John Lennon meets Arthur Scargill: How Jarvis Cocker captured the spirit of South Yorkshire
Sheffield has produced a wealth of Yorkshire’s greatest musical exports, whether it’s the classic stylings of Joe Cocker, the progenitive synthpop of Heaven 17 and The Human League, or even the experimental output of Derek Bailey.
Few groups, however, have managed to capture the spirit of the South Yorkshire city quite as adeptly as Jarvis Cocker and Pulp.
Forged by a teenage Cocker during his secondary school days, Pulp spent well over a decade propping up Sheffield’s local indie scene before achieving mainstream stardom, with thanks to the Britpop age and – tragically – Cocker’s relocation to London. Even if the group strayed somewhat from their steel city origins, though, Sheffield has remained a consistent source of inspiration for the band’s songwriting.
During the early 1990s, in the run-up to the band’s Britpop-era breakthrough, they released ‘Sheffield Sex City’, giving some indication of their debt to the South Yorkshire surroundings that produced the band. However, it wasn’t until a few years later that Cocker truly encapsulated the spirit of his home city and its immediate surroundings, with the woefully underrated anthem ‘Last Day of the Miners Strike’ in 2002.
A contractual obligation, the song was originally written to fulfil Island Records’ demands that their Hits compilation record feature at least one new song. Its musical basis was a sample taken from Burt Bacharach’s ‘South American Getaway’, brought to the group by Candida Doyle, but the lyrical content likely wouldn’t have made any sense to Missouri-born titan of loved-up lounge music.
Focused around the 1984 miners’ strike, which centred around South Yorkshire as an area dominated by and centred around collieries that were suddenly at risk of closure by Marget Thatcher’s devastating policy of deindustrialisation, the song is among Pulp’s most politically conscious. According to Cocker, though, the inspiration for the track came more from John Lennon than NUM president Arthur Scargill.
“I’d had this dream where I was listening to this John Lennon song,” the songwriter recalled to Mojo in 2003. “Woke up and realised it wasn’t a Lennon song; I wrote it down and tried to remember the tune.”
Cocker added that, to his shame, he wasn’t all that knowledgeable on the plight of the striking miners. “It’s a bit iffy writing about the miners’ strike when I don’t know that much about it,” he admitted.
Nevertheless, Cocker vividly remembers that period in South Yorkshire’s history. “When it was on, Russell [Senior] was going out on pickets all the time, but I had no interest in politics at the time. I kinda regretted it later… I tried to make the song more allusive rather than some Billy Bragg thing.”
Despite his apparent ignorance of the miners’ strike as a political struggle, ‘Last Day of the Miners’ Strike’ is among the greatest pieces of social commentary when it comes to the lasting impression that the period of industrial action had on vast swathes of northern England.
The declaration that “the last day of the miners’ strike was the Magna Carta in this part of town”, in particular, is a statement that still rings true when exploring the towns and cities of South Yorkshire to this day… Equally as important, though, is the song’s sense of resistance and rising energy, reflecting the north’s determination to rise again, despite the best efforts of Mrs Thatcher.
