Scene 1, early 2002: in D's kitchen, I ask Tim E what CD it is he's playing, and am surprised in that expectations-confounded way to find that it's the latest Pulp album. I knew they had more imagination than Oasis, but I didn't realise they'd moved this far from their Britpop template.
Scene 2, late 2002: Caroline rings to ask if I'm interested in Pulp's farewell Auto festival, conceived by the bass player, Steve Mackey (factlet: I did some work with his mum). I laugh scornfully: my house is for sale, I am so out of Sheffield already in my mind, that anything that smacks remotely of that city's self-congratulation is even more anathema to me than previously.
That captures a little of my ambivalence towards Pulp, but the clinching point came in Scene 3, July 2003, in Liverpool Street station where the CD/DVD store was offering We Love Life for £3.99. The store was called, appropriately, Impulse, since it was designed to sell the products in the same style as Mars bars by the checkout.
Then I treated the purchase with about the same care and attention as a Mars bar, but now I find that it is quite good. I love the way it opens with the Weeds songs, starting with refugees portrayed like invasive Sargassum, and then going on to show how we're all mutations of weeds, liable ultimately to be outlived by mutated weeds. I like Jarvis's extended monologues, too, not least on the eight-minute Wickerman, most of whose locations I remember all too well.
I've only ever given Pulp a glancing look, but they seem to me like the old bands we used to follow, whom we expected to lead us into difficult and abstruse places. The big bands don't seem to be able to do that any more (U2 tried, with varying degrees of success, during the '90s, but then seemed to make a policy decision to become conservative again).
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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