Jarvis Cocker can opine. The mop-topped, bespectacled frontman of Pulp, the beloved Britpop act, is in demand as a conversationalist for the canny turns of phrase and pungent references that also animate his lyrics.
Get him into a room with his bandmates — he and the three longest-running members had gathered last month at the Barbican Center in central London to talk about their newest album — and he will gladly unspool about what undergirds pop (“repressed feelings”) and the unexpected strife of band life: “You can’t get insurance! It’s loads more expensive for a musician.”
Then there’s the threat posed by streaming. “We’re in a situation now where you could live your whole life without ever listening to a piece of music more than once; you can just let it all just go past you, in a kind of scented candle vibe,” he said with horror.
Pulp, as the name suggests, is more visceral than that, with wryly observed dance-floor anthems that explore the social pecking order, like the enduring 1995 track “Common People.” What “made Pulp songs interesting,” Cocker said he realized lately, is that “they’re often quite frantic, trying to get some idea across or to work something out in your mind. Hysterical, sometimes, almost.”
That propelled them through their ’90s heyday, anyway. But “More,” Pulp’s first record in nearly a quarter-century, out June 6, has a different thrust: more introspective, more room to breathe. When he played it in the offices of Rough Trade, Pulp’s label, “Someone said, oh, that’s very age appropriate,” Cocker, 61, recalled. “I took it as a compliment.”
Sitting around a long conference table at the Barbican, the cultural center where they had gigged over the years, his bandmates — Candida Doyle, the keyboardist; Mark Webber, the guitarist; and Nick Banks, the drummer — mostly jibed with their songwriter and semi-democratic leader. But they did sometimes laugh (affectionately) at him.
Like when he recounted his fateful move to Paris, during the group’s early 2000s hiatus, and what he perceived as a sign from the universe that he should step back from music.
He had lashed his most expensive and prized guitar, an acoustic Gibson, to his car’s roof. “It fell off as we were driving,” he recalled. “Got run over by a lorry. Absolutely decimated.” His bandmates erupted. “First time I’d ever tried to put something on a roof rack,” he added, and they lost it. (“It’s so typical!” Webber sputtered.) Cocker responded in — mock?— indignation: “What are you laughing at?! You should be crying about that!”
But after playing together across three decades, Pulp can take the piss. They’re mellowed, “more accepting of each other,” Banks, 59, said. “Harmonious” was the word that Doyle, 61, used to describe the album-making process, which involved them giving each demo a numerical ranking to determine what would make the cut. (A downbeat, atmospheric track now called “My Sex” scored the most points.) Vast popularity might return, or not; at this stage, the stakes are different. “For me, there isn’t really a lot of pressure,” Webber, 54, said.
What were the metrics of success, anyway, Cocker wondered, in such a shifting industry. “Candida?”
“Whether I enjoy it or not,” she replied, and the guys laughed.
Fixated early on the ambitious occupation of pop star, Cocker started the group as a teenager in 1978 in Sheffield, England; with rotating members and D.I.Y. scrabbling, the band endured a decade of un-renown in its working-class hometown. Then, after Cocker’s stint in art school in London, Pulp became a sensation, especially in the United Kingdom, where it was part of the Britpop trifecta of Oasis and Blur — the funniest part, intentionally so.
James Murphy, the frontman of LCD Soundsystem and a friend of Cocker’s, said the magic of Pulp is that the songs are serious without taking themselves too seriously — there’s “an infinite possibility of depth and humor and wit and earnestness and flippancy,” he said in a phone interview. “I don’t think that those things are in conflict when they’re done well.”
Live shows, anchored by Banks’s ferocious drumming and Cocker’s spontaneous struts and turns, magnified its fan base; the group’s ascent was a marker of relatable striving. “If a lanky geck like me can do it,” he said, using a British term for geek, “you can do it too,” Cocker told the cheering crowd when Pulp headlined the 1995 Glastonbury Festival.
But by 2002, Pulp was a supernova: Its star had collapsed under its own weight. “There was no falling out,” Webber said. Banks agreed: “Just ran out of steam.” Still, there was no expectation, they said, that Pulp would be resurrected.
Real lives and other careers followed. Doyle, who was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis as a teenager, became an advocate and trained as a counselor; Webber was an indie film curator and writer; Banks managed his family pottery business back in Sheffield. Their success in the ’90s gave them all a financial cushion. Cocker, who had a side project, Jarv Is …, was also an editor at large for the publisher Faber and Faber, and a BBC broadcaster. (For insurance purposes, he listed the broadcasting job “to get my premium down.”)
Then came a couple of highly regarded reunion tours. The first, in 2011, was meant “to try and finish things off in a nicer way,” Cocker said (including with the guitarist Russell Senior, who had previously left the band). And Cocker also wanted to rid himself of the adolescent expectation that achieving fame would solve all his problems.
“It didn’t,” he said. “One of the things that drives me to do it now, is to try and do it correctly this time.” (He left open that this might be an impossibility.)
“More,” Pulp’s eighth studio release, is dedicated to its bassist Steve Mackey, who died in 2023. It was born of new numbers that Cocker auditioned during soundchecks, and tones down what Doyle called the “tense energy” of their earlier material for Cocker’s midlife reflections and talky meditations, now with a string section and a choir.
“I’ve always had a bit of an obsession with age,” Cocker wrote in the album notes. (At 33, he penned the arch ballad “Help the Aged.”) “And I’ve always not really wanted to grow up. So to say that I am grown up now is a big achievement, actually.” As he lays out in the cautionary track “Grown Ups”: “Life’s too short to drink bad wine. And that’s frightening.”
Once a Brit heartthrob in mod suits and stack-heeled boots, Cocker is still a dandy, but now in skinny corduroy and plaid, with perpetually mussed hair; in his all-brown tones, he nearly blended into the ’70s russets of the Barbican. “I once read this thing that said, if you want to do something original, then try and copy something exactly,” he mused, as he left the center to host a talk with a sculptor at a 19th-century chapel.
Cocker is like a cultural double agent — a mild-mannered aesthete in daily life and an outsize phenom onstage. The first time Murphy saw him perform (on the 2012 Coachella cruise), all long-legged knee bends and skyward fingers, “I was dumbfounded,” Murphy said. “He’s so magnetic. Lanks around, constantly throwing shapes. It seems almost impossible as a person — if you drew a cartoon of that, then it would be more accurate. It’s such an exaggerated presence.”
For his part, Cocker said he doesn’t plan any moves, and remembers little of concerts. “That’s why I like music,” he said. “It bypasses your intellect.”
The group finished “More” in three weeks, an unheard-of brevity for Pulp, whose last LP, “We Love Life,” in 2001, took close to a year in the studio — “This Is Hardcore,” from 1998, even longer — an experience the band didn’t care to repeat.
Aiming for a live performance sound, they recorded all together in one room, alongside the producer James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode), who plugged his mixing board in there too. He likes to work quickly, to “capture more of a kind of photographic moment,” Ford said in an interview. “My preference is always for the feel and the vibe of it, over the precision of the sonics.”
Murphy said he loves that the band’s sound is “a little [expletive] wonky.”
“They’ve never been rounded out and made to sound like everything else,” he said. In a pairing Murphy said he’d been trying to organize “for a very, very long time,” the two acts are playing the Hollywood Bowl this fall.
Both he and Ford gushed about Cocker’s lyrics. “They’re so kind of matter-of-fact, but then cosmic at the same time,” Ford said. (In 2011, Faber published “Mother, Brother, Lover,” a collection of Cocker’s lyrics, which he took pains to point out were definitely not poetry.)
“More” also presented a change in the way he wrote. All of the other albums, he led with melody and mumbled sounds until some words stuck, often at the very last minute. This one, he came to the studio with language sorted. Maturity! “I was born / To perform,” he announces on the synthy, nostalgia-fueled opening track, “Spike Island.” “It’s a calling / I exist / To do this / Shouting and pointing.”
Is he being ironic? As with so much Pulp, it’s layered. The title comes from a 1990 concert by the Manchester favorites the Stone Roses, a notoriously chaotic event attended by tens of thousands of fans, which helped inspire Britpop as a genre.
It’s having a bit of a resurgence now, with even the eternally dueling Oasis returning to tour. (Pulp’s members were split about whether they’d catch the group’s stadium shows.) Cocker was interested — the first time he’d met them, in the ’90s, Pulp was opening for Blur on a U.S. tour. A night off in San Francisco coincided with an Oasis gig.
“So we asked if we could go to see it,” he recalled, “and they said yes, ‘as long as Jarvis comes onto the tour bus and talks to us before.’” He pulled up. “I was led in on my own and set down at one of those little tables and spoke to them for a bit.” He doesn’t recall the topic, but “I thought that was quite an interesting thing, bit of a mind game, just to say if you want to come and see us you have to interact. I survived.” (Now, managing expectations, he’s just hoping for a spot on the guest list.)
Try as he might, Cocker cannot seem to give up on a musical life. Even when his guitar got destroyed en route to Paris, he was songwriting again with a month. “You’ll always go back to it,” he said. “So it’s actually easy in a way. You don’t really have to think about it or discuss it. It can drive you mad a bit. But you know, a lot of people wander around and don’t really know what to do. To have something that’s always kind of floating above you — it’s nice.
“That’s my opinion,” he concluded quietly.
“That’s beautiful,” Banks said, and the band murmured in agreement.
Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter at The Times, covering the personalities, projects and ideas that drive the creative world.
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