Jarvis Cocker on Pulp’s first session for John Peel: “we didn’t have a proper bass amp”
One of Pulp’s earliest reviews featured a line in which they were accused of listening to the John Peel show every single night in “an endless quest for influences.” For Jarvis Cocker, this was less an insult and more a statement of fact. As a teenager, the frontman listened to Peel’s hallowed Radio 1 show religiously. When Pulp were eventually invited onto the show to record their own session, Cocker and the rest of the band were overjoyed. In a recent conversation with Tom Ravenscroft for BBC 6 Music’s The Collection: Peel Acres, Jarvis discussed the recording of that first Pulp session.
In 1981, Jarvis Cocker was still a student. With Cocker unsure of whether to continue pursuing music or park his ambitions and enrol at University, Peel’s session offer convinced the young musician to stick with his gut instinct. It was a brave decision and a worthwhile one too. Their appearance on BBC Radio marked a new chapter in the fledgeling outfits blossoming career, introducing Pulp to countless new fans and making them one of Sheffield’s most esteemed bands.
Cocker was recently invited to poke around Peel Acres, John’s Suffolk home, with the DJ’s son, BBC Radio 6 Music’s Tom Ravenscroft. Attempting to pinpoint what Peel’s seal of approval meant for the band, Cocker said: “Well, for me, that was like the ultimate dream was to get invited to play a session. Because when I was thinking on the way here, you know, a lot of my memories are from hearing those sessions because they were really quite special. You know, say for instance, in the example of The Slits, they recorded sessions for the show long before they released a record. So sometimes you would hear about bands first through sessions on the John Peel show before any records came out.”
Cocker had secured the session after handing Peel a demo tape during his DJ set at Sheffield Polytechnic. Peel, to his credit, gave the tape due consideration and invited the band to London. The call was well-timed. Cocker was already in Oxford ahead of his university interview. There was just one problem: they 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 Ravenscroft.
“We had to borrow loads of equipment from other bands in Sheffield because we didn’t have enough equipment, the frontman continued. “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 equalizer on it and no one had seen one of those before. So we just didn’t know how to work it. And on our session, the bass sounds really weird…because we didn’t know how to work the amp properly. I was the oldest one in the band, so I was just 18. And the drummer was 15.”
You can listen to Cocker’s conversation with Ravenscroft in full at 1 pm on New Year’s Day, when BBC Radio 6 Music will broadcast the first episode in a new series of The Collection: Peel Acres.
