Achievement Unlocked: Hyde in the Park

Everyone has a first true music love. Sadly for some people it's Barry Manilow or Rod Stewart and increasingly these days it's more likely to be some group of dressed up teenage rapists with a drum machine. As if anyone could ever consider N-Dubz to be lovable. (For legal reasons Dappy is NOT a rapist or a druggie.)

There are three distinct things I remember about my work experience at secondary school. Firstly the sense of being treated like an adult by adults for pretty much the first time in my life. Secondly I remember one of the managers (who showed me round) telling me they had recently developed a way to make new liquid crystal displays so that a single screen could be as big as a house. Thirdly I remember them slipping me some cash for all my hard work. I remember waiting at the bus stop after finishing that day to get the bus into town rather than home because with this money I could buy up the two missing Pulp albums for my collection. It and Freaks.

It was released in 1983 when I was a tender 18 month old. My mother maintains that this was when I was at my nicest; fully dependent and no answering back with radical ideas or horrible curse words. She is probably right. It is a dreamy album of languid chords and slow burning lyrics. At first (at 13) I didn’t really understand it as an album and thought it was quite “out there” because the tempo never really got above 100BPM and the chords were too ethereal to pin down on my guitar. I also didn’t get the Pulp – It (pulpit) reference till far later on.

If however I had a problem with It then after putting the CD back in its case and replacing it with Freaks (subtitled: Ten Stories About Power, Claustrophobia, Suffocation and Holding Hands) I was about to be truly freaked out. Freaks opens with Fairground and a nasal narrator informing us about his recent trip (with his sister) to the freak show at the circus. The lyrics are full of imagery of monstrous freaks and carnival horrors. There is occasional background screaming and manic laughing as the waltz time chorus progressed. At the time it was just about the most insane thing I’d ever heard. Which made the next track (a romantic ballad) I Want You seem completely out of place. Particularly when the two tracks after that returned to the dark themes of the first.

Being Followed Home is self-explanatory, a paranoid walk down darkened streets until a smashed bottle becomes a glinting blade in the moonlight. Master of the Universe is a song of complete domination of another person physically and emotionally. Until they are a quivering wreck compulsively masturbating in the corner at your very command. The album continues in this way, dark, dirty, depraved and occasionally flicking into the light. Album closer They Suffocate at Night almost seems to resolve the two sides, with general love and lightness underpinned with something altogether more broody..

If nothing else They Suffocate at Night provided a nice bridge between Freaks and Separations, their third album. This one I had already, though only on vinyl. The previous year at the very start of my Pulp love I had picked it up for just a few quid from a bored chain smoking sultry man at a record fair at Crawley Leisure Centre. There was no price on it, he said £8 I said £4. We settled on £4. He was probably happy to be shot of it.

Separations is a little bleaker. However Jarvis’ attitude towards the darkness is different on this record to on Freaks. On Freaks there is a consistent sense of powerlessness either from the song’s narrator or those characters being observed within the song. Separations though is a far more resigned album. It says that the world is a dark place where terrible things happen and you can either ignore that or embrace it. Song’s like She’s Dead embrace death and it’s sadness but also contain an element of life going on, as it should. What I never really got about this album and still find a little hard to appreciate is that the second side of the album is predominantly songs in an Acid House style. For much of my youth I simply avoided this problem by only ever playing side A.

Seperations had been released in 1992 and I had just about got into the band a year and a bit later. This had come about because a compilation album (Intro) had been released in 1993 and the late night radio (not sure who, so let’s say it was John Peel) had played Babies quite a few times off that record and I had loved that song. I think now what it was that enthralled me about as much as the music was the lyrics. It seemed a bit unique because the lyrics tell a story and in my naïve teenage mind songs with stories where nursery songs, or novelty records like Puff the Magic Dragon (awesome track though.) Yet here was a serious band telling me a story (with adult themes) in the form of a pop song.

In fact this has always been true of Pulp's work. From Fairground to Wickerman, Jarvis's lyrics have often strayed from observation to narration to full blown storytelling. At first I was a bit resistant to the long tracks, i wasn't used to listening to a song that was 8 minutes long and had no chorus. But as i grew up and became more interesting so did these songs. To think i might never have enjoyed songs like David's Last Summer or Acrylic Afternoons makes me feel glad I kept going back and making the effort.

But anyway, back to the narrative. It's late in 1994 and I'm using some birthday money to buy a copy of His 'n' Hers. It is going to blow my tiny teenage mind. It is an album full of sex and girls and suburbia. All things that I had become keenly aware of since their last album. I remember almost wanting to say they sold out by putting Babies on it again. Luckily I'd not learned such hipster levels of shallow critique so i just went with it. Besides my mother liked that one so that meant we'd get to listen to the album in the car. 

As an album His 'n' Hers is a smorgasbord of everything that had come before.The sleazy and suburban sex of Acrylic Afternoons and She's a Lady harkened back to Separations, a rock band playing house influenced music with scuzz on the bass and in the lyrics. Joyriders, Lipgloss, Babies and Pink Glove were all about girls and even better; girls with loose morals.

Two distinct memories i have about this album include hearing on the radio that it hadn't won the Mercury Music Prize. I didn't really know what awards ceremonies were in relation to music at that point so i just sort of thought it was a bit like not winning a school prize, disappointing but really you were cooler not winning. The other was about two years later when, having persistently pestered my mother enough, we had a few days holiday in Staffordshire so that at least one of the days could be spent at Alton Towers. As a child raised just outside the M25 theme parks meant Thorpe Park or Chessington. Or on the holidays to the Isle of Wight, Black Gang Chine. I somewhat spoilt most of the holiday by acting like the horrible teenage child i was. However just about the only tape we had in the car was a taped version of His 'n' Hers with a few songs off Intro to fill up space. So we listened to that. For days.

What became more apparent over the next year and a half was that other people seemed to like Pulp. It wasn't just me listening to this weird music on my own in my bedroom. It's strange to think that then I thought of more people liking Pulp as a good thing when as an adult I got more upset when the things that were rare and curious to me suddenly became mainstream and beloved. That I was happy to share as a child but as an adult i was selfish. Oh how the world has shaped me. 

Different Class. Massive Album. Pretty much every member of my peer group either owns a copy or recognises it as a masterpiece album. Oasis had their Morning Glory, Blur their Great Escape and Radiohead their OK Computer but this was something else. Because not only did it crystallise where the Pulp "sound" had been heading on the last two albums it has elements of those other albums too. The outsider's view of Radiohead, the determined we're in charge swagger of Oasis and the suburban observationalism of Blur.

Suddenly Pulp were everywhere. I'd started buying NME (and Melody Maker) so that helped. Jarvis would appear on shows like TFI Friday. The band played TOTP and Going Live as well as other random programs across the schedules. This was about the point in my life in which I started to learn about bootlegs.

At my school, or at least amongst my social coterie, you had to choose between Oasis and Blur. In the end i came down on the Oasis side. Mainly i think because i'd started to want to look serious. It was 1995, serious times, certainly no time to be singing about Parklife or Country Houses. Naturally the record fair types that rolled into the local leisure centre every other month were keen to capitalise and were frankly quite brazen in selling plenty of illegal bootlegs for both Blur and Oasis.

I'd usually buy one of the Oasis ones, partly to bolster my CD collection but partly because by showing your intent and buying one thing would usually lead to the seller asking "... if there was anything in particular you  were after son?" He'd then look in the few flight cases he was sitting on behind his trestle table and usually uncover a gem or two. The Pulp unfortunately was often in the flight cases but rarely on the table.

Videos were harder to get hold of, but tapes were great. CDs at that time had just become cheap enough for mass bootlegging which had led to a huge drop in the price of tapes. There was one stall i remember clearly that had endless boxes of luminous yellow and pink tapes of bootlegs. They had a complicated (but efficient system of coding on the spine comprising of acronyms for source (FM/SBRD/CRWD) and a rating from A+ to D. The sources were generally correct but the ratings were pure garbage. Sure the original source might have been a soundboard recording, but after three generational copies it might as well have been recorded by the bassists trainers. Still, i'd always hold back a tenner to buy (at least) ten of these luminous gems. Sometimes there were offers and you could get 20 tapes for a tenner. This is also how i first got into Pink Floyd.

So now Pulp were massive and i was a teenager. The time had come to see them live. They toured the UK at the start of 1996 and we saw them at the Brighton Arena. It was amazing. These people, this band, that for years had lived inside various electronic boxes in my house and about my person were now out there in front of me. This was one of the very first gigs i went to and probably for that reason is still one of my favourites. The set was very His 'n' Hers/Different Class heavy as was to be expected. The other thing was a mad dash up the long hill of Brighton to make it for the last train back to Crawley. This tour also produced one of my favourite tourfilms ever.

F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.I.V.E was a recording of their Brixton Academy show interspersed with short monologues about life on the road written by the band and read by Robert Hulse. Sounds gash, but really it isn't. Imagine a sort of happier version of Radiohead's Meeting People is Easy. Worth checking out if you can source a copy if only for the footage of Postman Cheval's Palais Ideal.

Then Pulp sort of dropped off the radar a bit. They stopped touring and started recording a new album but up until this point i'd had at least one studio album a year from them, albeit not all recorded in that period. So to now to have to endure without them on the telly and in the papers and new material becoming harder to source i had to wait.

In 1998 they released This is Hardcore, their first album after the departure of guitarist/violinist Russell Senior. The album opens with The Fear and several guitar parts and it all sounds quite a bit chunkier than on their previous albums. Synths have been replaced with synthesized strings and weird guitar noises (courtesy of new guitarist Mark Webber.) The albums title track was (and still is) the stand out track of This Is Hardcore. It has all the hallmarks of every great Pulp song. It's got narrative elements, intricate musical arrangements and a sense of the sleazy and crepuscular, but with directness.

I remember busking underneath Brighton pier with one of my college friends one day when we should have been in college. We played Help The Aged off of This Is Hardcore a few times for two reasons. Firstly we thought a song with the name of a charity in it would provoke people into giving us money. Secondly it was one of the songs I could play that he knew all the words to. After an entire day we made enough to cover our return train fares. Which is probably enough.

That year it was back to the Brighton centre to see them live again. This time there was drinking involved too. The band were much louder now having replaced their one original guitarist with Mark Webber and now a second touring guitarist, Richard Hawley. There seemed to be a lot more buzzing and feedback and whining. By this point i was in my own band so as much as watching the band for fun i was trying to pick out other things. I knew i couldn't be Jarvis, he wasn't encumbered so i watched the three guitarists (yes, even the bassist) for ideas. They mostly stood around. I took it to heart and at all the gigs I've ever played i've stood in roughly the same spot all night.

I saw them again at the Reading Festival in 2000. they'd not really done any gigs in 1999 or 2000 so seeing them was tough. This along with not doing radio sessions meant that there were no new bootlegs to buy, or more frequently download via WinMX. That night they played at least two new songs. The Night That Minnie Temporarily Died [sic] and Sunrise. The first was a somewhat garbled ballad about a girl called Minnie. The second seemed to focus around the sun. What was memorable about Sunrise was the amazing sonic climax. It was not the sort of thing you ever would have expected from a band that had been either broody or insoucient over the years. This sounded frantic and wild.

After some searching i managed to download copies of these two tracks in somewhat hissy MP3 format. I'd listen to Sunrise repeatedly trying to pick out quite where this huge of explosion of noise came from and how it was achieved. I don't think i've ever really worked it out. Probably for the best.

Late in 2001 i managed to upgrade my lo-fi MP3 of Sunrise for an awesome studio version when the band released their (final) album We Love Life. Also it turned out that Minnie Timperley had died, for good not temporarily. By this point a new wave of music was "in" and this album had to sit along with other bands i was listening to like The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Hives and other such Garage Rock outfits.

It's quite a mellow record and one seemingly obsessed with nature. From the opening two tracks about Weeds (albeit human ones) to the closer Sunrise via Roadkill, Wickerman and Birds in Your Garden it seemed that Jarvis had finally made his way out of the city with it's sleazy backdrops, municipal sex experiences and near hypnogogic horror shows. If This is Hardcore had been about the dehumanising effect of pornography then Birds in Your Garden was about the naturalness of sex. Jarvis, had hit middle age and moved to the country.

We saw them again at Reading in 2002 and once again they ended with Sunrise. They did a few more gigs. Then nothing. Then they said they were going to stop for a bit. not to split, but to rest and each try other things. Bad Times.

Jarvis intermittently appeared with new work. His album with Jason Buckle "An evening with... Relaxed Muscle" was an interesting trip into Electro Glam. If nothing else Jarvis' penchant for dressing up during gigs meant his faced stayed in the papers. I liked some of the songs, but it was a bit too wilfully obtuse. Whereas Pulp had always sounded to me like the product of a band (albeit a sometimes very weird one) this was very much two blokes in a studio pretending to be a band. Two guys in a studio works if you're Daft Punk. Not so much for these guys.

His first solo album, Jarvis, was excellent though. Songs about Fat Children, killers, porn stars and the cunts running the world all featured. When the tour was announced, buying tickets was essential. We got some for Koko in London.

Jarvis was still a wild man on stage. They played the whole album and a few covers. Steve Mackay played bass in the band as he had done in Pulp and Richard Hawley was playing guitar despite being an artist in his own right by that time. In fact just a few months later we saw him play a massive gig at the Roundhouse just up the road from Koko. Jarvis didn't play any pulp songs but i didn't really think he would.

The second album was a bit dull. The lyrics weren't as incisive as those on Jarvis. Luckily Radio would step in as it had at the very start of our relationship. Jarvis had a BBC Six Music show. so even if his album was rubbish at least now he could play me tracks that he thought were awesome. Aalso he's got that genuine John Peel vibe in that he doesn't really care what form the sounds are as long as it is good. So sometimes he reads stories. Or has features from freelance journalists. Just like John Peel would get Viv Stanshall in to do sessions about the goings on at Rawlinson End.

I thought this is how it would go on. With him doing interesting radio and less interesting albums but we could manage that, after all we'd always have those glory years back in the nineties to reminisce about.

Till late in 2010 Pulp said they were reforming. At first i was sceptical as i think everyone is de facto these days. It said reforming, that seemed cack handed since they'd also gone to great lengths to point out they weren't breaking up. It also claimed it was the "original" line up. The one from 1982 that made It? No, the one from the nineties that made Different Class. Tickets were bought nonetheless.

Then began an 8 month wait. One that ended in Hyde Park last weekend.

This is the third decade i've seen Pulp playing (nineties, naughties, nowies) and I did wonder if they still had the chops. I saw some of the setlists from earlier gigs in the tour and as expected the majority of material was DC/HNH era stuff. So it should be alright after all these were the crowd pleasers. What did not please our corner of the crowd was having to watch Grace Jones. Literal horror show.

A big black curtain is having words projected on it, the stage is obfiscated and the words projected on the screen are teasing us. Soon the sounds swell from behind the curtain and as the curtain comes falling down there they are. Storming through Do you remember the First Time. Signalling the arrival of the first chorus huge paper cannons go off either side of the stage.

Over the next 90 minutes we are treated to plenty of singalong favourites as well as some of the more oblique material but at least back to back F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E. and I Spy mid set gives us all a rest and a chance to catch our breath. Band included i expect. They close predictably with Common People. This version is peppered with shots from giant ticker tape cannons either side of the stage. We were at the front and as the confetti swirled above us catching the light it had the strange effect of putting a roof above, that suddenly brought us much closer to the band. It was weird but in a good way. Much like the band.

Riding the tube home after the gig i was hot, sweaty, dishevelled and happy. Pulp had played another gig and i had been there and they was still fantastic. I can only hope they make another album. It seems unlikely given the band dynamics during the show. It's a real shame, but i guess that's the way it works out sometimes. A small part of me would like to leave it as it is album wise.

So Pulp where my first love, i grew up with them and they talked to me throughout my years as a teen and in my twenties as we both matured. Then they went away and all i had was old memories. Then they came back for one more show like some sort of musical fuck buddy from my past. Maybe we'll meet up in another park in a few more years and do it all over again. Maybe i'll never see them again. But knowing that they could play, and play well, at any time is a nice thought to carry round in the back of your head.

Pulp, I love you, you rock.