Jarvis Cocker grew up adoring the love songs of the ’70s. Then, as a teenager, he formed Pulp and started trying to write his own love songs. The problem: Love sucks as a teen.
“I started the band at the same time that I started trying to date girls,” Cocker told the Boston Herald. “And when I started to try to date girls, I was horrified that it was so difficult. It wasn’t easy and I felt betrayed by songs. Love wasn’t this nicey-nicey thing.”
“I still loved pop beat,” he added. “But I kind of fell out with the lyrics of songs because I thought they’d sold me a dud and I made a vow to write about what I felt was the reality of it.”
But the teenage Jarvis Cocker is a very different person than the guy bringing Pulp to The Stage at Suffolk Downs on Sept. 13. On Pulp’s recent single “Got to Have Love,” the modern version of the man sings, “It cannot be denied, I waited far too long/To believe, to believe in the words, I once wrote to this song.”
“I would have felt just too embarrassed to write that song,” Cocker said of his younger self. “It doesn’t say it in an ironic or tangential way. It just says, ‘Got to have love, and I’m not going to argue about it.’ In fact, I’m going to tell you off in the middle of the song. ‘Can you even spell it? Because I’ll even spell it out for you.”
A throbbing, climatic song, the track ends with Cocker going into a spoken word bit where he practically demands the listener understand the importance of love.
The tune is part of Pulp’s excellent new album “More,” its first in a quarter century. A star of the ’90s Britpop scene (even if they never really fit with that scene), Pulp reunited for tour dates in 2023. New songs started to crop up at shows and that artistic burst pushed the band toward recording “More.”
“It’s been an interesting period, and upsetting in certain ways,” Cocker said. “Steve Mackey, our bass player, passed away. My mother died as well. Things like that were significant in that if you were going to try and do something creative, why not get on with it because you don’t get forever to do it.”
“More” was recorded in a rush — partly because the studio the band recorded in didn’t have anywhere to relax (they bought the cheapest couch at IKEA just to stuff in the hall ). But maybe also because the band felt both a joy and a maturity in getting back together and making “More.”
While there are plenty of songs that sound classically Pulp-y (“Tina,” “My Sex”), “More” shows off a new earnestness in places beyond “Got to Have Love.” Opening track “Spike Island” has Cocker singing, “I was born to perform, it’s a calling/I exist to do this, shouting and pointing.”
“That was a realization that (performing is) something that I enjoy a lot,” he said. “I’m a person who tends to think all the time… When you perform live, there’s no time to think. You become a channel, shall we say, for the beat to come through.”
Cocker seems to know himself a lot better at 61 than at 16. Which is how it should be, but not how it often goes with rock stars obsessed with being eternally young. All this translates to pop beat — even love songs — that sounds like Pulp today while still being as powerful as Pulp was yesterday.
For tickets and details, visit welovepulp.info
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