LITTLE GIRL [WITH BLUE EYES] AND OTHER PIECES EP PROMOTION:

PULP IT UP—text by Andy Stricklan—in Record Mirror [18.01]

Every year, at least one great single gets lost in the Christmas rush. Pulp are the latest victims, but their record Little Girl (With Blue Eyes) deserves the attention it's still getting. A quirky, fragile crooner with a deceptively smooth lyrical bent—courtesy of one Jarvis Cocker—Little Girl could be the start of something big. No radio play, due to rather ‘adult’ lyrics, but a record to cherish as the group begin to grace the stage again after a year long reappraisal of their talents.

THE WINDOW INCIDENT

In November 1985, Jarvis fell from the window of Russell’s flat while trying to impress a girl with a Spiderman impression. He fractured his pelvis and broke several bones. He spent the next six weeks in the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, forcing the cancellation of concerts and other promotion for the Little Girl (With Blue Eyes) EP.

in Sounds [25.01]

SO, YOUNG Jarvis of Pulp. Whoops-a-daisy, eh? It is the case—do you remember?—that this young excitement was so excited about the band’s new single that he started dancing around to it in his bedroom, only to fall out the window (don’t try this at home). Well, it seems young Roger Holland had the temerity to imply in his recent review of the Pulps that Jarvis appearing in a wheelchair was a publicity stunt. I should coco! The man's legs are a pulp. Roger (whoops) and he is in point of fact [as Sue Lawley would say] still severely crippled. So. There.

AGAINST ALL ODDS—Unknown publication, Sheffield [Jan.]

PULP WILL be playing The Limit Club in Sheffield on Tuesday despite an injury list which would get Ron Atkinson’s sympathies.

Front man Jarvis Cocker will be there despite breaking his pelvis and numerous other bones when he fell out of a second floor window six weeks ago.

Guitarist Russell Senior will be there despite having had the end of his finger sewn back on after an accident last year.

Bass player Peter Mansell will be there despite managing to fall off the top of Woodseats quarry this week. He escaped with cuts and bruises.

Drummer Magnus Doyle will be there despite the most delicate of injuries. While thrashing his kit to within an inch of its life at a concert in Darlington recently his swivel drum stool unswivelled and Magnus sat down rather heavily on the exposed point. Painful.

Keyboard player Candida Doyle will be there unless...

SINGER IS BACK ON WHEELS!—Unknown publication, Sheffield [mid-Jan.]

A fallen Sheffield pop singer is back on the ladder to success—in a wheelchair!

Jarvis Cocker, frontman with up and coming band Pulp, broke his wrist, ankle and pelvis when he fell from a window two months ago.

And he threw the possibility of the band's big break into jeopardy when several concerts to promote a new single had to be cancelled.

But now, recovering at his Intake home, Jarvis has returned to the stage on wheels. Recently he played with Pulp at The Limit Club, West Street, Sheffield, and will front them at prestigious concerts in Bradford and London.

PULP: NEITHER SWEET NOR SOUR—in Sounds [8.03]

Meet the ‘new hard centre’ in indie pop’s choc box. JON WILDE finds that PULP have grown on him.

PULP, NEITHER putty nor pretty, meet Sheffield’s steely stone gaze with a prickly, lawless grin or two. Defying, denying the commandment that equates Sheffield pop vultures with a stinging, heart-attack splutter... Pulp, some kind of self-made Christs, seem solitary and even freakish besides. Oddballs or oracles? Let’s see.

Voice Jarvis Cocker, either the Alex Chilton or the Bamber Gascoigne of the new pop, first rallied his troops together over ten years ago, «inspired more by The Sex Pistols than Jethro Tull» and intent on being «the Finnegan’s Wake of post-punk».

After more lulls than lunges, here they are. Last year’s It album dribbled out on Red Rhino, oblivious to the uncaring skies and hampered on its way by bitter Simon And Garfunkel comparisons. Musically too cautious and lyrically self-conscious, it mostly choked on the vitriol.

Then last month’s Little Girl And Other Pieces appeared; Pulp with a rocket up their arse and a racket in their hearts. A regenerated, most degenerated Pulp, swapping a casual canter for a scurvy disrespect. ‘A new hard centre,’ as guitar/violin Russell Senior quaintly puts it, staring into his mug of gin.

The EP’s strange but endearing conceits have been swamped by the fussy over-concern towards its more, er, fleshy areas. There’s a wry point buried someplace within the lust-lorn 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»—which has had their dissenters waving copies of Spare Rib and generally missing the seething satire of the line. Then there’s (gulp) The Will To Power, a sturdy crack across the rib-cage of fascists and scumbags all: «The only choice, the only voice in the darkness. 1933, where are you now, where are the broken bottles... Where’s truth and beauty?»

«We’re not actually real-life fascists at all,» states Russell with a sandpaper-dry smile and a swift shine of his NUM button. Little Girl, meanwhile, is as much a pure love song as Baby I Love You or Baby Love. This is what Jarvis tells me.

Whatever, this year’s Pulp is a different kettle of spiders to last year’s Pulp or the Pulp that have been lazing about in Jarvis Cocker’s head for the last ten years. Just one year ago, I saw them in London, displaying all the hesitancy and spineless inhibition of It. All that saved them was their apparent unsoundness of [collective] mind and their ragbag appearance, a look recalling the barmy escape party from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest more than anything. Twelve months on, Art Garfunkel is left picking the pubes from his teeth the morning after and Pulp turn into a monster, sort of.

This year, they know their onions, a five-sided mess of snide rustlings and furtive fumblings. The Velvet Underground skip behind the bike-sheds for a surreptitious snog with Ted Rodgers, that sort of thing. Violin shrill, guitar grind, drums a la Maureen Tucker, vocal deadpan though often impassioned, full of hemmers and hawers. Like those Velvets, they frisk and skit from Sunday Morning tranquil to White Light White Heat bedlam, a disquieting imbalance but a good one.

«It was our puberty, a document of teenage crushes and talking about ideas when you don’t know much about them, loving the idea of love rather than it itself. The LP is almost embarrassing to listen to now for us, but it was accurate for that time. We didn’t feel comfortable with all that smoothness. Now, the overall feel is not wafting away on clouds of marshmallows. It’s more an underlying feeling of striving or longing for something that isn’t quite there. It’s more painful now—grabbing, clutching and missing.»

CURRENTLY CONFINED to a wheelchair following a three-storey fall out of a window («I thought it was a door»/«I was exorcising a demon»/«Did it for a bet», depending who he's telling), Jarvis is unrelenting.

Onstage, while the other four ends of Pulp run amok, nutty as a fruit cake, with this grumbling spire of noise, Jarvis sits there a long way from Val Doonican and The Green, Green Grass Of Home. Limbs twitch, eyeballs bulge and bounce, body snaps in short convulsions. Most interestingly, as the songs persist to their fickle climaxes, Jarvis clutches the chair arm, his hands sliding in time to the clumsy beat, his body wincing and starting, the chair a sex object. Thrilling. But they're not just as sexy as your sister.

Neither wilfully opaque nor bleeding bloody awkward, Pulp are many shades, fitting into the Sheffield brute-funk mosaic not at all. «We are ten times more Sheffield than any of those bands. Just because it’s from Sheffield, why does it have to sound like a steel factory? You go to Grimsby, you don’t expect fish-slapping, or the noise of trawlers.» «We stem from our industrial culture more than Chakk or anything like that. We’re just not what the current image of Sheffield is supposed to be.»

And so what? Pulp are not perfect, but they make most indie pop seem like it has its head packed with cotton. Pulp have only marginally more charisma than Leslie Crowther but have the gall and nerve of a madman. Pulp will barely rise from cultdom, they’re too full of nonchalant anarchy for that, but in the small pond... they will be nasty and endure. They’ll annoy the living, shitting hell out of you, and you’ll rub up to the person next to you because of it. They’re haywire and, like The Raincoats or The Mekons, they’re better for it. Their songs build and build and, unlike bubbles, they explode and still last.

Jarvis? «It’s like someone once said... as soon as you realise that except for love and art it’s all a bucket of shit... well, that’s true about us.»

Pulp. Nowhere near the bucket.

DOGS ARE EVERYWHERE EP PROMOTION

in The Star, Sheffield [June/July]

The startingly brilliant Pulp EP Dogs Are Everywhere, reviewed on this page some weeks ago, is finally in the shops, and to celebrate the band are playing the Library Theatre, Surrey Street, on Wednesday.

Pop Talk is also celebrating potentially the event of the decade [OK, maybe a bit over the top] with a competition with a Pulp T-shirt, badge poster, sticker and copy of the record as a prize.

Goodies go to the first person to tell us which comment or comments have been said about Pulp in The Star

1. Power pop with bottle.
2. A cross between comedy and music.
3. Sheffield’s brainiest band.
4. A cross between Abba and The Fall.

CANINE REVENGE—in Melody Maker [31.05]

PULP are from Sheffield and make rather outrageous records. Paul Mathur talks to them of dogs, wheelchairs, Nazis and baked beans

THERE’S a great big staircase at the back of Sheffield’s Wicker. At the top there’s two people settling down in the corners of the building. One of them is called Jarvis Cocker and he's hunched behind what appears to be a pile of pianos and a half-completed pigeon loft. «Don't come in,» he says, rather overestimating my prowess as a mountaineer.

In another room, there’s a young man called Russell Senior lying on the floor looking at the ceiling. «Are you ill?» I ask. «No, just resting.» These are two members of a pop group called Pulp. Pulp take me to a room in which everything—walls, tables, sofa—is completely brown, except for a huge plastic bag full of empty Heinz Beans cans. They tell me that it’s not an artistic gesture or a performance prop, it’s just that the person who lives there likes beans. They furrow their brows and cross their gangly legs and wait for the questions. Pulp were kicked out into the world in 1980. Jarvis was young, fresh faced and just out of school. «I was so soft then, I used to write about love and all that stuff. Now I’m a cynical old get.»

LAST year Pulp had a single called Little Girl out on Fire Records. A theatrical trouserless romp around the scenery of love, it didn’t get played on the radio and some people said nasty things about its sauciness.
«I always thought it was a bit banal,» says Russell. «It’s a lot less dirty than most of the other records in the charts and yet John Peel wouldn’t play it: I can’t understand what the fuss is about myself. My mum likes it.» One of the songs on the B-side, The Will To Power caused even more eyebrows to raise with its remarks about getting back the Spirit of 1933.

So Pulp, are you really Nazi stormtroopers? «Well, they had good uniforms.» «No, of course we’re not. The song was written in 1983 when we were living in a real SDP kind of environment, where no one had any opinions on anything. I wanted people to take sides, to get off the fence.» «I’d been reading about Germany at that time and the class conflict. I liked that atmosphere but obviously not from the point of view of being a Nazi. A lot of Left Wing statements are too wishy washy, too nice. I like the sharpness of the Moseleyite addresses. They were on the wrong side but they were better organised.»

PULP are better socialists than Billy Bragg and his little wooden guitar will ever be! Fact. «It was quite a commercial single that one. We want lots of people to buy our records. Being an Indie band is like pottering around the allotment. We’re not proud of our independence.»

At this point a hundred thousand birds start to sing at once. Someone is playing a birdsong record but no one’s quite sure why: Pulp mouth things silently at me which as the record ends tail off with «come along to slag off your trousers and say ‘look at that spaz in the wheelchair’.» Ah, the wheelchair. Following a particularly daft show of bravado in front of a young lady, Jarvis plummeted from his window and did a fair amount of damage to himself. He took to performing from his wheelchair on doctor’s advice but everyone just thought it was a gimmick. «That,» says Russell, «was cos you kept on getting up and walking off at the end of performances.» «Aye, I suppose so. Playing in a wheelchair made me move my head more though. That’s probably what’s inspired our new Eurodisco direction.»

Pulp’s new single Dogs Are Everywhere is about as Eurodisco as a piano stool. It’s a pensive, very nearly profound composition on well... «It's about dogs.» I see. «Well, it’s about dogs in society, male and female. As far as I can work out man is nearer to dog than ape. The way they shit on your carpet; that sort of thing. Sometimes you feel like a dog, it’s like low mindedness, brute instinct over higher values. It’s a bit of a dilemma. You get the nobility of lions but dogs are stuck with walking down the pavements being dirty. There’s no more pathetic sight in the world than a faithful dog.»

What sort of dogs would Pulp like to be? «Greyhounds, they’re fast.» «I’d rather be a cat.» One of the other new songs is called Aborigine and it’s about a man who gets married, has kids, all through lack of imagination. «I’ll tell you one thing about Pulp right. We’re not about being grey and dull but we do a lot of wallowing in the dirt so that we can find something better. It’s no use going on about the deconstruction of language. Your average man in the street doesn’t give a shit about deconstruction of language. We want to convey love in the eggs, chips and beans; we want to carve something between the lines of the everyday world.»

A MISSION eh? «The only group we all like is Sham 69, especially Jimmy Pursey doing his future dance on Riverside. He blew it all so spectacularly, looked such as total knobhead, it was brilliant. He’s our hero.»

Pulp. Pulp are... «It’s like when you go to a jumble sale and have to root around under all that crimplene until you find a real bargain. Actually, I quite like Crimplene. My trousers are made of Crimplene...»

DOGGED ENTHUSIASM—text by Andy Strickland—in Record Mirror [21.06]

Pulp are a band who’ve proved themselves a little special in the past nine months or so. Firstly a brilliant single, Girl With Blue Eyes, which won acclaim from all corners, and now the eagerly awaited follow-up in the shape of Dogs Are Everywhere. It's in a similar style: nicely understated clear guitars and soothing organ with Jarvis’s straightforward and unaffected vocals on top. But a strange title, n'est-çe pas?

«Well, there are a lot of dogs around, aren’t there?» says Jarvis drily. «At the time I wrote the song I felt surrounded by them, people who indulge in generally immoral behaviour with no actual purpose. I mean, some elements of bestiality are OK, but dogs haven’t got a very glamorous image really, have they?» Quite!

When Index popped along to see Pulp recently, Jarvis was to be found singing from a wheelchair. «No, it wasn’t a stunt,» Jarvis assures me. «I was trying to be clever, showing off on a second storey window sill, and I ended up in hospital for six weeks and in a wheelchair for another three. I broke my ankle, my pelvis and my wrist. Some people said it was all a gimmick at the time but really, Pulp are such a great bunch of guys that we really wouldn’t do anything like that.»

Some music papers have taken Pulp’s gentle yet cutting songs as part of the general ‘we want to sound like the Velvets’ wave, but Pulp person Russell isn't too worried about such accusations.

«No, we weren’t really pissed off because we knew that comparison was so inappropriate. We’re more influenced by groups like the Fall, really, and if people had picked that up, it might have worried us.»

I think Pulp will have a hit record within the next 18 months.

⁂

PULP THE NEXT ‘BIG THING’?—text by Mark Webber [Zig]—Cosmic Pig fanzine

If there is some truth behind all this talk that there will be another big change in the perception of popular music in 1986. Then the only band who I think will do it is PULP - the most useful thing to come out of Sheffield since Stainless Steel.

R—Russell Senior, M—Magnus Doyle, P—Peter Mansell, C—Candida Doyle

How did Pulp start?
R—Jarvis, the lead singer [and the only member of the band who has been there since the start], started it at school, about five years ago. The current line-up dates from when we were doing a surreal play in and around Sheffield about two years ago.

Who thought of the name?
R—Jarvis, I think. If you look in the dictionary, it means a kind of fiction in the 30’s, very trashy and with gaudy colours, but at the same time, it was quite deep. I think that's a lot like us, we're trashy and gaudy and unsofisticated.

What do you think of Chesterfield?
R—We played our worst two gigs here. The last one was at Gotham, that was pretty terrible, and before that, Adam & Eves. People were trying to bodypop to us—it didn't work.

Is Jarvis really the leader, on and off stage?
M—Well he’s been in Pulp from the start so I suppose it does rotate around him, but I don’t call him a leader.
P—I don’t look at it like that.

Who are you influenced by?
M—We are original.
R—I think I can honestly say that Pulp as a band isn’t influenced by anyone. The only band I think we all like is Sham 69.
C—Oh no.
R—Anyone who’s heard us knows that we’re nothing like them. I prefer classical music. Some of the others like punk, the Fall, Jarvis likes ballads and film themes.

At what point did you stop being a Sheffield band, in order to go national?
R—Really, this past year has been full of touring and trying to lose that label.

What kind of person comes to see your concerts?
M—I don’t know, I rarely meet them.
R—The people who don’t come to see us are like the hip scene. We're not a hip band in Sheff. I guess we attract your average interesting youth on the street, not trendies.

What do you think of Sheffield, opportunity wise?
M—It’s alright.
P—There’s plenty of places to play.

Would you rather be somewhere like London?
P—No, it’s too big.

Are you content in being at your present status?
R—Yes, but if 50 people come to see us, I’d rather there be 500 and if we sell 5 records, I’d rather sell 50 and I’d shun anyone who doesn't think that.

Did your last EP sell well?
R—It did O.K. , considering that it didn’t receive airplay. It got more-or-less banned everywhere because of its lyrics. The A-side got taken off Radio Hallam halfway through. If the next one isn’t banned, we reckon it’ll do well.

What will the next A-side be?
R—Probably Mark Of The Devil or maybe the excellent Dogs Are Everywhere. It will be out in March/April.

Do you think that it will sell better?
R—It can’t help but do so, Little Girl wasn’t danceable, they played it in the disco’s and people kept tripping up. It was too risque to play on the radio, but not shocking enough to get mothers writing in saying we’re corrupting the youth of Britain. It was banned but not hyped.

Can you see yourselves getting to number one?
R—Realistically, I don’t think it’s gonna happen.

If you were asked, would you appear on T.O.T.P.?
C—I wouldn’t, I don’t like it.

Rest - Yeah, why not?
C—I’d have to then!

Unknown publication

PULP: beguiling, disturbing, underrated, overacted, undiminished by mere cult status. Ballads of despair and optimism, soundtracks for the unloved eternal hopefuls, staring the beast straight in the eye. Little Girl and Dogs Are Everywhere are torn out of real life and presented for your further enlightenment.

in Step Inside My Pepperpot fanzine

PULP
What is PULP?
PULP is a strange creature, living on the left-overs of broken marriages, perverted sadistic ‘love’ affairs, the sucking [?] of the afflicted, violence in the subway and the slow, deliberate torchuring of your senses.
PULP is also perfection... evil perfection.

Each portion of this terrifying beast tells its own story, revealing traumas to your eyes and screaming to your ears before the sound is crushed and disposed of in the flotsam.

On the drums, MAGNUS moves in a hopeless arc of some unheard rhythm, dancing to some longlost childhood singalong from his psychedelic past.

CANDIDA nervously peers over the edge of her Farfisa into the city streets below. «Why is everything so bad in my life?»

MANNERS hides in the shadows, wielding his weapon that is poised to destroy any descent creature.

RUSSELL spins wildly at the fairground his head becoming his feet. He stares madly at the devil perched menacingly on his violin. Whirling manically, he manages only to dislodge the beast, which takes refuge in the shadows.

Or does it?
Perhaps it possesses The Master of the Universe—JARVIS cries out in despair, trying to exorcise the beast which will not budge, and slowly, JARVIS moves closer to the edge, screaming wildly as he reaches it, only to be pulled from the brink for yet another final breath.
Be aware of this bizzare beast, for soon, your noses[?] will be infested by it—on your turntables, your televisions, your books, magazines and the pictures on your walls.
The beast is growing.
PULP—Sheffield's answer to malaria.

A new PULP single should be around by now, but if it isn't, it will be soon. They Suffocate At Night/Tunnel will be available in 7 & 12’ form. With different mixes on each. A video to the A side was filmed on October 24th in a Sheffield warehouse.

In it, a mechanics pit was mocked-up to look like a room, in which Steve Genn (Mr. Morality) and Saskia Cocker (Jarvis’ sister) acted out a ‘Love scene’, with the band looking down on them. In another scenario, the band performed on an 8’ high ‘stage’, under which there was more acting, amongst hanging bags of coloured water. Other scenes feature Russell’s photocopy art object The Will To Power, and people wrapped in cling-film and trapped in cages.
I’ve seen the finished product (without sound) and it’s very well produced. You may see it down at the Limit or the Leadmill, and copies have been sent around the TV stations.
After Christmas, February should see the release of the LP Freaks. The 10 tracks No Emotion, Master Of The Universe, Suffocate, Never-ending Story, Fairground, Anorexic Beauty, Don't You Know, Life Must Be So Wonderful, I Want You and Being Followed Home were recorded in July and re-mixed in September. [Production by Pulp & Jonothan Kirk].
I’ve heard all the tracks except the last one and I can assure you that it’s a classic album.
In Spring, Master… and Manon will be released on a single.
This also has an accompanying video which is supposed to feature the band leaping around on a lunar landscape (which is really a painting!) and is very tongue-in-cheek.
Manon is already available on the Imminent 4 compilation. Other bands on the album include the Dentists, the Rain, Easterhouse, McCarthy and the Brilliant Corners.
PULP are also featured on the Record Mirror’s Fruitcake and Furry Collars LP, performing Don’t You Know [The best three piano notes ever played... Great stuff from the greatest band ever to have a wheelchair onstage for the singer]. Other bands include the Woodentops, the Fall, and the Wild Flowers.
On November 8th, PULP supported [!!!] the Railway Children at the Leadmill's Oxfam benefit. (see Alive)
The only concerts that the band have planned for the near future are some London gigs in December to promote the LP and single. Sheff. Limit Club March 4th.

THE PULP INTERVIEW—Unknown fanzine [1986/87]

Along with the equally excellent Blue Aeroplanes and Colenso Parade, PULP have formed a crucial part of the Fire records tour-de-force. Originally treading the boards back in 1983, the Sheffield-based group have re-emerged this year with only Jarvis Cocker remaining from the previous line-up, and have to date offered us 3 splendid 12-inch singles, with an album coming v. soon. No strangers to controversy, Pulp's first release for Fire, the haunting Little Girl (With Blue Eyes), had a BBC ban slapped on it due to the direct nature of the lyric. Were the band surprised by this?

Jarvis: «Not really I suppose. There seems to be an attitude that anything is acceptable in pop music as long as it’s never put directly; e.g. it’s all right to say ‘Let's make love tonight baby I wanna feel your body’ but not ‘There's a hole in your heart and one between your legs’. I wasn't too surprised.»

Guitarist/vocalist Russell puts the other side of the coin: «I was very surprised seeing as we’d been playing that song live and on local radio for years and nobody had ever passed comment on it. I suppose that we thought it was pretty tame really. What really cracked us up was that Jane Solanas, a feminist writer for the NME, gave it the biggest slagging off.»

As Sheffield has a fine track record for producing groups, I wondered what Pulp saw as the pros and cons of hailing from the city, and how important it was not to be seen as ‘just another Sheffield band’.

Jarvis: ‘we’d rather not even be thought of as another band, let alone another Sheffield band. We play music so obviously we're seen as a band, but music is just our chosen form of communication really. Nice tunes are all very well but a song should get something across as well. As for Sheffield, it’s big and smelly. There's no scene—just lots of people trying to outshoot each other.» Russell reciprocates this view: «In Sheffield the ‘local’ stigma is a pretty difficult one, i.e. there’s an image of what Sheffield music sounds like [A cross between New York funk and a steel factory] and we don’t sound like it. What pisses me off is that the tag doesn’t fit Sheffield at all. We’re proud to be part of the varied and very healthy scene that is Sheffield music. For the record I feel that Pulp stem very much from Sheffield’s industrial culture, but that doesn’t mean we can only appeal to Sheffield people or that we sound horrible. Something to do with having to make your own beauty because the sights and smells around you all offend the senses. Now the ‘scene’ is entirely different and there are a lot more bands like us (i.e. with songs rather than noises or textures) doing interesting things.»

I make mention of the song Will to Power, to be found on the 12’ of Little Girl, which attracted some criticism due to its [ahem] right wing connotations. Russell, who wrote the song, expands: «To be honest, I wasn’t too surprised at the Nazi flak we got. It is in fact a real commie anthem dedicated to Arthur Scargill, and Nelson Mandela and the I.R.A. The reason it got flak is: [1] it mentions 1933 [the year Hitler came to power) [2] the title is also a book of Nietzsche writings compiled by the Nazis and taken out of context to try and prove their race theories. [3] I look very similar to Adolph Hitler[!]. On a couple of occasions I’ve had to dash out of my local when yobbos started chanting ‘Zieg Heil!’ and taking the piss.»

To their eternal credit, Pulp shun any attempt to look self-consciously hip [or indeed self-consciously unhip] in their appearance. For despite Jarvis’ own admittance that «we are usually told that we look like a party of inmates from an asylum on a day trip», Russell is quick to point out that Pulp’s image is important the more so because it’s not a chosen or contrived one. Jarvis agrees: «We don’t attempt to avoid current trends», adding «we can’t help it if we’re 2 years ahead of everyone else!»

Russell thinks that there are too many easy reference points in most bands, to the extent that people will tend to fashion their lifestyle according to the types of bands they go to see, citing batcave music as a prime example. So where do Pulp fit into the scheme of things, Russell?

«There's a big gap between the sugary horrible pop charts and the ugly spiky indie sludge and there aren’t too many bands in the middle though that’s where our future lies I reckon. I think what we do is normal and healthy and what a lot of people are looking for—music that sounds beautiful but doesn't insult your intelligence isn't that absurd a thing to do.»

Overall I reckon Russell has every justification for saying this—listen particularly to the first 2 Fire singles, both truly tender but with a lyrical twist in the tail, or the eerie, relentless Aborigine, or the tranquil beauty of Goodnight, featuring Jarvis at his gravest, if you don’t believe me.

If I had to compare them with someone, I suppose The Velvets spring to mind, but really, trite comparisons do Pulp no favours at all, and more importantly they can never hope to communicate the many facets of Pulp. The best way to find out is to buy one of their records, and find out for yourself. Enlightenment is just around the corner.

Unknown publication—text by Andy Darling [Nov./Dec.]

Sheffield purveyors of last Xmas’s finest moment, PULP’s 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], was a Scott Walkerish sinister paean to pre-Flasher halcyon days. Also on that EP was the awesome Will to Power, deconstructed Leni Riefenstahl comes to dole gloom Britain, replete with tin trumpet orchestration and vocal histrionics. The impending nationwide visceral and cerebral putsch wasn’t to happen though, as frontman Jarvis Cocker saw in the New Year by walking out of a second storey window into a wheelchair. Back in dingy studios, work began on a collection of Jacques Brel sings Roman Polanski chansons, about to be unleashed in the form of an LP Freaks, and the single They Suffocate By Night (both Fire). Their outing at the 100 Club on Thursday is going to be their first for some time, and they have no intention of ‘going on the road’, so if you only go to one gig a year, make it this. To be filed somewhere between Ian McEwan and Charles Hawtrey.

Pulp Press Archive

1986