Magazine: Jarvis Cocker’s “great new hope” after the year zero of punk
It should come as little surprise that Jarvis Cocker, even as a young lad, was a bit sceptical of punk rock in its most base, aggressive, and easily Xeroxed form. Back in 1978, the same year a 15-year-old Cocker formed the earliest incarnation of Pulp in his hometown of Sheffield, he found a new spark of inspiration from another northern band in particular, and the influence would continue to seep through over the four decades that followed.
In June ‘78, the Manchester-based quintet Magazine released their debut full-length album Real Life. Today, it’s known as something of a cult record, but it was hardly overlooked when it first reared its strange head. Recorded in part at Abbey Road Studios and released on the Virgin label, it peaked at 29 on the UK charts and gathered up plenty of plaudits. Real Life also generated a lot of buzz even before its official release, as the band had been touring most of the songs throughout much of 1977.
Aiding their cause, Magazine was piloted by a frontman with established punk rock cred. Howard Devoto had already formed the Buzzcocks in 1976 with Pete Shelley, having abruptly ended that partnership after just one EP (Spiral Scratch). Like the Buzzcocks, Magazine had no blind devotion to the punk rule book, nor did its songwriters shy away from their pop sensibilities. Instead, the band’s unique sound resonated with a young audience seeking out something a bit more heady and artful than what the already collapsing Sex Pistols were offering. Once Real Life arrived in record stores, it was just what kids like Jarvis Cocker were waiting for.
“This was such an important record for the time because it showed that you could still do something that had attack to it combined with a real intelligence, without going into ponce territory,” Cocker told the NME in 2018.
Lead single ‘Shot By Both Sides’, which includes a riff that wouldn’t be out of place on a 1990s Pulp record, builds a convincing bridge from punk to what would soon-enough be categorised as post-punk. Slower, longer, glammier, and more technically sound than your average punk hit of the day (it’s four minutes long!), the song also seems to hint at Devoto taking lyrical stock of his own place in the pigeon-holing musical landscape of 1977-78.
It offered up Pulp’s alluring mix of playfulness and almost-secret poignancy in verses such as:
“New offences always in my nerves
They’re taking my time by force
They all sound the same when they scream
They have to rewrite all the books again
As a matter of course…“
It’s that “rewriting of the books” that seemed to strike a nerve with young Jarvis Cocker. “Punk established a Year Zero because you weren’t really allowed to reference things from the past, even though people ended up doing that,” Cocker said. “Magazine were seen as the Great New Hope when the ‘Shot by Both Sides’ came out, but I remember them getting criticised when the album came out for using synthesizers and for having long songs.”
If Magazine were the daring, successful, but slightly out-of-place cult band of their era (they disbanded in 1981 after four Top 40 albums), then the description seems fittingly adaptable to the man and the band they helped inspire. Pulp, while popular on a much grander scale than Magazine during their ‘90s heyday, were similarly working outside the restrictive genre of their time; in this case, Britpop. For Cocker, who admittedly sometimes cared more about style than substance in his younger days, Magazine also provided a template for how going against the grain didn’t have to look like screaming rebellion.
