“Help the aged / One time they were just like you / Drinking, smoking cigs and sniffing glue…”
Twenty-six years after Pulp released ‘Help The Aged’, Jarvis Cocker now finds himself at an age where he can claim a free London bus pass. The dividing line between young and old that served as a comedy trope with a touch of pathos in that hit song is no longer just vanishingly thin but has disappeared altogether. The definition of old gets slipperier, of course, especially from a personal perspective as landmarks are reached and left behind in the rear-view mirror. Nevertheless, More, Pulp’s eighth studio album, is riven with anxiety about the aging process.
Where their chef d’oeurve Different Class was impudent, spiky and a little bit spunky – figuratively and literally – More is more equivocal. The former features songs like ‘I Spy’, a kind of Saltburn meets ‘I Will Survive’ where Cocker relishes revenge-fucking the bourgeoisie in an act of solidarity with the have-nots: “You see you should take me seriously… very seriously indeed,” he sing-speaks in dastardly soliloquy, “‘Cause I’ve been sleeping with your wife for the past sixteen weeks / Smoking your cigarettes / Drinking your brandy / Messing up the bed that you chose together / And in all that time I just wanted you to come home unexpectedly one afternoon and catch us at it in the front room…” On ‘Pencil Skirt’ the protagonist slowly works his way through an entire family, defiling them with his working-class seed.
There’s plenty of eye-popping sex on More too, delivered with a roguish charm from Cocker that feels gloriously anachronistic. We’ll come to that shortly, though thematically, we find ourselves more in a position of uncertainty on the band’s eighth studio album, with an overriding sense of bewilderment at the world. We’ve been bewildered before, of course. This Is Hardcore was a comedown of epic proportions after the inciveness of Different Class, that seemed already like a walk around a tatterdemalion former stately home, a beautiful husk that elicited tuts of sympathy – though the fact Cocker got his pop star dream and didn’t like it made it difficult for the listener to feel too much sympathy.
And We Love Life lacked direction precisely because Pulp didn’t appear to love life at all. The coup of getting Scott Walker on board aside, it was as though they were putting on a collective brave face as the fanbase slowly dwindled away. The band never officially broke up, though the ensuing sabbatical implied a permanence, even when they were topping up their bank balances with excursions around the country in 2012 and 2023.
A sense of bewilderment works on More where it may not have been entirely successful in the past, because we all understand that time is elastic and our lives are ebbing away. Cocker’s negative experiences with fame will inevitably be harder to tap into than someone reflecting and trying to make sense of their lives. There’s a universality to More which benefits from Cocker’s inimitable, offbeat perspective.
Songs on the album then contain a series of wistful and not-so-wistful memories, such as a pratfall-strewn trek to Spike Island to see The Stone Roses – which actually is a second-hand memory, given that it all happened to co-songwriter and Jarv Is… collaborator Jason Buckle. ‘Tina’ returns like an apparition, being followed around by a soundtrack that sounds like Ennio Morricone at his warmest. Tina is a girl who Cocker remembers seeing around Sheffield whose appearances took on a significance even though they never spoke. ‘Grown Ups’, meanwhile, is perhaps an answer to ‘Help The Aged’, seen through the prism of experience rather than supposition. You sense, too, that the death of Steve Mackey in 2023 has injected Pulp with a sense of urgency.
If we are trying to live in the now on More with some inevitable looking back, then Cocker singing about sex feels more contentious than it ever did. In an interview in 1995, the singer admitted to injecting songs like ‘Sheffield Sex City’, ‘Do You Remember The First Time?’ and ‘My Legendary Girlfriend’ with tales about fornication to liven things up in the pop scene: “By 1991, what struck me was how sexless pop music had become. I thought I could see a gap in the market. I mean sex is constantly on people’s minds, isn’t it, but in pop it gets written about in such a stupid or nebulous way, even though it rules people’s lives. It’s either the Prince approach of going it all night long or it’s like that TV series The Good Sex Guide, which was enough to make anyone celibate. Let’s consult the manual: I’ve done my twenty minutes of foreplay; now I can achieve penetration.”
Cocker clearly isn’t set for the old folks’ home yet, and yet writing about sex in your 60s is still considered a taboo. A cursory web search will bring up a host of articles with headlines about “breaking the silence” about people of a certain age still having it off. Cocker is to be applauded then for refusing to tone it down, particularly in an age that feels increasingly priggish and puritanical. ‘My Sex’, a manifesto of sexual mores, is brave and even feels a bit kinky compared with what’s admissible, even if it’s not risqué in the way that surreptitiously hiding in a wardrobe to watch someone’s sister have sex with a garage mechanic is. ‘Babies’ from the ‘Sisters E.P.’ reached no.19 in the charts in 1993 and it brought about Pulp’s first invitation to play on Top of the Pops. There was no scandal at the time regarding one of the finest and grubbiest songs in the Pulp canon, though you suspect such a pervy lyric wouldn’t pass under the radar as easily in the age of social media.
The aforementioned ‘Tina’ meanwhile, features perhaps the most Pulp-esque ejaculation on the whole album, when in a fit of reverie, Cocker imagines himself “screwing in a charity shop on top of black bin bags full of donations / The smell of digestive biscuits in the air.” If there is to be more Pulp after More then the hope is that Cocker will continue to write about the salacious stuff for as long as his sex drive takes him into these scenarios and fantasies. It’s constantly on everyone’s mind, after all.
