Pulp made an appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show yesterday (April 12) and played ‘Spike Island’, taken from their upcoming album ‘More’ – watch footage below.
- READ MORE: Jarvis Cocker teases more Pulp shows and discusses new project ‘Biophobia’: “I used to be scared of nature”
Jarvis Cocker and co have had fans waiting on new material since signing a new record deal with Rough Trade last year after reuniting again in 2023 for the first Pulp shows since 2012 – where they played new tracks – including ‘Farmer’s Market’, ‘Spike Island’, ‘My Sex’, ‘You’ve Got To Have Love’, ‘Background Noise’ and ‘A Sunset’ – while on the road.
Earlier this week, the iconic Sheffield band announced ‘More’ – their first album in almost 24 years – which is set for release on Friday June 6. Recorded and mixed at Orbb Studio and produced by James Ford. The album marks their first since the passing of bassist Steve Mackay, who died in 2023, and is dedicated to him.
Ahead of performing ‘Spike Island’, Cocker sat down with Ross and discussed the new album, as well as his recent nuptials and his eclectic fashion sense. Explaining that his wife was in the audience, he said: “I proposed in a traffic jam. We’d been to Mexico. I thought about it a lot there, but something stopped me.
“We were in a traffic jam near Shepherd’s Bush and the conversation stopped and I thought, ‘I’ll do it now’. When the muse speaks to you, you have to answer.”
As for his quirky style, he said when he starting buying clothes for himself, he’d “experiment” with 10p bin bags full of clothes from jumble sales. “Sometimes it would fail, but you try things. It would be like people’s reaction, if people laughed as I walked past, I’d think, ‘I won’t wear that again’. I evolved through that.”
Touching on Pulp’s new music, he said the band “just decided to see how many songs we could write and ended up with a record”. Their newest single ‘Spike Island’, which Cocker went on to perform, is a nod to the historic Spike Island gig that The Stone Roses played in Cheshire in May 1990, a show considered one of the most legendary gigs of all time and effectively the precursor to the Britpop era.
Pulp have referred to the Spike Island show in the past – namely in their song ‘Sorted For E’s & Wizz’, which was shared as part of their 1995 album ‘Different Class’. Speaking on 6 Music, Cocker confirmed that he “never went to the concert, but I’d spoken to people who went and picked things up second hand from it” to piece together images and phrases that captured the show and the mood of the occasion.
@jrossshow #jarviscockerpulp shares the backstory behind their new single #spikeisland #thejrshow
♬ original sound – The Jonathan Ross Show – The Jonathan Ross Show
Pulp will release ‘More’ on June 6 via Rough Trade. Check out the full tracklist below.
The ‘More’ tracklist is:
- ‘Spike Island’
- ‘Tina’
- ‘Grown Ups’
- ‘Slow Jam’
- ‘Farmers Market’
- ‘My Sex’
- ‘Got To Have Love’
- ‘Background Noise’
- ‘Partial Eclipse’
- ‘A Hymn Of The North’
- ‘A Sunset’
Speaking to NME last year about the band’s new material, guitarist Mark Webber said: “We’re older so it’s a bit more mature, but that makes it sound boring! It’s somewhere between mature and frothy pop music.”
Pulp’s seventh and latest studio album, ‘We Love Life’, came out back in 2001 via Island Records. They then shared ‘After You’ – their first single in over a decade – through Rough Trade in 2012, as part of their first reunion. The track was produced by LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy.
