The night that Jarvis was singing to us again , a book came through the email and I opened it and had a good read.
I can’t share it yet , because its not published till August 7th and it’s about economics screwing our kids which I think happens now and in previous generations, though we are more aware now than before because our kids let us know.
If you didn’t get Pulp first time around, then he is back and I love his new album (look it up on Spotify and if you haven’t got Spotify go and buy it in your local Woolworths).
Last night Jarvis Cocker and his band reminded us that you can be outside the mainstream and bring a farm to you. Here’s the Guardian’s review
There’s something charming about the fact that they open with Sorted For E’s & Wizz, a song that takes a pretty equivocal, even steely view of the kind of hedonism that prevails at Glastonbury: proof, should it be needed, that Pulp remain a band who seldom go about things the straightforward way. Listening to them play their 90s hits – Mis‐Shapes, Disco 2000, Babies – you’re struck by how little they had in common with their ostensible Britpop contemporaries.
Their wonky collision of 70s glam, French pop, disco and analogue electronics didn’t sound like any of their peers, nor was the prevailing mood of their songs much in tune with the supposed mood of the era. They’re substantially darker and grubbier, consistently sticking up for oddballs and outsiders at a time when alternative music was making a lunge for a mainstream audience. It’s as if they became huge coincidentally, rather than as part of a movement.
There were a few numbers not on “Different Class”. The two songs from the new album were “Spike Island” and the single “Got to have love” , both could have been written in 1992 when they were emerging with “Acrylic Afternoons” and “O U Gone-gone” (both in the set).
This is not the enormous talent that took music with it, the Bowie and Beatles and as I hope RAYE, but it is more contemporary than the rest of the Britpop gang who live on in 1975 (who I found rather boring). Jarvis reminded us that you have to live if for now, not worry about the reviews tomorrow or 30 years ago. As the anonymous Guardian reviewer put it
You’d probably feel quite relaxed too if you knew you had Common People as your closing number. Surely the most straightforwardly rousing anthem ever written about class rage, it causes delirium on a scale not so different from that you can see in old footage of their headlining appearance: a highlight then, it’s also one of the most joyous moments so far in this year’s festival. Presumably somewhat by coincidence, the Red Arrows stage a flypast midway through the song. And off Pulp go, Jarvis promising to see the audience in Arcadia later.
By 1992 when they first came my way, or 1995 when I watched them at Glastonbury, Pulp were already the “kid’s band” but I have probably played Different Class more than any record of the nineties ( and it was Pulp’s fifth).
Many of my readers are in the sixties and some in their seventies and beyond (as Neil Young the day after mine in November! Music doesn’t really tie you to being young, nor does money or lack of it.
The bloke who wrote the book I put at the top, takes the crushing economic injustices that face young people very seriously. He’s right and there’s a side of me that sides with him and the bands of the second half of the 1970s that shaped me. Stuart Trow is an old Pension Play goer! He’s sold a lot of books.
You need a lot of money to go to Glastonbury, or know how to get in as or with a band. It’s a lot more fund being…
At least to laugh at it like Pulp!
Whether you are 1995, 2025 or came to music in 1975, it’s the music that helps us deal with anything that comes our way – as RAYE reminded us