A Long Rant About Pulp

Or, How To Completely Fall Out Of Love With Your Favourite Band In Two Short Years.

Hello, friends. Long-time Bar Italia voyeur here. In fact, the last time I posted was to break the news that the band were parting ways with Island Records back in 2002. Doesn't time just fly by? Particularly when your clock passes thirty.

Firstly, let me be very clear about this. I love all of Pulp's music intensely. Have done for nearly twenty years now. Their music helped me through a very bad time in my life, changed me as a person and altered my entire outlook on the world (hopefully for the better). But I'm sorry, I simply can't stay silent about it longer, I absolutely hated the reunion. In almost every conceivable way. So much so, in fact, that it's hard to even know where to begin criticising it.

Still, let's have a try. Well, when the whole thing was first announced, like most of you folk, I was naturally thrilled. Everything was suddenly okay again. The band had a future, all doubt was cast aside, the hiatus was over. Even Russell was back in the fold. Bonus! Then came the dismaying news that there would be no new material and the (admittedly self-deprecating) admittance from Jarvis that they were motivated to reform mainly for financial reasons. Hmm, okay, I thought...

Thinking it through, I found it hard to begrudge them touring the hits, really. After all, they never originally did it back when the actual Hits album was released and by 2011 a whole new generation of indie kids had grown up who had never had the opportunity of seeing them perform live. Still, what was troubling me was this: reforming just to tour the greatest hits - it was just all far too predictable for a group like Pulp. Just ask yourself this question - when else in their long, tortuous career have they ever been a group to take the easy option? To only do what's predictable and safe? From Russell's provocative Will To Power lyrics to the La Monte Young benefit concert, or pulling off a performance at the Homelands dance festival in 2001, they were always consistently imaginative and surprising in the moves they made. Sure, some of it infuriated, such as the Venetian blinds they played behind for a few concerts, but still you've got to give them credit for it. Their imagination was another reason why we loved them. And yet here there were, so many years later, predictably dragging their greatest hits set across the globe, chiefly in order to pay off their mortgages. As a long-time admirer one can't help but feel bitterly disappointed, cheated even, at the startling lack of imagination and creativity. I mean, at the very least, just think of how much more exciting the shows would have been (for them and for us) if they'd at least dared to drop two or three new songs into the set and tantalise us with the possibility of a new album on the horizon.

However, this grievance was quickly downgraded to being relatively trivial once I'd fully digested their new live sound. On first listen, I actually have to admit I was quite impressed. The sound was bigger, beefier, slicker and closer than ever before to how they sound on the Britpop records. But again, something was not quite right. It was almost as if they'd lost that quality that Jarvis so accurately pinpoints in the Hits sleevenotes - their ramshackle charm. Hearing songs such as Babies or Lipgloss, both of them on record imbued with that endearingly naive musical quality, performed now in such a bludgeoning, ruthlessly slick and professional way was a deeply unsettling experience for me. I love both of those songs like they were my own children and yet here they were just sounding... well, wrong. As though an ultra-polished but soulless Pulp covers band were playing them. Remember - a bad imitation of Pulp is not the real thing. And where were the surprises in the arrangements? There were none. No extended Live Bed Show. No Krautrock Common People. Nothing of the sort. Just a rather uninteresting, slowed down, clap-along Razzmatazz. Finally and most crucially, for me, the new live sound lacked something absolutely fundamental to the group in my opinion - edge. That palpable yet indefinable tension that the old Pulp used to have in spades. Unfortunately, the reunion-era line-up are just far too slick, too polished, too over-rehearsed to retain it anymore. So, what then are you left with? Even what little remains of their original home-baked charm has been submerged forever underneath all this new-found slickness.

And then there's the small matter of Jarvis's singing. Now it's been apparent ever since his performance on the Sky Arts Songbook programme that his voice has noticeably deepened in recent years and that most of the high notes are now completely beyond him. And I'm afraid the awful truth is that, with the exception of songs predominantly spoken or sung in a lower register (such as Sheffield: Sex City or Party Hard), he no longer has the vocal ability to competently perform most of Pulp's back catalogue. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that most of his reunion-era vocals are nothing short of downright embarrassing. I guess this also explains why, when performing live, he's now more inclined to talk and whisper his way through the songs instead. But failing to show off these songs' wonderful melodies is doing them a great disservice, rendering them all rather flat and one-dimensional in the process. Perhaps that wag who described a reunion Pulp concert as 'Right Said Fred with a Yorkshire accent' wasn't so very far off the mark. But by far the most annoying trait he seems to have acquired is the tendency to emphasise and stress certain parts of the lyrics in ways that he's never done before (For a perfect example of this watch I Spy on Pulp: The Film and listen to the way he camps up his Sheffield accent with the line, 'I can't help it, I were dragged up". It's completely unnecessary and does nothing other than distract from the melody and undermine the mood of the song.) It did occur to me that perhaps his tinnitus is the problem here, interfering with his hearing of the band's playing and causing his singing to go astray. But I fear what's sadly more likely, is that this new cavalier approach to his vocals is an unfortunate combination of over-compensation for his otherwise faltering singing and possibly all he can do to keep himself interested in performing these songs for the umpteenth time around (thus reaffirming the notion that the reunion was born more out of financial reasons than creative ones).

I was actually there for the Sheffield homecoming concert. I thought they put on a decent-enough show for an arena (Jarvis's vocals aside) and I'm sure the majority of the crowd went home happy after the Different Class-heavy set, though, rather predictably, for me, the interest and excitement only grew when they dug out the more obscure stuff (Countdown, Born To Cry, My Lighthouse, etc). Oh, and another thing, exactly when did Jarvis's between-song banter become so utterly banal and shamelessly crowd-pleasing? Alright, fair enough, I know he's been introducing some of these songs for twenty-odd years now and probably has little new left to say about them, but did anybody else, like me, cringe a little inside when Jarvis dedicated Something Changed to 'all the lovers out there'? And prefacing it with 'I know it sounds a bit corny but...', doesn't excuse it. Truly, this is the worst kind of clichéd rock star nonsense. And when could you ever have said that about Jarvis's banter previously? Even his onstage antics now grate on me. Where his unique take on dancing always used to appear genuinely spontaneous and perfectly natural, now it just seems forced and self-conscious - almost as though he's going for it a little too much, trying just a bit too hard to do his trademark 'funny little dance' and give the punters the performance they expect from him. Again, audience-pandering. So uncharacteristic for him. Or so I used to think. But again, maybe he feels the need to push it harder just to compensate for his obvious vocal shortcomings.

Still, I've got to hand it to them, the Xmas cards were a nice touch and, despite the disappointment that all they could muster creatively was to tart up a twelve year-old demo, I actually think After You is pretty great, even if I can't quite shake off the feeling that the new version sounds a tad laboured compared to the freshness and simplicity of the demo.

The film? Well, I thought it was good, but it told us nothing new and was ultimately pointless. The cynic in me even thinks it was just the most convenient way to get a new Pulp product out there in the marketplace without the bother of them actually having to come up with new material. And even though he wasn't part of the Sheffield show, completely omitting Russell from the proceedings was, in my view, unforgiveable. I was completely unmoved to go to a screening of it, and owned the DVD for about two weeks before reasoning that the live footage annoys me so much that I'd never be inclined to watch it again, so I sold it on eBay. Something I never thought I'd ever do with any new Pulp release. The end of an era. 

And so, in conclusion, it seems that this once brilliant group, who, in 2001, were so determined not to be pigeonholed as Britpop that they played almost an entire tour without Common People in the set (remember Jarvis saying, 'We want to get away from it'?) are now perfectly content to be forever associated with the movement. And even trade off the connection. Right down to using the old Pulp logo and Different Class-era cardboard cut-out images of themselves on promotional materials. And all this achieves is to cement in the public's minds that they are a solely a Britpop nostalgia act with nothing else to offer. And should they ever actually cook up any new material (yeah, right!) it'll make it even more difficult for people to take them seriously. Particularly if the music doesn't conform to the Britpop sound they'll undoubtedly be expecting. Which I, for one, seriously hope it wouldn't.

So... new material. That's the only thing that can win me back now, I'm afraid. Good new material, of course. With an interesting new direction. Take your Different Class Part II and shove it up your ass. And I know it's unlikely what with Candida's arthritis and the whole band's indifference after the difficulty of making the last two albums, but seriously, guys, it's put up or shut up time now. Tell us something new about ourselves and our times. Cut Cameron's Big Society Britain down to size. Please. Don't just peddle nostalgia like so many others. You're worth so much more than that.

Anyway, that's enough from me for now. Many thanks to you all for reading this extended rant and I'd be interested to know your thoughts or if any of you feel at all similarly, because I feel completely out on a limb with this viewpoint otherwise.

Pulp, 1978-2002; remember them this way.