Probably an idea of the wife... that was so avant-retro-garde.

Here's what I wrote about Relaxed Muscle on the old Mojo Boards, back in 2012.

-----

RELAXED MUSCLE

Oh, children of the future conceived in the toilets of Meadowhall to be raised on cheap corn snacks and garage food...

'A mask tells us more than a face,' wrote Oscar Wilde in Intentions (1891).  'Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.'  In full-body skeleton paint like Death Metal Nite down the miners' welfare, or perhaps the mortal remains of Kiss, Relaxed Muscle was ostensibly the work of one Darren Spooner, aided and abetted by JP (Jason) Buckle of the All-Seeing I and Wayne Marsden, a.k.a. Richard Hawley.  A Sheffield crew, giving us a slice of young Spooner's life.  Spooner was of course Jarvis Cocker, but his world, as exhibited on A Heavy Nite with Relaxed Muscle, is well-realised and feels like a project that could have come out in a number of media: a film or a novel, perhaps.  Instead it's an album, and one that deserves not to be filed under Avoid These if and when Mojo does a How To Buy...Pulp feature.

Pulp were sometimes charged with stealing a tip or two from World of Twist, and so it's tempting to see Relaxed Muscle as Cocker returning to the scene of the crime to do a job on Earl Brutus.  But there's no art school about this record.  It's all in character.  There's no theorising or intellectual analysis, no socio-economic explanations.  We all know why. A Heavy Nite with Relaxed Muscle presents the unpalatable truth behind Pulp lines like 'watch your life slide out of view, and then dance and drink and screw, because there's nothing else to do.'  This is a journey through the world of the post-industrial working (or drinking thanks again, Oscar) male.  Ladies and gentlemen, here is Darren Spooner, with Relaxed Muscle: an affectionate, fanciful slang for something less attractive.  A beer gut.  This is going to be a heavy night.

Jesus Christ, its only half-eleven!

The Heavy sets the tone, dark, brooding glam-paced scuzzy fuzziness.  The music itself seems to be drunk: ultra-trashy squelching computerised arrangements of the most basic bluesy raw chord patterns.  The themes are basic and fundamental: drink, sex and violence, or rather the boasted threat of violence, the promise of sex, the claims about drinking...the fundament is just another sham.

Oh, baby I feel lucky with you in my bed,

and I feel like getting mucky with a thoroughbred.

3-Way Accumulator promises a grunting threesome with characteristic charm: 'I got a three-way accumulator, and now the race is on.  So I think I'll see you later, with no panties on.' The influence of American English on certain British working men comes through loud and clear in the voice of Darren, who later claims 'I tell you one thing and I aint lyin' I rule my woman with a rod of iron.' Course you do, Darren.  They all believe you.  They're all the same. Rod of Iron is a pop classic from an alternative world where Cabaret Voltaire's Nag Nag Nag went to Number One.

Youre gonna need a week of rest 

by the time I've finished with you.

The boasts come thick and fast.  Beastmaster introduces a new dance craze that's as old as the hills, and Billy Jack raids the American culture that is replacing Darren's own to arm himself with a Smith & Wesson and tell the tale of 'a man who couldn't take it any more.  A man who was pushed around just once too often.' But even this ends up as a bizarre dance routine, the moves commanded by a gun-toting maniac.  Another mask, another story.

You need a seeing to.

It hurts me more than you.

Things become dense and thick both outside and in, and as the night progresses there's nothing for it but to Tuff It Out, where we must 'hack, hack, hack' (is that a machete or a cough?) through the claustrophobic Suicide chug-fug.  Typically, it's the woman who gets it or the threat of it in the end.  Should Relaxed Muscle ever return, Id love them to feature a female vocalist Pauline Calf to Darren Spooner's Paul with her own version of the story to tell.  Meanwhile, Sexualized lets us hear the thoughts and boasts of a man assailed by products advertised by appeal to the bluntest and basest of instruments.  Everything around him is all about sex, or at least that's how it looks to Darren.

The drink that I drink is sexualized.

The thoughts that I think are sexualized.

The life I live is sexualized.

I shoot from the hip 'cause I'm sexualized.

Adam and the Ants' Burundi beat meets Tiger Feet on the street for Muscle Music.  As with Antmusic, we're promised a more substantial and satisfying sound, but for all the promise there's the sound of a siren in the distance.  Police, fire or ambulance?  

You want something real, you want something raw?

Try this for size: pick your teeth off the floor.

The album definitely calms down towards the end, getting full of beer, fast food and experience.  Theres also an increasing sense that something is wrong; that there's a better life somewhere outside Darren's world.  But is he cut out for it?  B-Real addresses that core issue: a decision to 'be real' is a decision to adopt another mask.  All his talk about changing and settling down is just talk, like all the rest.

You don't need no previous experience. 

I'll show you the rules of the game.

Come on, open wide.  You know what I like.

Oh shit, I was previous again.

Two bits of wordplay before the end.  First the bleak, sparse urban blues of Previous, like Sabres of Paradise with vocals: going down the dub.  Or down the nick.  And then Battered.  Like fish?  Like the victim of an assault, or the result of a drinking binge probably both.  This is the reduced essence of northern masculinity: a drink and a fight encapsulated in a single word: battered.  Like a night on the town with Darren, it's enormous fun, but you wouldnt want to do it every week.

Mary, I just called to tell you 

that both our children are on drugs,

and the way their teens are going 

they'll be dead long before either one of us.

When at the end we get an 'outside' perspective, it's not from far outside.  We hear from Darren's father, the narrator of the final song Mary, with its wonky Lola [chords.  After the onslaught, the barrage of drink, fights and fucking, we get to hear a missive from the receiving end, although typically it's been the giving end in its time, and is now beating itself up about its failures.  

Now I like a bit of fun now and then, 

and I know sometimes I have too much,

and I know things are different now,

but drugs, Mary fuckin' drugs!

A desperate, hopeless, uncomprehending husband and father: it's a familiar story, very much so to Jarvis, who had one of his own.  That he should write somewhere about an estranged father is no surprise; that he chose one of his lower-key side-projects to do so should be less of one.  But the son's name is Darren, not Jarvis.  He's not asking for our pity or understanding.  Or if he is, he wants it for someone else: the real Darren Spooners, who don't have the opportunity to articulate.  

They say that some jobs social work, for example need a special sort of person.  You have to want to do it.  Well, in the same way you have to want to care about Darren Spooner, and you have to want to enjoy Relaxed Muscle, because it isn't going to make any accommodation for you.  Given time it'll make you laugh, sing, and feel faintly disgusted, but that's the way things are: this is the truth from behind the mask.

Probably got it from PulpWiki at the time, although right now the appropriate page there has "the teens" - agree "that things" makes more sense.