Pulp

Please understand. We don’t want no trouble.

That’s all.

Glastonbury, June 24, 1995. The Stone Roses, the event's main act, won't be playing tonight: an injury to John Squire has forced the Manchester band to pull out just weeks before the eagerly awaited show. The headliner slot is vacant, and the organizers, caught off guard, opt for Pulp. It's almost dark, and tens of thousands of people are packed beneath the huge stage. A man in a suit and tie steps out from backstage. The moment has arrived: after a wait of more than fifteen years, Jarvis Cocker is finally in the spotlight.

The Glastonbury performance, which turns into an outright triumph, represents the definitive turning point in the career of a band that had gone through a long period of obscurity and suddenly found itself pushed into the pantheon of British rock, thanks to sheer stubbornness and, it must be said, a fortunate string of events. Let's briefly rewind the tape. The band's beginnings in Sheffield way back in 1978, a first demo in 1981 good enough to earn a John Peel session. It seems like an encouraging start, yet for Jarvis Cocker it marks the beginning of a long stretch as an outsider. Amid a constant revolving door of musicians coming and going, the only one who keeps doggedly pushing forward is Cocker himself, who in the meantime has moved to London to study. Between synth-pop sounds, experimental urges and an unconcealed love for Scott Walker and the French chansonniers (Gainsbourg and Brel above all), this dandy who seems to have stepped straight out of an Oscar Wilde novel tries absolutely everything, in vain, to get noticed - including a run of shows performed from a wheelchair, the result of a nasty fall from a window.

Between the late Eighties and early Nineties, though, the wind changes. The line-up settles with the arrival of Russell Senior on guitar and violin, Candida Doyle on keyboards, Nick Banks on drums and Steve Mackey replacing Peter Mansell on bass. The line-up is finally completed by Mark Webber, already a key figure within the fan club. Suede kick off the britpop era, and this time Pulp know they can't afford to fail. In 1994, as the media feud between Oasis (who release "Definitely Maybe") and Blur (who do the same with "Parklife") heats up, Cocker and co. sign to Island and release "His'n'Hers". The stylistic growth is obvious: acid-tongued riffs, glam winks, direct and razor-sharp lyrics become the band's new trademark. The album breaks into the British top ten, while a Mercury Music Prize nomination and a support slot on Blur's American tour raise the sextet's profile, prompting the labels holding the rights to their earlier, overlooked material to scramble and reissue it.

1995 is the year of their definitive coronation. Cocker, the outsider par excellence, can hardly believe he's really been thrust into the spotlight. That astonishment turns into satire on the single "Common People", released in May of that year and good enough to reach number two on the British chart. Through the amused retelling of a 1988 encounter with a upper-class Greek student who nonetheless wanted to belong to "common people", Jarvis writes his unmatched masterpiece (and perhaps that of an entire generation), exposing the vices of a rich, bored England over a bed of synthesizers that, in an unrelenting six-minute crescendo, sums up art-rock and blatantly Nineties pop.

The uprising of the outcasts will be, that following autumn, the central theme of "Different Class", as the title itself makes plain. The weeks leading up to the album's release, which in its first edition came with twelve interchangeable covers, saw excitement building to a fever pitch. The night at Glastonbury captures the exact moment Pulp step out of the shadows to don the robes of first-rate stars.

September arrives, and the now hotly anticipated album is preceded by the double A-side "Mis-shapes"/"Sorted For E' & Wizz", which reaches number two on the UK chart. "Mis-shapes" is the most direct of the attacks Cocker levels at the English class system: the wordplay of mis-shapes, mistakes, misfits - which shortly become the very first words spoken in the piece - stand, in order, for misshapen chocolates (sold at a discount), mistakes, and misfits. "We don't look the same as you, we don't want the things that you do, but we live round here too", Jarvis proudly declares, before adding: "They think they got us beat, but revenge is going to be so sweet". Revenge here is, with sadistic precision, that of the rejects seizing power. Musically, with "Mis-shapes" Pulp mould britpop into a sweeping, epic-tinged charge, the perfect backdrop for the most confrontational (yet still subtly ironic) lyrics ever penned by their frontman. As for "Sorted For E' & Wizz", its references to drug use (complete with instructions on how to hide them printed on the single's sleeve) made it the target of press campaigns calling for the record to be boycotted. Opening with the sound of a distant crowd and playing throughout with muffled synth-pop textures, the track becomes yet another ironic vignette in which cartoonist Cocker examines rave culture ("in the middle of the night it feels alright but then tomorrow morning, oh then you come down").

With three singles already sitting near the top of the British charts, the release of "Different Class" on 30 October 1995 could only be a triumphant march. The album shoots to number one on the UK chart, earns four platinum discs (the Mercury Music Prize will follow the next year) and sells over a million copies. Like any self-respecting masterpiece, the record contains no missteps: its twelve songs, nearly an hour of music, are the product of an unreachable state of grace. The next single lifted from it, "Disco 2000", would in time become the band's best-known song. Cocker once again draws from his personal history, unspooling the story - an impossible teenage crush - with his usual narrative clarity, halfway between wistfulness and irreverence, while garage guitars, a steady kick-snare (and that off-beat hi-hat lending it, precisely, a disco feel) and razor-sharp choruses create a kind of glittering, danceable glam-pop.

More broadly, reflections on love and sex are one of the record's recurring themes. Midway through the tracklist, the nostalgic bitterness of "Live Bed Show" gives way to the ballad "Something Changed" which, backed by an orchestra, comes close to stylistic perfection and describes the randomness of chance encounters that change a life ("Where would I be now if we'd never met? Would I be singing this song to someone else instead?"). It would become the fourth and final single lifted from the album, released in March 1996 with the b-side "Mile End", a track later included on the "Trainspotting" soundtrack.

From platonic feelings to far more suggestive ones is but a short step. The furtive winks of "Pencil Skirt" and the bittersweet melodic openness of the gorgeous "Underwear" - the entire essence of the fin-de-siècle brit sound packed into four minutes - find their synthesis in the enigmatic "Feeling Called Love", poised between spoken word, sinister sounds and renewed orchestral explosions.

As for success, and everything that comes with it, Cocker already has clear ideas. On "I Spy", in its own way a forerunner of the paths later taken on "This Is Hardcore", Jarvis slips into the role of Serge Gainsbourg and, backed by strings and a bassline more prominent than ever, describes with a paranoid, menacing tone the brand-new discomfort of finding himself part of a fake machine, from which he immediately wants to distance himself, with a vengeful streak attached.

The gradual build of "Monday Morning", a kind of ballad hurled into the unknown, once again shows off the vocal range of Sheffield's histrionic frontman, tackling everything from his usual winks to shrill screams. The warm, elegant and faintly melancholy fragrance of "Bar Italy", on the other hand, hangs suspended in the air, as if buying time before the effect fades ("cause I'm fading fast, and it's nearly dawn"), almost refusing to put an end to that fleeting moment in which every melody becomes perfect and every song seems destined to go down in history - only to discover that it truly is.

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10/11/2013