W HEN GAVIN FRIDAY first became aware of Pulp in the 1990s, he found their gawky frontman, Jarvis Cocker, hard to ignore. “He was an Oxfam version of Bryan Ferry. He was very much in touch with what was real Britain at the time, in that sort of working-class, art-school voyeurism way. I’d seen him in Island Records” – Friday and Pulp were labelmates at the time – “and he had this extraordinary aura. He looked like Oscar Wilde meets a bagman meets Mark E Smith.”
BUSY WITH BJÖRK
Friday wasn't much drawn at the time to what was being dubbed Britpop. "It felt totally photocopied for me. Oasis always reminded me of Slade. Blur were just far too self-conscious and into themselves, they never really did it for me. But Pulp had something else, more of an edge. And the lyrics had an incredible depth, almost like that Mike Leigh film Secrets and Lies. Cocker was talking about the England that England didn't really talk about and I was intrigued by that."
Musically, however, Pulp largely passed Friday by first time around. He was too busy checking out the likes of Tricky, Massive Attack and Björk. Now, a decade-and-a-half on, he's surprised at just how well Different Classholds up. For one thing there's the sheer musical promiscuity on display, with everything from "square rock to glam to camp disco to melodrama" being showcased. Even Disco 2000's blatant steal from Laura Branigan's 1980s disco hit, Gloria, is rescued by Cocker's knowing wink.
But what Friday cherishes most about the album is its unapologetic artiness. “It’s telling you to go out and live your life and actually go a little mad. So much of today’s music, I mean, Jesus Christ, when I listen to some of today’s Americana, it’s brilliant but it won’t go away. And you see these 25-year-
old kids with beards sitting down trying to be Neil Young or whatever. On this album there’s a little bit of, like, ‘Grab it! Go sleep with the older lady that’s posh, stay up for the weekend’. There’s something gone so clinically straight and conservative about a lot of stuff today. And it’s become harder and harder to actually say you’re into art, it’s not cool any more. The dumbing down is huge. If you said you’re into art now, they’d be like, ‘What?’ If you said you’re into hardcore porn, they’d go, ‘Oh, cool’. It’s like there’s something really obscene about liking art! You’re allowed to like football and beer and if you like anything else you’re getting too complicated there, boy, get back in your box.”
WARMING TO JARVIS
GEmma Hayes was 19 when Different Classcame out. The whole Britpop phenomenon left her cold too. "It was all Oasis and Blur at the time and it just seemed very trendy. I didn't feel there was any heart in the music that I heard in the clubs, it never did anything for me." Although Cocker lacked Britpop's cartoon cockiness – "he looked like the kind of guy who would have been beaten up by the Gallagher brothers in a pub" – Pulp still somehow failed to appeal.
There was a studied Britishness to the whole affair that really alienated Hayes. “I kind of thought it was kitsch, you know? Very stylised and self-conscious. So it meant nothing to me. I would have crossed the street if Pulp were there.”
She would never have dreamed of giving this album a second chance, she tells us. “It’s been an amazing exercise, because I have actually gotten to warm to Jarvis Cocker and the production and the style. I think there’s something actually quite innocent about it now.” Innocent: it’s a surprising word, but one that Hayes will return to again and again in the discussion. She loves the way this album soundtracks Cocker’s awkward attempts to bring persona and personality into the same room.
"Back then I think there was something very contrived about the guy with the big glasses whom he had put together in his head. I feel like he created this character and over the years got more comfortable in it. He had been trying different costumes and found one. Now he's grown into it, but back then it just feels like he's kind of a teenager, a kid in men's clothes." The fact that the Cocker of Different Classwas a man in his 30s is what lends his almost adolescent shape-throwing such poignancy. "The music is all about this image that he's created and I just felt like every now and then maybe the real Jarvis Cocker was coming through." For Hayes, songs such as the voyeuristic I Spy give us a precious glimpse of the child inside the man behind the mask.
TRANSPORTED IN TIME
Cocker’s relatively late experience of being in the public eye has been exercising Naoise Nunn too. Revisiting the album has transported him back to his college years in Belfast, when “the jocks were listening to Oasis and the thoughtful beard-strokers were listening to Blur. That was the media-fed dichotomy of what Britpop was and Pulp came into it at an interesting angle, which was that Oasis and Blur had only been formed fairly recently whereas Pulp had been around since 1978”.
Nunn’s initial mid-90s take on Pulp echoes that of Hayes. “I thought it was a little bit glick and snooty and had an inverse snobbery about it.”
Over time, however, he really warmed to the music. And now, all these years later, he emphatically seconds that original emotion. “I think it stands the test of time very well. Because when it came out it sounded like it had been out for 10 years already. There were all those 70s sounds and all this disco-y stuff, as well as shades of Scott Walker and David Bowie. So it actually sounded like a nostalgia record when it first came out.”
Like Hayes, Nunn has been noticing how much the past haunts this album. "The lyrics are quite nostalgic as well. When you think about the scene that was around at the time, Pulp must have been much older than the other guys, because they'd started back in 1978. So they were already looking at life backwards a little bit. Disco 2000sort of sums it up: 'Well we were born within one hour of each other'. I think that idea shows a lot of heart. It's kind of bittersweet, and I really liked that."
Cocker’s maturity, then, was anything but a liability. It gave him the edge, ultimately, over the Albarns and the Gallaghers. It enabled him to “call bullshit on raves and say slightly more intelligent things than Blur and Oasis were saying at the time”. The years in the commercial wilderness had given his lyrics an added cultural and personal depth, yielding an album that now “rings true” in a unique way. “I wasn’t really a Pulp fan, but comparing this with the other records that were out at the same time, I think it’s among the best.”
* With thanks to Tower Records, Wicklow St Dublin 2
Want to have your say?
Join the club
What do you think? Join us online at irishtimes.com/ blogs/ ontherecord,where you can read more from our album clubbers – and join in. Welcome to the club
