A Pulp fan has created a giant lantern of Jarvis Cocker to celebrate the singer’s 62nd birthday – check it out below.
Cocker’s birthday was on Friday (September 19), and among a number of other gifts and messages from fans, he took to Instagram to highlight one in particular.
Writing on Saturday, the frontman said: “Thanks for all your birthday messages yesterday!! Here’s perhaps the strangest one: this representation of me in lantern form will be paraded around Ulverston tonight as part of the Ulverston Lantern Parade!”
“Send me a photo of it illuminated if you’re in the area,” he added. “Thank you very much to the Ulverston lantern-makers!”
Pulp are currently in the middle of a North American tour, which included a date at the Altria Theater in Richmond, Virginia on Cocker’s birthday. The previous show in Detroit’s Masonic Temple Theatre on Wednesday (September 17) was hailed by the singer as “hot”, ”loud” and “GREAT!”.
“It was my last concert as a 61-year-old man,” he wrote in another Instagram post. “See you on the other side”.
The band released their new album ‘More’ in June, their first new full-length record in 24 years. NME spoke to Cocker about the process of making it, and the impact that growing older had on the creative process.
“That’s the thing I’m pleased with on this record – you can tell it’s made by people, shall we say, of a certain age,” he said. “It’s still about the same things we’ve always written songs about, but it’s just looking at them a bit differently from a different time of life.”
“There are lots of downsides of getting older, but one of the good things is that you can learn who you are and can maybe stop worrying about that kind of stuff or trying to project an image of what you’d like to be.”
In a four-star review of ‘More’, NME wrote: “Drenched in synths and strings and aided by producer James Ford’s knack for making the music feel alive and omnipresent, ‘More’ is everything you’d want a Pulp album to be, made richer from some lived experience.”
“Just as Blur did with ‘The Ballad Of Darren’ and Suede have managed on their immaculate run of post-reunion albums, Pulp have retained their original spirit and flair into a statement of middle age without feeling any less vital. As Cocker pines on the cinematic closer ‘A Sunset’, all things end, so just make the most of the time you have. It’s strangely beautiful, now they’re all fully grown.”
The album has been nominated for this year’s Mercury Prize, alongside the likes of CMAT, Fontaines D.C., PinkPantheress and Wolf Alice.
The band will also release a deluxe reissue of their classic 1995 album ‘Different Class’ in October, complete with their full Glastonbury 1995 performance.
