From the Archive No. 1: Pulp, The Face, March 1994
I recently looked through the Really Useful boxes under my bed, filled with the transcripts of the thousands of interviews I’ve done since my first job at The Face in 1990. I’ve always thought that if photographers can recycle their photos endlessly, what’s to stop writers from revisiting their archives?
First up is an interview with Pulp in The Face from 31 years ago. I saw the band’s glorious show at Primavera in Porto last summer and I’ve been listening to their new album, More, on a loop. It’s up there with their best work and a good reason to tell the story of meeting the band for the first time, using quotes from the original interview, but with extra details omitted from the feature. It’s about where the band were in early 1994 as well as Jarvis Cocker’s memories of growing up dressed as an alpine shepherd boy and losing his virginity at 19; see the footnotes for a reminder of what happened to Pulp next.
It’s Friday night. Early 1994. recording studio in north London. Black leather sofas. Packets of crisps and Smarties. Lingering cigarette smoke. Nirvana on the muted TV, performing All Apologies, the Unplugged iteration. The new Pulp album, His ‘n’ Hers, plays in the background.
It’s not yet finished, but it sounds fantastic – pop at its very best. Sleazy, seedy songs of lust, longing, love and class. It makes me itch to see the band perform them live.
It will be their fourth album, after It (1983), Freaks (1987) and Separations (1992). Jarvis Cocker formed the band in 1978, while still at school, his mum spelling out the name of the band on the drum kit in sticky tape. A decade later, Jarvis moved to London to study film at St. Martin’s College.
This will be Pulp’s first feature in The Face. It's awkward being a journalist in the studio with a band; you are unavoidably an interloper. They’ve spent the day posing and pouting for photographer Peter Robathan and now they have to talk to me. I’m a fan, I’ve been watching Cocker’s distinctive dancing for years, but everyone is knackered. Russell Senior, guitar/violin, has gone home to see his new-born son. Steve Mackey, bass guitar, is curled up asleep under the mixing desk. Candida Doyle, keyboard, is chatting to Nick Banks, drums, who is sipping lager. Jarvis is playing table tennis in tight purple velvet trousers.
Jarvis eventually sits on one of the black sofas, draping a green blanket over his long legs. ‘I’ve given rock ‘n’ roll the best years of my life,’ he says wryly. He’s been waiting to be famous since 1978. NME made My Legendary Girlfriend (1992) single of the week. Gigs sold out. Music critics embrace Jarvis as a northern auteur writing lyrics about suburbia and sex with a filmic gaze, an eccentric pop star in waiting. But he isn’t yet a household name.
Another song plays in the background –
‘And so I, I hid inside her wardrobe/And she came home ‘round four/And she was with some kid called David/From the garage up the road/I listened outside, I heard her…’
It’s not a track for a new David Lynch film, but Babies. Released as a single in 1992, it failed to chart. But the band know not to let go of a great song, so here it is again, remixed, on His ‘n’ Hers.
Is Jarvis, his purple trousers clashing brilliantly with the green blanket, a natural star? He sips whisky and avoids eye contact for the entire interview. ‘That’s difficult for me to answer, isn’t it? If I say yes, then I’d sound very conceited. But I can tell you that I have always attracted attention, and for most of my life I didn’t like it. Because physically I’ve never really conformed. I was dealt a certain look. As in tall and thin. My mother didn’t help by making me wear certain clothes to school.’
He reaches for a cigarette.
‘We had a German relative, and they used to send over lederhosen. I looked like an Alpine shepherd boy. I was seven or eight. Of course, in a school in the suburbs of Sheffield, that wasn’t normal behaviour. I managed to cajole my grandma into buying me some normal shorts, and I’d change on the way to school. People would generally call me names and think I was odd. I didn’t get beaten up because I could tell jokes, but I always wanted to fit in.’
Later, aged 14 or 15, he went to see The Stranglers alone – no one else was interested. He wore a tie his mother crocheted for him, which is probably only punk in hindsight. ‘I just realised that there was no way, even if I wore casuals, that I would be like everybody else. In the end, I thought if you’ve got an imperfection, you may as well flaunt it and turn it into an advantage. As I’ve always worn glasses, I’ve been called all the names under the sun – Elvis Costello, Harold Lloyd, Michale Caine, Roy Orbison…’
Yet Pulp gigs are packed with young women who clearly have a crush on Jarvis. Perhaps it’s his northern poet lyrics about peeping toms. His angular dancing. Or simply the fact that’s he’s not alpha. He taps the ash off his fag. ‘I haven’t got the facility [to be alpha]. I wouldn’t know how I turned women on… But I’ve always got on quite well with women and girls. My dad left when I was seven, and I was brought up in a house full of women.’
Jarvis talks about Do You Remember the First Time? – ‘I can’t remember a worse time’ – the first single from His ‘n’ Hers. Self-conscious and shy, he didn’t have sex till he was 19, and only then because he wanted to lose his virginity while still in his teens. The band were given a big enough budget for the video to experiment. Instead of shooting a straight-forward promotional video, they made a 26-minute documentary, later shown at the ICA (you can find it on YouTube; it’s fascinating). ‘I interviewed a load of celebrities – Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, Terry Hall, Alison Steadman, Jo Brand, John Peel – about their first time. What a letdown it was, how long it took them to enjoy sex. I have no regrets about the first person I had sex with. We were both virgins, so neither of us were under any pressure to perform. It probably took me a long time to get any good at sex… I still don’t know.’
Before I leave, I ask the band if His ‘n’ Hers will be the record that changes everything for Pulp. Will it make them into the superstars they were always meant to be? Jarvis is optimistic. ‘Doing this album means we can kiss goodbye to a period of our lives. And I’m also moving out of my council house in Camberwell to Ladbroke Grove. I haven’t even seen the place I’m moving to, but it feels like the end of an era.’
The other members of the band are more conventional in their ambition. ‘We want to sell quadruple platinum in every territory so we can make at least one more album.’
Footnote 1.
His ‘n’ Hers was released on 18 April 1994. It was Pulp’s breakthrough album. In May 1995, Common People was released as the first single from their fifth studio album, Different Class. In June 1995, the Stone Roses were due to headline the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, but guitarist John Squire fell off his bike and they pulled out a week before. Pulp replaced them and it felt like the 80,000+ audience were all crammed into one field, singing, dancing, grinning like idiots. Jarvis, wearing a pink tie, talked to the audience about his new-found fame: ‘If a lanky git like me can do it, so can you.’ And then they performed Common People, and the audience, moving as one, knew every single word.
Footnote 2.
Pulp’s eight studio album More will be released globally on 7 June 2025. It’s their first studio album in 23 years and the first since Freaks without Steve Mackey, who died in 2023. The band’s world tour kicks off on 7 June 2025 in Glasgow and ends on 26 September 2025 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles