‘Freaks’: The album Pulp recorded for £600
Although Pulp found fame and fortune in the mid-1990s, with the 1994 album His ‘n’ Hers and the following year’s explosive masterpiece, Different Class, their road to the top was dreary and lethargic. Having formed the band in 1978, the Sheffield-born group navigated their late teens with an identity crisis of sorts: their early sound was described in Mark Sturdy’s Truth and Beauty: the Story of Pulp as “a cross between ABBA and The Fall”.
Early rumblings of glory were kindled in 1981 after John Peel laid ears on a demo tape and granted Pulp a Peel Session. By this point, the band had evolved their eclectic sound to welcome the contemporary synth-pop sensibilities championed by their Sheffield brethren, The Human League. The sessions were a relative success and saw the band emerge from the saturated obscurity of the local music scene. But there was still a long climb to the top.
In 1983, Pulp released their debut album, It, which took yet another genre deviation, now welcoming a folk-pop sound inspired by Leonard Cohen. The mini-LP failed to reach many critics and was a commercial failure, with a limited run of 2000 copies available for sale until it was reissued over a decade later.
In the same position, many bands would have called it quits to take up a day job in earnest, but Jarvis Cocker and his troupe were as tenacious as they were eclectic. Sadly, through the late 1980s, Pulp’s woes spiralled further still, and after so many years bearing the storm, 1987’s Freaks marked a demoralising nadir for the band, both on a musical and personal level.
“In June ’86, we started the Freaks album,” Cocker told Record Mirror in 1994. “It was recorded for £600 – in one week. The producer disowned it: he didn’t want his name on it! This was the low point, emotionally, of my life. It’s such a depressing album. There’s some decent songs, but they’re badly done. ‘I Want You’ is good, but there’s a better version as a demo. The violin’s miles out of tune – it’s supposed to be a big ballad. ‘Don’t You Know’ came out on a Record Mirror compilation ‘Fruit Cakes And Furry Collars’ – it’s the same version.”
Continuing, Cocker discussed the album’s title as a reflection of his post-academic failures. “It was called Freaks because I’d been out of school four years and lived this marginal life with no success,” he said. “I was living in a factory building, a drop-in centre for all the freaks and misfits of Sheffield. We’d been doing something worthwhile and original, and yet nobody seemed interested. This was the dark days of the mid-’80s: ‘we’re heading for a boom time, let’s be happy’.”
“[Modern Dance’s] ‘Aye aye aye aye moosey’ was in the charts. We were nowhere near the mainstream,” he added. “Also, I was in the middle of the first proper relationship I’d had. I’d gone into this terrible depression of finding out what relationships were really like, but not knowing how to deal with it – you go out with somebody for six months and spend another eighteen trying to split up. All in all, I was not a happy person.”
Thankfully, Pulp hung on by the skin of their teeth as the ’80s came to a close. From the early ’90s, singles like ‘Babies’, ‘Space’ and ‘She’s a Lady’ began to gain traction during live performances, channelling wind into the sails as they rose towards their zenith, Different Class.
