VoxPop wrote:

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Arcade Fires new song [...] seems to have been produced by Steve [...] but it made me wonder if PULP gains some new fans. Arcade Fire being as big as they are would certainly attract lots of press. 

I hope so too, but it made me think... Arcade Fire seem a HUGE band in our world - playing to huge arena crowds etc.  But in the non-indie / alternative world, I've found, they're surprisingly obscure.  I was speaking to a bunch of 20 / 30ish year old people a couple of years ago (getting to know people in a new job... what are you interested in bla bla), people who claimed to be music fans, and was surprised to find that none of them had heard of Arcade Fire - who at the time were what I thought of as massive.

Back in the 90's, when Pulp were huge, they were all over the tabloids, Jarvis on Richard & Judy, Pulp take over Big Breakfast etc.  Blur / Oasis on the main evening news.  Mass pub / common room singalongs of indie hits.  Britpop was all over the mainstream media - whether you like it all, or not, it is true that it was a huge cultural phenomenon.  It's hard to conceive of that now (the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there).

Now the days of big musical movements are over.  There will always be occasional mega-artists like Adele, but they will be few.  The whole of music has fragmented into micro-scenes.  All of culture has fragmented too, with each individual in their own tw*tter / f*ckface bubble, which only feeds you limited variations of that you already know and approve of.  Same with the rest of the vampiric social networks.  Same with this crackpot 'multi-culturalism' idea, where people have ended up dividing into discrete social groups, and are self-ghettoising.  Right now I'm listening to Radio 6, and I love it, but it's all my stuff.  Twenty years ago, I would be listening to Radio 1, where there would be my stuff (Evening Session / Marc N Lard / Breezeblock / Peel), but also large doses of partly revolting stuff, but at least I would sometimes hear something different.

Some young people have an no interest in anything old, anything that existed before they did.  I'm a creaky old fart now - In my youth we were buying cheap old vinyl, and making outfits out of a bunch of weird charity shop clothes.  My brother - 15 years younger - and his friends have an abhorrence of anything old. Why would you want to listen to something OLD?  Silent films?  No chance. Glam Rock?  - Why would you listen to that, when you can listen (on your tinny mobile phone) to a crappy contemporary artist ripping off glam rock.  It's a disposable society chronically swamped with covers and tribute shows (sad imitations, that get it so wrong).

I should be less cynical - Arcade Fire fans, teenagers included, would presumably be a bit more sophisticated than my brother and his philistine mates.  Here's hoping.  When I first noticed Pulp I was in my own bubble, and they brought me out of it - opening up a whole weird and wonderful musical world of Scott Walker, Leonard Cohen, Moondog.  When you find something new it goes on to show you ever more new and exciting things.  Do these damn social networks do any of that for any of you?

(Okay, this post doesn't make complete sense, but I lost big chunks of it twice when trying to correct a typo, and now I'm going goggle-eyed... this seem to happen to me a lot on this site!)

There are many connections between them from collaborations  and they all follow each other on social media. steves Instagram  shows he is in New Orleans (same as Arcade Fire) and he did post the new cover art of the single.  I suppose being a big AF fan (and I'm not a teenager!)  I assumed they were big everywhere (or so it seems from here in Canada) i am excited that Steve is now part of the arcade fire world but more importantly, the word PULP will be heard on the radio a bit more (always been rare and always makes me happy)

So Steve did in fact produce the new Arcade Fire. The first single was released today. Hope the coverage does get the word "PULP" out there somewhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC30BYR3CUk