Latest news with #Cocker
Spectator
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Jarvis Cocker still has the voice
For bands of a certain vintage, the art of keeping the show on the road involves a tightly choreographed dance between past and present, old and new, then and now. It's not a one-way transaction: there should be some recognition that the people you are playing to have also evolved since the glory years of the indie disco and student union. Halfway through the first date of Pulp's UK tour following the release of More, their first album in 24 years, I started thinking about Withnail & I. Watching the film repeatedly as a young man, the booze-soaked antics of the dissipated 'resting actor' and his addled supporting cast seemed like great larks, albeit in extremis. The last time I watched it, approaching 50, sober as a judge, it played as the bleak tragedy it had surely always been. To steal the title of a Pulp song: something changed. The music of Pulp has always been scored through with melancholy and painful longing, but its emotional heft and essentially good heart is more evident these days. Singer Jarvis Cocker no longer hides behind so many layers of ironic distance. As he half-joked before 'Help The Aged', at 61 he now requires audience assistance to reach the high notes. More is Cocker's delayed, reluctant reckoning with adulthood. As he put it on 'Grown Ups', 'We're hoping that we don't get shown up/ 'Cos everybody's got to grow up.' Love was once a source of shame and embarrassment, he told us, but he has finally reached a gentlemanly accommodation with it. The shift was evident on new songs such as 'Slow Jam', 'Got To Have Love' and 'Farmer's Market' – a terrific orchestral ballad – but also in the low-key sense of gratitude that emanated from the stage. Cocker came across as a warmer, less wary figure, tossing out grapes and sweeties to the front rows. There were more obvious signs that we weren't in 1995 anymore. The group's core four – Cocker, Nick Banks, Candida Doyle and Mark Webber – nowadays resemble members of the history department of a Russell Group university who have decided to enliven the pre-retirement years by forming a band. They were joined by a string ensemble, a percussionist and several superb multi-instrumentalists, enabling Pulp2025 to shift seamlessly from the vast, corrupted Bond theme drama of 'This Is Hardcore' to a pared-down acoustic version of 'Something Changed'. In the midst of all that evolution, the trick was that it was all still very recognisably Pulp. Framed by purple velvet drapes, the set was a Sheffield bingo hall transported to an aircraft hangar, while an air of slightly shambolic indie-ism survived the transition to a slick arena show. Cocker still has the voice and, perhaps more importantly, the moves. His hands pirouetted like a good actor playing a bad magician. He corkscrewed into the air when excitement got the better of him, such as the moment when 'Common People' exploded into life. The song, which should by now feel glossy with overfamiliarity, was instead a juggernaut of propulsive energy. By then, they had played most of More. 'Tina' might be a classic Pulp title destined to be for ever waiting in vain to become a classic Pulp song, but much of the new material held its own among the gold-standard highlights: 'Sorted For E's & Whizz', an exhilarating 'Disco 2000', 'Mis-Shapes', 'Do You Remember The First Time?' and 'Babies', as well as outliers such as 'The Fear' and 'O.U. (Gone, Gone)'. Nothing on More could possibly have the impact of those songs, a point the audience instinctively understood. That was then, this is now. Both band and fans simply seemed appreciative of the opportunity for 'one last sunset, one final blaze of glory.' The Waterboys are also touring a new album, Life, Death and Dennis Hopper, a gonzo, genre-hopping 25-track sprawl that maps the life of the maverick US actor to the shifting currents of the postwar counterculture. They played around half of it in Edinburgh, in a single suite that unspooled against a Hopper-heavy backdrop of black and white stills and saturated Super-8 video footage. It felt fresh, colourful, eccentric and ultimately celebratory. On either side, they crunched out setlist staples such as 'Be My Enemy' and 'A Girl Called Johnny', which delivered power and punch without much in the way of surprises. The gig was at its best when the interplay between the musicians had space to stretch out. A reworked 'This Is The Sea' gathered an elemental power, and there was a nod to the recently departed Sly Stone during the still effervescent 'The Whole Of The Moon'. Like Pulp, the Waterboys have seen over 40 years' of active service, yet they are still evolving.
New Statesman
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Jarvis Cocker at 61: Is this hardcore?
Photo byAre we in the era of the Mature Reunion Album? long hoped for but largely unexpected album releases lately by Blur, Everything But The Girl, Stereolab, and now Pulp, measuring the middle-age of both artist and audience. More, released on 6 June 2025, is the eighth Pulp album (their seventh came out just weeks after 9/11.) On Friday they re-united at the O2 and, fittingly, the album topped the UK Charts that night: Pulp's audience wanted More. When Pulp take to the stage, it is in front of a red velvet backdrop, the now expanded eight-piece band augmented by string section. Jarvis Cocker ascends the stage alone on a podium. The age-appropriate indie chug of opener 'Spike Island' is uplifting, but a little more ordinary than their 1990s material, which fused together two distinctly Yorkshire traditions: Alan Bennett observational comedy and specifically Sheffield electronic futurism. Cocker, 61, dressed in a dark, double-breasted suit, addresses the audience with the ease and command of a broadcaster. 'Once we're alive,' says the frontman early in the set, 'we have to grow up. The first step of growing up is clapping in time.' He invites the audience to join him in this 'developmental milestone', a neat bit of crowd control that tees up Mature Reunion Album track 'Grown-Ups', and one of tonight's surprise themes. Pulp's intergenerational appeal is apparent across the stadium. Older parents now bring grown-up children. Though their audience is noticeably broad – only a few lone aesthetes adopt the frontman's signature specs and vintage suits – Cocker remains the patron saint of people who hate stag do's and visit charity shops long after their salaries have stopped necessitating that. More than this, Pulp endure as cool, evidenced by Charli XCX's recent on stage call for a 'Pulp summer' at Coachella Festival in a way that impossible to imagine her doing for Blur. On the London stage, each of Pulp's Mature Reunion Album tracks have an unconscious double in their earlier work. 'Farmer's Market', a ballad Cocker says tonight is about how he met his wife, in the audience – hustling her phone number at the car park of an organic food bazaar – obsesses over the same questions of chance and fate as 1995's 'Something Changed', which tonight is delivered acoustic by the four nucleus Pulp members (happily, viewed together, they still look more like a departmental meeting than an arena rock group.) Ditto new song 'Tina' is a pen portrait of late middle-aged lust on a commuter train (which also contains a good reference to Mrs Thatcher's TINA acronym.) It's a greyer haired update of 'Disco 2000', their 1995 glam rock stomp about the memory of teenage sexual obsession. Listening to Pulp's greatest hits CD on my early teenage paper round in the 2000s, I remember feeling so scandalised and compelled by all the sex in their work that I worried I should keep this enjoyment private (lest it reveal something inadvertently awful about myself). There is less of this side of Pulp tonight, their more subversive songs about tragedies in reservoirs or exacting sexual revenge against West Londoners have been temporarily retired, to be our-age appropriate. This dulls some of Pulp's weird appeal. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Cocker's best writing was first as a misfit outsider in his native Sheffield, then as a geographical and class outsider in 90s media London. But that success made him something of an insider, which his writing has never really reckoned with. Cocker is one of his generation's cultural luminaries. He is a longstanding BBC broadcaster, a Meltdown curate and broadsheet arts fave whose collected lyrics are published by Faber. Now, the albums he infrequently releases seldom examine what exactly this type of life is like. Pulp's last big statement forms the unexpected high point of tonight's set. Introducing 'This Is Hardcore', the title track of their 1998 album, Cocker sits at the top of a small illuminated staircase (metaphor klaxon), splayed across a leather Mastermind chair and sipping an espresso, which is brave at 9PM. Against a seedy, dramatic loop, which repeats and throbs like erotic fixation, Cocker purrs about wanting it now, wanting it bad. The song's lyrics were written to compare the singer's experience of fame to what he termed his 'revulsion and attraction' to pornography, all with the subtext of his then escalating cocaine use. I had to get a little past paper round age to learn to love that part of the hits CD. Tonight, four songs come from This Is Hardcore, and it's in this material that Cocker delivers his most captivating performances of the night. Perhaps now that the album's chief obsessions of fame, pornography and cocaine have all accelerated in the 2020s, it has widened that album's appeal. The final third of the set runs through their big, 1990s hit singles. The biggest of which is 'Common People'. 'Common People' was conceived as a fanfare, but looking around tonight it's something of a requiem for a period when strange, five-minute songs about class somehow topped the charts. But it's never typically the biggest songs that get you in arena shows. Earlier, during 'Help The Aged', another This Is Hardcore cut, Cocker invites the audience to sing a falsetto refrain that he can seemingly no longer summon as his baritone has grown older, and the line 'funny how it all falls away' flashes on the screens for our benefit. Like 'Eleanor Rigby', 'Help The Aged' is one of those rare songs that peers out from pop's cult of youth, and is alarmed by what it finds there. 'Old age isn't a battle,' wrote Philip Roth in 2006's Everyman, 'old age is a massacre.' Guitarist Mark Webber's scuzzy, vengeful guitar part sounds suitably blood-shedding. There's a line in the song about dying your hair: the one thing you can change as time bulldozes on. As the line is delivered, a woman in front of me smiles at her partner, ruffles his grey hair, and cuddles up to him. Pulp's work has found a new theme. Something scary, something you might view with revulsion and attraction, something really hardcore: getting old. [See more: The rise of the west] Related
The Advertiser
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Pulp score first UK No.1 album in 27 years with More
British band Pulp has returned to the top of the UK album charts for the first time in 27 years as their new record More went to No.1. More was released last week just before the group, led by Jarvis Cocker, kicked off a UK and Ireland tour. It is Pulp's eighth studio album and their first since 2001's We Love Life. The band, from the British city of Sheffield, last topped the UK albums chart in 1998 with This Is Hardcore. The Official Charts Company said More also topped the Official Vinyl Albums Chart. "The day an album is released to the public is a very special day," Cocker said in a statement on the album's release. "The music changes from being something owned only by the band to something that can be owned by anyone - it can become part of people's lives. It's magic." Pulp found fame in the mid-1990s Britpop wave with hits such as Common People, Disco 2000 and Help the Aged. They split in 2002 before reforming twice in subsequent years. More was recorded over three weeks in late 2024 and the band has previously said it was dedicated to late bassist Steve Mackey, who died in 2023. Mackey is credited as a songwriter on two of the album's songs. Pulp released the first single from the album, Spike Island, in April followed by Got to Have Love in May. British band Pulp has returned to the top of the UK album charts for the first time in 27 years as their new record More went to No.1. More was released last week just before the group, led by Jarvis Cocker, kicked off a UK and Ireland tour. It is Pulp's eighth studio album and their first since 2001's We Love Life. The band, from the British city of Sheffield, last topped the UK albums chart in 1998 with This Is Hardcore. The Official Charts Company said More also topped the Official Vinyl Albums Chart. "The day an album is released to the public is a very special day," Cocker said in a statement on the album's release. "The music changes from being something owned only by the band to something that can be owned by anyone - it can become part of people's lives. It's magic." Pulp found fame in the mid-1990s Britpop wave with hits such as Common People, Disco 2000 and Help the Aged. They split in 2002 before reforming twice in subsequent years. More was recorded over three weeks in late 2024 and the band has previously said it was dedicated to late bassist Steve Mackey, who died in 2023. Mackey is credited as a songwriter on two of the album's songs. Pulp released the first single from the album, Spike Island, in April followed by Got to Have Love in May. British band Pulp has returned to the top of the UK album charts for the first time in 27 years as their new record More went to No.1. More was released last week just before the group, led by Jarvis Cocker, kicked off a UK and Ireland tour. It is Pulp's eighth studio album and their first since 2001's We Love Life. The band, from the British city of Sheffield, last topped the UK albums chart in 1998 with This Is Hardcore. The Official Charts Company said More also topped the Official Vinyl Albums Chart. "The day an album is released to the public is a very special day," Cocker said in a statement on the album's release. "The music changes from being something owned only by the band to something that can be owned by anyone - it can become part of people's lives. It's magic." Pulp found fame in the mid-1990s Britpop wave with hits such as Common People, Disco 2000 and Help the Aged. They split in 2002 before reforming twice in subsequent years. More was recorded over three weeks in late 2024 and the band has previously said it was dedicated to late bassist Steve Mackey, who died in 2023. Mackey is credited as a songwriter on two of the album's songs. Pulp released the first single from the album, Spike Island, in April followed by Got to Have Love in May. British band Pulp has returned to the top of the UK album charts for the first time in 27 years as their new record More went to No.1. More was released last week just before the group, led by Jarvis Cocker, kicked off a UK and Ireland tour. It is Pulp's eighth studio album and their first since 2001's We Love Life. The band, from the British city of Sheffield, last topped the UK albums chart in 1998 with This Is Hardcore. The Official Charts Company said More also topped the Official Vinyl Albums Chart. "The day an album is released to the public is a very special day," Cocker said in a statement on the album's release. "The music changes from being something owned only by the band to something that can be owned by anyone - it can become part of people's lives. It's magic." Pulp found fame in the mid-1990s Britpop wave with hits such as Common People, Disco 2000 and Help the Aged. They split in 2002 before reforming twice in subsequent years. More was recorded over three weeks in late 2024 and the band has previously said it was dedicated to late bassist Steve Mackey, who died in 2023. Mackey is credited as a songwriter on two of the album's songs. Pulp released the first single from the album, Spike Island, in April followed by Got to Have Love in May.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Pulp score first UK no.1 album in 27 years with 'More'
LONDON (Reuters) -British band Pulp returned to the top of the UK album charts for the first time in 27 years on Friday as their new record "More" went to No. 1. "More" was released last week just before the group, led by Jarvis Cocker, kicked off a UK and Ireland tour. It is Pulp's eighth studio album and their first since 2001's "We Love Life". The band, from the British city of Sheffield, last topped the UK albums chart in 1998 with "This Is Hardcore". The Official Charts Company said "More" also topped the Official Vinyl Albums Chart. 'The day an album is released to the public is a very special day," Cocker said in a statement on the album's release. "The music changes from being something owned only by the band to something that can be owned by anyone – it can become part of people's lives. It's magic." Pulp found fame in the mid-1990s Britpop wave with hits such as "Common People", "Disco 2000" and "Help the Aged". They split in 2002 before reforming twice in subsequent years. "More" was recorded over three weeks in late 2024 and the band has previously said it was dedicated to late bassist Steve Mackey, who died in 2023. Mackey is credited as a songwriter on two of the album's songs. Pulp released the first single from the album, "Spike Island", in April followed by "Got to Have Love" in May.
Straits Times
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Pulp score first UK No. 1 album in 27 years with More
Pulp released the new album's opening track, Spike Island, on April 10 – their first new single in over a decade. PHOTO: FACEBOOK Pulp score first UK No. 1 album in 27 years with More LONDON - British band Pulp returned to the top of the UK album charts for the first time in 27 years on June 13 as their new record More went to No. 1. More was released last week just before the group, led by Jarvis Cocker, kicked off a UK and Ireland tour. It is Pulp's eighth studio album and their first since 2001's We Love Life. The band, from the British city of Sheffield, last topped the UK albums chart in 1998 with This Is Hardcore. The Official Charts Company said More also topped the Official Vinyl Albums Chart. 'The day an album is released to the public is a very special day,' Cocker said, in a statement on the album's release. 'The music changes from being something owned only by the band to something that can be owned by anyone – it can become part of people's lives. It's magic.' Pulp found fame in the mid-1990s Britpop wave with hits such as Common People, Disco 2000 and Help the Aged. They split in 2002 before reforming twice in subsequent years. More was recorded over three weeks in late 2024 and the band has previously said it was dedicated to late bassist Steve Mackey, who died in 2023. Mackey is credited as a songwriter on two of the album's songs. Pulp released the first single from the album, Spike Island, in April followed by Got To Have Love in May. REUTERS Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
