‘Live On’: the curious tale of Pulp’s most underrated anthem
Tales of wood-chipped walls, legendary girlfriends, and striking miners, Jarvis Cocker has written a plethora of enduring anthems for the common people. Despite initially forming in the post-punk golden age of the late 1970s, Pulp became one of the defining groups of the 1990s, thanks to breakout successes like His ‘n’ Hers and Different Class, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist of the era. With such an extensive and beloved body of work, it can be easy for certain Pulp tracks to fall between the cracks, which perhaps explains the strange tale of ‘Live On’.
By the early 1990s, Pulp had existed in one form or another for over a decade. Initially, the band had been formed while Cocker was at secondary school in Sheffield, and they even recorded a John Peel session during the early 1980s. Seemingly, though, the world at large was not listening. Throughout much of the 1980s, Pulp existed more as a name than a fully-fledged band, as Cocker tried to elevate his songwriting and find success outside the small indie scene in South Yorkshire.
His ‘n’ Hers was the album that provided Pulp with this national exposure, spawning hit singles and becoming a top-ten album in its own right. The 1994 album arrived at the perfect moment to capitalise on the emerging landscape of Britpop, although Pulp’s sound and songwriting style shared little in common with the likes of Blur or Oasis. Tracks like ‘Lipgloss’ or ‘Do You Remember The First Time’ marked a departure from the sounds of records like Separations, and the transition between those two very disparate albums was essential to the band’s success.
‘Live On’ was one such transitional track. First appearing in the band’s live set in 1991, the song toes the border between the indie and acid house-inspired sounds of Separations and the suave romanticism of His ‘n’ Hers. It evokes the spirit of a band reinventing themselves and their sound on the cusp of achieving mainstream greatness while retaining their independent roots and DIY spirit.
If you have never heard of ‘Live On’, do not worry; you are not alone. After all, the song never appeared on any studio albums or even as a B-side. Despite being a key part of the band’s live set during the early 1990s, the only official recordings that have ever seen the light of day come from the Party Clowns live album, recorded in 1991 in London, and from a BBC session in 1992. Reportedly, Pulp did record the song in the studio during the His ‘n’ Hers session, but to date, the recording has never surfaced.
Cocker once wrote about the track when the BBC Mark Goodier session version was released on an expanded version of His ‘n’ Hers in 2006. “This song pre-dates everything else here and is uncomfortably close to that dread genre ‘Indie-Dance’,” he shared.
Adding, “At one time, it was our most popular live song, and we were always intending to release it as a single, but we never seemed to be able to get it right in the studio.” While I would never be one to doubt Mr Cocker, ‘Live On’ is a woefully underrated Pulp track that was undoubtedly deserving of a studio recording – even if it might have taken a few tries to get it right.
Not only does the song reflect the band’s transitional period from hometown heroes to one of the biggest bands of the 1990s, but its crooning lyrics are some of Cocker’s best; what love-drunk fool has never thought, ‘I tried to listen to some records, but they’re all singing about you’?
