Latest news with #Pulp
Daily Mirror
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker hints he'll be arrested after making bold claim
Pulp's Jarvis Cocker discussed the likelihood of him getting arrested as he discussed the loss of iconic venue The Leadmill in Sheffield Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker joked about potentially getting arrested as he discussed the loss of iconic venue The Leadmill in Sheffield. The group played their first-ever public concert at the venue in 1980, and returned to perform many times as they got more and more famous. However, the venue lost their appeal against their eviction notice from The Electric Group in 2024 and asked artists if they would like to perform farewell concerts at the venue for one last time. During a recent interview, Jarvis was asked whether there would be a chance the group could play at The Leadmill one final time. Jarvis said he doesn't think Pulp 'would fit into' the venue now but admits he wants to take home a black plaque that commemorates the group's first concert. 'My main thing is trying to figure out how to get that plaque outside off the wall before the new owner moves in,' he said to NME. 'I vowed that's what I'd do if it was to close, and now it is. If the next thing you read about me is that I've been arrested trying to crowbar off a plaque from the outside of The Leadmill, you'll know why.' Pulp might not be performing at the venue but Miles Kane recently hinted he could be joined by Alex Turner at the final-ever gig. Miles, 39, who collaborates with the Arctic Monkeys' frontman in The Last Shadow Puppets, is set to headline the iconic venue's farewell gig on June 27, following The Leadmill's forced departure. Sheffield-based band the Monkeys performed at Leadmill countless times before the release of their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am That's What I'm Not. Now, Wirral-born Miles' performance could see Alex reuniting with Miles on stage, as hinted during Miles' chat with Radio X When quizzed about the possibility of Alex, also 39, joining him, Miles joked: "Well, he's redecorating it (The Leadmill) at the minute, so he's making it all leopard print for us, because, you know, it's got to be done by hand." He affectionately added: "My door's always open for my bro, he knows that, and that's that." Alex hasn't performed on stage since Arctic Monkeys wrapped up their tour for their latest album, The Car, in 2023. Speaking to Radio X, he reflected: "It's served me well, and Sheffield as a city as well has always had my back with gigs, that'd be one of the first to sell out or whatever. "So, it's a complete honour, and let's give it a good send-off. I think it'll be a very special night, and it always pops off in there, and hopefully next Friday it won't be any different."
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.
Forbes
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Lil Wayne Earns His First Hit On One Chart As His New Album Debuts
Lil Wayne has been charting hit albums around the world for decades. He got his start as a teenager, becoming a superstar in the rap world at a very young age. The hip-hop powerhouse has continued to work for many years and remains hugely prolific, even if he has spaced out his past few releases by several years. After nearly half a decade, his new project Tha Carter VI arrives on a multitude of tallies across the Atlantic. In the United Kingdom, the title underperforms in some respects while also earning the Grammy winner his first placement on one important ranking. Tha Carter VI debuts at No. 28 on the latest edition of the Official Vinyl Albums chart. Amazingly, Wayne scores his first appearance ever on the list of the bestselling vinyl titles in the country. While he has released projects on wax in the past, it appears that none of them sold well enough in a single tracking period to make a home on this roster. The Official Vinyl Albums chart in the U.K. is packed this week with several exciting new releases. While Tha Carter VI starts at No. 28, Wayne earns the fifteenth loftiest debut at the moment. The top 10 is crowded with eight launches, including projects from Pulp, Addison Rae, Marina, and Turnstile, among others. Tha Carter VI earns Wayne one of his loftiest starts this week on the U.K. rankings on the Official Vinyl Albums list. The new project reaches a total of seven tallies, and it opens inside the top 40 on about half of them. The sixth installment in Wayne's Tha Carter series opens highest on the Official Hip-Hop and R&B Albums chart. It manages a top 10 beginning on that tally, kicking off its time in fifth place. The arrival gives Wayne his seventh top 10. The full-length is also new to the Official Album Downloads chart, where it starts at No. 32. Tha Carter VI doesn't perform quite as well on several other rosters, including those dedicated to pure purchases, streaming activity, and the all-encompassing Official Albums chart. The title misses the top 40 on all of them and even brings Wayne to a new career low on a handful of those rankings.
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
Edinburgh Live
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Edinburgh Live
Rod Stewart fans fear he could be 'replaced' at Glastonbury following cancelled shows
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info Glastonbury Festival fans are speculating about potential replacements for Rod Stewart amid concerns over his health. The celebrated musician, who has had to cancel several concert dates leading up to the Worthy Farm extravaganza, has left fans worried he might not be fit to perform at Glastonbury this year. While there's no official word on whether the 80-year-old rocker will need to be replaced in the festival line-up, uncertainty looms after Stewart was struck down with the flu, leading to scrapped shows in the US. Expressing his regret, Stewart shared: "So sorry my friends. I'm devastated and sincerely apologise for any inconvenience to my fans. I'll be back on stage and will see you soon." His followers are crossing their fingers for his recovery, especially since a reunion with guitarist Ronnie Wood was announced for the Worthy Farm event. Additionally, Stewart has teased that a new album from The Faces is in the pipeline, which would be their first since the 1973 hit 'Ooh La La'. However, should the 'Maggie May' and 'Hot Legs' singer have to withdraw from Glastonbury, users on the r/GlastonburyFestival Reddit page have been throwing around ideas for his replacement. One fan posed a question on the subreddit, asking: "Thoughts on Legend substitute if Rod can't play? Do you think they move around the line up to give another act that slot, maybe Pulp? Or bring in an entirely new artist..." A festival enthusiast has shared their thoughts on the potential shake-up if Stewart were to withdraw from the festival. They suggested: "Nile Rodgers and Chic would get bumped, and a replacement (if any) would be added earlier in the running order." Festival-goers seem to concur that this would be the most probable move. A user commented: "This seems the obvious answer. "Getting someone suitable for the legend slot at short notice won't be easy but I imagine bumping Nile then rearranging some other timings/stages a little or offering someone who's already on site an extra set would be relatively straightforward." (Image: Jim Dyson, Redfernsvia Getty Images) Some fans are convinced Stewart will remain on the lineup, citing his dedication as seen when he performed despite suffering from food poisoning. A fan expressed confidence in Stewart's commitment, writing: "He isn't pulling out. He played [...] with food poisoning. All the cancellations are so he can get better for Glastonbury." Reflecting on a past performance, Stewart mentioned in a 2012 interview that despite feeling "groggy" he was determined not to miss the iconic Copacabana concert where he entertained an astonishing crowd of 3.5 million people. Speculation continues among those unsure about Stewart's appearance at Glastonbury Festival, with suggestions of alternative acts like Robbie Williams being floated, although some doubt his willingness, with one fan writing that they "don't think he would do it." A second user said: "Stevie Wonder is touring in the U.K from the 3rd of July..." A third fan commented: "It will all come down to how much notice he gives the festival. Pulling out 24 hours before is very different to pulling out a week before. I've got a feeling the slot won't be filled if he does pull out."
