They called him Henry because why?
52:26 Yasi Salek? His name rhymes with Henry Winkler, who is the Fonz.
52:30 Speaker 06 Yeah.
52:30 Yasi Salek? Because why is he added? Because Jarvis wants trombone in Pulp.
52:36 Speaker 06 Of course, of course he does.
52:37 Yasi Salek? Of course he does.
52:38 Speaker 06 Brass is quite strong in the early eighties. I just wanna put that out there.
52:42 Yasi Salek? That's a good point.
52:42 Speaker 06 Because if you think about Dexies and if you think about, there's a lot of brass instrumentation. It's Fun Boy 3 has them after the specials. There's all sorts of, you know, it's really brass heavy, the early eighties in UK music.
52:55 Yasi Salek? Especially if you're not making like dour post-punk, like they're not the cure.
53:00 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
53:01 Yasi Salek? Okay, yeah, that, that does make total sense.
53:02 Speaker 06 It's quite rare now, but, but then it was, yeah, it was, it was a big deal.
53:06 Yasi Salek? I think it's both good and well that we, it's rare now. That's all I'm gonna say about brass. But I'm glad they, I'm glad they
53:13 Speaker 06 I like it.
53:14 Yasi Salek? Put this guy in here.
53:15 Speaker 06 Yeah.
53:16 Yasi Salek? To make their second demo, produced by David Hinckler's brother, Simon Hinckler.
53:23 Yasi Salek? Who's in a very popular and very serious Sheffield band called Artery. But then Pulp 1.0 falls apart because it's time to go to university. Uni, as you guys would call it. And several of the members' fathers were like, you're not gonna be in a band. You're gonna go to uni. Pack it up.
53:39 Speaker 06 Yeah.
53:40 Yasi Salek? And Jarvis is bummed. Jarvis is not gonna go to uni and he spends the summer trying to figure his life out. He auditions to host the television program, The Tube.
53:51 Speaker 06 Yeah.
53:52 Yasi Salek? I didn't get it. I think he would have made a good host.
53:54 Speaker 06 Yeah, it would have been great. Totally great.
53:56 Yasi Salek? Um, moves in with his friend, Tim Alcard, in an old factory building. Tim is the caretaker, so they live rent-free on the top floor. There is no heat. It's like, it sounds like a punk house to me, but like a punk building of just creatives that live, live for free.
54:11 Speaker 06 Yeah, absolutely. Perfect for bands and for musicians, for artists, any creative people, as you're saying. The things that don't exist anymore, but those are the things where scenes happen.
54:20 Yasi Salek? We don't have that anymore, which is why, um.
54:23 Speaker 06 We're not allowed that anymore.
54:25 Yasi Salek? We need Margaret Thatcher back with her enterprise, um, allowance scheme. Just for that. We just, we'll resurrect her dead corpse just to bring back the enterprise allowance scheme. And then we'll kill her again and rebury her.
54:41 Speaker 06 Yes. Yeah, that made a difference. Yeah, everyone ran on that.
54:45 Yasi Salek? Yeah, it was, it was a big deal. But an important thing happens, even though Pulp is, Pulp 1.0 has been falling apart. Jarvis is living in a creative environment and he starts going to what he calls Disco University, which is, he goes to the nightclub in Sheffield called The Limit. It is the only nightclub in Sheffield that plays alternative music. And he learns about dance music, I guess, or alternative music and goes partying every night.
55:11 Speaker 06 Why not? He was very sociable, Jarvis.
55:13 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
55:14 Speaker 06 He's got raving all the time.
55:15 Yasi Salek? Yeah. I, I don't know what kind of music, he didn't, he wasn't specific about what kind of alternative music was being played in the only nightclub in Sheffield in 1982, but it's probably good stuff.
55:26 Speaker 06 Yeah, I wonder what it was. It wouldn't have been the only club.
55:29 Yasi Salek? Or the only alternative club, I guess.
55:31 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
55:32 Yasi Salek? Pulp regroups, don't worry. Arteries manager gets involved. He pays for Jarvis to record a new album. They bring back Simon Hinkler, who's dating Saskia, Jarvis's sister. And then they make another demo. They call it Spice. It has these songs on it. Sickly grin, Taking the Plunge, The Heat of the Day, and Boats and Trains, which will later be included on the album. Now it's November. Jarvis starts hanging around with a band called In a Bell Jar, which is a weirdo performance art collective.
56:01 Speaker 06 Course it is.
56:02 Yasi Salek? Of course it is. These are Jarvis's bohemian years. He's living in a factory. There's no heat. He's hanging out with a weirdo art collective. He's going to the disco to listen to alternative music. He's shaping his musical education.
56:14 Speaker 06 Do you think he's getting up early in the morning or is he getting up late?
56:17 Yasi Salek? I think he's getting up very late, don't you think?
56:19 Speaker 06 I think so too.
56:20 Yasi Salek? I think this is like a 3pm, yeah. Right, right there. Listen, we're putting out an album. It's 1983. They end up on Red Rhino Records because that man, Tony Perrin, who had offered to pay for them to make the album, had run out of money and Red Rhino's distribution arm had distributed the Artery album. So Tony went to the owner, who's also named Tony, and said, can you pay for the rest of the Pulp album? And he said, yes. And boom, 1983, we have the first ever Pulp. 1983, we have the first Pulp album. It's called It. What are your memories of It? What are your feelings of It? Did you know about it in real time?
57:04 Speaker 06 I didn't know about it at the time. No, no. I knew about it after the time when I was listening to the other ones. So it wasn't on my radar. Let's just say that. Bless it, but it wasn't, no.
57:16 Yasi Salek? No. Well, three, only 300 people bought it.
57:19 Speaker 06 I'd say it does sound like it's been produced by Cardboard Box. The songs could have flown a little more.
57:24 Yasi Salek? A little more.
57:24 Speaker 06 Taken off a little more, yeah.
57:26 Yasi Salek? If you look kind of in nineteen eighty-three, even in like what was popular with an alternative music, which would be like, I don't know, Murmur by R E M, not in maybe the UK, but you know, in the broader world, New Orders, Power Corruption and Lies, Talking Heads, Speaking in Tongues, U2 puts out War in nineteen eighty-three. It's sort of an outlier even within that. Although I feel like, I guess you could kind of make the argument that it is somewhat in relation to like the Aztec Camera album, Highland Hard Rain. I'm stretching, but I'm just trying, I'm trying to place it.
58:02 Speaker 06 I think it just hadn't, they hadn't found their place yet.
58:04 Yasi Salek? Right, yes.
58:05 Speaker 06 It hadn't landed. It wasn't something that came out of, because I'm still really, you know, I'm still a kid at this point. I've sort of understand a bit of what alternative music is like, and I listen to John Peel all the time.
58:16 Yasi Salek? Right.
58:17 Speaker 06 But it hadn't broken out, even within small terms of kind of bands that you'd heard of, not really into it.
58:24 Yasi Salek? Yeah. It's, it's an interesting album when you think about the inputs being punk and John Peel, and then this is what came out the other side. You're like, oh, okay.
58:33 Speaker 06 Do you know if they played in London a lot at this time?
58:35 Yasi Salek? I don't think they did. I don't think they've, I don't think they've even played in London once yet.
58:40 Speaker 06 Hmm.
58:40 Yasi Salek? Yeah, I think they've pretty much exclusively played in Sheffield and then that one time at Bath University.
58:46 Speaker 06 Yeah.
58:46 Yasi Salek? Which, that's not in Sheffield, that's in Bath.
58:48 Speaker 06 It's not in Sheffield.
58:49 Yasi Salek? Yeah, it's its own place, which is called Bath. Jarvis said in nineteen ninety-four about this album, "It embarrasses me. It's naive, like somebody on a diving board about to jump. In fact, there's a song that we recorded but never mix, Sink or Swim, about standing on the threshold of life. They're all love songs, but from the perspective of not knowing about it. It was called It because pulp and it made pulpit, the idea of preaching to people. The album was well received, but it didn't set the world on fire. We were disappointed because Tracy Thorne and the Marine Girls were doing similar acoustic music. They got a career and we didn't." There are nice songs on here. I mean, I really like Blue Girls, which is the first
59:30 Yasi Salek? song on side two. It's got Saskia and her friend Jill Taylor doing backing vocals.
59:44 Yasi Salek? Wishful Thinking is a funny song, and there's a little bit of flute at the end.
59:57 Yasi Salek? It didn't set the world on fire, but we have the early version, very earliest version of Pulp. I think Jarvis kind of nailed it where he was like, I was writing love songs, but I had never been in, like, you know, there's, there's not a lot of authenticity to like, what's being translated by a young, young lyricist. The Shakespeare song had a bit more oomph behind it, poor Yorick.
1:00:18 Speaker 06 Yeah, maybe they're trying to be a band, they're trying to write songs. And when you try to write a song, you don't often tune in to what could be a, a better song, if you see what I mean. They're still honing it. My Lighthouse, I do like, that's the standout one for me.
1:00:33 Yasi Salek? Yeah, that's a good song.
1:00:34 Speaker 06 And I think that has something of it. But yes, it's, it's a shadow of what they obviously to become, but even within a couple of albums, you know, getting their voice, aren't they?
1:00:51 Yasi Salek? They make a bit of a misstep after this, I have to say. They get more money to put out another single. Here's what Jarvis said. This is where things got bad. Tony Parent, in his infinite wisdom, decided that Wham! were a good group and said, "You could write commercial songs like Wham!, Jarvis. Everybody's problem was the result. As soon as I'd written it, I'd realized I'd made a grave error. It's got a brass section. I refuse to sing properly. What's on the single is a desultory guide vocal. I messed up all the words. The B-side was a very genteel song with a lot of harmonies. I wrote all the songs at that time on guitar, but Simon Hinkler helped a lot. He was good at arranging and adding instruments. Everybody's problem bombed out and the future was cancelled due to lack of interest."
1:01:34 Speaker 06 Oh.
1:01:36 Yasi Salek? It's not a good song.
1:01:37 Speaker 06 No.
1:01:38 Yasi Salek? No, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. It is, it's a bit, it's a bit, it's a little...
1:01:43 Speaker 06 But this is why it's interesting, is because there's no, no glossy, uh, no glossy history, no hit, hit, hit, hit. They really have to try. And you can hear them really trying and, and if they do missteps.
1:02:03 Yasi Salek? Jarvis is eighteen, right? So it's like, or eighteen or nineteen. So if somebody comes to you and says, you should write a Wham! song, you're gonna be like, okay.
1:02:11 Speaker 06 Yeah, absolutely.
1:02:12 Yasi Salek? Putting money up. Sounds reviewed it. I don't know why, but they made sure to say that it was unmemorable, lightweight, fade drivel.
1:02:21 Yasi Salek? They also said their skulls deserved to be crushed like eggshells. That, that is kinda mean.
1:02:25 Speaker 06 See what I mean?
1:02:25 Yasi Salek? I'm back with you. Yeah.
1:02:26 Speaker 06 They are mean.
1:02:27 Yasi Salek? It's a little
1:02:28 Speaker 06 They're horrible.
1:02:29 Yasi Salek? It's a bit inciting violence against teenagers. I think that's not very nice.
1:02:33 Speaker 06 It's textbook inciting violence against teenagers.
1:02:36 Yasi Salek? Also, wasn't Sounds kind of like, more like the hard rock one?
1:02:39 Speaker 06 Yes, it was the more heavy metal one.
1:02:41 Yasi Salek? Why are they even reviewing this single?
1:02:44 Speaker 06 Yeah, just to be mean.
1:02:45 Yasi Salek? Just to be mean, just to make sure that they could say that.
1:02:48 Speaker 06 But maybe it gave Jarvis more fire in his belly. So maybe it did work and he went, aha. You detractors, I will prove you wrong.
1:02:54 Yasi Salek? Sounds did give It four stars. So.
1:02:59 Speaker 06 I could never understand that about the press. It's one writer would go nothing. Within the same magazine, you would have four or five stars by another writer on the same band. It'd be really strange. A single or an album or a feature.
1:03:11 Yasi Salek? Sure. I'm kinda surprised, again, with absolute love and respect, ultimate love and respect to Paul, that It got four stars. Dave McCullough, babe.
1:03:23 Yasi Salek? Okay, but I'm, I'm with it. He, he said it was a celebration of the sixties singer-songwriting greats. Nostalgic, airy-fairy-ness. This is positive. At least they have an album under their belts. We're a real band. We have a Sounds review. It's a positive one. We've sold three hundred copies. We put out one pretty bad single. We're ready to party.
1:03:44 Speaker 06 Yay!
1:03:51 Speaker 02 They're running a Cover Two defense. But you're running to get game day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's watch party fed with deals from your go-to restaurants. Or stock up with deals on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game day deals on Uber Eats all season long. It's not football without food. Uber Eats. Order now. Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.
1:04:21 Yasi Salek? They add two people from In a Bell Jar, the art collective, Tim Alcard, who is also Jarvis's landlord technically, and Michael Paramore. They would make homemade instruments out of like household objects and also Tim Alcard would recite poetry on stage. One poem was just the lines, "Lots of yachts, lots and lots of yachts over and over again." I don't think this is my favorite era of pulp, probably.
1:04:48 Speaker 06 Oh, it's when they sort of, yeah, I think they'd go on stage and then they'd just sort of shuffle about and there'd be all sorts. The stagecraft was very important.
1:04:55 Yasi Salek? Right.
1:04:56 Speaker 06 Remember when they just were an art band? And so it was more like, "We've got to do something so strange and so anti-performance, but also do songs." It was really hindering the songs quite a lot. But you know, there was a lot of dressing up and putting foil on overview and there was sort of bits and pieces. Yeah, all that stuff.
1:05:14 Yasi Salek? Yeah, foil. They would wrap the stage in foil. Tim Alcard is shouting. They have washboard instruments. This could not be less appealing to me if I'm being honest about myself. It's giving circus punk. I don't like it, but I'm happy for them that they were experimenting.
1:05:29 Speaker 06 The Monks played washing machines and things, so maybe it was a Northern England sort of thing.
1:05:33 Yasi Salek? Yeah, that's a good point. Amongst all the lots of yachts, lots and lots of yachts, they do get a real drummer, Magnus Doyle. This is important.
1:05:41 Speaker 06 Hmm.
1:05:42 Yasi Salek? Because he is the brother of one Candita Doyle, who is not yet in pulp, but is now in the pulp orbit, because her brother is the drummer.
1:05:50 Speaker 06 So we're getting closer, aren't we, to the lineup? We know.
1:05:54 Yasi Salek? Inching closer. And also Russell Senior joins.
1:05:56 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:05:57 Yasi Salek? In September. He had to get his business degree from Bath University first.
1:06:01 Speaker 06 Of course he did.
1:06:03 Yasi Salek? Also, they take a break from pulp stuff to focus on Russell's project, which was a Dada as piece of agit prop, which was a play, that's his words, a play called The Fruits of Passion. This thing sounds insane. Okay, in Russell's words, "It was a kind of Zurich 1919 revolutionary, very much inspired by Dada. The idea was people would either walk out and discuss or stay until the end and think it was really cool. And the people who would stay would be the people who we'd start this socialist revolution with." Jarvis said, "The stage directions were something like, 'Put vacuum cleaner on stage. Switch it on. Leave it on until audience becomes restless.' The climactic scene was me eating a plate of fake shit at a job interview." Oh, no.
1:06:48 Speaker 06 Yay.
1:06:49 Yasi Salek? Oh, no.
1:06:50 Speaker 06 I quite like the sound of that more than you, I think. You look like you don't like the sound of that at all.
1:06:54 Yasi Salek? No, I think it's, I just, you know, I think it's great. I just want them to focus on the music.
1:07:01 Speaker 06 Yeah, but there's the theater of it. They are about theater in that way. I know someone who was a flat, who shared a flat with Jarvis, and he said it was like living with a theater.
1:07:09 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
1:07:10 Speaker 06 That was his one line, and that's what it was. Jarvis, you know, had to make such a big, big thing about having a very strange sugary cereal every morning.
1:07:18 Yasi Salek? Russell said that later too. He was like, I don't think you guys understand that this person was meant to be famous because he's always acted like this. Like, he has been this person, like, prancing about the flat, like, make, like, doing the theater. And it's just like, thank God, he's finally actually famous.
1:07:35 Speaker 06 Yeah, he got it out of his system. You know, it was good, good for him. Yeah, he was always like that. It wasn't something that he, you know, because people have that thing. You know, if you're gonna do a show, do you put on your clothes before you go and get into character and do this thing? You have stage clothes, you have normal clothes. You know, I like the pop star that will walk on stage in the clothes that they were already wearing, and they'll look like a pop star still. They'll look, pop star on and off, you know, and that's Jarvis.
1:08:01 Yasi Salek? You guys had a lot of those. I feel like Brett Anderson is also like, if I saw that man walking down the street, I'd be like, up.
1:08:06 Speaker 06 Yeah, you'd know it was Brett.
1:08:08 Yasi Salek? Yeah, this is.
1:08:09 Speaker 06 Yes, absolutely.
1:08:09 Yasi Salek? He knows he's a pop star. Everyone knows he's a pop star.
1:08:12 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:08:12 Yasi Salek? Okay, I'm back on it. I'm back on this play, the Dada's play. It's important. You're right. I think it's also important because Russell Senior is such an important part of
1:08:22 Speaker 06 Of course.
1:08:22 Yasi Salek? adding to now making Pulp a good band. And this was like the earliest creative collaboration between him and Jarvis. While it wasn't music, it was something that sort of got them both excited and interested and did have something to do, like with you said, like the theater of Pulp. Too bad we can't watch it. They should put it back on. You know, when they're reuniting, I know Russell's not, not back in the picture, but perhaps they could just bring Russell back just to be the opening act where they do this play.
1:08:51 Speaker 06 Yeah, good luck with that.
1:08:52 Yasi Salek? Jeanette, if you're listening, that's my brilliant idea. We can, I feel like we can make it happen. Oh, you want to come see Paul at the Hollywood Bowl? You have to sit through three hour Dada is played by Russell senior first. For those keeping track at home, which nobody is, everyone's like, Yasi, what? Can you please get to common people? And I'm like, no, I'm not going to, we're so far away from common people. You have no idea.
1:09:16 Speaker 06 We're going to do dogs everywhere.
1:09:17 Yasi Salek? Babe, we are so far away. The band is now Jarvis, Russell, Magnus, Tim Alcard, and then we have the 16 year old guy, Pete Mansell, AKA Manners on bass. What do we do now with Pulp 3.0? We make another demo. One song on this demo is called Coy Mistress. It's two minutes long and borrows heavily from the Andrew Marvel poem to his coy mistress.
1:09:39 Speaker 06 It's a good poem, though.
1:09:40 Yasi Salek? It's a great poem. I became familiar with it as many people of my generation did via the television program, My So Called Life.
1:09:47 Speaker 06 Oh, okay. I did it at school. There you go. You know why Manners is called Manners?
1:09:51 Yasi Salek? No, was he nice?
1:09:52 Speaker 06 I once asked, I went, why is he called Manners? He was very tall, too. He probably still is. And they just replied very quickly in their dry Sheffield way, because he doesn't have any.
1:10:01 Yasi Salek? They love a nickname, these people. I have to say.
1:10:04 Speaker 06 Oh, God, oh, totally. They'll walk everything, the catchphrases all the time. They used to call things Hugo. And you go, why are you saying Hugo? It's really Hugo, it's really Hugo, they'd say. They go, it's boss. A boss is a term of, it's a northern term for someone being really good. So they call it Hugo instead. Hugo Boss.
1:10:23 Yasi Salek? So good.
1:10:24 Speaker 06 So, yeah, it's all this in-joke and this melding of language with them. So that's why Manners is called Manners.
1:10:30 Yasi Salek? That's what I mean. This is why I'm an Anglophile. I'm an Anglophile because somehow you guys are like, oh, that? That's a syrup. That's a syrup. And I'm like, it's a what now? And then I have to go 17 steps backwards to figure out that that means a wig. I love it. It's perfect. You invented the language and then you've evolved it so far.
1:10:50 Speaker 06 Evolved, inverted commas, yeah.
1:10:54 Yasi Salek? Well, Manners has got none. We're all in the band. It's Pulp 3.0. Russell is playing the fucking fiddle. Tim is doing poetry. Shit is crazy, but we're, we're giving it our biggest go. Now we're, we get to play a show in Leeds. We're gonna open for Chumbawamba. This is pre, uh, we get knocked down and get back up again. And for those of you that don't know, even though I think I've said on this podcast a thousand times, Chumbawamba was a British anarcho punk band. Okay. They were not a we get knocked down, get up again, and only that. They were very important and very cool. Dunston Bruce, who is the frontman of Chumbawamba, said, I remember Pulp. They all stood around the house and garden as, as though they weren't in an Ingmar Bergman film.
1:11:37 Yasi Salek? They were all very nice in play and just a little bit strange. I liked them. They were weird like us, but in a totally different way. More art school than political, but definitely outsiders.
1:11:47 Speaker 06 Yeah, he's right. He's right. They were weirdos, but they wanted to be as well. Do you know what I mean? They really enjoyed it.
1:11:53 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
1:11:54 Speaker 06 Yeah, no, they were coming from that, but also they played on it. Hence, Misshapes and those, those songs.
1:12:01 Yasi Salek? I think it is worth mentioning too, that like as many times as we've brought up art school, nobody was in art school. They're doing art school without being in, enrolled in the program.
1:12:11 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:12:11 Yasi Salek? Russell senior has a degree in management.
1:12:13 Speaker 06 I know. It's hilarious, isn't it?
1:12:15 Yasi Salek? And Jarvis didn't go to school. He's a failed fishmonger at this point. All right. Tim Alcard and his poetry leave Pulp. Russell actually says that he had a really central role and will become the peak imperial phase pulp that we know and love because of his quote, willfully odd performance art influence stance. So kind of to your point, like you're right. It was, all of this was so important in like cementing the pulp experience.
1:12:44 Speaker 06 It is the foundation, the weird shit.
1:12:47 Yasi Salek? And but he's replaced by Candita Doyle. So we're getting closer to imperial phase pulp. She had never been in a band before.
1:12:55 Yasi Salek? This is so fun, right? You could just be around. You could just be someone's sister or girlfriend and they'd be like, you wanna be in the band? And you'd be like, I don't know how to play anything. They'd be like, doesn't matter, come on in.
1:13:03 Speaker 06 She could play, say?
1:13:05 Yasi Salek? Well, they asked her, did you ever have plans to join a band? And she said, well, me and my friends used to pretend. It was only me who could play, but we'd all plan what we were gonna play and make up names for ourselves. We never did anything. I had been playing piano since I was about six. There was always one in the house. My brother had been in pulp, the lineup before Russell joined and then had disbanded. Then he got back together with Jarvis and Russell and Pete. And then Tim left, so Mag and Pete said I could play piano. I went along for practice with Jarvis and we seemed to do okay. And they were like, you're in the band now?
1:13:34 Speaker 06 Yeah, I love that. But it's like, you know, it's Human League is it's Phil Oakey spotting two girls on the dance floor. It's, you know, the serendipity. Britain is a small place and you could just write to someone or you could spot them on the dance floor. And there's an idea that, you know, it really is about time and happenings and just the right place, right time.
1:13:52 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
1:13:53 Speaker 06 That I really like about music. It's really random.
1:13:55 Yasi Salek? I love it. I also, I do feel that like we just talked about Tim Alcard and Russell and their art theater adding to Jarvis's art theater was really important. And I also think it's really important that they added a feminine energy to the band.
1:14:10 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
1:14:11 Yasi Salek? You know?
1:14:12 Speaker 06 I do. Can we just mention that Russell senior has never had a violin lesson in his life?
1:14:17 Yasi Salek? Oh babe, not a one time.
1:14:20 Speaker 06 And that does add to the band. You know, it's like madness. I mean, they they couldn't play and all of the sax is is one tone lower on the early songs because he couldn't, didn't know what the keys were. You know, it's this that actually makes the music sound so jarring because Russell's not in tune for a lot of this stuff and didn't know how to play. So he's adding something totally weird to it and proudly so.
1:14:41 Yasi Salek? Yeah, I was gonna say, he wasn't interested in learning either. He was not interested in learning.
1:14:46 Speaker 06 No.
1:14:47 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
1:14:47 Speaker 06 And they weren't. So you can see they're coming from that ethos and then trying to do something different in sound, which is really important.
1:14:54 Yasi Salek? Yeah, and it's punk, you know, ultimately, right?
1:14:58 Speaker 06 It is. It's, it's, yes, it's trying to, yeah, reformulate everything. Reformulate what what are? Expectations might be as an audience.
1:15:07 Yasi Salek? As an audience.
1:15:08 Speaker 06 Change our way of viewing the world.
1:15:10 Yasi Salek? They do eventually do that, although not in nineteen eighty-four. What they do do in nineteen eighty-four, they make another demo. This band has made eight hundred demos, but they have a new person in the band. We need to make a demo. They do eleven songs. Half of those do end up coming out on later Pulp releases. Half of them don't. Most notably Jarvis's most hated Pulp song, which I believe is widely considered to be the worst Pulp song of all time. It is called Silence. Have you heard the song?
1:15:42 Speaker 06 You're with a song called Silence. It's a bit too suggesting what the audience should do, which is just listen to silence instead. And I thought, I don't want to crack it. I don't want to break the spell.
1:15:52 Yasi Salek? It's, it's quite bad.
1:15:53 Speaker 06 I'll have silence.
1:15:54 Yasi Salek? It's just two organ chords and Jarvis's tortured vocals.
1:16:07 Speaker 06 Well, how do you feel it, it goes? How do you feel it sits in the pantheon of music?
1:16:12 Yasi Salek? The pantheon of music. Um, I, I wish I'd never heard it. And
1:16:18 Speaker 06 There you go.
1:16:19 Yasi Salek? You can't go back. I'm sure there's like some twisted butterfly effect that's going to happen because I heard this song. Now I know the kids are all about the butterfly effect and I don't deserve it. I don't deserve that to happen to my life, but we can't go back now. There's only pre-silence and post-silence.
1:16:37 Speaker 06 Okay, well, I'm pre-silenced still. Look at my happy, smiling face.
1:16:40 Yasi Salek? Stay there, be, be happy. Anyway, that song notwithstanding, that demo did impress Clive Solomon, who had started a label or was about to start a label with former Sounds journalist Johnny Waller called Fire Records. Speaking of butterfly effect and things that people wish never happened, I feel Jarvis probably wished that that had never happened, but. We'll get into it. He's not shy about talking about that. It's 1985. Clive Solomon likes this demo. He had already offered Pulp a publishing deal. And when they found out Pulp had been dropped-ish or whatever by Red Rhino, they were like, oh, we want to sign them. So they bring in Tony Perrin, Pulp does, to help them finalize the terms of their contract with Fire Records.
1:17:25 Yasi Salek? They sign on July 10th, 1985. This date is later immortalized in the lyrics to the Pulp song Tunnel. It says, the 10th of July, 1985. Don't ask stupid questions.
1:17:41 Yasi Salek? The relationship with Fire Records was not positive.
1:17:44 Speaker 06 And it went on for a very, very, very long time. It's probably still going on now. Bless Jeanette. She's tried to sort it out. I think it was really hard.
1:17:54 Yasi Salek? Jeanette's like, I can't, I can neither confirm or deny, I can't comment on that.
1:17:58 Speaker 06 Yes.
1:17:59 Yasi Salek? Jarvis said in 1984, unfortunately, the only people interested were Fire Records, and thus began a relationship which blighted our career, very nearly ended it, really. We'll get on to the thorny subject of Fire in a while. Clive Solomon talks incessantly until you eventually agree with whatever he wants. I never liked him, but it was the only offer on the table. The only thing I can say for them is they gave us money to record. Okay, tell us how you really feel, Jarvis. Regardless, they have a deal. At this point, we don't know it's bad yet. We're ready, we're, we have our 3.0 lineup, we're ready to party.
1:18:33 Speaker 06 Yeah, we're positive, we're optimistic.
1:18:35 Yasi Salek? We have one attitude, violin and a dream, and we're gonna fucking do it. In November, something really important happens. 1985, we're still in 1985. Jarvis falls out the window. I don't mean to say gleefully, it's not funny or good, but it is important. And you had, you had alluded to this earlier. Do you want to tell the story of Jarvis falling out the window?
1:18:57 Speaker 06 I did a speaking event with him for his book quite, quite recently, and he sort of performed it. He performed the going out on the ledge and then suddenly losing footing and hanging on. And it was incredible because his limbs are still so very, very long. I've seen him reenact it and it was horrifying then. I was very worried for him and I knew what, I knew what was gonna happen. And I was still surprised, you know what I mean?
1:19:19 Yasi Salek? The power of theater, the acting.
1:19:21 Speaker 06 Yes, exactly. Again, again, he knows how to perform. Falling out of a window to a, to an audience in Gloucestershire.
1:19:29 Yasi Salek? I think this is definitely a key piece of the Jarvis Cocker mythology.
1:19:35 Speaker 06 It's really key.
1:19:35 Yasi Salek? As evidenced by him reenacting it in the year 2024. So apparently he was trying to impress a girl called Adrian by, in theory, climbing out of a window, going alongside the building and back in through the next window. Jarvis said, I said, do you want to see something quite interesting? And she begged me not to do it, but I was in the mood. It was just senseless bravado, which is quite out of character. I realized I didn't have the strength to do it or to climb back in. So he couldn't, so he got out and he was like, oh my God, I can, I'm not, I do not have the upper bicep arm strength to shimmy over here.
1:20:12 Speaker 06 There was no ledge, there was no ledge. There wasn't anything to walk around. So he is literally hanging, I think he hangs for quite a while, wondering what to do, which is even more of a, of a visual.
1:20:24 Yasi Salek? He was not doing pushups at this time or any weightlifting. And so, yeah, he just hangs and then he's like, well, there's literally one single option and I must let go and get to the ground. And he count to three and let go. And this was quite high up, 20 feet.
1:20:42 Speaker 06 Yes, he can see the buses. So you know, double decker buses here. He can see the tops of the buses, thinking, actually, I'm quite high up, am I?
1:20:48 Yasi Salek? Oh no. And Adrian, what the fuck bitch? You didn't even try to help? What, you didn't extend an arm? Call somebody, go in the hallway. Anyways, it didn't, that didn't happen. He fell 20 feet, broke his wrist, broke his ankle, fractured his pelvis, spent the next six weeks in Sheffield's Royal Hallamshire Hospital. But this was really important because his friend brought him a little Casio keyboard with headphones and he started to write songs in the hospital on the Casio keyboard. Because he said that he was in a room with like 20 dudes and he would get his ass beat if he tried to write on an acoustic guitar. That would be quite annoying. Imagine you're just like recovering in hospital and then Jarvis Cocker is in the next bed with an acoustic guitar, trying to write a few tunes.
1:21:33 Speaker 06 Yeah, it would be horrific. It would make your stay much, much longer, wouldn't it? No one would have got better in that room.
1:21:39 Yasi Salek? And then Russell shows up with his violin. He's like, I came to play you a little concert. And everyone in the room was like, please go away.
1:21:46 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:21:47 Yasi Salek? But the Casio was important because it had a disco setting and he got really into writing to that beat setting. And I think, would you agree, Sean, that like a major cornerstone of Pulp's music when it starts hitting is that it has a disco sensibility, right?
1:22:05 Speaker 06 Yes, yes.
1:22:06 Yasi Salek? Danceableness. And I think that kind of germinates here. Would you agree?
1:22:10 Speaker 06 It's really pivotal, but also this is the point where he thinks, fuck, if I'm not a pop star, what am I gonna be? I'm in fucking hospital. I need to do something to get myself out of this and actually take this seriously. It's really, really important for him. It really all comes together here at this point.
1:22:24 Yasi Salek? Yeah, that it's that desperation we're speaking of, right? Like, I gambled. I didn't go to uni.
1:22:29 Speaker 06 And he realizes that he can write better songs and he can push himself at this point. And he can write about real life. And he talks about that in that book, that life is happening now. It's really amazing when he talks about life is happening now, write about what's happening here for you now. It's not tomorrow you're gonna write the good song. It's not on a week you're gonna write a good song. You take what is going on immediately, you do it. And that's this, it's lightbulb moment, as they call it, in a kind of drossy sort of way. It's really, really pivotal, this whole bit. This, this shapes and makes Jarvis. And how he would have failed without having, well, he may have failed without having fallen out of that window. This is really, really key.
1:23:05 Yasi Salek? It's also, he, he says it in a quote, but it's something I've thought about too. And I've been like, I'm gonna write my book or movie or whatever. And then you're like, have you ever had this? When you're like, I wish I could just go to prison.
1:23:18 Speaker 06 Someone once told me that. They said, the only thing you haven't done in your life yet is go to prison. So you better sort that out. You've done every other job.
1:23:25 Yasi Salek? You're not dead yet, Sean, you know? Don't count yourself, don't count yourself out, babe.
1:23:30 Speaker 06 What do you know? What do you know?
1:23:33 Yasi Salek? No, but I'm just like, like I genuinely, well, okay.
1:23:36 Speaker 06 It's quite horrible being in prison, though.
1:23:37 Yasi Salek? Yeah, I think it's bad from what I've heard.
1:23:39 Speaker 06 It's not good.
1:23:40 Yasi Salek? I'm not, okay, well, let's just, let me maybe institutionalized. Some sort of institutionalization.
1:23:45 Speaker 06 The mental health problems will.
1:23:47 Yasi Salek? Full grippy socks. Yeah, I'm like, but you know what I'm where you're like, oh, I can't fuck around. Like if I, like what Jarvis is, is stuck in this hospital bed. He's like an artist retreat, basically like he's not able to go party and sleep till 3pm every day and eat his sugary cereal and. Like, there was a lot of fucking around that's able to be done when you're not confined to a hospital room. Or in my case, hopefully sent away in grippy socks to to a seaside institution.
1:24:15 Speaker 06 Remember this happened to Robert Wyatt, too. And that Robert Wyatt and Jarvis have some parallels as well, and it changed, obviously changed Robert Wyatt's life. And then he became, you know, not a band member, the the whole band itself. So it is, you know, it's something that was really pivotal for him, too, and I'm a big Robert Wyatt fan, which is why I mentioned it.
1:24:34 Yasi Salek? Yeah, I think that is, I think you make a great parallel. And this is why I keep saying that someone needs to send me to the seaside institution for women with hysteria.
1:24:42 Speaker 06 There you go. I'll do it. I mean, I can sign the form.
1:24:45 Yasi Salek? Please, then I can make my great work of art. You and Ted Kessler and Simon Reynolds, all of you, Miranda Sawyer. We're like, this woman has spent four years reading or writing on Rock's back pages to regurgitate.
1:24:58 Speaker 06 Years doing a pulp.
1:24:59 Yasi Salek? A pulp episode. She needs help. She needs God. She needs Jesus. Okay, he said about the hospital, up until that point, I thought that I wanted to lead an aesthetic life. I thought that the only things like art and stuff were important. I'd kind of been ignoring the everyday realities of life, thinking that they didn't matter. Because I wouldn't be living that life for very long. I was going to be a famous artist. So I wouldn't have to deal with the drab mundane things. But while I was laid up, I realized that you could spend 15 years of your life thinking that and never actually do anything. It's a bit like being in a rocket, getting ready to take off, but never actually taking off. The countdown might never stop. So I changed all my feelings about things like that. Plus, being in a hospital ward with lots of ordinary people, rather than mixing
1:25:43 Yasi Salek? with the kind of bohemian ragbag that used to accumulate around our flat, just made me realize that there was a lot more to the world than I'd been seeing. It changed my outlook. And if I hadn't broke my leg, I don't know that what would have happened to me. I used the wheelchair on stage while I was recovering, but I'd like to make it clear that I never used the wheelchair as a stage prop. As soon as I was well enough to get out of it, I didn't use it. I've never believed in exploiting disability.
1:26:05 Speaker 06 All true.
1:26:06 Yasi Salek? All true. It's all important. And this is the quote that you mentioned. "It made me decide to live in the present and not in the future, and gave me time to think about things. It made me realize I didn't have a guardian angel looking after me." Love it. He also got really into reading Tom Wolfe in hospital. He said he made stuff I might have dismissed as crap seem exciting. Stories about stock car racing or surfers. It was a revelation. Reality wasn't this gray lump of concrete after all. It's been my personal thing ever since to try to do that, to try to be specific. And this is such another important cornerstone of pulp, right? Jarvis's like, ability to observe and document the mundane.
1:26:43 Speaker 06 But I think, let's not call it the mundane.
1:26:46 Yasi Salek? I don't mean mundane in a pejorative way, like the quixotic, right? Which is basically the same as mundane. Just the day to day, like.
1:26:52 Speaker 06 The day to day, yeah.
1:26:53 Yasi Salek? The day to day has beauty in it. It has so much beauty. I mean, mundane does sound like a bad word, but I think it's just, you know, it's just day to day life. It's the everyday living of people has so much beauty and interest in it. And I think that hadn't occurred to him before because he was so in the clouds of dreaming of being something else and somebody else.
1:27:13 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
1:27:14 Yasi Salek? And it was right, it was all right there in front of you, babe.
1:27:17 Speaker 06 And, and they get very Sheffield. He starts talking about specific areas, about specific roads, the idea that, you know, he suddenly realizes he's not going to be Roxy Music, as we're saying, you know, it's not about the aspirational, beautiful silk scarf and the model and the, the, the sunset. It's about walking down the road and imagining women's bras. And naming the road and naming the bras. Bless him, what perv, but there you go.
1:27:42 Yasi Salek? It is great, though. It's like, it made me think so much about how like, this is something that Morrissey did really geniously from the beginning, right? Except ob- obviously, his version was like, quite a bit more depressing. But it's kind of the same kitchen sink drama.
1:27:57 Speaker 06 Sense of place.
1:27:58 Yasi Salek? Sense of place, the British life observation. And once Jarvis sort of locked in on it, like, things really open up, I think, for Pulp songwriting.
1:28:09 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:28:10 Yasi Salek? Well, he's doing all that in the hospital, but three days after he falls out that window, Pulp's next EP comes out, which is A Little Girl With Blue Eyes. These lyrics are truly something.
1:28:22 Speaker 06 That you can recite them.
1:28:24 Yasi Salek? I am. Here's the chorus. "Little girl with blue eyes, there's a hole in your heart and one between your legs. You've never had to wonder which one he's going to fill. In spite of what he said, you'll never get away. Hey, eh, eh, you'll give it up one day, tom one may."
1:28:46 Yasi Salek? It's a little perverse.
1:28:48 Speaker 06 It is. It's very Jarvis, though, isn't it? And it is, and you think, oh, ouch, because I was thinking, oh, ouch there, but actually, it's just really beautiful. You know, it's explicit, but it's really beautifully put.
1:28:58 Yasi Salek? Totally.
1:28:59 Speaker 06 It's quite heartbreaking.
1:29:00 Yasi Salek? It's sympathetic. Yeah, it's a, it's a...
1:29:02 Speaker 06 Yes, exactly. It's rather than being, um, objective.
1:29:06 Yasi Salek? Yeah, exactly. DJ Richard Tandy on Radio Hallam was not, he faded it out at 1am and said, "Well, I never expected to hear anything like that from Pulp." Jarvis said, "This was about a girl who gets pregnant. It was after seeing a picture of my mom getting out of her wedding car and realizing she was only 20 when she got pregnant and had to get married. She was at art college, but had to give it up to have me." The song got banned because of the lyrics, but not like Frankie Goes to Hollywood. They just didn't play it.
1:29:35 Yasi Salek? This is sort of, I think, when the Scott Walker comparisons start, and it does have like a Scott Walker-iness to it. Jarvis's voice has that crooneriness to it always from the beginning, and here I feel like it's really on display.
1:29:47 Speaker 06 Yeah, they've got a different range though, haven't they?
1:29:50 Yasi Salek? Yes, totally, totally.
1:29:51 Speaker 06 Yeah, Jarvis's bargain bin, and I say this with respect to Scott Walker, in that he doesn't want that creamy tone.
1:29:56 Yasi Salek? No, right.
1:29:58 Speaker 06 You know, something that's a bit rougher. And I say that, you know, I love both of them, obviously.
1:30:02 Yasi Salek? Yeah, yeah.
1:30:03 Speaker 06 But I see them as quite different.
1:30:04 Yasi Salek? He's doing a different thing, for sure. Twisted Scott Walker.
1:30:08 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, let's be kind, it's twisted.
1:30:12 Yasi Salek? He does say in the same quote that he resented anybody who was successful. I resented the Smiths because they were from the North and doing a fairly similar thing. So from early on, it's interesting, again, it always blows my mind, and one day when I get really deeply mentally ill and I like wallpaper my house with one of those like string, red string boards, I am gonna make a timeline that shows what bands were active at the same times. But like, the fact, thinking about the Smiths and Pulp were active at the same time doing shit is super weird.
1:30:45 Speaker 06 Yeah, because you do forget, you just think they must be different, and then you realize it's the same.
1:30:50 Yasi Salek? Okay, so they put out that EP, there's a controversy, but it got, it gets some good reviews. Again, no, they're not setting the world afire yet. Right before Christmas, Jarvis is discharged from hospital. He acquires, of course, a regular wheelchair, no babe, an antique wheelchair. He has to have a cool old wheelchair.
1:31:12 Speaker 06 She does, yeah.
1:31:14 Yasi Salek? Where do you even get it? I don't want to, I don't, I'm an OX fam.
1:31:17 Speaker 06 Who knows, yes.
1:31:18 Yasi Salek? Who knows. He said it was quite easy doing gigs in it, actually, because I didn't have to do any of that jumping around business. I love it, he was like, this is great. But people did think it was a gimmick, and I saw one sounds writer compared it to Morris's hearing aid, which obviously famously was completely faked, that he did not eat. But no, poor, poor Jarvis. Sounds really liked them from the beginning. They seemed to get the most write-ups in Sounds. They got one in March by John Wilde. Pulp are not perfect, but they make most indie pop seem like it has its head packed with cotton.
1:31:51 Speaker 06 They're burgeoning now, aren't they? They're getting there almost.
1:31:54 Yasi Salek? It's taken, it's taken quite a while. It's, we're about nine years in. Okay, Dogs Are Everywhere. It's an EP, June 30th, the first Fire Records release. Melody Maker gives it single of the week. That's a big deal, right?
1:32:07 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, it's a really big deal. Yeah. Power the press. Yeah.
1:32:10 Yasi Salek? Power the press. Uh, they said, once you hear Pulp, you'll never need the Smiths again. And respectfully, that is not true. This particular juncture of 1986, respectfully to whoever wrote that melody maker piece, you're a liar. But I like that you said it because I'm sure it made Paul happy, especially given Jarvis's prior quote about being very jealous of the Smiths and wanting to be successful the way they are. What do you make of Dogs Are Everywhere? Do you like this song?
1:32:36 Speaker 06 I love Dogs Are Everywhere. I sometimes sing it to myself. It's one of those songs that comes up and Dogs Are Everywhere, then I go. What a line.
1:32:52 Speaker 06 It's really, really good. And I say it's proto-Pulp, isn't it? But when they were very happy to be peculiar. Yeah, I love it. I love it.
1:33:00 Yasi Salek? Do you think this is the first properly good Pulp song?
1:33:03 Speaker 06 Yes, I do. Yeah, very much. I really do. It's, it's the one where, say, it's got all the elements properly starting to get into place for what they're going to be. Yeah, I really like it. Enormous fondness for it.
1:33:14 Yasi Salek? It could be a little bit danceier for my taste, but I do think it's a good song.
1:33:17 Speaker 06 Well, again, I mean, if we talk about the production of some of that stuff and we do get on to to a few where you could, that, you know, something that could be absolutely amazing, but it was just fairly ruined by being two dimensional. I was quite astonished by that. This is that, but there you go.
1:33:31 Yasi Salek? This is a little bit no one to blame with themselves, though, because according to the credits, it was produced by them, so. So who could have done this situation?
1:33:39 Speaker 06 They needed fresh ears, maybe, for that, is what we're saying.
1:33:42 Yasi Salek? Jarvis said about the song, "I wrote Dogs Are Everywhere in hospital, inspired one night after playing in Chesterfield. Magnus and Pete were always pissing about and getting stoned. Myself and Russell were puritanical and thought that was terrible. They'd have these mates hanging around, which got on my nerves. That night, they nicked bottles of beers from behind the bar and we got into loads of trouble. That's what Dogs Are Everywhere is about. People who display a dogish attitude."
1:34:03 Speaker 06 Now that disappoints me because I always did think it was just about
1:34:06 Yasi Salek? Actual dogs.
1:34:06 Speaker 06 I bet it is about dogs though, because dogs, I mean, it is about that primal human animal thing.
1:34:12 Yasi Salek? I think so.
1:34:12 Speaker 06 And dogs just, you know, happy to be the lowest of the low when they just fancy it. And then just be nice again.
1:34:17 Yasi Salek? I think so. One of my most enduring takes about music is it doesn't matter what the artist says it's about. It's whatever you think it's about. That's how art works.
1:34:26 Speaker 06 It's far more important what we think about it. Yeah.
1:34:29 Yasi Salek? Exactly. There's also a B-side or well, it's an EP, so there's several songs on the B-side, but one is called Ninety Seven Lovers. Which is an interesting one to point out because the chord structure of Ninety Seven Lovers actually gets recycled for one of their bigger hits later, which is OU.
1:34:47 Speaker 07 Ninety seven lovers twisted out of shape.
1:35:05 Yasi Salek? It's another classic Jarvis Perv song about a a woman with a picture of Roger Moore in a short towel and dressing gown pinned to her bedroom wall. And how they make love beneath Roger every Friday night.
1:35:19 Speaker 06 Yeah, and how Jarvis thinks about it.
1:35:22 Speaker 06 Every Saturday night.
1:35:25 Speaker 06 In a cupboard. Yeah.
1:35:27 Yasi Salek? In a cupboard. It's great. He's sitting there waiting. It is an extremely specific thing to put into song, like, oh, they have a picture of Roger Moore above their bed and they like, how did you even think about that? And I'll tell you how I even thought about it. His aunt had a picture of Roger Moore above the bed.
1:35:44 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:35:47 Yasi Salek? Threw her right under the bus, observing, never be friends with a writer, never have a writer in your family, right, Sean?
1:35:54 Speaker 06 Yeah, true.
1:35:55 Yasi Salek? Okay. Just now we're playing in London. I want you to understand, May nineteen eighty-six.
1:36:00 Speaker 06 Okay.
1:36:01 Yasi Salek? They play this little mini tour and that's why they play London, but at the Sheffield show of this mini tour, there's a twenty-year-old bassist in the audience. His name is Steve Mackey.
1:36:10 Speaker 06 Lovely Steve.
1:36:11 Yasi Salek? Lovely Steve.
1:36:14 Yasi Salek? Um, he said, I'd seen them about three times. I liked them. They seemed quite self-contained, though quite aloof. And I was in a really noisy band, a garage band, and Pulp were like an art band. It didn't seem very welcoming. But he was intrigued. This I really enjoyed. Steven Jarvis met for the first time at an Australian themed party at Russell's flat. What do you think that means? Like, there were like koalas and kangaroos, shrimp on the Barbie?
1:36:41 Speaker 06 Totally, but it would have been sort of far more low rent than that. What what's an Australian drink?
1:36:46 Yasi Salek? Foster's?
1:36:47 Speaker 06 Well, they would have fosters. Yeah, they would have had fosters and someone would have been wearing shorts. And some, yeah, there might have been a prawn somewhere or whatever we think. But it would have been something, yes, deeply offensive and just a very low time. But they had a thing about themes. Jarvis used to have parties and always had to have a theme. You always had to dress up and then he'd do a quiz in the middle of it. So he'd be dancing or having a nice time. He got to fucking sit down and have a fucking quiz. And he's got to do it for hours and do all the questions and stuff because they were really obsessed with themes. It's very, very funny. He once dressed up as the Isle of Wight.
1:37:20 Yasi Salek? How do you dress up as the Isle of Wight?
1:37:22 Speaker 06 Well, we had to guess what he was. He was walking around. He was the Isle of Wight because he was all in white and painted his face white.
1:37:30 Yasi Salek? Got it. Yeah, got it. Yeah, I love this. I we should have, we need to bring back more themed parties.
1:37:35 Speaker 06 What theme would you want to?
1:37:37 Yasi Salek? Ooh, like
1:37:37 Speaker 06 Party go to?
1:37:38 Yasi Salek? Greece, like Greek gods and goddesses would be fun.
1:37:42 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:37:43 Yasi Salek? I like wear wig, so anything syrup, we can have a syrup.
1:37:46 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:37:47 Yasi Salek? Part. Okay, so they had the Australian themed party, koalas everywhere and they meet and then pulp plays, like I said, London, the Rock Garden. They get a melody maker right up by Martin Aston.
1:38:00 Speaker 06 You know why it's called Martin Aston?
1:38:02 Yasi Salek? Is that a fake name? Is that a stage name?
1:38:05 Speaker 06 Let's flip it round.
1:38:06 Yasi Salek? Oh, Aston Martin, like the car?
1:38:07 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:38:08 Yasi Salek? Very clever. That's very clever. People really loved a fake Johnny cigarettes ass fake name when you were writing for the for the things. Why is it you were afraid because you were saying mean things that they would find you and hurt you?
1:38:20 Speaker 06 Maybe it's the rock star thing that maybe wanted to be a bit like that.
1:38:23 Yasi Salek? He kept it because I feel like he's written a couple of books and they're also written under Martin Aston.
1:38:29 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, he did. I don't know what his real name is.
1:38:32 Yasi Salek? He said, "An oddball bunch, Pulp, a National Health Spectacles climbing uh frame inside a secondhand suit with a blissful, deep-throated voice like a dark angel, or at least Scott Walker, an unsmiling undertaker on second guitar and violin, a drummer who looks like Andy Pandy." Um, Sean, who's Andy Pandy?
1:38:51 Speaker 06 Andy Pandy was a children's uh character who wore kind of blue stripey stuff. So I don't know what he was wearing at the point. Is that? Manners? No, that's manners isn't bass, isn't he? Um, and he had a hat on. Andy Pandy was just uh not masculine.
1:39:07 Yasi Salek? Okay, got it. Got it. So that's what he was getting at.
1:39:10 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:39:10 Yasi Salek? And a girl behind the keyboards whose face stays perpetually behind one of several cakey pop art posters dangling from the ceiling. Khaki pop art posters.
1:39:20 Speaker 06 It's not very nice, is he?
1:39:21 Yasi Salek? To be honest, it's so British what he's saying and can't actually tell if it's nice or not.
1:39:28 Yasi Salek? I can't make, it just sounds kind of weirdly descriptive, but like I can't tell tonally he's saying it's good or bad.
1:39:34 Speaker 06 Well, to me, it's a little bit catty, but then he goes on to write a book about Pulp, doesn't he?
1:39:38 Yasi Salek? Yeah, he likes it. He calls them a brilliant new pop group, another desperate hope for pop in nineteen eighty-six to stay free of its conventions. And then Sounds liked it too. He said of all Lou's lost sheep, I believe he's talking about Lou Reed, these are the oddballist of the lot. That's a nice thing, I think.
1:39:55 Speaker 06 Yeah, he would have really appreciated them, John Wild. He liked that sort of thing, though.
1:39:59 Yasi Salek? Yeah. Russell said in nineteen eighty-six about the Velvet Underground influence stuff. He said, "We weren't really pissed off about it because we knew the comparison was so inaccurate. We were more influenced by groups like The Fall, really, and if people had picked that up, it might have worried us."
1:40:14 Speaker 06 Yeah, I didn't see a Velvet's thing.
1:40:17 Yasi Salek? It might just be Jarvis's voice, you know, because he kind of has that same deep, non-emotional delivery as a Lou Reed a little bit. So I could see that being kind of a stretch, but past that, I don't really see it.
1:40:29 Speaker 06 Yeah, I don't get that.
1:40:31 Yasi Salek? I see The Fall in when you think about the untuned guitar, uh violin and all the rest of the.
1:40:37 Speaker 06 I'm riffing on a theme and and uh.
1:40:40 Yasi Salek? The guy who was shouting poetry was not in the band anymore.
1:40:43 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can see that a little bit. Still very different to me.
1:40:45 Yasi Salek? Still very different. Russell's like, "We sound like The Fall," and everyone's like, "You don't sound like The Fall at all, actually. You don't sound like anybody that we've ever heard of." Okay, so then they make the Freaks album. It took one week. And it's done and then they just have to wait forever. The album is showing no signs of being released. It's been six months. They make a video for the song They Suffocate at Night, which was what Fire had chosen as the first single. It comes out, They Suffocate at Night.
1:41:13 Speaker 06 What do you think of the title? It's got hit written all over it.
1:41:15 Yasi Salek? Yeah, I think they're really.
1:41:17 Speaker 06 Number one, Suffocate at Night.
1:41:21 Yasi Salek? Here to perform on Top of the Pops is They Suffocate at Night. The video also is a bit weird. Have you watched? I think it's on YouTube.
1:41:30 Speaker 06 I should do. I haven't, sorry.
1:41:32 Yasi Salek? They have a breakdown on the set of that and Pete and Magnus, I believe, quit the band because they're parting so much. And Russell and Jarvis are not into it. Maybe Pete stays, but Magnus leaves and they replace him with Nick Binks. This is where Nick Binks finally comes into the picture. October of eighty six, he's a Leo. He's the nephew of Gordon Binks, the goalkeeper of the nineteen sixty six FIFA World Cup winning England squad. Did you know that?
1:42:01 Speaker 06 Funnily enough, he may have mentioned that.
1:42:04 Yasi Salek? He he leads with that. He's like, hello.
1:42:07 Speaker 06 Quite a big deal. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, in this country, you know, clinging on still to the sixty six World Cup.
1:42:14 Yasi Salek? They hired Nick Binks without ever hearing him play the drums. They bring him to a rehearsal. Jarvis said during the course of walking around, we talked on and got on so well, so we thought we'd just have him. We'd never heard him play the drums and we certainly wouldn't have if we had.
1:42:29 Speaker 06 I think that's wonderful.
1:42:30 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
1:42:32 Speaker 06 That's very British thing to do, isn't it? Yeah.
1:42:35 Yasi Salek? Russell said that what Pete Mansell said about Nick was you need the yob element. Can you explain for the people at home what a yob is, Sean?
1:42:45 Speaker 06 It's interesting in that, yeah, Nick isn't the yobbiest of of people in bands and yet he probably does bring a roughness, I guess. But manners wasn't posh either and he wasn't art school. So I'm not sure what they're kind of saying. They just might be doing one of their, you know, funny. Quasi digs, that's sort of Sheffield humour.
1:43:04 Yasi Salek? Yeah, Russell's to the lineups before had been too jokey. The lineup that had produced it had been too pancy. And Jarvis and myself's tentative collaborations had been too arty.
1:43:14 Speaker 06 But he might have said, yes, it just had the right chemistry to it in that way.
1:43:18 Yasi Salek? Could have been.
1:43:18 Speaker 06 There's something about him, yeah, coming in and doing that. Cause they can go that if they, yeah, they could have gone too arty and they would have failed doing that or too comedy. You know, become a novelty band, one hit and that's it. So, yeah.
1:43:32 Yasi Salek? Maybe he just brought a nice salt of the earthness, Nick.
1:43:36 Speaker 06 He's quite down to earth. So I'd say that more than job. You know, he eventually bought a pub. He's quite pubby, pinty, have a bit of a sandwich, you know, that kind of thing. He's not airs and graces. He's not a man with refined tastes, probably. Sorry, Nick. Lovely. I love you, but yeah. His son is a pilot now, refused to be in their music and rock and roll.
1:43:58 Yasi Salek? I love what you, I'm sorry, I'm just like to describe someone as a have a bit of a sandwich. Oh, that person, they're just like a bit of a have a bit of a sandwich.
1:44:09 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:44:10 Yasi Salek? You know what he's like. He's nice. He's like a have a bit of a sandwich.
1:44:16 Yasi Salek? That's all I want in life. When I'm looking for a husband, I just want, I actually want. Yeah.
1:44:23 Speaker 06 Interesting.
1:44:25 Yasi Salek? Do you know any have a bit of a sandwiches?
1:44:27 Speaker 06 I do, but I I wouldn't go for the have a bit of a sandwiches. It's interesting this.
1:44:32 Yasi Salek? Have a bit of a crepe, have a bit of a kebab curry.
1:44:35 Speaker 06 I'd say a steak to tar and a bottle of whiskey and.
1:44:38 Yasi Salek? Wow, okay, you have a, you have a finer aspirations. I'm okay with a have a bit of a sandwich and a pinty, a pinty.
1:44:46 Speaker 06 A pinty, yeah. We call them here.
1:44:49 Yasi Salek? I'm really partial to fish and chips. We don't have to get into it. Okay. Here's where it gets interesting just for me. It's November. They're playing shows. It sounds like it's mostly the lineup now, but they add one person. On these shows, on keyboards, a mysterious individual called Captain Sleep. I'm obsessed with Captain Sleep. I could, even with my skill set, it could not unearth more information about Captain Sleep than this. Their friend Jonathan Kirk said he was really small, kind of semi-bald. He arrived on the scene quite unsettled, very intense. He had that kind of air of fear and loathing about him. You weren't quite sure if anybody was home. And if they were home, you weren't quite sure what was gonna happen next. Almost
1:45:34 Yasi Salek? like a human Spit the Dog type character.
1:45:36 Speaker 06 Spit the Dog is a pretend sort of puppet that you put your hand up to do that, who was with a man called Bob Carol G's who was on Saturday morning TV program called Tis Wars. Spit the Dog was an anarchic figure.
1:45:51 Yasi Salek? Here's what Nick said. Nick said, "I have no idea where he came from at all. He was very, very sleepy. We went down in the van to play this Hundred Club thing and he was asleep in the van all the way down, played the gig, sat on the edge of the stage, then all the way back, he was just spark out in the van. He was Captain Sleep. I mean, you get to know somebody by talking to them and he was never awake. I'm sorry, have you guys heard of heroin? Did they not? Anyways, Darvin said, "We had a keyboard player called Captain Sleep who couldn't keep awake for more than two hours. So we got rid of him because he was depressing." You guys, if anybody out there listening, sometimes this happens. Sometimes we have a listener who's like, "Oh, I know Captain Sleep. I knew him. He was my flatmate."
1:46:32 Yasi Salek? Please get in touch. I need so much more information about Captain Sleep. Where is he now? Did he get married? Is he a bit of a sandwichey? Is he a bit sandwichey? Did he, did he survive? Is he alive? I need a lot more information about Captain Sleep." That's my favorite has been in pulp member is Captain Sleep.
1:46:50 Speaker 06 Captain Sleep. Yeah, it's fortunate he was called Captain Sleep, really, considering.
1:46:55 Yasi Salek? He doesn't have, no one, no one ever mentions his real name. It's not there.
1:46:58 Speaker 06 Obviously it's not, yeah.
1:47:00 Yasi Salek? Um, all right. Well, they get a guy, another person in the band called Stephen Havenhand, who plays bass, and he was in a Sheffield group called Lay of the Land. I know you're like, why are you telling us all of this information? And I'm gonna tell you, it is important.
1:47:15 Speaker 06 People are writing it down. They're writing all the bands down and they're doing one of those family trees.
1:47:20 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
1:47:21 Speaker 06 Like Pete Frame used to do. They are. I know they're doing it.
1:47:24 Yasi Salek? There's a big circle around Captain Sleep with question marks.
1:47:27 Speaker 06 Yeah, he's pivotal.
1:47:29 Yasi Salek? Lay of the Land was important because it was a band that featured Rob Mitchell and Steve Beckett, the two men who went on to form Warp Records and would then sign Pulp to their subsidiary gift. So that's why Lay of the Land is important. Okay, now it's January of 1987. Pulp puts up an ad for a new female keyboard player and Candita sees this and is like, excuse me, what bitch? Who's this? My Candita said, I thought bastards, that's a bit nasty, but they must have rung me up a bit later and asked me back as I went along for practice. Peter was gonna rejoin as well, but Magnus wouldn't go along, although we tried convincing him. Actually, he did turn up once, but Nick was there drumming, which made a weird atmosphere, but I'm glad I went back.
1:48:14 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:48:15 Yasi Salek? Lineup is crazy.
1:48:16 Speaker 06 A bit of an HR problem there, but they've sorted it out.
1:48:19 Yasi Salek? They're like, oh, we have a new drummer. We asked our old drummer back. We put an ad for a new keyboard player, but we didn't tell our keyboard player that she was out. And then she just came back and everyone's just happy to go, except for Captain Sleep, who was the one person that was.
1:48:31 Speaker 06 Well, he was asleep, so I didn't.
1:48:32 Yasi Salek? He was just like, he doesn't even, he didn't know they changed it. Okay, They Suffocate at Night finally comes out in January of 87. So it's nearly a full year, which is kind of a bummer that they have recorded stuff and it doesn't come out. Nobody cared about They Suffocate at Night. Respectfully, I'm so sorry. Didn't get much press, didn't sell well. They put out one more single, Master of the Universe, which somehow does even worse than They Suffocate at Night, like less people care about that. These are okay songs. I mean, I can, you can kind of see why people didn't care about them.
1:49:04 Speaker 06 Yeah, they're still ticking along, aren't they? The Jarvis master plan of what, of writing about what he knows still hasn't quite sort of clicked in, has it? He's had the revelation, but we're not seeing that yet.
1:49:16 Yasi Salek? I'm gonna tell you what has to happen, and we're not there yet, but I'm gonna tell you what it is. I'll give a spoiler alert. It's ecstasy. Someone went to Ibiza, someone came back and changed the world forever. I'll just say that was the key ingredient, but we're not there yet because we're still in somehow incredibly in nineteen eighty seven.
1:49:41 Yasi Salek? Well, into this atmosphere, we put out Freaks, ten stories about power, claustrophobia, suffocation and holding hands, which has been done for a year and a half. I've read a quote from Jarvis about the inspiration for this album, which I thought was really interesting. He said, "I definitely felt I had taken the wrong turn at that point, and that album Freaks was all about that feeling. I was living in this weird place above an old silk factory and all the strange characters of Sheffield used to come around, which was a laugh at first, but it just seemed that we were all becoming freaks, that we weren't legitimate members of society, and I hated that. I didn't want it to happen." I thought that was really interesting, given like proto-mishap, right?
1:50:21 Yasi Salek? Where it's like, it's, I don't want to be outsider art, living on the fringes of society with, um, checks notes, a mate who, um, was in the nightclub and got glassed by this bloke who'd just been let out of prison that day and was dressed clockwork orange style in a white boiler suit. He was like, "I don't, I don't like this." But then later, it's like a point of pride to be a freak, if you will, or a mishap.
1:50:50 Speaker 06 Yeah, and that's something, it's a theme that he always returns to, isn't it? And it's also, you know, that book that he wrote, The Good Pop, Bad Pop? And it's about objects. The objects are also the detritus. He's interested in the detritus and what, what is, you know, just left on the pavement, as we would say, and left as rubbish. So that's, you know, very much his theme. He starts warming to from Freaks before that.
1:51:14 Yasi Salek? Yeah, totally. What do you make of Freaks?
1:51:17 Speaker 06 I like Freaks. I like it a lot. I wouldn't say it's derided or overlooked, because I think a lot of people really like it. But, um, to me, it's got everything in place still. I mean, I know it's not sort of hit, hit, hit, but there's something about it I really, really like.
1:51:31 Yasi Salek? Do you put it on often?
1:51:32 Speaker 06 Ish.
1:51:33 Yasi Salek? Ish.
1:51:33 Speaker 06 I don't not put it on. I have a real warmth to it. Yeah. Do you see what I mean? You know? It's not just two in the middle of everything.
1:51:41 Yasi Salek? No, no, it's okay. I respect your opinion.
1:51:43 Speaker 06 But they're starting to get good here. They're starting to become one of the things that, when I first saw them live, I just thought. This is my band. It was really, really strong. It was just like, what? You know, when you have those, you have them every few years, you just go, oh, I get it. Oh, everything. Oh, you're talking about me. You're talking about me. I get this. I get this. I get this. I love you. I'm going to the front. I'm going to jump up and down. This is just before that, that point, you see. So I find this is really quite exciting, this bit. Can feel it bubbling.
1:52:10 Yasi Salek? I can see the DNA is here. So they had one week to make this, like we said, cost between six hundred and eight hundred pounds. They were very unhappy with the mix and they convinced Finally Fired to give them more money to go back to remix them. But when they got back there, the owners had wiped the master tapes. So they were not able to remix it. According to Jarvis, the producer disowned it. He didn't want his name on it. So it's credited as produced by Pulp. He says, this was the low point emotionally of my life. It's such a depressing album. There's some decent songs, but they're badly done. I Want You is good, but there's a better version as a demo. The violin is miles out of tune.
1:52:46 Speaker 06 Maybe I like things.
1:52:48 Yasi Salek? You like, yeah. There's a lot of Russell singing on here. Like the first song, Fairground has lead vocals by Russell. I'm just gonna say respectfully, this song is bad. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. This is a bad song.
1:53:07 Yasi Salek? I Want You is an okay song. Being Followed Home is a very stressful song for me to listen to. It makes me feel frightened. Here's what's happening. The latent circus theater music is still holding tight to me on this album for me. But I see what you mean. There's some good building bricks, but we're just not quite.
1:53:31 Speaker 06 I like the weirdness.
1:53:32 Yasi Salek? Definitely the weirdness.
1:53:34 Speaker 06 They're not playing the game at this point. Maybe they hate it, but I, yeah, there's something about it that informs so much of that weirdness that we get even with mainstream pulp that I still think is really important.
1:53:44 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
1:53:45 Speaker 06 And Russell being on the mic is always funny to me.
1:53:47 Yasi Salek? He sings three songs on here, Master of the Universe and Anorexic Beauty, terrible name for a song. But, you know, apparently it was dedicated to a Scottish singer and actress, Lena Zavroni.
1:54:00 Speaker 06 Oh, Lena Zavroni, yes. Yes, I have her autograph.
1:54:03 Yasi Salek? Do you?
1:54:04 Speaker 06 Yes, she was an interesting person and very tragic, actually, but very, very mainstream, very light entertainment.
1:54:11 Yasi Salek? Sounds gave it, I think, a decent review. If it's a tonic, you're after a lift, a bit of light relief, then this record isn't recommended listening. If you're in the mood for a touch of dour introspection, however, then the opposite is true. Freaks is so glum it hurts. There is no room here for joviality. Pulp are too wrapped up in immortalizing their own manic depressive daydreams to consider the business of actually living. But somehow, despite this, to rudely turn them away is impossible.
1:54:38 Speaker 06 Scott Walker thing, isn't it? It's they want to be in that and they want to be really European at this point. And I quite like that, not pandering to an idea of, you know, the charts at this point, it's all bouncy, bouncy. So the acid house comes in and you've got a super, super pop at this point. Pop starts going really, really shiny and pre Stock Aitken and Waterman and those sorts of things. So to come out with this sort of thing, I think is very them.
1:55:04 Yasi Salek? Yeah. And also, like, I think when you put it into the perspective of, like, A, it's a year and a half old. So like, they might not, that's not really the pulp of nineteen eighty-seven. And also, these songs were by and large written in hospital in Jarvis's sort of like
1:55:21 Speaker 06 I know, it makes me like.
1:55:22 Yasi Salek? Darkest night of the soul, you know, like, so they are gonna have this. Like, while he is getting pieces in place of the observationalness and, and sort of shifting into what he's interested in, he's also still in fucking hospital for six weeks feeling Les Mis. And I think that's gonna come out in the songs. And then Russell's out here like, hold on, let me add a little out of tune violin on here and this is what you're gonna get.
1:55:49 Speaker 06 Yeah. In the country at the time, playwriting and theatre and writing for TV is really, really strong. So you've got Alan Bennett, you've got Dennis Potter, you've got Victoria Wood, and you've got Alan Bleesdale still, and you've got Liverpool directors and writers. And the idea of working class art's really strong. We don't have that now. It went quite quickly. And I really see the tendrils of this. And you're saying hospital, and obviously Singing Detective by Dennis Potter is nineteen eighty-six. That's set in a hospital. It's really bleak. There's an idea that they start being the idea about British writing, art and theatre, and something coming from those working class roots that is all coming together
1:56:30 Speaker 06 within this point within, and they're realising that their voice gets more and more confident, I think, Russell and Jarvis, in terms of writing, what they want to do with Pulp. It seems bolstered by this idea.
1:56:43 Yasi Salek? Because they're in a zeitgeist.
1:56:45 Speaker 06 Yeah, absolutely. And, and very much Dennis Potter, I mean, I'd say Victoria Wood's a really weird example, but it's, Joe Orton gets really fashionable again at this point. And you get a lot of reissues of that. And the idea of, as I say, the very singular voices coming through, narrative wise, I think informs bands like Pulp and gives them the confidence. And I think it's no mistake that that's eighty-seven and written in eighty-six. And in eighty-six, it's really, really strong for TV writing and writing from working class authors and writers.
1:57:17 Yasi Salek? Oh, okay. I love that. And also, is, I know the timing's a little off, because like, I think Meantime was nineteen eighty-three, but also like, Mike Lee films, maybe, like?
1:57:28 Speaker 06 Well, he never really went away. I mean, he was strong at points, but he's been going for so long, he is another institution. But yes, that's a very good example. It's all coming from the same place, Brookside. I hope that Brookside has been mentioned many, many times. But it's really, really important for everybody in music. It's a Liverpudlian soap opera, but it had, the genius was, it was the first one to have an omnibus. And it was on Sat-, well, I think, it was on Saturdays, and it was at five past five in the afternoon. So it's an hour and a half. When you are getting ready to go out, you watch the Brookside Omnibus of three episodes from the week. And Brookside was clued up to have lots of young people in it and they were, you know, and lots of the storylines are about going out, drinking, music, that kind of thing.
1:58:12 Speaker 06 Everybody I know watched Brookside. It was really, really, you could get really obsessed by it. So I think there's lots of things happening at this point.
1:58:18 Yasi Salek? Well, I know we have not, somehow have not come across Brookside, mostly just Coronation Street around here.
1:58:24 Speaker 06 Go to YouTube and watch Brookside. It's amazing.
1:58:26 Yasi Salek? Okay. Well, that is, that is really interesting. What you're saying is very fascinating and it is, I mean, you've said it, like, you know, the UK is class obsessed, but also part of like, I think the magic of punk was, was also freeing up maybe indirectly the idea of like working class people making art.
1:58:47 Speaker 06 Yeah, art and class could be melded together. It wasn't necessarily exclusively for people of a certain upbringing or an upper class upbringing, which is seen more like now, because how can you afford to do it now? You don't, so you don't have enterprise allowance.
1:59:01 Yasi Salek? It's so sad.
1:59:03 Speaker 06 And, and Pulp are a very good example. So they're very similar to Roxy Music in that way. It's, you know, you might think, oh, look at those toffs, because they're a bit arty, but they all come from working class backgrounds.
1:59:12 Yasi Salek? Right, right.
1:59:13 Speaker 06 But they are doing something else and pushing the medium forward. And the art and class and working class art is really, really important at this stage.
1:59:20 Yasi Salek? I want the time machine. I want the time machine.
1:59:22 Speaker 06 Actually, I'm with you on the time machine. Just do the time machine.
1:59:29 Speaker 02 They're running a cover two defense. But you're running to get game day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's watch party fed with deals from your go to restaurants. Or stock up with deals on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game day deals on Uber Eats all season long. It's not football without food. Uber Eats. Order now. Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.
1:59:59 Speaker 03 Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code "HACK". Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.
2:00:30 Yasi Salek? Freaks comes out, they don't like it, like I said. They are looking back like, ugh, Russell said it's hard for him to listen to. They want to make more music, right? Because like we said, it's been a year and a half. This is old hat now. They are not really happy with Fire Records. They want to put out music with this Sheffield label called FON, Fuck Off Nazis, amazing name. They do record two songs, "Don't You Want Me Anymore" and "Rattlesnake", never comes out. Jarvis is lightly demoralized. It's September. He enrolls in a part-time film foundation course at Sheffield Polytechnic. He'd been living with Russell, but they were not great roommates because Russell thought Jarvis was a hoarder and a bad cook. And Jarvis thought Russell was too uptight.
2:01:14 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's all true.
2:01:15 Yasi Salek? He's not a good cook, doesn't make it not a sandwich.
2:01:17 Speaker 06 He's a real hoarder as well. There's a lot of tat.
2:01:20 Yasi Salek? He was like, I had a can of baked beans. I was like, oh, man, you put me to shame with my hoarding. Jarvis thought Russell was both too uptight and walked around naked too much.
2:01:31 Speaker 06 Yes, seemingly opposing, but I think they did sit together.
2:01:35 Yasi Salek? Within the same person.
2:01:38 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:01:38 Yasi Salek? That's very funny. So he moves out, moves in with Nick Banks. He's studying film. They go back to the studio, record another song called "Death Comes to Town". That won't come out till 1992. So this is a new thing where the vibes are bad because they keep trying to put out music and record music. And it's just they're being thwarted. I read some speculation that if "Death Comes to Town" had come out in 1988, they might have had their big breakthrough. In eighty eight instead of nineteen ninety one. What do you think? Do you think that song would have been that powerful?
2:02:15 Speaker 06 Good question. Not sure. I love the era where all the songs have got the type of the word death in them. And also it's funny because there's a lot on separations. Interesting. No, I think it's just not right. The time's not right. It's that weird thing with pulp. They really were at the mercy of some sort of cosmic energy, weren't they? They just couldn't get it together. It just didn't happen. So I know, I believe that it just happens when it happens, really. I think had they put this out, it still wouldn't have done it. There's something not quite. Because Jarvis moving to London and everyone going fuck, really, isn't it? That's what it is. And as you're saying, it may have been the medicinal element.
2:02:47 Yasi Salek? Well, just a part, just a small.
2:02:50 Speaker 06 But I really think there's that London thing, seeing London, as we'll get to. As this huge pond, rather than the tiny, tiny one, and going, we better be good.
2:02:59 Yasi Salek? Yeah, and also expanding the horizons of the subject matter that you're observing and writing about, I think probably had a had a lot to do with it. So that doesn't come out. They add a new bassist, Antony, is it Jen or Gen? Antony Gen, who is sixteen years old. He could not play, but he learned quickly. I'm very obsessed with Antony Gen. He's a DJ now, I think, right? Is that right? He's just sort of doing stuff.
2:03:23 Speaker 06 I think he's doing stuff. I don't know. I don't really know him at the moment. He was just quite a big show off, wasn't he, Antony Gen, as we know, because he's the last to come, man. Steve Gen's cool. He was all right.
2:03:35 Yasi Salek? That was his brother.
2:03:36 Speaker 06 Yeah, Steve Gen was writing a novel that had taken him about. I mean, they were very slow up there. I think he was on year twenty five of his novel. Girlfriend was getting really annoyed. I think he was only probably about twenty one as well. So there you go.
2:03:48 Yasi Salek? So good.
2:03:49 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:03:49 Yasi Salek? I'm only obsessed with Anthony again to the point of, this is a spoiler, but he leaves pulp to join a cult. A religious cult, a weird religious, like, e, like, e.
2:03:58 Speaker 06 Well, he's the naked, you know, he's the naked elastic man, don't you?
2:04:00 Yasi Salek? Yes, yes, exactly. So.
2:04:02 Speaker 06 That's Anthony Gen all over. He's just.
2:04:04 Yasi Salek? More, I'm just more interested. I'm like, okay, you've had a strange life and career by the age of twenty three, where you've like been in pulp and then also joined a strange religious cult that's based around raving. Sorry, spoiler. Okay, huge, huge moment, you guys. Nineteen eighty eight, massive change. Jarvis begins to wear contacts. It's huge. Nick said, this will have made a difference because as we've seen before, if you lose your glasses on stage, should they fall on the bass drum? It can cause a lot of problems. So we went for contact lenses, which I think in a weird way was one of the many catalysts that changed pulp from being worthy but underachieving to starting on the upward plane. I thought that was interesting because. Jarvis wearing the glasses by the time they really broke through, didn't he put them back on? Or was he not wearing them? I just picture him with the glasses.
2:04:49 Speaker 06 Well, in the kind of ninety five, he's mostly taken them off. So in some of the videos, he's not got them on at all and he's got the floppy fringe and that sort of thing. And that's his very big pop look. But, I mean, we're saying he's always the same on, on stage and off, but actually he'd wear the glasses a lot more. It was very him, but it's his shield, he really needed them. He found it really weird not to wear the glasses like normally. That was, that's his pop star persona as such, but it does make a difference.
2:05:18 Yasi Salek? Totally, and it's very much like the she's all that movie making style of like this ugly dork girl.
2:05:25 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:05:25 Yasi Salek? And then they just remove her ponytail and take her glasses off and she's suddenly the hottest girl in the school. That was Jarvis Cocker's, she's all that moment.
2:05:33 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:05:34 Yasi Salek? Russell said, the phenomenon of Jarvis, the celebrity and sex symbol as opposed to Jarvis, the lanky get with halitosis and underarm sweat that women avoid. I've shared a bed with Jarvis more than most people, other than his girlfriends, and he never seemed terribly attractive to me. He wears brown pajamas and horrible things like that, but he did start to cultivate it, which I think, good for him, really.
2:05:55 Speaker 06 Russell's just jealous.
2:05:57 Yasi Salek? They're so funny.
2:05:58 Speaker 06 He's just jealous of Jarvis being a sex symbol.
2:06:01 Yasi Salek? Halitosis, brown pajamas, but yeah, sure, go off, guys.
2:06:04 Speaker 06 Yeah, but that's very Jarvis, isn't it, brown pajamas? He made brown look quite cool.
2:06:08 Yasi Salek? He did, he really did.
2:06:09 Speaker 06 Brown isn't that cool and it's quite difficult, but he did do it.
2:06:12 Yasi Salek? This is also why I think Pulp is such a nineties band, because the nineties was, made the seventies cool, you know? And it wasn't that cool in the eighties yet, but then he was holding on and he, he was right there, right?
2:06:22 Speaker 06 It is very genuine, I have to say, I have bumped into Jarvis in a charity shop more than once. That's where he goes, that's where he bought all his stuff from. It wasn't contrived in that sense.
2:06:33 Yasi Salek? Sure.
2:06:33 Speaker 06 In any, any shape or form, this isn't a person pretending to be someone else. This is going, oh, I could be me, people quite like it.
2:06:39 Yasi Salek? Right.
2:06:40 Speaker 06 Which is best pop music, isn't it?
2:06:41 Yasi Salek? The best pop music, it's so true. Well, I already said it, but Anthony again leaves the group in July, he's only in it for five minutes because he got really into acid and joined a religious cult called Nine O'Clock Service, who had a rave vicar and a sex scandal in nineteen ninety five.
2:06:59 Speaker 06 So this is the most nineties thing that's ever existed.
2:07:02 Yasi Salek? Ray Vicker, I'm dead. This really broke Jarvis's spirit, Anthony, leaving the group, I think, according to my research. Or maybe it was just ten things after another, like this album not coming out, this song not coming out, this eightieth person leaving the band. And so he was like, I'm moving to London. Goodbye. Goodbye, Russell. Goodbye, everybody. I'm going to Central Saint Martins, which isn't, is it not hard to get into Central Saint Martins?
2:07:28 Speaker 06 Yes, it was. It was quite hard to get into Central Saint Martins. Yeah, yeah, it's true. It still is. Well, it's mainly your international students now that they get the money from, but it was hard. It has a very, very good reputation.
2:07:39 Yasi Salek? I'm just saying it's quite, it's quite impressive. I mean, I think it's usually written about as like, he just picked up and went, but he had to like get in, he had to provide a body of work. Yeah.
2:07:48 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:07:49 Yasi Salek? I thought that was cool. He was like, bye, I'm going to art school. You guys, you thought I was art school band before? No, no, I'm gonna be a real art school band. I'm gonna go to art school. Russell stays in Sheffield with his long-term partner, Vicky, who is about to give birth to their first daughter. And Candita moves to Manchester with Manners, her boyfriend. But Russell said pulp was in bits, scattered, but we never sat down and said, that's it, the end, see you later. There was still a dimly flickering ember under the rubble. There was still a desire to try and keep things going somehow. We didn't know how this was gonna happen. We just thought the songs we had were too vital to let die.
2:08:23 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:08:23 Yasi Salek? There's like eight different points of this story that we've already told that they could have quit this band and been like, okay, bye, I'm gonna move it, pack it in and move it on, but they don't. They play one last show before Jarvis moves to London. Everything went wrong. It was like a real like going out with a whimper, you know, instead of a bang. And he was like, oh, fuck it. Thank God, I'm leaving. Goodbye. And he starts school in London in September. Jarvis said, "The tale of woe ends with me deciding at the age of 25 to leave Sheffield. I had to admit that I'd taken a wrong turn. You know when you're in a car and you take a wrong turn? You don't like to admit it. You think if you keep going, you'll come right again, but you don't, do you? I'd spent the best part of a decade in bed and in an unsuccessful group." I was forced to admit I'd been wasting my time. It's humiliating.
2:09:08 Yasi Salek? But I was lucky enough to get into St. Martin's College in London, doing a film course. So I was off. I just imagined the group would cease to exist. He doesn't give up.
2:09:18 Speaker 06 He doesn't give up.
2:09:19 Yasi Salek? He spends his first term working on a video. He can never, he can never quit Pulp. He's in art school. He's, he's like, I've left Sheffield, fuck you guys. But then what does he work on in his first term? A video for the song Death Goes to the Disco? Using footage from that last show that they played that everything.
2:09:33 Speaker 06 That's cause Pulp is him and he is Pulp, you know, can't, he can't get it out of his system.
2:09:38 Yasi Salek? No.
2:09:39 Speaker 06 It's good, isn't it?
2:09:40 Yasi Salek? It's great. I mean, thank God.
2:09:42 Speaker 06 Cause we still get help. Yeah, exactly.
2:09:44 Yasi Salek? Luckily also Steve Mackey was in London. He had been studying film production at Goldsmiths College. And Nick Binks had said to Jarvis, like, well, why don't you, you know, get in touch with Steve Mackey? You guys could play down there. And he did. And Steve was like, yes, absolutely. Let's do it. And so Pulp is only dead for five minutes before Pulp London 5.0 is resurrected.
2:10:09 Speaker 06 Five? You sure we're not on seven or eight?
2:10:11 Yasi Salek? I think we honestly might. There's been so many people in this band. There's been so many people in this band. Things start to take off in London. I mean, sometimes as funny as it is, it really does take moving to the big city. To get things popping, right? I mean, and so much, again, with love and respect in my heart to Sheffield. It's not exactly like Sheffield was like the music capital of the world. It wasn't popping off up there.
2:10:32 Speaker 06 No, but WAP was still there and in those days, it was still quite divisive. If you did move to London, people would think that you were a tart and you were selling out. So for instance, if you talk about the fall, the, you would have been booted out of the fall anyway. Cause Marky Smith obviously boots everyone out eventually, but hits them, whatever. Sorry. But you know, they were a Manchester band. No one moved to London. You know, you would stick with it. Um, it was really important. So it was quite a thing. It was quite a pop group thing for Jarvis to say, I'm going to move to London. It was a bit of a sellout thing. And they would have been sniggering behind his back, I bet, and then realized that they were wrong. But you know, it's only takes, it's Oasis who moved from Manchester to London and don't care.
2:11:15 Speaker 06 You know, that's, you know, they kind of set it that it was all right. If you think of Supergirl, it always stayed in Oxford. Loads of bands, you know, they stay, they're meant to. It makes them more authentic.
2:11:24 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
2:11:24 Speaker 06 So it's a bit of a thing.
2:11:26 Yasi Salek? That is a really interesting, you make a good point. I think, feel like Oasis was like, why would we stay in Manchester? This place fucking sucks.
2:11:32 Speaker 06 Yeah, but what's unusual?
2:11:34 Yasi Salek? They were like, I don't know about you guys, but this place.
2:11:37 Speaker 06 But all the other Manchester bands stayed because they were laughed out of town. Literally, if they did move, they wouldn't be able to come back because it was seen as too ambitious.
2:11:46 Yasi Salek? Right. And I guess that makes sense.
2:11:47 Speaker 06 And too superficial.
2:11:48 Yasi Salek? Yeah, too superficial. You're like, oh, you're just abandoning, you're moving to the big city to make it so.
2:11:54 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:11:55 Yasi Salek? Well, it does work for Pulp because five minutes after Steve Mackey joins Pulp and they're just like, you know, farting about in London, they get contacted by this person that worked for Fire Records sometimes, but also was on the staff of Sounds Magazine about playing the Sounds Magazine Christmas party at Dingwall's in Camden. The person's name was Robin Gibson and they opened for John Robb's band, The Membranes. It's May of nineteen eighty-nine and it's my favorite part because Jarvis and Steve start raving. It's acid house time. I mean, it's been acid house time, but they get into it in May of nineteen eighty-nine. Here's what Steve said. It was the end of the eighties, a really bad time for us as nothing good had happened.
2:12:35 Yasi Salek? We couldn't believe the Smiths were successful because Morrissey's got such an awful voice and just repeated the same thing over and over ad nauseam. And then all this music came along, which sounded like the music from the future, like Star Trek. You'd go to these raves and it was like a spaceship it landed. Lights were flashing. There were sexy girls. The music was like Kraftwerk. It was like the future and you were part of it. And for a while it was like a little secret.
2:12:58 Speaker 06 It was genuinely exciting for people.
2:13:00 Yasi Salek? Oh, my God.
2:13:01 Speaker 06 Genuinely, yeah, just it did that literal blow people's minds thing. It got all those little indie kids out and indie grownups out and they all started dancing. They hadn't danced before.
2:13:14 Yasi Salek? Jarvis said, I think acid house made a lot of people in bands reevaluate what they were doing. I think that rock had become very complacent. It thought that it had a divine right to exist when it doesn't. It's got to remain interesting to retain people's interest. Acid house made me think, do I still really want to be in a band? And if I do, what do I want it to do? It was a bit of a prod, a little bit of a kick up the ass. And this is why I was really putting forth my, my hypothesis that. The last missing secret ingredient to the magic that is the best version of pulp
2:13:52 Yasi Salek? was just a little ecstasy, a little acid house, just a little, a little go to the club and dance and lose your mind, you know?
2:14:00 Speaker 06 Well, yeah, it certainly changed what they were doing. They're not massively, I mean, I was thinking about this and listening to them again today. They're not massively acid house here. Not massively disco. There's sort of an element of, well, they might bring it in, but it's not like it's primal scream was like it's a completely different band. Or soup dragons, it's completely different band. This has got a little way to go.
2:14:20 Yasi Salek? That's very interesting about pulp, which I actually, it's something I really appreciate and admire is that like they do something super unique with their influences, which is like they'll talk about their influences and then you'll be like, oh, the fall, you say, or acid. I mean, they're taking inputs, but they're just, they're putting it out through this like such a specific pulp sieve or whatever, so that it comes out as something so different. As opposed to like your point of like, you know, one day primal scream was like, and here is loaded, which is a great song. And like I said, I would take the time machine back, but you know, that's sort of like
2:14:59 Yasi Salek? why I love that these little pieces fell into place because they just seem to tweak the existing pulp formula just a little bit, just enough to suddenly like, it's really hitting.
2:15:12 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, I agree. Yes, it's rather wonderful, isn't it? That you're gonna, you could put Jarvis anywhere, you know, you could take him up as if he was a stick figure and place him in a field or in a supermarket or in, I don't know, in a beautiful vista, you know, a beach surrounded by Hawaiian lovelies and he'd still look like Jarvis and act like Jarvis. And therefore you can put him any genre of music and he's still going to be Jarvis, but just in a different genre.
2:15:37 Yasi Salek? Honestly, that would be such a great merch idea. Once again, Jeanette, if you're listening, where's Waldo books? But it's not Waldo, it's Jarvis. And you've got to find him and in all these scenarios. Yeah. Where's Jarvo? Um, you can have that one for free.
2:15:54 Yasi Salek? So Fire Records is back in the chat. They've re-entered. They have a new A and R that's taken over Pulp named Dave Bedford. And Jarvis was like, he called and said, why don't we do something? And I thought, no chance. But nobody else was interested. And so to my eternal regret, we talked to Fire again. We just wanted a one-off single, but they wanted an album deal. So because they had nobody else to put music out with, they sort of ended up re-embed with Fire Records. And they went to record back to Sheffield. They had like this backlog of unrecorded songs, and that's basically what became the third album, Separations, which for a variety of
2:16:39 Yasi Salek? reasons, will not come out until 1992. So we'll just put a pin in it, even though just know that that album dates back to July 1989, and even further back, because these are older songs. But they've made it. And then it's 1990, which for Pulp is an absolutely completely dead year. They don't play any shows. They don't put out any music. Pulp tries to use the finished album Separations to get other labels interested, but that doesn't work. As Nick Banks put it, we could not get arrested. Plus, they would have had to get someone to buy them out of the Fire deal. It was like 10,000 pounds. So that was not working. They choose "My Legendary Girlfriend"
2:17:20 Yasi Salek? as the next single, but it's not coming out in this year. End of 1990. Still, nothing has happened.
2:17:29 Speaker 06 Are they just raving in fields in 1990, do we think?
2:17:32 Yasi Salek? Very difficult to get any information about what it just like, no shows. Steve was doing something. Steve was making music videos for Nightmares on Wax and Sweet Exorcist. He was using that art school degree to do something. But yeah, I think they were just, it sounds like they were, you know, that's that me depresso, just sort of in a liminal state where they were not, not a band, but not not a band. Like, they had the album recorded and ready, but it wasn't able to come out. They're not playing shows. They play one show at the very end of December, or mid-December, or something of 1990, which they hadn't played a show in like almost two years. They opened for a band that I had never heard of, but which seems to come into
2:18:14 Yasi Salek? heavy play in all of their future music press for the next two years called World of Twist. Shaun, can you tell me about World of Twist? High key, one of the worst band names I've ever heard in my entire life.
2:18:26 Speaker 06 Really?
2:18:27 Yasi Salek? World of Twist?
2:18:30 Speaker 06 Well, World of Twist is a very World of Twist name. It's a Manchester band. How many? Five, I think. They were very pulp. Yes, they were, if you think about it. They put on incredible stage shows. So if you went to see them, they had twirling things and round things and glittery things and sequini things. And they were incredible to see live. They were really, really good. And they're sort of on the coattails of that baggy movement. They weren't quite that, or you know, around at that time, you know, baggy being.
2:18:58 Yasi Salek? Sure.
2:18:59 Speaker 06 The Happy Mondays, dance orientated, but they were still trying to be slightly distinct. So they weren't quite sure what they were. They were absolutely amazing live and yet they didn't really have the songs. The album's great, but it's produced really badly and they don't really have any hits at this point, but they were brilliant to see. You'd always go and see them if they were there. And they also had an amazing range of merchandise. They nicked cigarette, no one had done this before, they nicked cigarette advertising and cigarette packet.
2:19:27 Yasi Salek? Oh.
2:19:27 Speaker 06 Designed to put World of Twist on. So they were one of those bands where you saw the T-shirt before you saw the band in London at least, and in Manchester, you would just think, what's that? What's that? What's that? At the time, it was very fashionable to have long sleeved T-shirts.
2:19:41 Yasi Salek? Sure.
2:19:42 Speaker 06 Yeah, you'd never have a short sleeve. They were much, much cooler. So they were all long sleeved and all looked like Marlboro packets.
2:19:47 Yasi Salek? You've blown my mind because that's obviously a very beloved graphic design trope of the nineties.
2:19:55 Speaker 06 Yes.
2:19:56 Yasi Salek? Use cigarette package to put the words, but they were the first. This is breaking news, you guys.
2:20:02 Speaker 06 Yeah. And obviously all my great World of Twist T-shirts, I don't have anymore because I don't have anything anymore. But there we go.
2:20:09 Yasi Salek? Why, Shaun? I was gonna come to your home and.
2:20:12 Speaker 06 Oh, don't.
2:20:13 Yasi Salek? Be like, do you have any T-shirts for me?
2:20:16 Speaker 06 And I'm gonna disappoint you. I'm gonna disappoint you. But yeah, I can lend you a pair of trousers. I once broke down on the motorway and I was wearing a Happy Mondays T-shirt and the boy who then drove me back home because my van was fucked, looked at my T-shirt and then bought three Happy Mondays tapes with him for us to play on the way home in silence because he couldn't speak.
2:20:39 Yasi Salek? And then you got married.
2:20:40 Speaker 06 No, then I said goodbye and that was it, but I at least thought that he had, he had put the work in. And we listened to those albums in silence down the M one for a very long time.
2:20:51 Yasi Salek? I'm really disappointed because that is the kind of the best meet cute I've ever heard of. This is like a little guy is like this cool girl and she her van broke down and she had a cool T shirt on and I bought the tape so we could listen.
2:21:02 Speaker 06 No.
2:21:02 Yasi Salek? But then you were like, bye, have a good life.
2:21:04 Speaker 06 There was no meet cute. That was a meet boring. Yeah, boring anecdote. There you go. That's Britain in, in the nineties.
2:21:13 Yasi Salek? Well, you're, you're, when I rewrite this as a, a feature film, I'm sorry, it's gonna have a different ending. Yeah, no, it's gonna, it's, we're changing the whole thing. You're gonna go on an adventure. Bez is gonna be involved as one of those like magical tricksters, you know, who comes along. It's gonna be sort of a mythology, but I'm gonna use the Happy Mondays as different figures. This is, you guys, if anyone's listening, wants to fund this feature film, please bang my line. Okay, so we've learned about World of Twist, which for me, the most interesting being that cigarette thing. Nick's bank said, we didn't want to play that concert opening for World of Twist. Because World of Twist had stolen all our ideas. They were crap and they'd completely taken this pulp version.
2:21:54 Yasi Salek? And they'd gotten this great press hype and all of us were saying, they've nicked our time. But we thought, well, we'll do this concert because it's another opportunity to get in front of people. You can't just stick your head in the sand and go, we're not having out to do with them. They've nicked all our ideas. You know, you'd still be playing at the Bloody Hallamshire. So we did that year zero again, but then it was different.
2:22:15 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's quite churlish of him, isn't it?
2:22:17 Yasi Salek? Well, I mean, this poor band, man, can you?
2:22:20 Speaker 06 I suppose they're a bit down from Vallespo.
2:22:22 Yasi Salek? It's been 12 years. They've been, had 18 albums that they can't even put out. They're sitting around and then World of motherfucking Twist comes along with their sparklers.
2:22:31 Speaker 06 T shirts, yeah.
2:22:33 Yasi Salek? And their cool T shirts and they're like, what the fuck bitch? We have been here. Okay, now it's 1991. Some important things happened in 1991 that you guys might be aware of. Namely, it's the year that punk breaks. And we've talked about it. It's not maybe until the tail end of 1991, but a little American juggernaut called Grunge is about to blow into town. But it hasn't happened yet. Blur's album Leisure comes out in 1991. So that's kind of a big deal in the building blocks of what will eventually be known as Britpop.
2:23:08 Speaker 06 Yeah, leisure.
2:23:10 Yasi Salek? So what do you call leisure?
2:23:12 Speaker 06 Leisure here, actually.
2:23:15 Yasi Salek? You know, one of my favorite albums comes out in nineteen ninety-one, U2, Octune Baby. On the same day later in the year, we'll have Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magic, Primal Screams, Screamadelica, Nirvana's Nevermind and Tribe Called Quest. Yeah, and and a Pixies album, I believe.
2:23:34 Speaker 06 You know, we were talking about Pulp having silly names for everything. Do you know what they used to call that famous grunge Seattle band? Yeah, they used just used to pronounce it, Steve would just go Nervena.
2:23:48 Speaker 06 Yeah, so all of Pulp used to call them Nervena on purpose, to take the power away. You've got any Nervena? Because I remember, I think Steve was in my van at that point. And we were all listening to Nevermind on cassette, driving down somewhere, and we were calling it Nervena. It made us laugh.
2:24:04 Yasi Salek? I mean, you guys already, don't you guys already say Nirvana anyways? Don't you already say it wrong?
2:24:09 Speaker 06 Is that wrong?
2:24:10 Yasi Salek? Nirvana.
2:24:15 Speaker 06 I prefer Nervena as my favorite.
2:24:16 Yasi Salek? Nirvana is really good. Well, it's February of nineteen ninety-one is when my legendary girlfriend comes out, finally. We finally put out a piece of music. It's been several years. Jarvis says my legend girlfriend was about my girlfriend that I had in Sheffield. See, I never liked to mix business with pleasure. I'd always kept my private life separate from music. So I've always gone out with girls who aren't interested in music. And so people always ask me about my legendary girlfriend because they've never seen me with her. We were waiting for it to be issued and Fire said, in a bit, in a bit. It eventually came out. Ten months after we'd finished the album, which was bad enough, and lo and behold, it got a reaction, single of the week in the NME. And heralded a new era in which Pulp started getting more popular rather than less.
2:25:02 Yasi Salek? That's good. What do you think about my legendary girlfriend?
2:25:06 Speaker 06 I love it.
2:25:06 Yasi Salek? Yeah, it's a really good song. It's a really good song.
2:25:09 Speaker 06 Terribly produced as we know, but it's really, really good. And that was the start of something. You can really tell. It's great. And it's got, it says, it starts to get all the hallmarks of, you know, his sort of glottal ooze and ah's and everything. He gets more confident at this point, I think. Well, the extra stuff, the extra stuff that you get in. You know, those good gods, you know, good god now, which Martin Fry from ABC does a lot, which I think he nicked them from Martin Fry, looking back.
2:25:36 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
2:25:36 Speaker 06 They're all over, let's kind of love. Good god now. It's totally Jarvis.
2:25:40 Yasi Salek? It is really good. The way he does it, there's a real panache to it.
2:25:54 Yasi Salek? Here's what Stuart McConney said in the NME. Hold the front page. Stop the presses. This is what I thought working for the NME would be like. At the fag end of a very ordinary singles column, we grudgingly sling on one last disc and it is fantastic. Do you hear me? Dropouts? Fantastic. A throbbing ferment of nightclub soul and teen opera. World of Twist play the theme from Shaft with Cathal Coghlan?
2:26:19 Speaker 06 Cathal Coghlan.
2:26:21 Yasi Salek? Cathal Coghlan, an Irish, that's an Irish singer songwriter from Cork.
2:26:24 Speaker 06 Micro Disney singer, yeah.
2:26:25 Yasi Salek? Micro Disney. I had to look that up. Mysterious and grand. Poor pulp, slaving away since nineteen seventy eight, only to get their first really strong, good piece of press and be compared to World of Twist who just popped up two years ago. It's so rude.
2:26:41 Speaker 06 Yes.
2:26:42 Yasi Salek? I understand why they were mad. They were like, world of fucking who, babe? We've been here for ten years. Anyways. So people started asking them to play shows again. This is a big deal. I also just, this is such a sidebar, but I find, I find this so deeply fascinating as a pathology and I've known several men like this. To be, your whole life is immersed and devoted to music and you go out of your way to date women who don't care about music or know about it is so interesting to me.
2:27:10 Speaker 06 Hmm.
2:27:11 Yasi Salek? What do you guys talk about?
2:27:13 Speaker 06 Well, there's life, isn't there?
2:27:15 Yasi Salek? Is there?
2:27:15 Speaker 06 There's real life. And you don't get that with someone who's not interested in music. They don't give you all that. Not interested in all the flim flam and the superficiality.
2:27:25 Yasi Salek? Right, like they're not a fan.
2:27:27 Speaker 06 Exactly. But I think I know the person he's talking about, and she was very, very lovely. And she was a bit on off girlfriend, but she couldn't give a toss about all the, all the rubbish. Say the flim flam. She was a social worker. And she was beautiful and she was very, very cool. But she just was not interested, not interested in any of the other stuff. And I, I think that's wonderful.
2:27:49 Yasi Salek? She was like, I don't even know who World of Twist is, babe. Talking about them and I'm really sorry that, that that happened to you, but I don't know who that is.
2:28:00 Yasi Salek? She was like, can we put on Coronation Street, please? We need to watch our shows.
2:28:04 Speaker 06 Yes, absolutely.
2:28:06 Yasi Salek? Melody Maker also said, the first thirty seconds of this single are very steamy indeed. And then the damn fool spoils it all by opening his mouth another centimeter or two and singing. They didn't like it. Worse, singing like Brian Ferry was today's news instead of World of Twist.
2:28:24 Speaker 06 Ah, there they are.
2:28:26 Yasi Salek? Why is there so much World of Twist?
2:28:28 Speaker 06 Isn't it bizarre?
2:28:29 Yasi Salek? In vocation. Yes. It is really funny to your point, like where you just really realize you're like, wow, interesting. For like a month, all the Weekly has talked about World of Twist, never to be spoken about again. But they were talked about in such like hushed tones as if this was so important. And then you never hear about it again.
2:28:47 Speaker 06 Yeah, because they always realize, they all realize that, you know, they had to back another horse. I mean, it's all pathetic. But I was saying, you know, the bitchiness of the press as well. When you read back, it is just like, oh, just give it a rest. Everyone gets proved wrong in the end. And all of you were, you know, we're a world of twist now. Well, some of them were in different bands. Some of them fell by the wayside.
2:29:09 Yasi Salek? As we do. Russell said in this BBC documentary about pulp, I can remember us being described in a number of papers as pale imitators of World of Twist, which galled a lot because they used to come see our shows. And then Wendy did it in a rather.
2:29:23 Speaker 06 Such a problem, aren't they?
2:29:26 Yasi Salek? They went and did it in a rather burlesque way without the soul and intensity that we had. And we watched them zoom past us. You know, it made us angry. We were angry people. We were wound up. We were really blooming wired, but I think that's what made us good in a way.
2:29:40 Speaker 06 What do you think of that?
2:29:41 Yasi Salek? I like that a lot because there's other bands that they're all like this, though. Like, it's like the number of bands Bobby Gillespie threw under the fucking bus in every interview did. But it's so relatable because you're like, yeah, we all, this is like you all, everyone has like a nemesis that in your mind, you're like, I should be, you know?
2:29:59 Speaker 06 I do know what you mean. Yes. We all have that little petty enemy on our, enemy on our shoulder.
2:30:06 Yasi Salek? I think it's healthy. I think it inspires you to like Russell is saying to like be better, to win.
2:30:12 Speaker 06 Yes. Yeah, yeah.
2:30:14 Yasi Salek? And charming. And you know, Pulp is a petty band. They're petty.
2:30:18 Speaker 06 All bands are petty. All bands are really bitchy, actually. They pretend not to be, but they just go around sniping about everyone else.
2:30:25 Yasi Salek? So great. It's so great.
2:30:26 Speaker 06 In the very tiny.
2:30:28 Yasi Salek? Unless you're like Oasis, who's busy sniping about each other the entire time where they're like, I don't even notice the other people because I'm too busy screaming about my own brother.
2:30:36 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:30:37 Yasi Salek? Okay, we're back, babe. Did we have a fallow period? Yeah. Was World of Twist fucking the albatross around our neck for one year? Yeah, but we're back. We're cooking with gas. My Legendary Girlfriend is a hit. Well, in the sense that Melody or NME called it a hit, didn't like chart or make any money, but
2:30:54 Speaker 06 No.
2:30:54 Yasi Salek? We're playing shows.
2:30:56 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:30:56 Yasi Salek? They played a show at the Lead Mill in May and Anne Scanlon from Melody Maker wrote, "with a cool bassist, manic drummer, aloof organist, and a guitar violin player who looks a bit like the demented one in Sparks", which by the way, so does look like the demented one in Sparks. I went back and looked and I was like, Russell O'Sullivan, very handsome, a really, a really like classic movie star handsome. Um, addition to the, the, the look of that band. Okay. And then she goes, "Pulp are in a world of their own, a world that's been made all the more surreal by two enormous silver mobiles at the sides of the stage. On top of all this, of course, is Jarvis Cocker. Long, lean and dressed in jeans and a minute nylon sweater.
2:31:38 Yasi Salek? He's a true star. Star as in classic entertainer, as in Barry White, Tom Jones, and all those other gets who eventually make their way to Vegas. He's a great songwriter, too. So just to contrast, just wasn't not like two years ago where we had the mean review where they were saying that one of them looked like a children's entertainment clown or whatever. And the Jarvis was weird looking and whatever. And now he's a star.
2:32:02 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:32:02 Yasi Salek? They're cool now. Okay. May of nineteen ninety-one is the day that pulp became cool and beloved by the, at least the melody makers and enemies of the world.
2:32:13 Speaker 06 Isn't it funny? It just turns on a pin.
2:32:15 Yasi Salek? Turns on a pin.
2:32:16 Speaker 06 It's peculiar and, and how horrible to be at the behest of it, really, I would imagine in a band. One day,
2:32:22 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
2:32:22 Speaker 06 you wake up and everybody doesn't know who you are. The next day, you're suddenly cool and you're Barry White. How do you deal with that as a human? Must be quite difficult. It's really mad.
2:32:33 Yasi Salek? I think it's, that's pretty much like, just like all life, right? Isn't that like, sort of like?
2:32:39 Speaker 06 But most people just go on being themselves and they just sort of wake up every day in a similar sort of state of neither cool nor uncool. And yet some people have to be, you know, say branded as such.
2:32:50 Yasi Salek? I talk to my therapist about it every day. I'm like, what would I be like if I wasn't preoccupied with what other people thought about me? What, who would I be?
2:32:57 Speaker 06 And what did they reply?
2:32:58 Yasi Salek? She never, um, gives me any direct answers because she's a Jungian therapist.
2:33:02 Speaker 06 Oh, she says, how do you feel about that?
2:33:04 Yasi Salek? Kind of, yeah. We, we got down to the bottom. We did an exercise. We did a meditation exercise. It's fine. I'll eventually, it's only been thirteen years that I've been going through. We have some more, we have some more work to do.
2:33:14 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:33:15 Yasi Salek? But I liked there's something, this is getting ahead, but that, I didn't realize that what Jarvis, the name of this is hardcore. He said hardcore was referring to the hardcore of the self, which is un, remains unchanged.
2:33:30 Speaker 06 Are you sure about that?
2:33:33 Yasi Salek? Well, you take it up with Mr. Cocker because that was his quote. Perhaps it was a double entendre.
2:33:39 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:33:40 Yasi Salek? It's also about pornography. So I think it works on both levels, but, but I really like that, like the idea of like, The unmovable self that is beneath all of whether or not NME thinks you're fucking cool this week or whatever, you know? Also, don't worry, are things getting great for Pulp? Absolutely. What does that mean? Something terrible has to happen. And here it is. Rough Trade Distribution, which distributes Fire Records, goes into liquidation right, right at the end of May of 1990, right when they've become cool, which nearly bankrupts Fire Records and it does put Separations on hold. Once again, Separations is not coming out. But they did put out one more single called Countdown, which is a pretty good song also.
2:34:25 Yasi Salek? It's not, I don't think, to me, it's not quite on the My Legendary Girlfriend level, but it's a good song.
2:34:29 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's off that ilk as well. I mean, it's, it's really integral to them though, and Jarvis has talked about it a lot because it's his, uh, it's got a raison d'etre. It's this idea of waiting again to be famous, which we come back to, you know, the, when he falls out of the window, the countdown is to, when is it happening? When is it happening? So it's really core to that oeuvre countdown. I do like it and it's named after a comic he had as well.
2:34:53 Yasi Salek? Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, that's cool.
2:34:55 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah. Cause he was really interested in robots and space and all those sorts of things. And there was, there's a countdown comic.
2:35:01 Yasi Salek? I love that.
2:35:11 Yasi Salek? I mean, this could be the Pulp story up until now. It's hurry up and wait, right?
2:35:16 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:35:17 Yasi Salek? It's September now. We've had this album sitting in the can. We were cool. We're, we're sniping again. Simon Hinckler is back in the mix. You might remember him, who was in the Band Artery, had been doing some production of earlier Pulp things. If you don't, that's okay. That's why I'm here to tell you again on the fourth hour of the podcast. He's doing Pulp's live sound. You're like, why do I fucking care about that, Yasi? Fucking hold on, okay? I'm gonna tell you why you care about that. It's because he had a Canadian girlfriend named Suzanne Caddy and she worked at Hollywood Records. She had worked with Def Leppard, okay? And Per Oubou. She was cool. Or I don't know if she was cool or not, but she had a big Hollywood job. Record shop. She's pretty cool. Simon took her to the Pulp show at the lead mill and she fell in love.
2:36:02 Yasi Salek? Here's what she said. She was like, they had unbelievable talent and as much potential. It was insane that they weren't selling records. Jarvis was clearly one of the most talented classic stars of the last 20 or 30 years. I could see him filling stadiums even then. I believed I could make this band one of the biggest things on the planet. All right, Suzanne Caddy, let's go. At this point, they apparently went, Pulp went back to Fire and was like, okay, we don't like Separations anymore because it's five years old and we want to record new songs for it. But it's possible they weren't exactly being honest about that. Maybe they were just trying to find a new label. It's unclear. I don't want to throw stones. Let's just say that they're, they're doing some machinations and Suzanne Caddy is in their ear being like, Fire is probably a breach of contract, you guys.
2:36:46 Yasi Salek? So, you know, let's, we can maybe get around this. And then she gets Nigel Coxon, who I believe signed PJ Harvey and the Cranberries. Does that sound right to you?
2:36:59 Speaker 06 I think so. I think so, as far as I know.
2:37:02 Yasi Salek? Yeah, mover and shaker in the industry and David Gilmour from Island Records. She brings them out to see Pulp play and they get interested in signing Pulp. So that is why Simon Hinckler coming back in the mix was fucking important. Okay? At some point here, they play France for the first time. This is a big deal. Pulp is such a band that I truly understandable to me that they would be big in France. Do you agree?
2:37:27 Speaker 06 Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. There's something about it and I can't tell you why. I have absolutely no idea, but it's one of those things, isn't it? That it would just be got, if you see what I mean. They would get them.
2:37:39 Yasi Salek? One of my best friends is French and sometimes I'll bring up a band. She'll be like, yeah, we didn't have that here. That did not, that's not a thing that anyone cared about here. And then there'll be another band. She'll be like, oh yeah, huge here. And it's like, I could just like Sublime didn't make it in France, I don't think. Or perhaps Dave Matthews Band, not a big connection in France, but Pulp, yes.
2:38:01 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah. Something about it, isn't it?
2:38:03 Yasi Salek? Jarvis has a French thing about him.
2:38:05 Speaker 06 Do you think? Maybe. He got married to a French woman, as we know, for a little, little while.
2:38:10 Yasi Salek? Little while, has a tall son.
2:38:12 Speaker 06 Yes.
2:38:15 Speaker 06 He would have a tall Sunday, he wouldn't have a short Sunday, would he, there?
2:38:17 Yasi Salek? Yeah. They're a hit in France, is all I'm saying. Then, they come home, they play Subterranea in London and they get more glowing reviews from Melody Maker. Pulp is magic, Jarvis Cocker is a star. And then Select also, visually pulper, so fascinating that it's a shock when your mind returns to the music. They are the fall in Las Vegas.
2:38:40 Speaker 06 Hmm, interesting.
2:38:42 Yasi Salek? Select also said, and Jarvis Cocker, in case you missed the clues, is god.
2:38:47 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's quite a thing to say.
2:38:49 Yasi Salek? Russell, at this point, says about Jarvis, "One thing that would infuriate me about him was that he'd always been a brilliant performer, but he used to undermine it by taking the piss out of himself." Oh, who can relate, babe?
2:39:02 Yasi Salek? "He'd work up the audience and then be self-effacing and say, 'We're crap.' If there was a little sound problem, he'd go over to the sound engineer and threaten to smack him, and other ridiculous little absurd theatrics that didn't look dark and intense, but kind of stupid. In mid 1991, things had built up, but then fizzled out a bit, and we were still playing depressingly sad gigs to 70 people in London, and we were just shooting ourselves in the foot with that attitude." I almost had this argument with Jarvis, being pissed off with him for not being a proper pop star, and it seemed like the group would split up at that time. And then, for some reason, it started feeling pretty good, pretty much overnight. He stopped doing the 'I am a crap specky git', and seriously tried to be a proper pop star and sexy, rather than just a parody of a pop star.
2:39:47 Yasi Salek? I think he knew that we couldn't just carry on in our own little underground way, held together by a rubber band, so he started taking it seriously. I thought that was an interesting, really actually like astute observation of the difference between playing the parody of a pop star and seriously committing to a pop star. And I do feel like that's probably what changed things, you know? Like, because they were sort of joking before, right? Jarvis was a little joking.
2:40:18 Speaker 06 Well, it's the element of theatre, is the theatre a contrivance? Or is it enhancing what is already there within that person? It's about confidence and all those things that you can't pinpoint, these intangible things. And you can, you either sort of gain confidence or you don't. And it was just something that Jarvis got and think maybe the good reviews. And a slight interest are gonna help, but I understand what Russell, Russell means in, in that way is it's, it's, it's on a, again, all these things are on a pin. This, are they gonna make it? Are they not? Is a record gonna come out or is it not? Are you gonna be a charismatic pop star? Are you gonna be a bit of a twat?
2:40:57 Yasi Salek? Right, a bit of a specky, a specky.
2:40:59 Speaker 06 Yeah, and Russell's perceptive in, in, in that way. And I think Jarvis did get it, but yeah, he, he might not have been able to. World of Twist, for instance, never got to the point, if we're gonna talk about that. It, it just didn't take off. It just didn't lift off for whatever reason. And you don't have a charismatic singer within that band, bless them, but you don't. But Pulp just did something and I saw them around that time and I saw them live. And I think it was Mickey and Lush and me were in the audience telling every, afterwards telling everyone that they should go and sign them and do the press for them and do the, because they were the best band I'd ever seen at that point. It was absolutely shocking to me that that I, this is my voice, this is what I found. It was, they were.
2:41:36 Speaker 06 Playing the underworld in Camden and they had these frames round them with these shoes glued to the frames and a spray gold or something, because it was a, it was a shoegazing joke.
2:41:46 Yasi Salek? Right.
2:41:48 Speaker 06 I mean, it's shit. I mean, this is the thing, Russell's right, that's the theatre, that's the bit of the am drum stuff. And yeah, it was still the best thing that I'd seen for years.
2:41:57 Yasi Salek? It's really funny.
2:41:59 Speaker 06 It's idiots, eh? But you know, they were just brilliant. They were brilliant.
2:42:03 Yasi Salek? It's really funny, I think, for, maybe because given, again, the deep research I've done, it's like, how, how big of a deal shoegaze was at the time? And if you weren't into it, how annoying it was to people.
2:42:17 Speaker 06 Yes, because it was everywhere, yeah.
2:42:19 Yasi Salek? Because it was everywhere and you see it, like, people were like, I'm out here trying to do a fucking show, I'm putting on a fucking show for you people. And you wanna go look at that guy with feedback? Look at his fucking feet for an hour? And so I really like. If it wasn't the theatre part of it that really like connected with you and spoke to you, like, what was it about seeing Pulp that like flicked the light on for you?
2:42:42 Speaker 06 It was the subject matter of these very, the dingy sort of anecdotes and parables about sort of bad British sex.
2:42:51 Speaker 06 And a bit of disco. And a guitar bass sound, but also you have Candada's synth would take it somewhere else. And there's a lot of her, her playing, it's, her playing is really great, but she uses really silly noises over the top. You just hadn't seen bands meld it. They were either guitar bands, as you're saying, or they were grunge. Or they would be just doing something strange and a bit dancy. And there wasn't a melding of it at this point. And I think Pulp were the things of melding it. But Jarvis's lyrics were, he was coming from a place similar to Suede in some respects. He was building a world and you could go into that world. And his lyrics were very, him, they're very poetic. They're very of a thing and they are about, say, the shit aspects of life, but made beautiful.
2:43:34 Speaker 06 And that's always the, what, what you want is to see that, to see the diamonds glittering in the, in the gutter.
2:43:41 Yasi Salek? I love that at that time, again, I wasn't there, but from my studious reading of it, which is the, the best way to learn about anything. Of course, just to read about it thirty years later.
2:43:52 Speaker 06 Of course, yeah, you, you were there now, really.
2:43:55 Yasi Salek? And you can speak to it because it sounds like you were really at ground zero and you, so that means you, I'm sure you were also seeing Suede. You're also seeing Blur, right? Everyone's kind of playing.
2:44:05 Speaker 06 Yeah, they're all playing the same venues also.
2:44:07 Yasi Salek? Yeah, it sounds like maybe this is outside of Oasis, which seems to fall completely outside of what I'm about to say. Like this is maybe like a, a run, a through line of Britpop. It's like you had on offer many different bands who were in different ways presenting British life back to people, right? But in completely different ways. It's like Brett Anderson's version was like sordid, like gothy, dark, you know, this like sort of like romantic goth version of it.
2:44:38 Speaker 06 Yeah, bronte version of it.
2:44:41 Yasi Salek? And then you had Damon Albarn's like, oh, I missed a Yumi mother, like chimney sweep version.
2:44:46 Speaker 06 Yeah, when I'm cleaning windows, George Formby, if you've heard of him.
2:44:51 Yasi Salek? And then and then Pulp's version, which are all just kind of like.
2:44:55 Speaker 06 Pulp's version is Philip Larkin goes to the disco and so it was absolutely brilliant in that respect. That's what we really wanted. Yeah, I mean, you're spoilt for choice. And again, you're talking about the competition. It's when those bands know that someone else is playing around the corner or playing the next day at the same venue, they all up their game. They're really competitive at this point. Starts. This is where it really starts, people trying to up each other. And you know, they were, they would have seen Blur as rivals, Suede as rivals. And why not? Creatively, anyway.
2:45:23 Yasi Salek? Yeah. Were you also into Suede and Blur?
2:45:27 Speaker 06 Blur, we all used to know because he just used to hang around the pubs we hung around in. Yeah, I like them. Suede, I never really got till much later, actually. I didn't like the drama of it so much. It didn't appeal to me. I like the mundanity of life being reflected back in that way. But Pulp were, when I got it, Pulp were, my bad.
2:45:48 Yasi Salek? That was your thing. I love that.
2:45:49 Speaker 06 Tragically, but there you go.
2:45:52 Yasi Salek? I just want to point out that at this point in our story, Jarvis is still only twenty eight. So it's not like he's like a thousand years old, you know, he's, he's, he's simply twenty eight years old. Oh, look at this. January nineteen ninety two. Here's a quick little quote from Jarvis in an interview in NME with one Sean Patton. That's you. So you saw the play and then you were like, oh my god, hi, can I, I need to interview you. And you went to your boss and you were like, can I interview Pulp? Is that how that works?
2:46:22 Speaker 06 Yeah, probably. Yeah. My short-lived stint at the NME, because everyone at the NME hated each other at that point. And then I went to select. But yeah, I was there for a few months.
2:46:31 Yasi Salek? Don't forget Smash Hits. I liked all your little Smash Hits.
2:46:33 Speaker 06 Before, yeah, we used to just try and get the bands that we liked in Smash Hits, didn't we? You know, in amongst the stock eight kind of water.
2:46:40 Yasi Salek? Smash Hits is so like sassy magazine. You're like, and what are you wearing? And what's your favorite color?
2:46:47 Speaker 06 Yes, but those, those, no, we never asked that. What were you, what were you wearing is important because clothes are very important. It was what color is Tuesday is the question.
2:46:55 Yasi Salek? What color is Tuesday?
2:46:57 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:46:57 Yasi Salek? What does that mean?
2:46:58 Speaker 06 What if I ask you, what color is Tuesday?
2:47:01 Yasi Salek? Oh, that's a good, it's kind of a green, I think.
2:47:04 Speaker 06 Thank you. I asked someone recently, they said red. It's like, fuck you. It's green. It's so green. Yeah, that's what the question is and you'll get something out of someone. That's more of a sm- smash it's question. Have you ever grown cress in a hippopotamus, we used to ask?
2:47:15 Yasi Salek? Have you ever crested in a hippo?
2:47:18 Speaker 06 Have you ever grown cress in a hippopotamus?
2:47:21 Yasi Salek? Like water cress?
2:47:22 Speaker 06 No, no, little cress, little, little cress things. You used to have these terracotta animals as kids and you'd put
2:47:28 Yasi Salek? Oh, like chi, like a chi pet?
2:47:29 Speaker 06 Seeds round, yeah, yeah, and then it would come out. Th- those sorts of things. Then you get a very strange anecdote that no one would have ever related
2:47:36 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
2:47:37 Speaker 06 to anyone else.
2:47:38 Yasi Salek? That's when we used to be a proper society of music journalism.
2:47:41 Speaker 06 It's all fallen apart. Have you ever been sick in a gumboot?
2:47:44 Yasi Salek? I don't even know what a gumboot is, babe.
2:47:45 Speaker 06 Well, there you go.
2:47:49 Yasi Salek? Here's what Jarvis said to you, though, Sean. He said, I don't mind Nirvana.
2:47:54 Speaker 06 Nirvana, yeah.
2:47:55 Yasi Salek? He probably said Nirvana, but I've never liked music like that. It's lads music. When I was going to clubs, it would be the cult and everybody would do the chicken war dance. Babe, what, is that a moshing? What the fuck is the chicken war dance?
2:48:07 Speaker 06 Yeah, you see my elbows and I'm flapping like a chicken. You would do that at the front to kind of elbow people out of the way while kind of moshing and stamping. So it does look like a chicken war dance. He's right. Yeah, that's what kind of rock people would do and it's a, it's a throwback from psychobilly as well. Psychobilly was quite, if you're aware of that, was quite aggressive and quite fighty.
2:48:30 Yasi Salek? Like the Cramp.
2:48:31 Speaker 06 Yeah, exactly.
2:48:32 Yasi Salek? Noise is an easy thing to hide behind. If you make a lot of noise and shout behind that, nobody can tell what you're singing. It is show business after all. I think you have a duty to perform. You have to entertain people. But just because someone might wear a sequin jacket on stage doesn't mean they're instantly interesting to watch.
2:48:49 Speaker 06 You think that's a secret dig at World of Twist?
2:48:51 Yasi Salek? World of Twist, yeah, for sure. Hundred, a hundred million percent, that's a... I think there was a lot baked into that comment that is like, just shows a lot about pulp, right? Where it's like, I think pulp was the most I I think Brett Anderson would have agreed to an extent about the like importance of putting on a show and being an entertainer like obviously like that was very important. And you could see how that manifested in early Suede shows, you know, like, but like not all bands, especially in the nineties, were like, it's show business, Tinseltown, you know, like, that wasn't really the vibe.
2:49:30 Speaker 06 Yeah, we'd had, as we're saying, we'd had shoegaze and grunge was really popular here. And that was about authenticity, like we were talking about before. So the idea that you would have some kind of superficiality or some element of, as we're saying, we're using the word theater a lot, that's what they're talking about. So it wasn't necessarily in vogue yet, but it becomes in vogue.
2:49:51 Yasi Salek? Or you had the version of like Bobby Gillespie, who truly believed in the church of rock and roll. Like, he believed that rock and roll is like sacred and and part of that is performance, right? But yeah, but it had nothing to do with-
2:50:06 Speaker 06 Well, yes, but that's in an MC5 way. That's in an Iggy way. It's very different from the Las Vegas way.
2:50:12 Yasi Salek? Hundred percent. Exactly. So I'm saying it was like such a different, like, this was like a very, like, unique to Pulp stance. And he was very open about it. Whereas like, if you ask Kurt Cobain, he'd be like, I don't know what you're talking about. This is not, I have no, actually, I have no responsibility to entertain you.
2:50:28 Speaker 06 See, Pulp liked the fourth wall. The other bands didn't.
2:50:31 Yasi Salek? Totally, totally. That's such a good way of putting it. Anyways, who we want to get out of the fire contract? Suzanne Caddy, the Canadian, is working hard, round the clock, to legally prove that they had signed their contract under duress. She said, as we all know, a contract isn't worth the paper it's written on in many cases. And the band certainly did not have legal advice before they signed. So we felt pretty confident in our position. Plus, we had to move and Pulp were stagnating. So I put the fire under fire.
2:51:00 Speaker 06 Nice.
2:51:01 Yasi Salek? She said it.
2:51:02 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:51:02 Yasi Salek? In comes Gift Records. Gift Records is a subsidiary of Warp, who, if you'll remember, the founders, Rob Mitchell and Steve Beckett, were friends with Pulp from before because they were in that other band whose name I don't remember. And it's five pages up the dock and I'm not going to go back, but they were playing shows with them.
2:51:18 Speaker 06 Lay of the Land.
2:51:19 Yasi Salek? Yes, Lay of the Land. Good job. Wow. See, this is why you're here. Because you know things. I just have it written in a doc. And then Nigel Coxon is like, well, you know, we like pulp over here at Island Records. We'll pay for some demos, air quotes, which effectively meant they paid for the studio time that led to the singles that came out on Gift Records, which would be "Oh You", "Gone Gone" and "Space". Also done at this same time, but that don't come out till later, is a song called "Live On", which I don't know if that ever came out, and "Babies", which is going to be very important. They had Simon Hinckler produce it, but then they
2:52:02 Yasi Salek? were very unhappy with the results, so they brought in Ed Bueller, the ex keyboardist from the Psychedelic Furs, who I read in this book that he had done work with Spiritualized. However, as much as I dug around on AllMusic.com and could not find a credit for that, so maybe he had worked on it, but was uncredited, I'm not really sure. But he had also worked with Lush, right, on Gala as an engineer. The reason they liked the Spiritualized, this is what Jarvis said, "I'd heard his production on the Spiritualized LP, and he sounded able to work with keyboards rather than concentrating on guitars", to your earlier point about the specialness of pulp with Kandita having those synth lines and not just being a guitar
2:52:44 Speaker 06 man. And when we talk about separations, we can talk a bit about the production on that, where it really are between producers from separations then to this stuff. It really does make a difference.
2:52:54 Yasi Salek? It makes such a difference. I feel very, again, very bad for them, where they're like, once again, this album that we made so long ago is now coming out somewhere in the timeline that we don't. So they were good friends with Lush and Sean Patton at this point. And through that friendship, perhaps at your behest, they sign with Savage and Best, the world's greatest PR company.
2:53:15 Speaker 06 Bless you.
2:53:16 Yasi Salek? Or at least, in my estimation, the early 90s UK best PR company.
2:53:23 Speaker 06 They were well-known, good guys. No, they're great. John Best's great. Jane Savage is great and it was good that they found their home because without that Savage and Best became, as you know, really, really important. And it sort of sounds horrible and media-y to say that, but it wasn't. It was that they really champion bands that they loved and they were really good at their job. And they had a really good roster and there was something about pushing things forward and pushing creativity forward. And they were really behind the music. They went out all the time. They knew people. They were facilitators. You know, it's not superficial in what they were doing. And they had a lovely time too. I've seen them roll around on the floor. And why shouldn't they? I think it were, we didn't have phones then, we didn't have phones.
2:54:07 Speaker 06 You could do all this stuff and no one would know.
2:54:10 Yasi Salek? No one would know. I want to throw my phone in the fucking ocean.
2:54:13 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:54:14 Yasi Salek? Jeff Bezos, I need the time machine.
2:54:21 Speaker 02 They're running a cover two defense. But you're running to get game day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's watch party fed with deals from your go to restaurants. Or stock up with deals on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game day deals on Uber Eats all season long. It's not football without food. Uber Eats, order now. Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.
2:54:51 Speaker 03 Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code hack. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.
2:55:22 Yasi Salek? We've got Savage and Best, babe. Lush is our friends. Sean Patton is championing us at every turn. And guess what? Here's an important thing that Savage and Best did, rather surreptitiously, I must say, but in a very cool way. You could say Britpop is happening now.
2:55:39 Speaker 06 Hmm.
2:55:40 Yasi Salek? Well, it's burgeoning because what did Savage and Best do? Well, first, Suede gets on the cover of Melody Maker with the headline, "Suede: The Best New Band in Britain." Have they put out one singular note of recorded music on a purchasable format? The answer is no. They are the best new band in Britain. So that's happening. In May of this same year, just to reiterate, we're in 1992 now, Blur puts out "Modern Life is Rubbish." Oi, Mister, you mean mother. It's out there. It's happening. This is a few weeks before OU comes out. OU comes out and is named Single of the Week in Melody Maker alongside Suede's The Drowners, which I think they come out the same day. Here's what the person said.
2:56:25 Yasi Salek? "This is colossal, and already I'm torn between these two inspirational records. OU is three minutes of staggering poptasm. Sharing a similar disdain for the age of Suede, which of course makes it feverishly modern, its prime difference is that it is out of control. Jarvis Cocker's love life brims, it seems, with the elation that comes with phenomenal doubt, pain, and failure. Cherish and be damned is Pulp's implicit motto, while Suede are more the damn and be cherished type."
2:56:53 Speaker 06 Interesting.
2:56:54 Yasi Salek? You have to admit, these people were clever. You included amongst them.
2:56:58 Speaker 06 Me aside, but these are people who are absolutely obsessed with music. We lived and breathed it. You would go out and see bands in the evening and you would think about them all weekend. It wasn't like it was like a hobby or a job or something. You just lived it. So you would become very, very obsessed. And when something you liked, you really liked, you would just go all into it. I mean, it's embarrassing, really, the amount of the passion and drama from people who are just meant to be writing about something. But you really would. You'd just be all in it. And because London was where the music press, most of it was at the time, and London were all the bands were playing, you could see amazing bands every single night. And you thought it was gonna last, and it didn't. There you go.
2:57:37 Yasi Salek? Nothing will come stay, babe. This is another part that I really liked. Again, I say you can stuff kitsch. You can bury glamour in a pit. Give me life, real life in all its heart stretching, sweat drenched, love sick, splendor and swirl. These records have it, even if they like to disguise the fact. But hugely positive reviews of the OU single.
2:58:01 Speaker 06 And it's a great single. It's a great tune.
2:58:03 Yasi Salek? We tried to make the case that The Drowners was the first Britpop single. I mean, to the extent that Britpop is a real thing, I think it holds water.
2:58:14 Speaker 06 Yeah, it probably does, but you, I mean, you, you understand by now that no one likes the word and none of the
2:58:19 Yasi Salek? No, everyone hates it, but it's not, it's not my fault that it is a thing.
2:58:25 Speaker 06 It's not your fault. But it does become a thing, yeah.
2:58:27 Yasi Salek? It's, it's a thing and some people do play into it. So I'm, again, I'm simply here as a journalist after the fact, reporting from the front lines of 40 years ago.
2:58:37 Speaker 06 You know that Britpop was a term that had been used in the 60s.
2:58:40 Yasi Salek? Of course, yes.
2:58:41 Speaker 06 Yes, so Stuart Coney brings it back for the 90s, but it had been around, yeah.
2:58:46 Yasi Salek? All right, Pulp, we're, we're riding high. OU is doing great. We've somehow gotten around Fire Records by putting this out via Gift Records, which apparently Fire Records was like, that's fine, because that's just a little indie. Um, I don't know, this is speculation. But they did see the press, Fire Records, around OU and they were like, oh, people be caring about Pulp. Hold on, we have an album, we have a Separations album. And they put out a press release trying to frame Separations as a brand new Pulp album, coming on the tail of the OU single.
2:59:21 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:59:22 Yasi Salek? Again, I'm not really sure. The dates listed online are very confusing because according to the dates listed online, Separations comes out a week before OU. Don't, I don't know, but this is what
2:59:30 Speaker 06 I'm not sure actually.
2:59:31 Yasi Salek? Who can say? I don't know. But Separations finally does come out, June 19th, 1992. This was the album where they said, can you make us sound like a cross between Barry White and the Pet Shop Boys? And this is a great little tidbit, Alan Smythe, who is the producer. I think he was just an engineer, but they sort of elevated him to producer. He said, I'll never forget that because halfway through the sessions, a guy called Dave Palframan, who was sometime drummer for the Cocktoe Twins, walked in and he just stood there and said, bloody hell, this sounds like a cross between Barry White and Pet Shop Boys. And I thought, winner, I've done my job. That sounds like a fake story.
3:00:11 Speaker 06 Do you reckon?
3:00:12 Yasi Salek? I'm just gonna take it at face value. I don't want to get on this podcast and call Alan Smythe a liar. That's not what I'm here to do.
3:00:19 Speaker 06 That's not our job, is it?
3:00:20 Yasi Salek? That's not our job, no. He also said, we ran into problems straight away. I don't know if Nick would think, here's, here's the thing I love and no one else will love it. Cause once you, these books are all out of print and you kind of realize what part of the reason they're all out of print is because people were messy bitches who lived for drama. They'd just be saying anything. They'd just throw everybody under the bus. And unfortunately I do have access to eBay and I can get these books and I will read the quotes. So yeah, he said, Alan Smythe said, we ran into problems straight away. I don't know if Nick would thank me for saying this, but they'd asked me to do Barry White meets Pet Shop Boys, both of which are highly accurate playing and Nick Banks isn't, or wasn't at the time. We tried to do these things with MIDI going on and keyboards with him drumming along to it and it just wasn't happening.
3:01:05 Yasi Salek? It sounded a mess. I said to Jarvis, it's just not going to work because he's not accurate enough. So I had a drum machine at the time and I brought it down and said, Nick, here's the drum machine. Here's the book on how to use it. All credit to the guy. He didn't freak out. He did it. So he said, Nick Banks couldn't drum for his life, Ben.
3:01:23 Speaker 06 No, that has been said earlier, hasn't it?
3:01:26 Yasi Salek? Hey, that's fine. Listen, and Nick Banks wasn't like, whatever.
3:01:29 Speaker 06 It's hard. It's difficult.
3:01:30 Yasi Salek? It's hard. I can't drum. I can't do it.
3:01:33 Speaker 06 It's really difficult.
3:01:34 Yasi Salek? It's really hard. Have you, have you been in the band for six years? Yes, it's fine. It is not a big deal. Eventually you'll get it. It takes time. Love takes time. Can you talk to me about Separation? So now you're in the mix. These are your fucking roll dogs. These are your homies. And you love them. And then Separations comes out. What was the vibe? How did they feel?
3:01:58 Speaker 06 Well, it was a damp squib as far as I can remember. Someone had given me a-
3:02:01 Yasi Salek? A damp squib, you say? That's bad, right?
3:02:04 Speaker 06 Yeah, someone had given me a tape of it a few months before it came out. Because it'd been hanging around for so long. So I'd heard the songs. And there were nothing like they were played live. Now, you know, live at this point in time, they've really taken those songs and made them three dimensional. I've said this before and I will say it again, it is produced so badly. Bless Alan Smythe, but it's, I mean, it's terrible. The songs are terrible.
3:02:28 Yasi Salek? He didn't hesitate to throw Nick Binks under the bus.
3:02:31 Speaker 06 Why, exactly.
3:02:31 Yasi Salek? You can go ahead and throw Alan Smythe right under the bus.
3:02:33 Speaker 06 And I was listening to the remastered versions today. They still sound absolutely terrible. You know, where you just think, I don't know why this record is produced badly. But it's produced very badly. But I love the songs and they were really dear to me. And so this is where death comes in a lot. There's a lot of deaths in the lyrics.
3:02:51 Yasi Salek? She's dead, death too.
3:02:53 Speaker 06 It's about his leaving his girlfriend. I mean, and then splitting up and all this sort of thing. But I love the tracks. I mean, you know, I love Love is Blind. I think it's an amazing opener. They should have just produced it properly. Even Down by the River is really like maudlin. That's really good. Separation's great. It's got my legendary girlfriend on it. This House Is Condemned is absolutely hilarious. Shall we talk about that?
3:03:10 Yasi Salek? That's the acid house song, right?
3:03:12 Speaker 06 Yeah, Russell.
3:03:12 Yasi Salek? I quite like it. And the telephone- The little telephone going off in it?
3:03:17 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah. I think it's great.
3:03:19 Yasi Salek? That was an accident, but it works great. They kept it in.
3:03:21 Speaker 06 And had they got a remix done of it, or someone who knew that they were doing it, then that could have been a massive dance floor filler.
3:03:27 Yasi Salek? If they had just called Andrew Weatherall on the horn. Or Paul Oakey's Folds over there.
3:03:34 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:03:43 Yasi Salek? I mean, you were there, but it sounds like at this point they were like, um, please bury this fucking album in a goddamn pit.
3:03:49 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wasn't, wasn't what they were doing. And as I say, they do these songs live in the set quite a lot of separations and they're becoming something else and they're becoming, they're mixed with OU and the new songs coming through that everything's starting to sound uniform, something else and much, much better. And live is much better than this album ever recorded.
3:04:08 Yasi Salek? It's definitely market improvement from,
3:04:11 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:04:12 Yasi Salek? you know, say, It.
3:04:14 Speaker 06 It isn't It, no.
3:04:15 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
3:04:16 Speaker 06 Even I am fond of It. Yes, it's, we're getting there. We are very slowly getting there.
3:04:22 Yasi Salek? We're so close. We're so close, babe. Actually, you'll enjoy this. You said all the death songs. Countdown was actually initially called Death Three. And then they changed it to Countdown. A lot of death, a lot of death songs.
3:04:33 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:04:33 Yasi Salek? I like that Down by the River features Kandita on backing vocals, too. That's a nice little touch.
3:04:45 Yasi Salek? That song is from 1986. So, yeah, they're like, this album, things, but no things.
3:04:52 Speaker 06 It's a golf album, isn't it, really, I guess?
3:04:53 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
3:04:54 Speaker 06 Yeah. But Love is Blind still, I mean, I know I just said that, but.
3:04:57 Yasi Salek? You love it. What do you love about it?
3:04:59 Speaker 06 And love is blind. Um, it's because of the drama. I think it's because of life or death. The lyrics are really clever, but this idea, the histrionics in pulp, it becomes more and more. They realize they've got more to play with. You know, we're talking about Suede being a bit kind of, you know, overdramatic and everybody's sort of dying of consumption in the corner. We have Jarvis, who is going to, you know, literally throw himself into a river because his girlfriend's decided he's a bit of a twat.
3:05:37 Speaker 06 But you really feel it. And there's something about that earlier Russell quote that you were saying about Jarvis starts to inhabit the songs. And something is happening in the magic and the chemistry is happening here where you see. You see them play live and it's really coming from them. It's now proper.
3:05:53 Yasi Salek? Right. I love the Brett Anderson is dying of consumption. It is. It is. It is such a funny two sides of the same coin. I mean, maybe because I just immersed myself in Suede for fifty years. I really feel for them. They really should have made it in America. They have every aspect to have made it in America. Because, you know, Americans like that serious.
3:06:13 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:06:14 Yasi Salek? Uh, dour. We like that.
3:06:15 Speaker 06 Guitar rock, isn't it?
3:06:16 Yasi Salek? Love guitar rock. We love gorgeous people. We're very fond of gorgeous people over here. And Brett Anderson's cheekbones could cut glass. He's one of the most, all of them. Bernard was gorgeous, like.
3:06:28 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:06:28 Yasi Salek? Just all together, beautiful picture.
3:06:30 Speaker 06 Very tall band as well. And it's.
3:06:32 Yasi Salek? Tall band.
3:06:33 Speaker 06 Blur, Pulp and Suede are all very, very tall. I think that's got something to do with it, but I'm obsessed with height.
3:06:40 Yasi Salek? Me too. We're, um, we're called we're size queens, babe. Um, are you, are you a tall woman?
3:06:44 Speaker 06 I'm short. That's why I, I just, I don't actually hang around with anyone of my height. I just know to all people, cause they're much better. I hate shorties. Stupid.
3:06:54 Yasi Salek? Just you and Randy Newman.
3:06:57 Yasi Salek? And you know, it's very funny. This is, should have been in the Suede episode. The woman who went by Suede. Which is the reason that in America, they have to be called the London Suede, which I do believe killed their entire career in America. Still performs every year in like, uh, I want to say it's like Cape Cod or something. So at the, at the very least, she didn't ruin their career for nothing, you know?
3:07:25 Speaker 06 Well, that's being very generous, but why not?
3:07:28 Yasi Salek? Why not? So it's a real like up and down for Pulp. Oh, you. Yes. Best single in the world. Jarvis is God. Separations comes out. Oh, God, please don't look at that. Don't look at me. Don't look at separations. In July, they signed their publishing deal with Island. Okay, things are going great. Then they're about to record Babies. And that was supposed to be the first single on Island. And the night before they fire Suzanne Caddy, who I guess was kind of their manager at this point. Apparently it was Russell in particular, who is not very into her, especially when she tried to sort of like strong arm them into signing a proper management contract. According to Nick Banks, Russell hated constantly being told what to do by somebody.
3:08:11 Yasi Salek? As a manager is wont to do. Also, you know, I'm sure there was a cultural divide because, you know, us American and Canadians are forceful people. Not as light of a touch as perhaps a fellow Brit would have had.
3:08:26 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:08:26 Yasi Salek? I don't know. In the end, it was probably a good thing because I'm not a lawyer. I'm simply reporting back what I read. But apparently she had made a small mess of the situation with Fire Records. Because Pulp comes to realize, oh, no, we are actually definitely still signed to Fire Records. And Island cannot pay for us to record Babies because that is illegal. Because we are not allowed to do a single with another label. So then Suzanne was gonna pay for the recording, but then she was like, I won't do it unless you sign the management agreement, I guess.
3:09:03 Yasi Salek? And they were like, no. And instead Jarvis went to his grand and said, can I borrow five thousand pounds? I love it. I love it.
3:09:14 Speaker 06 It's great.
3:09:14 Yasi Salek? At every turn, God is like, oh, babe, humility, I'm gonna show it to you. Oh, you thought you were a Melody Maker Song of the Week? Jarvis is God. You need to go ask your grandma for money to make the next single.
3:09:27 Speaker 06 That's Britain. Yeah.
3:09:28 Yasi Salek? It's so good. And he went home to Sheffield and said, Grandma, Graham, I need five thousand pounds.
3:09:37 Yasi Salek? Alright, so after they pay for the baby's recording with Jarvis's grandma's loan, they learn that in all the wheeling and dealing of Suzanne, Island had actually also not been told that Pulp were still signed to Fire, and Pulp had not been told that Island had not been told, and therefore they could not cash the cheque they had just received from Island Publishing, because then they would be in breach of contract with Fire's publishing arm twist and shout music.
3:10:06 Speaker 06 This is the point where the grandma needs to start a record label.
3:10:09 Yasi Salek? You were there. Why didn't you recommend that?
3:10:12 Speaker 06 Funny enough, yeah, see, they didn't tell me about this stuff. It was like, "Yeah, you're signed to Island, come down and have a drink." It wasn't the, oh, but well, they thought they had signed to Island at that point. They, they, there was just lots of mutterings and mumblings. They didn't really discuss those things, and I was too stupid to ask any of that stuff. I'd be just like, "Can you buy me a drink, please? Let's all roll around."
3:10:32 Yasi Salek? You got some Island money, could I have a pint?
3:10:34 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
3:10:35 Yasi Salek? Steve Mackey said, "Suzanne Caddy kept us in the dark. We are now very literate in all aspects of the music business, but back then, we just wanted to release a record, and she told us we could free ourselves without much hassle." She had that Canadian-American, "They won't fuck with me" attitude, and she was so wrong. It's really more American than Canadian, so.
3:10:55 Yasi Salek? So anyways, what that happens is they use Gift Records as a smokescreen to put out records. So Island would pay Gift to put the Pulp records out, which this kind of worked because they got to be, this is genius, because they got to be perceived, and you tell me, as being on a cool indie, right?
3:11:17 Speaker 06 Hmm, yeah, yeah. It was beneficial. And it was kind of made for them as well, so that's even cooler, isn't it? When you've got a record label that's just yours.
3:11:24 Yasi Salek? Yeah. And so was that the sort of perception of Pulp at the time? With these singles, was like, "Oh, they're like a cool indie band?"
3:11:31 Speaker 06 Absolutely. But what was super cool, and because they weren't exclusively indie, they're an electronic label. It really helped Pulp. It took them out of that kind of playing the Nottingham Roadmenders aspect and put them somewhere else. So set them apart as well from something like Suede.
3:11:48 Yasi Salek? Given the warp connection to, it's actually like somewhat of a miracle that they didn't put out an acid house song, like a real one, like a dance remix, you know?
3:11:57 Speaker 06 Yeah, so again, it was one of those things that was quite factionalized then. And I've read back some of the press of the time, as you obviously have. And there are points where bands get asked, you know, I'm not sure, you know, we like this, say journalists, you're a guitar band, but you seem to have a dance element to you. Are you one or the other? A lot of bands get asked this at the time, it seemed to be really no diversity. And you can see how white Britpop is at this point. It starts to become a bit more diverse, but it's slightly embarrassingly post guitar rock here. I say with all of those, it's still skinny white boys, a lot of it.
3:12:33 Yasi Salek? Totally, totally. The, the bread and butter of UK rock music. Skinny white boys, tall, apparently, apparently tall skinny white boys. Okay, now it's time to find a new manager because they fired Susan Caddy. John Best puts them in touch with Jeff Travis, who you guys will know from listening to this podcast, was the founder and is the founder of Rough Trade Records and just moved into management, taking on the Cranberries. And Nick Bang said, I remember him saying, yes, you're in a shit situation. I'm not surprised no one wants to touch you with a barge pole, but I do. I love the group. I don't mind getting into a sticky situation. I'll take it on board. And it was like, great, someone who seems genuinely nice, with such a great track record of being involved in great projects.
3:13:17 Yasi Salek? So it was, right, let's get things moving. Travis said, Jarvis came into the office and sat down and talked for about two or three hours, telling me his tale of woe. It intrigued me enough to say to Jeanette, Jeanette Lee, hi, Jeanette, let's go and see them play. They were kind of a cross between the Rolling Stones, Roxy Music and Manfred Mann. Every single song they played in their set seemed like a classic single to me. It was a really exciting mixture of all the best virtues of 60s pop, but in a totally fresh way. They just seemed a very classy English band to me. Jarvis said this, "I had a very jaundiced view of the music business until I met Jeff Travis. Him and Jeanette and the people at Rough Trade convinced me that there were some actual human beings still working in the music business rather than reptiles."
3:14:01 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's good, isn't it? And they're still good, Jeff and Jeanette.
3:14:04 Yasi Salek? Yeah, I've never met Jeff, but I'm a big fan of Jeanette Lee on here on this podcast. We love Jeanette Lee.
3:14:09 Speaker 06 Yeah, she's brilliant. Hello, Jeanette. We love you.
3:14:11 Yasi Salek? And again, the point of these quotes is that taking on pulp was a nightmare because they had created the worst legal situation on earth for themselves.
3:14:20 Speaker 06 It was an enormous gamble.
3:14:22 Yasi Salek? Enormous gamble.
3:14:22 Speaker 06 Because they hadn't proved that they hadn't had any hits, remember? They've got all these cool singles coming out, the enemy going, "Oh, that's great." And we're all going, "Yeah, it's great." But they have no track record and also they've been going for so long.
3:14:33 Yasi Salek? No sales, no charting hits.
3:14:36 Speaker 06 No, and you've been going for 35 years and you haven't made it. So it was one of those things, people just did it out of the love for it. Whereas a lot of, a lot of music business people do think, okay, this is a cert. We've got the stats, we know what's going to go on, we can do this, that and the other with them. Can't with pulp. Pulp's just like, "Oh, we'll just do it and if it fails, it fails." And it didn't.
3:14:55 Yasi Salek? And it didn't, thank God. We like it when good people have good things happen to them. So yeah, poor Jeff Travis spends like one full year of his life trying to untangle them from that Fire Records deal. And then Babies comes out, October 5th, 1992. Island Records, produced by Ed Buehler. Now we are fucking cooking with gas. I have in my notes here, "We are pulp. It is pulp. Pulp has happened." It only took 27 years, as you said, but and OU was definitely like very much like the rehearsal of this, but Babies?
3:15:32 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:15:32 Yasi Salek? Let's fucking go. This song is so good. I'm sorry, it's so good.
3:15:37 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:15:37 Yasi Salek? Why is it so good? I don't know. Jarvis said, "What struck me was how sexless pop music had become. I thought I could see a gap in the market." I mean, sex is constantly on people's minds, isn't it? But in pop, it gets written about in such stupid or nebulous ways, even though it rules people's lives. This song is ostensibly about being like a peeping Tom Voy.
3:15:58 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Normal. A little edgy too. Yeah, but that's, that's pulp, isn't it? It's gonna go there. We don't have to go there. Pulp will.
3:16:15 Yasi Salek? He said, "At the side of intake primary school is Stan Hope Road", which turned up in a Pulp song years later called Babies. And it was funny because I was out in Sheffield the other night and I got to talking to these two girls. And one of them said they'd moved on to Stan Hope Road because it was mentioned in the song Babies. And I said, "Oh, that's a shame."
3:16:38 Yasi Salek? Imagine letting the real estate of your life be determined by the lyrics of a Pulp song.
3:16:43 Speaker 06 Well, people probably do that, don't they?
3:16:45 Yasi Salek? Once again, I don't think it charted. December of 1992, in the enemy Christmas issue, it included Damon Albarn's Tips for the Next Year, like, who to look out for. And he said, "Smashing Pumpkins and Suede."
3:17:01 Speaker 06 Very generous of him, isn't it?
3:17:03 Yasi Salek? I feel like it was like four dimensional chess on his part. I don't want to like put words into Damon Albarn's mind, but I feel mentioning Suede was somehow some sort of game theory. I can't prove it, but...
3:17:14 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
3:17:15 Yasi Salek? He's like, "I have my eyes on you. I'm here." But Smashing Pumpkins surprised me. Miranda damn near fell out of her chair. She was like, "That's not a good band." And I was like, "Excuse me, this is an American podcast." And on this podcast, we love Smashing Pumpkins.
3:17:29 Speaker 06 Yeah, I met Smashing Pumpkins on the side of Miranda Sawyer.
3:17:32 Yasi Salek? Okay, well, you can't go based on the personality of the person. That is not...
3:17:39 Speaker 06 They're very similar to Suede, aren't they? It's all histrionics and nobody loves me, isn't it?
3:17:44 Yasi Salek? Yeah, it's great, wonderful. I mean, Brett Anderson seems like a far more likeable person than Billy Corgan. But again, I don't know. I mean, listen, I could never listen to The Smiths again if I was going personality based on my rock stars, you know? You have to leave a little room for...
3:18:01 Speaker 06 Indeed, separate the artist.
3:18:02 Yasi Salek? Exactly. Okay, actually, in the top of 1993, Pulp does open for Suede in France. That's a moment. They put out another single on Gift, "Rasmataz". I didn't remember this one. It's not as good as Babies, but it's... They're building on to the lore of Pulp.
3:18:19 Speaker 06 Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
3:18:20 Yasi Salek? It charted at number 80. So, okay, we made it in the top one hundred.
3:18:25 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:18:26 Yasi Salek? I don't know that's that important, but and that's I'm talking about the UK eighty. So of the eighty singles, the hundred singles that were out in the UK at that time.
3:18:36 Speaker 06 It was one of them.
3:18:37 Yasi Salek? Rasmus has a non-album single, so it didn't actually end up on one of the albums. It also got single of the week. I did think it was interesting that the way they wrote it, according to Nick Banks, was that Jarvis bought this like old Korg Trident synth for Kandita to play. And the sound of it was the beginning of the song. And that happened a lot for them. Apparently also with OU Jarvis had brought a stylophone. And Nick Banks said, a new bit of equipment brought in was often the catalyst to write new songs. And once again, bolstering your point about them being both a synth band.
3:19:12 Speaker 06 Yeah, absolutely. A lot of bands, as you know, write, write around the preset because they're lazy bastards. Um, and they do that and then they try and cover it up. Then why not?
3:19:22 Yasi Salek? Why not? I don't care how you write it.
3:19:24 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:19:25 Yasi Salek? I don't care.
3:19:25 Speaker 06 Just stick one finger on a thing and then just write a song.
3:19:27 Yasi Salek? It's fine.
3:19:27 Speaker 06 Don't need to even two chords.
3:19:29 Yasi Salek? Catchy and emotional is all I care about. I don't care how hard it was for you to write. I don't care if I was, okay, Radiohead, you know, I mean, also Radiohead did a good job, but you didn't, you don't have to be Radiohead. You can three chords.
3:19:39 Speaker 06 Most of us are, yeah.
3:19:42 Yasi Salek? All right. Here's where it's really Britpop, where Savage and Best really are like, watch this bitch. It is Brett Anderson on the cover of Select, where they did superimpose him over Union Jack without his knowledge or um approval. With the headline, Yanks Go Home. But more importantly, they list five bands that are sort of, again, doesn't really say Britpop, but this is really a Britpop moment. Obviously you're in front of the Union Jack. And these are the five bands, Suede, Seidatien, Denim, Pulp, The Autiers, and The Battle For Britain. There was a quote, which I didn't write down here, but I either John Bass, I think it was John Bass was like, really?
3:20:22 Yasi Salek? Like, we use this as a way to sort of Trojan horse pulp into the conversation. Where like Suede was already, because they were also doing Suede, but they're like, Suede was already like big and being, you know, feted left and right.
3:20:36 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:20:37 Yasi Salek? We were like, and Pulp. Pulp in the list. Put this in the, and of those bands, it seems only Pulp and Suede seem to have really.
3:20:47 Speaker 06 Yes, well, we know, St. Etienne have still done kind of, they still have a huge kind of solid fan base.
3:20:53 Yasi Salek? Sure, sure.
3:20:54 Speaker 06 And they are sort of really, really revered here. Denim obviously then becomes go-kart Mozart, Mozart Estate is ex-felt.
3:21:03 Yasi Salek? And denim, very cool. And the auteur is also very cool and very underrated, but I'm just saying in the Britpop canon, if you will.
3:21:11 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:21:12 Yasi Salek? Pulp and Suede take their places in the Mount Rushmore of Britpop.
3:21:16 Speaker 06 Yes. Yeah, it was clever all around. It was lots of people being very clever and I thought that that cover was awful.
3:21:24 Yasi Salek? You hated it because we hate the Union Jack.
3:21:27 Speaker 06 Yeah, and it was at a time also there's loads of National Front in this country. There was a kind of neo, pre neo fascist thing going on. Just a normal neo fascist thing going on and I felt it was really a bit too overt, but that's what I felt. I didn't work there yet. I, I think in a few months I end up working at Select. But at that point I thought was too brash, but it was talked about and that's what they want.
3:21:49 Yasi Salek? I think Brett Anderson also hated it. Also probably the neo fascist.
3:21:52 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:21:52 Yasi Salek? Moment plus his haircut. It's too much visually, you know?
3:21:56 Speaker 06 I'm not sure he likes his tummy at that stage.
3:22:00 Yasi Salek? Here's a quote from the Select piece inside of that issue about Pulp. Pulp are the world's most patient overnight sensation. The punk rock roots in Sheffield, the naive first album, the naive second album, Mo's envy, the wheelchair, art school, the timely dawn of crimplism. We haven't talked about crimplism yet and I don't even know. Crimplenism, can we even, can we even open that can of worms?
3:22:23 Speaker 06 We can. It's not as interesting as it sounds.
3:22:25 Yasi Salek? Fifteen years in a rayon shirt. This person just did the entire first three hours of this podcast in one paragraph. And we could have just said, I could have just said that and called it a day.
3:22:37 Speaker 06 Oh, well, we've got to this point. We should continue.
3:22:40 Yasi Salek? Yeah, we're maximalist here. Crimplin is a fabric.
3:22:44 Speaker 06 Yes, it's a nylon fabric. And so Britpop was called a few things beforehand, and one of them was the crimplin scene. Which no one remembers, like they don't remember the lurch scene, although I think the lurch scene is fairly better known than the crimplin scene.
3:22:56 Yasi Salek? The lurch scene?
3:22:58 Speaker 06 Yeah, the lurch scene is pre-Shoegaze.
3:23:01 Yasi Salek? Were they lurching?
3:23:01 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were lurching around and it was sort of between psychobilly and shoegaze. So it was rocky, it had no form or function, but you could lurch to it. And I think it was Stephen Mack that invented lurch scene. At least he liked the lurch scene.
3:23:15 Yasi Salek? I don't work in marketing, but crimplin doesn't quite roll off the tongue the way Britpop does.
3:23:22 Speaker 06 Which is why it didn't really last. It lasted a couple of weeks. Yeah, there was a start, right, kids? Although that's kind of also cutie and that's twee and that's eighties as well. There were all sorts of things were coming up because people were toying with what to call it. So some of these eighties terms were being used, then crimplin scene, and there was another one that I can't remember. And then it just became Britpop.
3:23:42 Yasi Salek? It's really occurred to me just now. I don't know why it took so long. My god, that, those shirts do not breathe.
3:23:50 Speaker 06 No.
3:23:51 Yasi Salek? And you're just sweating on stage every night.
3:23:54 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, they hold it all in.
3:23:55 Yasi Salek? And you're probably not going to the dry cleaner. And I know it's the UK. There was no washer dryer in the home, so.
3:24:02 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's a bit icky. It's a bit yucky. But I mean, that's what he was wearing. He was getting them from charity shops. It was real.
3:24:09 Yasi Salek? Sure. At least Brett Anderson had a good system where he would just have someone rip it off every night. So then it was just a new one every day.
3:24:15 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:24:16 Yasi Salek? It's the Lip Gloss EP now, November fifteenth, nineteen ninety-three. You, you were saying that you feel that lip gloss and babies sort of have a similar vibe and song structure and.
3:24:28 Speaker 06 Yeah. And there's the idea of this idea of this notion of superficiality, the lip gloss and cigarettes. And I also think.
3:24:37 Speaker 06 I kind of know some of the people that he was talking about when he wrote that song. Some of the people that started hanging around that he liked and he didn't like. It's it's a formation of a scene is then the formation of people who want to hang around a scene. If you see what I mean, even if it's subconscious, even if it's happening sort of by happy accident. And this is the point before he writes Lip Gloss, there are these girls and there are these boys. And suddenly the audience changes and people want to be seen with him and with the bands, even if it's just a sense of just standing next to them, do you know what I mean? And this song, I think, is always about this and about this idea of uh where the realness is and where the superficiality is. Uh he's trying to toy with that. He then spends the next few years of the of these lyrical themes.
3:25:20 Speaker 06 Babies, yeah, a little bit different, but you can see the tendrils of it.
3:25:32 Yasi Salek? You know what, it's funny, you you mentioned this and I now I'm like, oh, there's a little bit of the like seed of common people here too.
3:25:40 Speaker 06 Yes, that's what I was sort of trying to get to, that's what I'm saying it really.
3:25:44 Yasi Salek? Like the idea of this woman who needs to call her dad on the phone.
3:25:49 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:25:49 Yasi Salek? To determine when she can, it sounds like get money or stay or go.
3:25:54 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
3:25:55 Yasi Salek? And her whole thing is trying to sort of be part of this scene by being around it and being around the men of it.
3:26:05 Speaker 06 And this is the point where I start knowing people who who actually talk in serious terms about the scene. Are you going down? Are you gonna see the scene? I thought people actually say things like that. Very clubby and the clubs are now really, I hesitate to use the word explode because they're not literally exploding. The clubs in London are becoming filled with the same people. The scene is getting sort of, as I say, uh more cemented. So it's getting bitchier and say some elements more superficial. So that's all coming in and Jarvis is seeing it and starting to write about it. The club called Smashing, which you will have heard about and all those sorts of things were were now oversubscribed and Mick Jagger is being turned away at at this point or just just after.
3:26:49 Speaker 06 Which is hilarious. I mean, smashing was very good, good fun, but it becomes trendy and then it's it's less good fun.
3:26:55 Yasi Salek? And you get the sense that like, no matter what. Jarvis is like, he's still writing from the perspective of an outsider, right? Even though he is being feted as like, I mean, and he's not as famous as he's going to be, but he's being feted as God and single of the week or whatever. He's not still, he's not quite yet a pop pop star. We haven't gone on top of the pop.
3:27:18 Speaker 06 No, it's not that point. Yeah.
3:27:20 Yasi Salek? He's definitely like an integral figure of this small scene. But yeah, it's, it's from the perspective of an outsider with sort of a.
3:27:30 Speaker 06 And this Jarvis is desperately trying to cling on to this too, because at this point Jarvis and Steve go out a lot. And they look, you know, they've got the brown on, there's a lot of corduroy, there's a lot of ray on and crinkling. And yet they are quite trendy and they've been to St. Martin's. So they are trying not to be that superficial lot. And yet they're still skirting that and they're starting to meet people in film and fashion and all those sorts of things. Yeah, Jarvis starts to write about fashion and girls of that ilk.
3:27:56 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
3:27:57 Speaker 06 So he's still deciding, you know, am I an outsider or am I within the firmament? And how do I get myself out of the firmament if I don't want to be in it?
3:28:04 Yasi Salek? We talk about the music scene a lot here, but it's worth mentioning that like this scene that you're describing was also filled with, like you said, like Damien Hirst, that there was like new British artists, Tracey Emin, filmmakers, writers, there was a whole crop of like young, hot, British art talent that were sort of within this scene.
3:28:25 Speaker 06 Yes. Not that I would have noticed any of them if they'd hit me over the head with a hammer, but there were those people that, yeah, I think.
3:28:39 Yasi Salek? All right. We've entered 1994. Music has changed, right? I think, again, while Britpop and all this was such a reaction to grunge, grunge lasted for three and a half minutes. So grunge is over. It's 94. It's already done. Kurt Cobain dies this year. Like, may he rest in peace. It's morphed into something that's just more like general alternative rock.
3:29:03 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:29:04 Yasi Salek? But this is when Britpop really picks up and goes running. Oh my God, who do we have here? Sean Patton for a magazine that I've never heard of, but I'm deeply interested in now called Just Seventeen.
3:29:14 Speaker 06 Yes.
3:29:15 Yasi Salek? Here's what you asked Jarvis, "Do you have a style tip for the Just Seventeen readers?" And he said, "Let me have a think about this. Subtle hair coloring is good. I've got a hint of plummy red in mine at the moment by glints, I think." It works too well, though. It was supposed to wash out in four washes. I put it in mid-November and it's still going strong.
3:29:34 Speaker 06 Means he didn't wash his hair, doesn't it? Glints.
3:29:37 Yasi Salek? Oh my god, he didn't wash his hair and he was wearing the nylon shirts. This is really upsetting for me.
3:29:44 Speaker 06 Just glued, brown, whatever, mahogany, whatever he's got in it. Plummy red collar.
3:29:49 Yasi Salek? Just no breathing in the pores. Nothing. April eighteenth, nineteen ninety-four is when Pulp puts out, for the first time in their beloved twenty-five-year career, an album I think that matches both temporally and stylistically what they were really trying to do at the moment.
3:30:15 Speaker 06 At last, yeah.
3:30:17 Yasi Salek? It happened.
3:30:18 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:30:18 Yasi Salek? Okay, let's talk about his and hers. First, again, your boots on the ground.
3:30:23 Speaker 06 Hmm.
3:30:24 Yasi Salek? What was the general feeling like amongst, first, can you tell me like amongst the pulps when this album came out? And then also amongst like the rest of the scene, like was, was it kind of a big deal?
3:30:37 Speaker 06 As far as I remember, yeah, it was a lot of people like, we're kind of cheering at this, coming out and being, you know, oh, look, their worldview is now out on a record. After all this time. Yeah, it's, you know, the boys have come home. It's, it's really exciting. It's really good and people really behind them. There's an enormous feeling of optimism. Yeah, it's something that they've actually got there. They've got to that point. And I mean, I mean, it's fairly bland, but I can't be anything but blandly saying this was all fairly brilliant and, you know, watch them go. And we wanted them to be successful. It felt exciting and new and...
3:31:13 Speaker 06 Say again, it's giving a voice. They still had the misfit thing. They still have at this point, you know, outsider thing.
3:31:19 Yasi Salek? Right.
3:31:20 Speaker 06 They're not coming in. You know, the cover being that very strange fan art idea.
3:31:24 Yasi Salek? I love it. I love it so much.
3:31:27 Speaker 06 It's so them. And at this point, the merch is getting really good. So you know that they're starting to really think about the visuals and it all coming together. And then what else that they can do with what's coming out and the promotional items they can do. So at this point, yes, ve- very blandly, we're all happy. This is brilliant and this is wonderful and they're really happy. And half the band is still in London, half the band is still in Sheffield, but it seems to work. And I'm sure they moaned in the spare time, but they looked happy enough.
3:31:58 Yasi Salek? I love his and hers. His and hers is, it really works for me on every level. I wrote in my, I mean, first of all, the first song, the chorus being, hey, you in the Jesus sandals. So evocative, really. Wouldn't you like to come over and watch some Vandals? What an amazing rhyming scheme there.
3:32:18 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:32:28 Yasi Salek? It feels to me, and I said this before, but I feel like this is where it really, really is a salient point, that Jarvis has nailed doing what he does best, which is these little vignettes of British life, this little mini country, little kitchen sink dramas in the style of Morrissey, his sworn enemy. But again, Morrissey's were the, like you said, dying of consumption, woe is me, the world is against, everything is the worst. I'm gonna die alone, nobody loves me.
3:32:58 Speaker 06 Yes.
3:32:58 Yasi Salek? And this is missing that element. It's more just perverted.
3:33:02 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:33:03 Yasi Salek? And fun and arch, you know? These like, it's just these perfect little observational vignettes that. Hey you in the Jesus sandals, just the vision. Also, this, for those at home who care what my favorite Pulp song is, this album has my favorite Pulp song on it, which is Pink Glove.
3:33:20 Speaker 06 Pink Glove.
3:33:21 Yasi Salek? I live.
3:33:21 Speaker 06 Why do you like it so much?
3:33:23 Yasi Salek? I don't know. I think it's really emotionally kind of gut punching for me. Like, there's a real bittersweet sadness to this song, like in a yearning, and I really like that.
3:33:45 Speaker 06 But there is a sadness to Pulp when they are really good. It's, there's something about what is lost in their songs.
3:33:52 Yasi Salek? Totally.
3:33:52 Speaker 06 What is gained and what is lost. And at this point, remember that Jarvis isn't super famous, so he really, really loves going to junk shops and charity shops and just fucking about. And he likes just spending an hour looking at the record rack in something. And he can do this now, so he's happy, because he hasn't got to the point where everyone's stopping him, which does come, and he finds really difficult. And so, there's a real element of freedom to it. And this is saying, he's found his voice. Lyrically, he's really found his voice. He can really push this. And he's, there's not a death in the title on this album, so it's a relief he got that out of his system.
3:34:28 Yasi Salek? He's done with that. Now it's more just asking some questions. Have you seen her lately?
3:34:34 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:34:34 Yasi Salek? Do you remember the first time?
3:34:36 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:34:37 Yasi Salek? Hey you in the Jesus sandals.
3:34:38 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:34:38 Yasi Salek? It's, it's a phenomenal album, really great. Hits number nine in the UK album charts. It is nominated for the Mercury Prize. It's a big deal.
3:34:48 Speaker 06 Hmm, tis.
3:34:49 Yasi Salek? Jarvis said in a TV interview at the time that a lot of this album is about couples and their issues. Like we said, a little mini kitchen. But also relatable, right? Like, you, you said this earlier, like, just the little sad little British sex lives, but
3:35:02 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:35:03 Yasi Salek? that's what people care about, especially people that are young.
3:35:08 Speaker 06 Yeah, all the disappointments. You know, American music, I love you all, you lovely Americans, but it often tells you, you know, about the, you know, we rock and we do this and life is this. And British music's like, we're all a little bit upset at the moment because we didn't get off with, you know,
3:35:24 Yasi Salek? Sure.
3:35:25 Speaker 06 The girl down the street and the brass that broke and everyone's a bit hungry and what's have a tea.
3:35:32 Yasi Salek? It's all a little with Neil and I, yeah, but it's all about the the yearning for something more.
3:35:38 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:35:39 Yasi Salek? Which I do think is also the through line in American alternative.
3:35:42 Speaker 06 It probably is. I was just making a point and generalizing, but you know what I mean?
3:35:45 Yasi Salek? Just express it differently.
3:35:47 Speaker 06 But yeah.
3:35:48 Yasi Salek? Black Hole Sun, Won't You Come? Um, it's a little different. I mean, the Pixies kind of nailed this also pre, pre all of this.
3:35:57 Speaker 06 But the Pixies are surreal and Pulp aren't surreal.
3:35:59 Yasi Salek? Sure.
3:36:00 Speaker 06 Pulp are very rooted in the everyday.
3:36:02 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
3:36:02 Speaker 06 And I think that's the difference.
3:36:04 Yasi Salek? It's early to make this point, but I just want to say it before I forget. I think that sometimes there's a criticism of when bands do become famous and then the preoccupations of their music and lyrics are about having become famous. But I think that's sort of an unfair criticism because I think it can be and it is done by pulp, but it can be done well. Because actually, like, that's all of life for everybody. It's not necessarily about becoming famous, but all of life for every person is imagining a future in which everything is better because of X, Y, Z. It can be anything. I got this job. I got a boyfriend. I got a
3:36:45 Yasi Salek? marriage. I had a child, right? Like, placing your happiness in the future based on whatever thing it is you feel that you need to have different in your life. And then getting on the other side of it and being like, oh, gosh darn it. Ha ha. That didn't fix anything, you know? And actually, oh, my God, some, in some ways, things are worse. So I just, so I do think that that can be really relatable and it just so happens that for pop stars, it's becoming famous usually, you know, that is the thing that they've been striving for, that they're like, it'll fix everything and then it doesn't.
3:37:20 Speaker 06 It doesn't at all.
3:37:21 Yasi Salek? But we're not there yet. We're not, we're not quite so famous yet.
3:37:24 Speaker 06 We'll get to that point.
3:37:26 Yasi Salek? His and hers is fetid, it is beloved, the enemy gives it an eight out of 10. They have to, so mean. Who was that Brett Giezer anyways? Why do we, why does Brett Anderson have to catch straight? Why can't, why can't these, why is it always, it's not these bands pitted against each other all the time?
3:37:44 Speaker 06 It's always a competition in this country. It's always a competition.
3:37:48 Yasi Salek? I love it. I'm like Brett Anderson is fucking dead in a ditch underneath a Gothic vampire house.
3:37:53 Speaker 06 It's World of Twist, it's someone else, you know, it's Morrissey, it's like all these people.
3:37:58 Yasi Salek? That's so good.
3:38:00 Speaker 06 See, World of Twist references have gone, haven't they?
3:38:02 Yasi Salek? Yeah, we've, now it's Swayed and Blur, only poor World of Twist.
3:38:07 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:38:07 Yasi Salek? Select said, "They've skillfully turned Sheffield into a soft-focus British everytown that David Lynch would recognize if he'd had a decent, comprehensive education. And it's not a million miles from the nameless new town Dead Zone portrayed on Blur's Modern Life is Rubbish. But where Damon Auburn's version is a nightmare community of blank faces, Jarvis takes us into the kitchens and parlors and bedrooms to show us what? To show us a city going mad with frustration, ennui, and stoppered-up lust."
3:38:33 Speaker 06 And I know that you were talked extensively about Blur and that album. But I've always felt that Damon is a good songwriter, but the lyrics often come from a stance of him looking down on people. He's separate from them. He's observing other people doing things that he doesn't always approve of. Whereas Jarvis is observing human behavior that he understands and that he relates to. It's a really different view. With Jarvis, you know that he thinks that everyone is, is a misfit as he is. That that person over there is, you know, is one of us. And what are they doing? And why does that mean something to me? And what am I doing with my life? There's never a snootiness or a looking over, I always think.
3:39:12 Yasi Salek? That was sort of my argument also when we did the Blur episode. Because those early Blur albums, I have like no emotional connection to, because on top of everything, I'm not British. So I'm like, I don't even literally fucking know what we're talking about, sir. You know what I mean?
3:39:26 Speaker 06 Yeah.
3:39:27 Yasi Salek? For me, Blur really works when Damon Albarn's like, "I'm gonna look inward now." And you're like, "Oh, look what you had inside." All this beautiful, personal emotion.
3:39:36 Speaker 06 When something goes horribly wrong and, you know.
3:39:39 Yasi Salek? You know, Justine Fishman, the great muse of both the great artist and a great muse, and responsible for so much wonderful music at the hands of herself and other people. Who else can say that? Deeply obsessed with her. One of a kind, one of a kind person. What we said about Blur was that Blur is doing art and Oasis was doing music and Pulp is doing both. You know what I mean? Whereas like, it's like Blur had this like art project of the idea of like, "Look, like, we're really looking, what if British life? And let's talk about it and let's frame it." And the way Pulp is doing is so, so much more naturalistic. It's still art, but it's also from within, like you said, instead of from outside.
3:40:24 Yasi Salek? "We're gonna put a pin in Pulp's saga epic Homeric Odyssey of a story at this juncture and we'll come back to see what happens. Does Pulp finally break through to full pop stardom? You already know what happens, but you wanna hear the details, you wanna hear the goss, you wanna hear the tea, the ins and the outs. Come back next week for a new episode of Bandsplain."
3:40:54 Yasi Salek? If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandsplain. Our guest today was the wonderful Sean Patton. This episode was produced by Liz Sanchez and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Executive producers for Bandsplain are Gina Delvec and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavain 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 Sivenson, Robert Adler, Leah Edwards, David McDonough, Dana Myerson, Jessica Hopper, and the fresh spirulina I get from the farmer's market. That's who I am.
3:41:39 Yasi Salek? Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandsplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.
3:41:49 Yasi Salek? They're playing a few shows and you're like, I'm not, I'm so tired. When are you gonna let me go home?
3:41:55 Speaker 06 At some point I will have to eat maybe or you know, visit a hospital or a
3:42:03 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
3:42:06 Yasi Salek? For dehydration.
3:42:08 Speaker 06 Carry on.
Previous Primal Scream with Chris Ryan Next Pulp: Part 2 (1994 to Forever?) with Siân Pattenden Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated