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Like a separated couple getting back together, Pulp’s reunion has gone from cosy reminiscing on the nostalgia circuit, starting in 2023, to an old-times-sake quickie in the recording studio last November. The Britpop band, one of the scene’s “big four” with Blur, Oasis and Suede, dashed out their first album for 24 years in just three weeks. Due in June, in mischievous proximity to the start of Oasis’s return to the stage, it is called More.
A taster comes with the single “Spike Island”. It alludes, in characteristically arch fashion, to the dangers of much-loved bands making comebacks. The song is named after the famous gig played by the Stone Roses at Spike Island, a Cheshire park, in 1990. This was an important staging-post towards Britpop. But the reference also points to the Manchester icons’ disillusioning reunion in 2011, which fizzled out five years later with the arrival of two dire new songs.
Now a touring nine-piece, Pulp’s rebirth as a recording act opens with a high whining note — a neuralgic sound rather than nostalgic, redolent of gritted teeth and painful visits to the dentist. But then the whine is replaced by a stately guitar riff that rises upwards like a pennant on a flagpole. Bass, drums and synthesiser join together in a satisfyingly sturdy way. Last to make his entry, after bandmates Nick Banks, Candida Doyle and Mark Webber, is Jarvis Cocker.
The singer is 61 but still performs as though holding a hairbrush in front of a bedroom mirror, one eye on himself, the other visualising an adoring audience. He switches between a deadpan Sheffield sing-speak and the agitated cry of someone at the mercy of irresistible impulses. Desire and disappointment, the twin poles around which Pulp’s world has always revolved, are his topics. “This time I’ll get it right,” he sings.
Unlike classics such as “Common People”, there is no story. Spike Island is used as a metonym for big events that are also unsatisfying, as the windblown Roses’ gig was. Pulp fans may also feel a bit cheated that the music has not been written by the original band members, but rather by Jason Buckle, formerly of the (very good) Cocker-affiliated outfit, All Seeing I. But the song is a solid opening gambit, with a knowing sense of what is at stake.
‘Spike Island’ is released by Rough Trade
★★★☆☆
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