It’s a comeback that fans have spent years praying for: the return of Pulp. Thirty years after Jarvis Cocker sang “Let’s all meet up in the year 2000,” the beloved Brit-pop band are finally back. Even after their wildly successful reunion tours in 2011 and 2022, nobody dared to hope for a new album from the band who made Nineties classics like Different Class and This Is Hardcore — until now. But their brilliant new album More is coming in June. “It’s 24 years since we did a record,” Cocker says. “Which mystifies me, really.”
Pulp had a historic run as the great British band of their generation, with Jarvis Cocker as one of rock’s genius storytellers and thrift-store trash-fashion icons. They kicked around for years as an indie band nobody cared about, in the tough Northern steel town of Sheffield. They finally blew up in the 1990s Brit-pop explosion, with the sex-and-shopping hit “Common People.” But they always had their own style — Seventies glam-rock meets Eighties synth-disco glitz, in the alley between the library and the goth club. With his trademark bitchy wit, Jarvis turned ordinary slice-of-life details into classics like “Disco 2000” and “Do You Remember The First Time?”
But on More (out June 6) Pulp are boldly exploring the unknown: adult life. “Someone told me the album is ‘age appropriate,’” Jarvis says. “I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not, but I guess I have to — I am an adult.”
Today, Jarvis is sitting in Katz’s Delicatessen, the most legendary eatery on the Lower East Side. At 63, he’s every inch the ultimate English rock-star gentleman, on a cold and rainy afternoon. He’s eager to try his first taste of New York deli food — cheese blintzes and chicken soup. The deli is bustling, with a line around the corner and a famously fearsome staff, yet something about the legendary Jarvis charm makes them uncharacteristically glad to let him relax and chat for a few hours. Nobody recognizes him, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a law of nature: nobody ever complains about having Jarvis in the room. (He gets excited when he notices we’re sitting under a framed photo of Jerry Lewis, and snaps a picture of it — the only time he even takes out his phone.)
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A few of the new Pulp songs are old sketches they finished up; most are totally new, fine-tuned at soundchecks and rehearsals on the band’s 2002 reunion tour. “‘Grownups” is the oldest one on the record,” he says. “It’s always been called ‘Grownups’ but I just could never get the words written. So it’s kind of a relief that after nearly 30 years I’ve managed to write some words for it.” He blows softly on his hot soup. “I suppose maybe that was it. Maybe the song decided to grow up.”
Band reunions are often a bit sad — somebody needs money, or somebody’s got hurt feelings. But this one has its own warm and benevolent spirit. Pulp remains a band of lifelong hometown friends, with the core of Nick Banks on drums, Mark Webber on guitar, Candida Doyle on keyboards. They’re now expanded as a ten-piece band, with a prominent string section. The mid-life love ballad “Farmer’s Market” sums up the mood of the new album. “We thought we were trying on dreams for size,” Jarvis sings. “We didn’t know that we’d be stuck wearing them for the rest of our lives.”
Pulp ran out of steam in the early 2000s, but they all moved on with their lives. Yet Cocker has remained one of global pop’s most-wanted men. His band Jarv Is did the excellent 2020 album Beyond the Pale, with the quarantine anthem “House Music All Night Long.” He’s teamed up with everyone from Nancy Sinatra to Chilly Gonzalez, even playing the Hogwarts prom in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. He became a longtime U.K. radio DJ, with his “Domestic Disco” broadcasts, and published the memoir-manifesto Good Pop/Bad Pop. He’s dabbled in weird underground projects like his art-perv electronic duo Relaxed Muscle, with his friend Jason Buckle — who now plays in Pulp.
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The biggest catalyst for More was the death of an old comrade — longtime bassist Steve Mackey, not just a Pulp member but a right-hand-man for much of Jarvis’ solo career. “When Steve passed away, it’s a kind of cliche, but it gives you a reality check,” Cocker says. “It made us realize that we had a chance to be creative. We had time to create something, while we could. If you’re still around, you’ve still got that opportunity to make things, so this is the time.” So he convened his old mates. “I said, ‘Let’s meet up early next year and just have some rehearsals. Everybody brings some ideas and let’s see where we can get. And that’s how it started off really. No pressure — we weren’t signed to a label or anything. Just to see if we can do it.”
One of the wonders of the 2022 reunion tour was that audiences went bonkers for the new tunes. “We’ve brought these songs, some of which are very old, back to life,” Jarvis said at their New York show, before going into every audience’s six least-favorite words: “So how about a new song?” That’s where people usually dash to the bar or a bathroom break. But these crowds cheered — screamed, really — at getting to hear new Pulp material. Especially the Bowie-style synth-glam anthem “Spike Island,” where he looks back on the dashed rock-star dreams of youth (“I was born to perform, it’s a calling”), and how they fizzled out. As he sings, “The universe shrugged, then moved on.”
“I suppose another part of it is the fact I got married in June,” he says. “We’d been together for a long time, then in 2018 we split up for a year, then we got back together. I was very lucky that I managed to revive the relationship. Dealing with changes is the trick of life — not that I claim to know what a trick of life is—but from experience, I think that’s what it is. I’ve always had this thing that I don’t like change. But you have to try and ride it, rather than get submerged by it.”
They knocked out the album in just three weeks — a big change from the old days. “It was very quick to do it, although some of the songs have been around for a long time,” he says. “I think the band were in a bit of shock at how quick it was, probably even more than me, because they always had to go through the pain of waiting for me trying to write the words, trying to get that right. So they were bracing themselves for that again, but then it wasn’t like that. So yeah, I take that as a sign that it was a ready-to-happen kind of thing.”
Cocker has been a promiscuous collaborator over the years. Yet More has the distinct Pulp sound, evoking the shabby-glam swish of His ’N’ Hers or Different Class. “I think the main thing that makes Pulp sound like Pulp is that Nick the drummer plays extremely loudly, and that makes everybody else have to make themselves heard. So it’s always got quite a lot of energy because people are actually frantically trying to make themselves heard over the top. And obviously Candida’s got issues with movement” — she’s had arthritis since her teens — “so she has to make her parts work with what she’s capable of doing. So you get all those things that everybody has, to make it work with the other people, and that gives it a certain sound. I’m glad we’ve got them. You can sometimes get frustrated — all drummers are always getting told off for speeding up. But ‘Common People’ speeds up something ridiculous, like 20 BPM. That’s what gives it its energy.”
Producer James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Fontaines DC) didn’t try to cover up the band’s idiosyncrasies. “When we started off, that was the only way we knew how to do it anyhow,” Cocker says. “And there was no such thing as Pro Tools or anything, so you couldn’t massage things and make them perfectly in time. But what’s the point of human music-making if it hasn’t got some of that personality?”
After Pulp, Jarvis stayed in the public eye, but his mates went back to Sheffield and embraced ordinary life. The enjoyable 2014 doc Pulp: A Film About Life, Death, and Supermarkets has a scene where Nick Banks boasts about sponsoring his teen daughter’s football team, while she rolls her eyes about “me dad’s crap band.” “Nick’s in this Sheffield band called the Everly Pregnant Brothers, who play in town,” Cocker says proudly. “They do folk-tinged covers of famous songs, but with the words changed so it’s about South Yorkshire. For instance, there’s a kind of sauce in Sheffield called Henderson’s Relish. They take Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’ and changed it to ’it was all Hendo’s.’” So much for rock & roll glitz. “Candida’s a counselor, talking to people who’ve been through stressful situations. And Mark has always had an interest in experimental film — he’s published some books on that. But yeah, neither Mark nor Candida have done any musical stuff in years.”
What spurred them to play again? “I just rang them up,” he says. “We met at my house, just outside Sheffield, and we just talked about it. Then we did have an attempted rehearsal, which luckily was not recorded with the instruments in my living room. We played four songs or whatever, and we just said, yeah, let’s try it out. I dunno — maybe we did it out of curiosity.”
The last Pulp tour, in 2011, was devoted to playing the hits — they took pride in refusing to flog a new album, simply aiming to do right by their songbook. But it was also about unfinished emotional business. “It was my attempt to tidy up,” Cocker admits. “I thought that Pulp kind of fizzled out in a not-so-good way. Also [guitarist] Russell [Senior] had left the group and I kind of felt bad about that.” Senior was a major creative force in the band until 1997, when he quit at the peak of their fame; he’s now a local antiques dealer. “We invited him back,” Cocker says, recalling the 2011 tour. “He did play with us for a while, then he was coming to America, but he won’t go on a plane anymore. He tried to get on a boat, but that wasn’t available either. He just gave it up.”
Anyone lucky enough to have seen that tour can tell you it was a triumphant success, musically, commercially, and emotionally. “I thought that was going to be the full stop,” Jarvis says. “To finish it in a nice way and make it a pleasurable memory, rather than a slightly painful memory. Which it DID do.”
For the core quartet, there’s a shared history that goes back decades. “That’s the good thing about it,” Jarvis says. “Because we don’t really hang out as friends. We might see each other, but before we started playing again, it might have been once or twice a year. So it was a pleasure to realize that we could still play together and make something together. I think everybody’s been quite happy about that.”
Certainly, the warmth in their onstage camaraderie is palpable even from the audience. “I’m glad that it comes across like that — maybe we’re just naive,” he says. “I saw Fleetwood Mac with Lindsey Buckingham, before he got chipped out again. I could see why he was slightly irritating, overzealously talking to the audience, and you could see the rest of them. [Loud sigh.] We’re lucky that none of us has pissed the others off. Too bad. We’re still talking to each other.”
Pulp have always had a tight connection with their hometown, which inspired tributes like the 1992 electro-sleaze cult fave “Sheffield: Sex City.” One of the More highlights, “My Sex,” describes how he and his sister grew up there, raised by their working-class mother, in a female environment. “I grew up in a neighborhood where all the men were gone,” he recalls. “All the dads left. My dad, my auntie’s husband, my mom’s best friend’s husband, they all left. It seemed like they all disappeared at the same time — maybe there was a couple months. But my mother’s brother had died, so the only male in my life at that point was my grandfather. And I couldn’t imagine him having sex, basically. So I was going through puberty and I wanted to find out about it, and so I found out by listening surreptitiously to what my mom was talking about with her friends. They were trying to date together, so they would talk about what was going on. And so I learned about stuff through them, a very female perspective.”
That became part of his adolescent sexual confusion. “It was difficult enough for me anyway, to start dating, because I was quite shy,” he says. “But those mixed messages certainly didn’t make it any easier.” Yet that’s always been a crucial part of what made Jarvis an icon and an unlikely sex symbol — unlike a lot of his fellow Nineties Brit-pop stars, he always had a fascination with female characters, in classics like “Inside Susan” or “Underwear.” “I always made friends with women easier than I did with men because I had more experiences of hanging out with women, and that’s okay,” he says. “I’ve written songs from a woman’s perspective, presumptuously, because I don’t know exactly how it feels to be a woman. But a lot of those songs are really me commenting on my own actions from a female perspective.”
One of his newfound inspirations on More is a rock poet he’d never given much attention until lately. “I started listening to Bob Dylan, for the first time,” he says. “I started on the train. It was practicalities, because the Victoria line is really noisy. You can only bear it if you ride with your fingers in your ears. So I thought instead of doing that, I could listen to Bob, with Blood on the Tracks. I got hooked on ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ and then what’s the next one — ’Simple Twist of Fate.’ He tells you a story in such a magical way.”
For a fan as eccentric as Jarvis, it figures that he’d schedule his teenage-Dylan-freak phase for his sixties. “I started listening because I saw him in London, on the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. The stage was very dark, but I liked that — you felt like you were watching a seance, like they were trying to make contact with some spirits. He was playing the piano, just leaning on it. He did that song ‘Key West’ and that was just the most amazing song — it seemed so on the edge of disappearing. I looked up Key West — it’s almost like an island, isn’t it? But I still don’t know what that song is about. ‘Murder Most Foul’ — when I first heard it, I really couldn’t believe it.”
For such a staunch advocate of pop trash, Jarvis is surprisingly tuned out from modern radio. The airwaves are full of young stars spinning narratives with a Jarvis-style eye for junk detail, from Chappell to Billie to Olivia. But asked about any of them, he smiles politely and says “I’ll have to check that out.” (Just to pick the most glaring example, “Pink Pony Club” is a Pulp banger if there ever was one.) “I’ve got no knowledge of modern pop,” he admits. “I used to listen to the chart show in the U.K. — it was always on Sunday — but I haven’t done that probably this millennium. So my picture of pop is a very antiquated one. Taylor Swift, I heard her because Mark’s daughter really likes her — he’s taken her to see her sometimes. I don’t really know the songs.” He’s bemused to learn that young fans are discovering Pulp on TikTok. “Really? I’ve never even been on TikTok. I tried Twitter first and I absolutely couldn’t stand that — I was gone within half an hour. But Instagram I liked — it’s like sending a postcard.”
But the timing for More is perfect, especially in America, where Pulp are far more famous now than they were in their lifetime. Jarvis is openly baffled by the band’s cross-generational appeal. “I did put a lot of my life into writing songs,” he says. “And sometimes my real life suffered because of that, because I would say things in songs that I wouldn’t say to people I was in a relationship with. That got me in trouble. Not a nice thing to do. But the thing is, you’re not really in control of it. Sometimes you sit down and try to write a song, but nothing happens. It’s horribly frustrating. That’s why I have tried to retire a few times, but I’ve always come back to it. It’s like a magic trick, isn’t it? You’re in touch with something that you don’t quite understand, and the more you try to understand it, or control it, the more it slips away. If you grab at it, it’ll disappear.”
“Grownups” is a song he spent years trying to grab, but it ended up as the centerpiece of More — in so many ways, he and the song grew up together. “I was shivering on crutches,” he sings. “More dead than alive/It was Christmas 1985.” It’s an autobiographical tale of his shambolic youth, from when he was 22. “That was when I got out of hospital,” he recalls. “I’d fallen from a window, and they let me out the day before Christmas. I suppose that was a step in me growing up. I’d left school and was trying to do the band and it wasn’t really working. But I ended up falling out the window and that gave me quite a lot of time to lie there and think about stuff. I decided that I was going to have to get out of Sheffield and go try something else.”
That winter he also entered what turned out to be a long-term romance. “The night I describe in the song, when I went around to her house for the first time — that was a very pivotal moment for me,” he says. “It was strange actually because the next morning there was news about the [Challenger] space shuttle that exploded. At that point in my life, I used to take any events in the outside world as portents. I was a child who thought, ‘I’m going to space when I grow up!’ But the fact that the spaceship blew up made me think, ‘Oh, that’s it. Now you’re in a relationship and you can’t go to space anymore.’ Very immature thought patterns, anyway.”
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But that immature 22-year-old ended up crafting this song for years, turning “Grownups” into a grand statement of purpose. “The last part I finished was the spoken section about that dream of going to another planet, looking back and seeing where you come from, but you can’t get back there. That was a dream I had ten years ago. It seemed to fit in with the mood. It’s the oldest song, but it’s also now the longest song on the record—it’s got the most words in it. So at least when I finally got around to doing it, I put some work in on it.”
For a career full of lucky accidents and bizarre disasters, More is a summary of how Jarvis and his Pulp bandmates have traveled through the years. “It felt quite easy,” he says, with a slightly guilt-ridden grin. “Which might seem like I’m lazy or whatever, but that’s something I’ve learned — when things are working properly, that’s what it’s like. You have to be ready to accept the message when it’s there. And if you’re thinking too much, then it kind of bounces off you. But if you’re open to it, then it comes through, and then you alter it a bit as it passes through you. But it’s not like you made it. Some of the songs are old, some are new, but it was all just ready to happen. It could only have happened at this moment, after going through all the other stuff that hasn’t been that pleasurable.” It’s in his nature to be wary of good fortune, but he’s finally learning to accept it. “Music is supposed to be simple,” he says. “I mean, LIFE is supposed to be simple, but it isn’t always. So it’s great when it is.”
