Do you remember the first time? Well it was only about an hour ago, but it’s something special to get a brand spanking new Pulp song. The rumours were abound following the tour announcement, but many thought it might just be one more time round the block. Who doesn’t want to hear ‘Common People’, ‘Babies’, ‘This Is Hardcore’ one more time.
But no, much more than this. There’s another record. A new LP. More. arrives in June, only a couple of months to wait. The first single, ‘Spike Island‘ debuted on Lauren Laverne’s BBC 6Music show this morning, but was it worth the wait?
Yes, I think it was. There you go. Nice and succinct. To the point. You want more? Ok, well what isn’t there to like about any song Jarvis Cocker is singing. It begins like a close cousin of ‘Party Hard’ but two decades later and we’re all a bit older, fatter and knackered. It shimmers like those 1990’s summers, all that glistened was gold, or at least fools gold. The Stone Roses gig on that day in May 1990 near Widnes probably marked the beginning of the end for that legendary band but perhaps sparked the beginning of the movement, not just the mega gigs copied by those who came in their wake. It feels fitting that a band that first touched the stage in 1978 but blew up in the years to follow on from the subject of this song, an event nearly 35 years ago now, at the dawn of the decade that they went on to straddle like giant Sheffield steel pylons.
It’s a bit ‘Disco 2000‘, but now Disco 2025, and it has all the hallmarks of what made that period of Pulp so exciting and essential. The kitchen sink dramas that Jarvis perfected and many of his hometown contemporaries and those his music and the city birthed have subsequently traded on, is all here. The years roll by like litter on the street and his deep register that makes your knees tremble is still making you wobble, and the ever so slightly strained higher range, which is the sound of a thousand common people still in need of his words. Will we ever tire of it? Will it never be relevant or prescient?
The only dampener on this return is that Stephen Mackey isn’t there. His stoic presence on stage and tight rumbling bass is absent. Taken too soon. The record is in his memory and this still echoes with his influence.
I defy anyone not to stick on His’n’Hers, Different Class, or This is Hardcore after listening to this.
If you didn’t come to party, then why did you come here?
