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This month, the beloved British pop band Pulp will release “More,” its first new album in twenty-four years. Jarvis Cocker, the band’s founder, lyricist, and front man, has engaged in innumerable interesting projects in the meantime—an album with his band Jarv Is, collaborations with Wes Anderson and Chilly Gonzales, a BBC radio program, an excellent memoir, “Good Pop Bad Pop”—but the new Pulp record feels like a significant return, triumphant and humble at once. Its first song, “Spike Island,” establishes a friendly, self-deprecating tone (“I exist / To do this: / Shouting & pointing,” Cocker sings) and the rest is full of Cocker’s signature motifs—half-serious spoken-word amusement, playful imagery—warmly suited to life in 2025. (“Please stay in touch with me / In this contactless society.”) On “Grown Ups,” he mentions life being about the journey, not the destination, and asks, “But what if you get travel sick / Before you’ve even left the station?” Elsewhere, he sings, “Instead of having us this Slow Death / We should be having us a Slow Jam.” At their best, Cocker’s songs can feel like a shared groove, with dancing as good an answer as any to life’s joys and befuddlements.
Cocker grew up in Sheffield, in north-central England, with his mother and sister; his father left when Jarvis was seven. He formed the first incarnation of Pulp at fifteen. He gave a demo tape to John Peel, the legendary British broadcaster and tastemaker, at a local event; Peel’s producer called two weeks later, and Pulp was off to the races. After releasing a couple of albums in the eighties, the band became hugely popular in the nineties, amid Britpop, owing to its catchy melodies, danceable rhythms, and Cocker’s sly, funny, sharply observant lyrics, with themes of class consciousness, sex, and the gentle absurdities of the human condition—all of which reached an apotheosis in the song “Common People,” which turned into an anthem. Pulp’s celebrity became uncomfortable for Cocker in the late nineties, and the band went on hiatus in 2002. They’ve toured occasionally since, notably in 2012, when a farewell show in Sheffield was documented in the 2014 movie “Pulp: A Film About Life, Death, and Supermarkets.”
Cocker’s book “Good Pop Bad Pop,” from 2022, is structured around anecdotes prompted by various objects he’d stored in a crawl space. A notebook from his youth, in which he described how Pulp would change music as we know it. (“The group shall work its way into the public eye by producing fairly conventional, yet slightly off-beat, pop songs. After gaining a well-known and commercially successful status the group can then begin to subvert and restructure both the music-business and music itself.”) A news clipping from 1985 (“Cocker Comes a Cropper”) about the time he fell out of a window while trying to impress a woman with a party trick, which led to injury and artistic breakthrough. A Polaroid of his first electric guitar, given to him when he was thirteen, by his mother’s boyfriend, a German scuba instructor they’d met on vacation in Ibiza. The memoir is not comprehensive or chronological; it’s made up of bursts of inspiration, thoughtfully threaded together.
In a similar spirit, perhaps, Cocker and I recently visited MOMA, where we took in two exhibits composed of bits of things—“Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage” and “The Clock,” Christian Marclay’s magisterial film collage—and then proceeded to the National Arts Club, where we talked about life, art, the new Pulp album, and the passage of time. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
[Cocker begins.] Have you heard the record?
Yeah. It’s great. I listened at the Rough Trade offices.
I did too—the Rough Trade offices played it for everybody there and I went.
So when you listened to it for the first time you were with them?
Well, I set it going and I went downstairs. It’s an open-plan office, so I could hear it and I didn’t have to look at people whilst they listened. At one point, I poked my head in and said, “That’s the end of side one.” Because I still think of it as two sides. A side of a record is a good length of time to listen to something. CDs are always too long.
And then there’s the formlessness of the digital era, where you just listen to everything in any order—
And there’s no order in anything. Maybe that’s the future. I saw a picture taken inside an Amazon warehouse and it’s just a mess, all jumbled up. Things aren’t put in particular places because it’s not necessarily a human who will go and say, “Oh, I need to go to where the books are” or “I need to go to where the records are.” It’s got location tracking so you say “I want this” and a robot—bzz—might go to find it. There’s no need to file things neatly or put things together. So that’s quite a new way of . . . The world is kind of becoming like that.
Have you seen any of “The Clock” before?
I’ve not seen the whole thing. It’s very long. I’ve been watching the Chris Marker film “Sans Soleil.” That’s a bit similar—like it’s mostly things that he shot, and he put commentary over it to have it make some kind of sense. It’s a lot to take in, so I watch in ten-minute chunks. Let’s have a look at “The Clock.” [We watch from 11:20 A.M. to 11:50 A.M., then head downtown.]
Sorry to bring this up, but in “The Clock,” there’s that horrible scene [from Don Sharp’s “The Thirty Nine Steps” (1978)] where a man dangles from the giant clock hand of Big Ben. It made me think of the part in your book about—
Ah, falling from the window.
I’m so sorry that happened.
Well, it was my own fault. But as I said in the book, it was kind of a turning point. I wasn’t happy that it happened, but it made me stop for a minute and look at what I was doing, and I decided to do things differently.
You decided to make art out of what was in your life as it existed, right? Not trying to think of a different place or time or—
Yeah. Inspiration not being something that’s beamed in from the cosmos. To look at exactly what is around you. That’s the trick. You have to let yourself appreciate things all the time.
I love that lyric in “Grown Ups,” about a dream of looking at another planet through a telescope, seeing the people there having fun, going to the other planet, and then looking back at the Earth and seeing that it looks like a pretty good time back there, too. But now you’re stuck.
That was a real dream I had.
Really?
Yeah. I had it a few years ago and I wrote it down. That song is the oldest song on the record. The music was demoed when we did the Pulp album “This Is Hardcore” (1998), a long time ago. I knew I wanted to call it “Grown Ups” but I couldn’t think of any words beyond that. I lost confidence in it. And then when we were trying to get songs together for this record, I thought, This is it. This is its last chance.
You started writing “Grown Ups” around “This Is Hardcore”?
Yeah. Maybe thirty years ago. Now I am grown up.
It also makes me think of your Jarv Is song “Must I Evolve?” Some of these songs are about embracing being wherever you are in life.
Yes, I suppose accepting it and trying to do something with it, not pretending. Because that’s the thing that gives me pain. You don’t want to be aging, but you are.
Can you tell me how the new album came about?
Well, practically the way it came about was when we were touring in the U.K. in 2023, there was a song, “The Hymn of the North,” that had been written for a play called “Light Falls” (2019), written by Simon Stephens, a quite well-known playwright in the U.K. He gave me the script and said, “Can you write a song that keeps coming into the play?” So I’d done that.
And what was that song meant to do?
The play was about a mother who dies and then can go back and see what her kids are doing. My son was sixteen, and I started to become aware of the fact that school would end in a couple of years, and then he would go and live his life. And that slightly petrified me. Just wondering about whether I would see him, thinking about my own relationship with my mother, where I would go months without seeing her. And so that kind of got the ball rolling. Also, Steve [Mackey], the bass player in Pulp, he passed away before that tour started. And my mother died at the beginning of last year. So it was a bit of what we were talking about—when someone close to you passes away, one of the ways to deal with it is to think, O.K., well, I better make the most of my life now, or what’s left of it. I just thought it would be good for us to see whether we could get enough songs together for a record.
How did it feel writing those songs for Pulp? You’ve been writing for yourself and for different projects, like Jarv Is, for a while.
That’s a good question, actually. The first time we had a rehearsal, I thought the band had played a trick on me, and that they had moved the keys up, because it was really hard to get to all the notes. But as you get older, it gets harder to hit high notes. So I thought, I could ask them to change the key, but maybe I’ll just see if I can get back up there. And I did manage to get there. I didn’t change the key of any of them.
Wow. And does it strain your voice?
[In yelping falsetto.] Yes, it does! It’s very painful! [Laughs.] I stopped drinking milk. That’s my tip for readers. Big difference. Once I was able to do it, it was quite exciting. When you’ve managed to play a song that’s twenty years old or whatever, it does kind of take you back to what you thought when you wrote it. You start to channel that same kind of energy through it. And through the course of my life, I have put a lot of my energy into songs. Maybe I should have put it into other things, who knows? But that’s where I put a lot of my life, in songs.
Is there a certain sound that you feel works for Pulp that you wouldn’t try in your other projects?
I don’t know. I think that’s not really down to me, actually. I think that’s down to the band. As in—one thing I’ve realized is that, you know, Nick [Banks], the drummer, is very, very loud. The drummer who played in Jarv Is was, I don’t know, a fifth as loud. That changes the way everybody plays, because you’ve got to try and make yourself heard over the top of these drums . . . so it gives it a certain feel, you know? It’s not so much a thought-out thing. It’s just how the people are, how they play, it makes it sound a certain way.
And how does it feel to play with your old band members again?
It was good. It’s a funny thing, when you’re in a band with somebody it’s a very intimate thing. You get to know somebody because you’re making something together, so you rely on each other. But you’re not talking about anything, you’re just doing it, you know?
The tour had a really special feeling, I thought. I went to one of the shows in Brooklyn in the fall.
That was in that Kings Theatre. A good venue.
It seemed like everyone got there early, everyone was very keyed into it, very focussed. It’s a fancy, old, beautiful place with velvet seats and everything, and everyone was standing up. It wasn’t raucous, but it was very felt, it seemed to me. Did it feel that way to you?
It was—I especially liked that venue. The shows in America were really good. Pulp really hadn’t played any proper tour in America, I think. We did one on a bus once. It was a bit of a disaster. We had this one show in New Orleans, and there were ten people there or something. I think that was 1994. We weren’t so well known then.
On the tour last fall, you played a couple of songs that would make it onto the album, including “Spike Island.” That was the site of a famous Stone Roses show, right?
Yeah. I never went, but I’ve ended up writing two songs based on what people have told me about it. The first one was “Sorted for E’s and Wizz” (1995).
So what’s happening in “Spike Island”?
It mentions “The Garden of Earthly Delights” [by Hieronymus Bosch]. That painting is quite important for me. My now wife—we started our relationship fifteen years ago, and then in around 2018 we were apart for a year, and then we got back together. So the song is kind of about that, really. When we got back together, we were seeing whether it was a good idea or not, and we went to Madrid, and the painting is on display at the Prado. Usually the bit that you see is the right-hand panel, which is an end-of-the-world kind of thing. But what really struck me when I saw it was the central panel—that’s the garden of earthly delights. And I just looked at it for about twenty-five minutes.
What’s happening in the central panel?
There’s a lot of interpretations of it. You’ve got the Garden of Eden on the left panel, and the central panel is kind of square, and there are these funny structures and lots of, like, giant strawberries. One interpretation is that that’s what the world would have been like if we hadn’t got thrown out of the Garden of Eden. That would be what humanity would have developed into—just having a great time with giant strawberries and things like that. And then the right side is all dark, and it’s like what the modern world has done to humanity. But I chose to focus on the possibilities of the middle one.
Anyway, we got back together.
Do you feel like you’ve had a more focussed-on-giant-strawberries time since you’ve stayed together?
I think as you get older, you realize you can decide—well, obviously, things happen which will put you in a certain mood, but you can decide to focus on one thing or another, and if you want to go down the giant-strawberry route, you can, you know? But you’ve just got to believe it. Some people don’t go down that route at all, and everything is kind of a drag to them all the time.
Have you seen the Mike Leigh movie “Hard Truths” yet?
Is that the new one? No, I haven’t seen it yet.
That’s a question you’ll be asking yourself throughout, why are some people so happy and why are others—I mean, obviously some people are depressed and things, but it can be sort of mysterious sometimes, to what extent happiness is a choice.
It’s difficult to say that, isn’t it, because some people have it hard. I think you realize that the world is—there was a Jarv Is song, we never even recorded it, about everything being awesome and awful at the same time. You know, it is. And you just decide which one you’re going to look at.
That makes me think of the part of your book about being in the hospital, recovering from the window accident, and getting to know the other guys and realizing that there are good townies and bad townies and good indie weirdos and bad indie weirdos and that everyone’s a little of both.
Yeah. Being in the hospital, I was among people who I would have been frightened of walking around town, and I just realized they were all right. I think that’s an important thing, you know, to realize that everybody’s the same, really. It’s a big platitude, but it’s true, and that isn’t the dominant message at the moment.
Do you remember what you wrote immediately following the time in the hospital?
Well, it was a very old-fashioned hospital, like a long ward with beds all along the side. So I did character studies of all the guys who were there, because I’d been struck by this idea—that I had to look at everything around me in as much detail as possible. And that if I could capture everything, it would mean something. That’s why that Joe Gould book interested me, with the oral history. [Joseph Mitchell’s “Joe Gould’s Secret,” 1965.] He’s trying to take everything in and write it down. And I do still feel that a detail in a song is what will catch people, will make them pay attention. It makes it genuine in some way.
The way that you interact with the audience both on your songs and onstage—there’s a very natural familiarity there. A lot of the songs have funny little details that feel like you’re talking to us like a friend, someone who will understand your viewpoint.
That’s probably because I’m not that talkative in normal life. That’s part of the contradiction, really, because the main issue that I’ve had in my personal relationships is people say I don’t communicate very well. I’ve never liked confrontation and stuff like that. I don’t like to be the center of attention in a social group, you know? . . . If I could communicate with people who I care about so that they don’t get irritated, that would be good.
It’s harder sometimes to have interpersonal conversations that say basic, important things—it just feels way too loaded. I mean, you don’t have intense emotional relationships with everyone in your audience, you know?
That’s a good thing. It’s like the audience for me is an entity. I can see that it’s made up of people, and I’m always curious as to why those people are there. But, yeah, it’s easier than just one person. And I don’t know whether that’s because—I mention in the book the fact that I was shortsighted from birth. You know, I can only see, like, that far away. So maybe I had to address the world as some kind of blur—as a kid, that’s what it was. So I just got into the habit of it.
I love the part in your book about listening to Barry White and being inspired by him. I never would have made that connection—how he’ll break it down and have a talking part in a song, like you. And you have a deep voice, like him.
Yeah! His music’s got a great sound to it, and I like how the way he speaks is kind of rhythmical, but it’s not rapping at all, he’s just talking. I’d never really heard that used so much in songs before. The first time we tried it I wrote a song called “My Legendary Girlfriend” (1992), which was musically quite indebted to him, as well. And I think that’s how you can get something interesting to happen. You hear something that you like and you try and do it yourself and you can’t do it, but you get somewhere near it—you invent something new in the process.
Let’s go back to the album. The second side opens with “My Sex.” (“My sex is neither here nor there / is neither him nor her / It’s an out-of-body experience.”) How did that come about?
I thought that would be a good title. It could have turned into a kind of a jokey song, but I didn’t want to do that. The second verse is a bit darker in a way—the stuff like, “Love is invisible to the naked eye when it’s raised in the dark of two people’s minds.” My wife doesn’t like that one. She said, “Are you trying to tell me that you’re gay or something?” She just didn’t understand what it was supposed to be about.
I feel like that would be a bad way to tell someone that.
You know, I wouldn’t put it past myself.
You’d have to admit that you’re a bad communicator, interpersonally.
Yeah, exactly. I suppose part of that is because I learned about sex from being in a female household. I got a female perspective on the men in their lives. That was always there when I started trying to have relationships. I didn’t want to act like a jerk, like a typical guy, because basically all the husbands had left their wives. My dad had gone. And my cousin across the yard, her dad had gone as well. So men weren’t very popular. And I didn’t really have any kind of male figure to give me their side of the story.
What ended up happening with your mother and the guy she dated, the scuba instructor who gave you your first electric guitar?
Well, that was quite sad—I think they kind of stayed in touch, you know? I mean, the thing was that he was working on one of the Balearic Islands, teaching scuba diving. And my mum was in Sheffield with two kids. He came a few times. I really liked him. But he quite understandably did not want to live in Sheffield, when he was living in a nice warm place. He was German. He was an interesting guy. Because he gave me that guitar, I felt very grateful to him, but I’d never told him that. So I decided that I was going to try and track him down, and I made a couple of attempts, and couldn’t really find him. And then I got a German friend to write to the hotel that he used to be at, in German, and say, Is he still there? And we got a reply back saying, Yeah, he’s still here.
So I booked a holiday for me and my son to go. I was scared of scuba diving, so I never got him to teach me when I was a kid, and I thought, he can teach my son, that would be a good thing, and I could express my gratitude to him. So we went over and met him, and he couldn’t teach as a diver because he was getting quite old and he had got in a car accident a few years before. But he organized it. And me and my son did our PADI accreditation, and we hung out with him for a few days and he drove us to the airport and I said, you know, “We’ll keep in touch.”
And we went back to England. At the V. & A. Museum, in London, there was a Pink Floyd exhibition on and he was mad on Pink Floyd. So I bought him the catalogue of that exhibition and I posted it off to the hotel and then, you know, two weeks went by. I thought, What? Maybe he’s gone off Pink Floyd. He didn’t acknowledge it in any way. And I rang up the hotel and he’d died. He died basically the day after he drove us to the airport.
Oh, my God!
Yes. I mean, it was just a strange thing. I was obviously upset that he died, but the fact that I managed to say thanks to him a day before he died was, uh . . .
So what was it like when you first saw him again? Was he aware of you and your band?
Yeah, he knew that we’d become popular and everything. So he was happy with that. And when I found out that he died, I tried to think back, like, should I have known? He was showing me things, and it was like he was going through his past. So he obviously was aware that he wasn’t well, and he was trying to sort out his possessions and things like that. I just didn’t realize that at the time.
Did he have a family of his own at some point?
No. Speaking to him was interesting, actually. He said that the reason that he got into scuba diving was because you were completely alone—you couldn’t talk to anybody. You were just there floating in the void. He told me about this one night when he’d been out and something went strange with the weather and he had to spend the night on a desert island, uninhabited. And he said it was the best time of his life. [Laughs.] So he just didn’t really like hanging out with people very much.
Boy, that scene in your book where he comes to visit and he’s packed the two pieces of the guitar in different bags. It’s almost like a magic trick—someone shows up, no guitar anywhere, and then takes these two pieces, puts them together, and presto.
For ages it was the only guitar that I had. It’s not a fancy guitar. It’s called a Hopf. I still use it onstage. That’s the one I play on “Babies.” [Sings guitar line from “Babies,” from 1992.]
Imagine giving a kid a guitar and then he turns out to be a successful musician. That’s a beautiful thing.
Thank you.
After “My Sex” is “Got to Have Love,” which is the other old song on the record. I think that was from the late nineties.
“Without love, you’re just making a fool of yourself,” it says.
And then it’s got a line that the rest of the band really object to. “Without love, you’re just jerking off inside someone else.” And that’s a very unpleasant image. But for me, that was the best line in the song, in a way. It’s true. That line was directly inspired by watching a very bad film, the film version of “American Psycho” with Christian Bale in it. One bit stuck in my mind. He was about to have sex with a woman—in fact, while he was doing it, he was just looking at himself in the mirror and admiring his muscles and things. It just went so far off, you know, actually having sex with somebody.
Do you think of yourself as being imaginative? I tend to think of myself as a writer as mostly observing things and writing them down, and making something new from that, even if I’m writing fiction. Do you like making things up? Creating things?
Yeah, I do, but I also like to observe. Like we were saying, details make it realistic and make it convincing. So I’m always writing about my own experience, really. I’m not really an imaginative writer as in, invent a character and then wonder, How would he eat bread?
But definitely imagination is something that I’m a bit suspicious of. You need it to be able to imagine a song, how it would work, so it’s useful to me in that respect. But then, when you imagine what somebody else might be doing when you’re not with them, or that kind of thing—in fact, New York is an interesting place for me to talk about that, because when I first came to America, it disappointed me in some ways. Part of it was because of seeing on TV those very-wide-angle shots of skyscrapers. I thought skyscrapers would be about a mile high, and they weren’t. In “Slow Jam,” I say “Let’s have a threesome: you, me, and my imagination.” That’s trying to express my suspicion of the imagination.
Yeah. You always have to be imagining things—always filling in blanks about what you don’t know, to make sense of reality—but a lot of the things that you imagine, however rational they may be, might not be accurate, and there’s all kinds of ways for that to go bad.
Yeah, but it can also go good. Like, you know, we saw “The Clock,” and I was thinking, He must take a lot of time watching things and making notes. And to keep all that within a human brain is quite an amazing feat. I wonder if you could get A.I. to do it now. Like, you could just put in, “Tell me films that have clocks in them,” and it could probably collate something like that quite quickly. But I don’t think it would make as good a film, would it? Because somehow, just the fact that information passes through another consciousness does change it. So you get an impression of the person who made the film from that. It’s a very strict structure he had there, of trying to move through the day, minute by minute, but it’s still based on films that he’s seen, the way he’s been brought up, the period of time he’s existed in. And so you get a portrait of someone through that.
I was thinking about that, too, and about the idea of making something from scraps that haven’t been used in other things—like the Robert Frank home movies that we saw at MOMA. I like that idea of a project made from curated bits of things—that’s sort of what you did with your book.
I did. I was glad to find that way of writing an autobiography because it made it much more interesting than if I’d just sat down and tried to remember what had happened in my life. It would have been pretty boring. But because of these objects that I just put [in the crawl space] for no reason, I just stored them there and I hadn’t seen them for a long time—when I looked at one and thought, Why is this here? It would take a while for me to remember how it fit in. And then the memory that came from it would be quite a strong, fresh memory because I had not been aware of it at all.
I did have a lot of writing up there, too, but I started reading that and just gave up on it, because it felt a bit too much like I was trying to present a certain idea of what I thought I should be, rather than what I actually was. Whereas the objects, like shoes and things that I’d actually worn and used, gave a much more accurate picture of what I was like.
It’s an exciting feeling to dig up those new, fresh memories. I realized recently that “Revolution 9” can transport me immediately to childhood in a way that’s different from other Beatles songs—you don’t tend to listen to “Revolution 9” a lot. You’ve been interviewed over the years, so there are parts of your life that you’ve told over and over, I would think.
Yeah, that’s it. And that’s why if I’d tried to write it in a conventional way it wouldn’t have worked, because I’ve already said it so many times. And also songs are a way of kind of telling the story of your life, but hopefully in a more entertaining way, you know, because you’ve got music. You don’t just have to listen to someone droning on about what they’ve done in their life, you can dance to it or whatever.
The last song on the record is “A Sunset.” Brian Eno’s got this Earth/Percent organization, which is trying to get people to give the Earth a writing credit on songs. It’s a good idea—you cut it in on the publishing, the Earth. I came up with this idea of doing this PowerPoint tracing my fear of nature, which I did used to have. When my son was going to be born, my then wife had to glue shut some of the pages in this having-a-baby book. I was very worried about fainting during the birth of my son. But then when it actually happened, I forgot about that. So it’s about how I came to actually feel O.K. in nature, and even love it. I have a house in the countryside now, and I really like it.
What does it feel like, being in nature there?
The landscape doesn’t really change. When weather changes, it looks a bit different and sometimes it’s a bit greener. And that’s something that, as a human being, puts you in your place: this is going to be the same when you’ve gone. You don’t make much of an impression on this at all.
And you become aware of the seasons a lot more. You just feel the cycles of what’s going on. And for someone brought up in a city—I didn’t really like going to the countryside, I didn’t understand it—it’s quite a good thing to feel that.
What didn’t you like when you were younger and you went to the country?
Just having to walk up hills, and things like that. Rain. Nothing to tell you what to do. Well, there are signposts, actually. I just didn’t feel at home in it at all.
And the landscape where your house is, is that different?
It’s hilly.
So now you’re O.K. with those?
I love them.
They can help with beauty and stuff. You know, you climb to the top, you look up at them, you look down from the top.
Yeah. It’s amazing.
Contemplate the beyond.
But it is good to access that. I mean, we are natural beings. That’s one of the problems with—there seems to be an attitude of man against nature, and I suppose that’s getting more pointed as climate change seems to get more extreme. So it’s like a war, us against nature. Well, you’re not going to win that fight. Really. We are natural things as well. Why can’t we all just work together? That’s what I say. [Laughs.]
Have you been experiencing art in any particular way lately? Besides what we looked at today?
I went to look at this exhibition at the Tate Modern called “Electric Dreams,” which is kind of like the kinetic stuff from before the internet. Some of it is video stuff, some of it is, like, you know, things that spin around. Quite good! I enjoyed that.
“Things that spin around” sounds so innocent somehow.
Yeah, well, it’s a different way of looking at it. There isn’t a general optimism about the future anymore, but this is from a period when there was, I suppose—they thought the future was going to be great, and technology was going to sort out a lot of problems. We played in Japan and I went to the Tower of the Sun, on the outskirts of Osaka, built for the 1970 Expo there by Tarō Okamoto. It’s amazing, a crazy building to look at—it’s got a tree of life inside that goes all the way up toward the sun, and it starts off with trilobites and things in the basement, and jellyfish . . . mankind is only very small at the top. The sun is in control. Okamoto was mistrustful of technology—he was saying, Really, you’ve got to just think of the fundamentals. If the sun went off, everything would disappear immediately. So he tried to add a bit of perspective.
You’ll be doing a big tour when this record comes out.
We will. I think it’ll be the biggest tour we’ve ever done.
How do you feel about that?
Good. As long as people come and watch it.
Your last tour really seemed to mean something to people.
Good. In a weird way, I’ve come around to the idea of Pulp again. Toward the end of it, the last two records, I wasn’t in a very good mental place. It was a strange thing. Because I’d achieved my ambition, which I’d had from being a kid, to be in a band and be famous. But it was too much for me, really. And so “This Is Hardcore,” and to a lesser extent, I suppose, “We Love Life” were made when I wasn’t sure whether I really wanted to do it, or I had a slightly ambivalent attitude toward it. So even though it’s a long time since that, the fact that we’ve come back to it, and hopefully I have managed to sort out certain things in my life—it’s a pleasure to do it now. And hopefully people can feel that. There’s no conflict in it now for me.
When you were young, before you had even gotten a band together, you were planning the band’s clothes and imagining it all vividly.
It’s like you build up a belief system. I think I thought that becoming famous would transform me in some way and would solve things that I had issues with. But I realized that it doesn’t. It was just being lazy, I suppose—to think you’ve got a magic wand that’s going to sort everything out.
You thought you personally would change, not just the way people reacted to you.
I wanted to transform, become a butterfly or whatever. It just seemed like it would take me to—as a kid, I thought that I wanted to live inside the TV. I would cross over into another dimension, which didn’t involve having to make day-to-day normal decisions; I would live in a mythic space. Which sounds very naïve to say now. And it just didn’t quite work out, you know? I used to be really nervous coming to New York. I came here toward the Christmas of 1996, and I was on my own and I kind of had a bit of a breakdown. And then whenever I came back to New York, it would remind me of that and I would start to get panicky and stuff. And I’m not panicky now. I hope you can see that. [Laughs.] I feel O.K. And you know, touch wood, it will last for a long time. That’s all I’m asking for. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
