I love The Next Day! Big highlights for me would be How Does the Grass Grow? and Valentine's Day but I pretty much like it all. I often think with that album he perfected each sound he had. For example, If You Can See Me sounds like an Earthling era song but if it was on Earthling it'd be a contender for its best track. Valentine's Day is like a contender for the Ziggy era, How does the grass... that's like Scary Monsters era etc etc. Heat is like Outside era. You feel so lonely... that's like Heathen era. I just felt like he revisited everything and perfected it with that album. Then once the slate was clean he could produce the likes of Blackstar and surprise everyone all over again.

I think Buddha is his strongest 90s offering but I have a soft spot for Outside and Earthling too.

He left us on a real high and even if he hadn't done those last 2 albums he was always going to be my old favourite but it was a fitting end artistically to do those last two particularly Blackstar and I'm so happy there was the time for it to happen.

Same with Pulp. They'll always have huge emotional significance to me no matter what happens but going back to what Jarvis said before about Glastonbury 95 would be the closing scene in the film...sometimes my mind wanders off to imagining them leaving on another high in album terms. WLL has been the end in my mind for years though and it's fitting in it's own way. They had the success (DC), then the hangover (TiH) and this(WLL) was like picking themselves back up and swearing to live a cleaner life after the hangover here comes sunrise. And that's one nice ending. A sunset could be one too though. What will be will be. It's been a fantastic voyage either way :)

I think if you haven't heard many good-to-great albums by projects that took a 10+ year break then you haven't listened to enough albums

I love how organically We Love Life takes everything full circle. That album and Hardcore feel like companion pieces. With We Love Life you have the mature musical progression of Pulp's sound, given air and room to breathe for the first time proper. And it's there in the songs: Bad Cover Version recalls the jealous ballads of His 'N' Hers, Weeds recalls the class anthems of Different Class, it's all in there; especially in Wickerman which is an odyssey through all of those past stories, meandering yet purposeful... so beautiful and poetic... it's an album about how endings are beginnings, and it's never too late to start again and open a new page... life, death, and renewal, through nature's life-cycles (trees and sunrise), and before the sunrise the penultimate track Roadkill sounds like it could be off the very first Pulp album... a foray into the past then a leap into the new...

I could honestly be talked into thinking it's the greatest thing Pulp have ever done (even though I don't go a bundle on Bob Lind). But as perfectly as it brings things full-circle, it leaves the future open. That's the genius of a wise, wise album that knew it was ending something before the jig was actually up: the fact there's unfinished business is actually what so neatly finishes the business. The three songs we've heard (two Jarvis/Hawley tinkerings and one outright Pulp track) all plough that same furrow.

Everything has been incredibly astute with how the Pulp legacy has been managed. Jarvis got to go and do his own thing and make songs he couldn't with Pulp, like his album with Steve Albini (it's so sad to think that half the people in the room on Further Complications aren't with us anymore). And Pulp sat back and saw that Pulp aged incredibly, incredibly well - finer than fine wine - songs like Common People and Mis-Shapes have only grown in momentous purpose... we need them more than ever now, really, really, more than ever. I think they know that.