by Anyone who has ever felt at home listening to a Pulp record will probably know about two things to be true.
One, that listening to their music makes the world feel smaller in the best way possible. And two, that familiar sense of at home, at ease, and completely in the zone with your own creature comforts comes from the fact that Jarvis Cocker has always been one of the most self-assured people in music.
Whether that’s actually true or not doesn’t really matter, especially not when his awkwardness and pub-style conversational lyricisms are the main reasons why people kept coming back in the first place. Because beyond the constant Britpop chatter and why Pulp did or didn’t beat other players of the moment at their own game, their biggest achievement – and most people from or living in Sheffield will attest to this – is how much Cocker romanticises Northern oddball charm to the point where having a complex about your own working class roots can feel like the best thing in the world.
Cocker has actually written about this countless times. It might be funny now to watch him perform a song like ‘Common People’ and wonder whether he still even identifies with that familiar strain of being hard done by, but he has actually been there himself multiple times. Enough to know what it’s like right at the bottom, peering up, walking with a chip on your shoulder, with endless questions about why the world is the way it is.
One of the most “savage” songs he’s ever written was actually inspired by that very feeling. ‘I Spy’ came about when Cocker was in the throes of “superior hate” about his own misfortunes as a lad on the dole in Sheffield. “If you’re in a real cocky mood, you can walk down the street and kind of despise people from above,” he once said – a familiar atmosphere for anyone who has ever set foot outside in the Steel City.
But what also gives Cocker’s songwriting its charm is how he never minces his words, his recollections literally pouring out of him as though he’s sat in a grubby bar chatting about his woes to some other brood he met not five minutes ago. As we all know, this situation provides space for some of the best and worst one-liners you’ll ever come across in your life, like the typical, ‘Here’s why Sheffield is no longer what it used to be’, or the kicker – first times.
Cocker wrote this into a song aptly called ‘Do You Remember The First Time?’. Though not precisely about a conversation he’d had in a pub once, it was about his own real experience, a fixation he brought to life with an elaborate marketing campaign in which he got a handful of other big names to talk about their first-ever sexual encounters.
The song wasn’t as much of a standout as some of their more obvious hits, but it did spark a bit of a turning point, not only with their sound but also with their chemistry and progression. In the moments leading up to it, they’d played around with different styles and sounds, almost but never really landing on that quintessential core of what made Pulp the band they eventually became.
But with ‘Do You Remember The First Time?’, something clicked in the way they moved, and Cocker felt like it was the first time they truly arrived in every sense of the word. He even later said the song marked “the day modern-day Pulp was born”. Interestingly, most people who exist on the surface of Pulp’s popularity have never even heard the song. But that could be something more to do with the controversy it attracted upon release, by people who rendered it nothing more than a familiar trap rather than a complex form of relationship rumination.
