A new Pulp album after 24 years wasn’t Jarvis Cocker’s idea.
“There’s been a groundswell of feeling … a desire for us to play again,” he told me three years ago when plugging his memoir, Good Pop, Bad Pop. “You know, if people clap for long enough it’s a bit churlish if you don’t go and give them another bit of music.”
Hence, More. Not a lunge for relevance from a legacy act but a thoughtful response to friends in need. The distinction is everything because this long after the pilled-up promise of Disco 2000 we don’t need a new high. We need something more real, for less certain times.
Jarvis Cocker performs with Pulp at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles last year.Credit: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
Pulp were always the smarter, more ironic, less cavalier band of the Britpop pack. Common People was a ’90s anthem. True stories of sex and shame, class resentment and crushed romanticism bopped to kitchen-sink disco and velvet melodrama.
Even in the literal throes of ecstasy, Cocker was the guy who wasn’t quite buying in. “Is this the way they say the future’s meant to feel?/Or just 20,000 people standing in a field?” he wondered in Sorted for E’s and Wizz.
True to those dry-eyed instincts, More is no grab for lost youth or even nostalgia. It’s an embrace of where we’ve landed, a mirror held to ageing, love and the weight of shared memory.
Spike Island lurches in like a boozy contiki bus, a flashback to a mythic Stone Roses show in 1990: a generational touchstone for Brits for which there’s no real Australian equivalent, unless you count Nirvana (we were all American back then) at the first Big Day Out.
The cover of the new Pulp album More, the band’s first album for 25 years.Credit:
Cocker conjures a vision of near-transcendence coexisting with an immediate comedown, the cosmos moving on in the midst of his tiny epiphany. “I exist to do this,” he wails, hips a-wiggle, “shouting and pointing.” A rock star’s battle cry in past tense: sad, but strangely noble, too.
There’s more disturbing pathos in Tina, about a long-running romantic connection on a train that turns dark as we realise our narrator has never spoken to her. “Although I did once buy a ring,” he whispers, just mortified enough to make us believe it.
Grown Ups is a bittersweet memory of first-time fumbling dated Christmas ’85. Its time-lapse narrative leaps from student flat to futuristic dreams of space as the singer looks back at himself looking forward to now, his whole life already missed, his reverie drifting off like muttering on a bus.
Later comes My Sex, a more defiant and decadent reflection on his boudoir legacy, quoting Leonard Cohen at his horniest, with guitars sliding across silk sheets to the sound of – is that a whip cracking?
Pulp’s underlying smirk is a given but it can’t help feeling more pained now. More is dedicated to bassist Steve Mackey, who died in 2023. His legacy shimmies and pumps through Andrew McKinney, one of several joining longtime members Mark Webber, Nick Banks and Candida Doyle.
Strings arranger Richard Jones is key to Cocker’s circa-1980s Pulp manifesto, as unearthed in that memoir: “Scott [Walker] + Barry [White] + Eurodisco + Gritty Northern Realism = The Future.”
The formula skews darker, less brash now, but true. The Hymn of the North is a gut punch: a father’s plea to a child leaving the nest as grief, pride and blood memory collide in a magnificent storm of restrained emotion.
The heart of the matter, though, is Farmers Market, a blissful waltz weaving pastoral fiddle and piano to pure romantic surrender, as sweet and unguarded as Pulp ever sounded. Cocker has said it’s a favourite of his new bride: a real-life detail that makes sense of so much here.
Got to Have Love hits like the essence of a life boiled down to one thing you’d shout to your friends as the last disco on Earth crashed under the waves. Oh, the ecstasy, as the tempo pushes like swirling lights against the spoken breakdown, the singer berating himself for denying it for so long when the answer was always “L-O-V-E, yeah!”
The picture fades as it began. A Sunset might be the very one from Spike Island in 1990, childlike wonder, creeping doubts and all. “It’s just a sunset,” someone says, “but now they found a way to make it pay.” The dream drifts away on pizzicato strings, beauty slipping from view.
The ache would be tragic if love weren’t such a fresh and radiant presence: something real for uncertain times that’s forever new – if you’re doing it right. Whether More proves a comeback or a footnote for Pulp, that’s its message. We’re not here to impress. We’re here to connect.
On that score, I had to ask Cocker at the end of that interview three years ago whether any future Pulp plans might include Australia. He responded with a generous smile and a line he knew I’d recognise from Common People. “I’ll see what I can do.”
More is out on June 6.
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