Watch the first-ever Pulp interview from 1984
When they sat down for their first interview in 1984, Pulp had already been together for five years. The project had been swirling around Jarvis Cocker’s head for some time, too, with the frontman penning the “Pulp Manifesto” in a school exercise book before he’d managed to recruit any bandmates. In that manifesto, Cocker laid out his plan of action, one involving chart domination, intentionally “rancid” outfits and a band-owned indie label called Pulp Inc.
By 1984, that dream had yet to come to fruition. Formed in 1978, Pulp came together at Sheffield’s City School, with the band performing their first live concert at Rotherham Arts Centre in the July of 1980. The following year, BBC Radio 1’s John Peel performed a DJ set at Sheffield Polytechnic. Cocker, a devoted listener, approached Peel and handed him a tape of the band’s one and only demo recording. Peel was sufficiently impressed and invited the band to London to record a session.
The session was well-timed. Cocker was already in Oxford ahead of his university interview. There was just one problem: Pulp had barely any equipment. “When we got the phone call saying come down to London and record, it was crazy really because we’d only done one demo recording,” Cocker told BBC 6 Music’s Tom Ravenscroft. “We had to borrow loads of equipment from other bands in Sheffield because we didn’t have enough equipment,” the frontman continued.
He added: “I used to play my guitar through this old tape recorder. We didn’t have a proper bass amp. In fact, the bass amp caused us a big problem when we got there. It had like a graphic equaliser on it, and no one had seen one of those before. So we just didn’t know how to work it.”
Pulp’s John Peel session made them one of Sheffield’s most talked-about bands. While the exposure didn’t lead to the international success Cocker had been dreaming of for so many years, it did make them something of an authority on the Sheffield music scene. In 1985, the band was interviewed by communications students Simon Bebbington, Shelina Mawani and Mandy Mattheson for a short documentary about the Sheffield pop scene.
Filmed in Cocker’s mum’s garden, the footage captures Pulp at a rather pessimistic moment. “I was living in a factory building, a drop-in centre for all the freaks and misfits of Sheffield,” Cocker told John Reed in 1994. “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’. ‘Aye aye aye aye moosey’ was in the charts”.
He added: “We were nowhere near the mainstream. 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.”
But soon, everything was going to change. Check out the interview below.
