Pulp at the Hollywood Palladium

September 19, 2024

I’m With Pulp, Are you?

Compiled by Mark Webber

Published in 2024 by Hat & Beard Press

hatandbeard.com/im-with-pulp-are-you?

 

By Yann Perreau

 

My name is Jarvis. I want to thank you all for coming to my birthday party,” the Pulp singer shouts to the crowd. He dances like a shaman, his body in a trance while the rhythm gets insane, and the audience goes nuts as guitarist Mark Webber’s first riffs of “Disco 2000” resonate. The atmosphere inside the Hollywood Palladium is electrifying, two or three generations of fans sharing a common passion for the musicians and demonstrably knowing most of the lyrics by heart. Jarvis Cocker then lays on a chair, taking a break while the rest of the band continues with fury and devotion. He has this I-don’t-really-care-but-I’m-still-with-you way of being, a gentleness, ultimately, that reminds me of the Fall’s Mark E. Smith or Serge Gainsbourg—musicians who became even more interesting into their 50s, a bit like some rare wines mature into even more complex flavors with time. The friend who accompanied me to the gig, composer Benjamin Speed, reminds me what’s great about Pulp (and, in some respects, Blur, their frères ennemis): they compose songs from the most mundane life experiences.

Nostalgia is not the right word to describe how I felt during the almost three hours of the band’s performance. Sure, memories of my early twenties reemerged as Cocker sang classics like “Common People” and “Babies.” But fun, joy, and excitement were my predominant feelings. I was surprised to be that way, having assumed that Cocker and his fellows, with their ironic, witty, sometimes blasé mindsets, would bring me more into a distanced “cool Britannia” state of mind. One of Cocker’s recent outstanding achievements is the album Room 29 (2017), composed with Chilly Gonzales.* It tells the sad but fascinating story of a recluse losing his mind in a Chateau Marmont room, haunted by the ghosts of old Hollywood. So, I had somehow come to associate the singer with a dark and delusional L.A. noir style, despite his sarcastic sense of humor in the way he sings his compositions, stopping sometimes to tell anecdotes of life’s crap stuff. But hearing early songs like “Pink Glove” (from Pulp’s 1994 His ’n’ Hers album), one could feel Cocker’s delight and happiness. At 65 years old, he still allows himself, while on stage, to come back as the romantic, candid boy in his twenties when he started composing lyrics.

A few months after the concert, I finally received I’m With Pulp, Are You?, a 300-page compilation of rare photos, flyers, lyrics, and testimonies collected by Pulp guitarist Mark Webber and published as a coffee table book/art object by Hat & Beard Press, an independent house founded by my friend J.C. Gabel. “I’ve often thought that bands are like Outsider Art projects,” writes Cocker in the foreword to the book. “The practitioners are self-taught individuals (I wanted to learn guitar at school but was told it was not a ‘proper’ instrument) who follow their instincts to create (songwriting was certainly not taught at the school I attended) and are generally considered to be a bit ‘weird’ (see practically every Pulp review ever written).” How far are we from this time, in the age of reality TV music competition shows? Sure, one could argue that TikTok, Instagram, etc., have brought back the DIY spirit, propelling unknown kids composing in their rooms around the world to the public stage. But what’s lost nowadays is the aesthetic that was crucial to a recording artist’s identity in the twentieth century: the LP covers (often gatefold), photos, illustrations, flyers, and posters—not to mention all the numerous long-gone print magazines and music papers—which any fan would rush to music stores to peruse and acquire. One finds this material in I’m With Pulp, Are You? “I was always a hoarder,” Webber writes. “One of my teenage best friends used to accuse me of buying records so that I could look through the holes. I was also an obsessive fan, attracted to the scraps of ephemera that had been left behind by the bands that I loved most, like the Velvet Underground and the Beach Boys, so it was inevitable that I would collect this kind of stuff for Pulp, eventually becoming the group’s self-appointed archivist.”

Thanks to him, we have all this material to dig into, meticulously organized chronologically and laid out with details and care to constitute the ultimate Pulp object. In an essay, Simon Reynolds mentions how Pulp exists “in the gap between self-aggrandizing fantasy and self-effacing realism… Even the interviews have the same quality, as artistic ambition constantly jostles with self-deprecating bathos.” A “Sheffield way of being.” Hurrah for this North of England sensibility, something we need sometimes in the bright, sunny, in-your-face La La land.

*See: chillygonzales.com/room29-with-jarvis-cocker

 

 

Mark Webber, I’m With Pulp, Are You? Images (6) courtesy and © 2024 the artists and Hat & Beard Press.