How Pulp brought the perfect musical accompaniment to ‘Trainspotting’: “A bit of serendipity”
In 1995, the battle of Britpop saw Oasis go head-to-head with Blur to reach number one in the charts, while Hugh Grant and his floppy hair, Kate Moss and her party-going pals, and the Spice Girls (Union Jack dress included) became defining figures of rejuvenated British pride.
The following year, Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting was released, and it came to be a defining movie of the ‘Cool Britannia’ era, emphasising the realities of life for many young Britons at the time, with a soundtrack packed with Britpop tracks to boot.
Heroin addiction is depicted pretty brutally in the film, with surreal elements emphasising just how far removed from normal life these characters become as they depend on drugs, losing all sense of stability.
While it still revels in good humour, Trainspotting was an important reminder that, despite this seemingly prosperous era for British culture, poverty, unemployment, and addiction were still major issues affecting young people.
Perfectly encapsulating the grottiness and the grime was Pulp’s ‘Mile End’, an upbeat number in which Jarvis Cocker uses his fantastic powers of description to paint a slightly too vivid picture of a terrible flat, where “It smelt as if someone had died, The living room was full of flies” and “The lift is always full of piss, The fifth floor landing smells of fish”.
Near the end of the track, Cocker delivers some pretty resonant lyrics which fit perfectly with Trainspotting: “I guess you have to go right down, Before you understand just how, How low, how low a human being can go.” It’s like the song was written specifically for the film, besides the fact that Cocker is referencing London instead of Edinburgh. However, it had actually been penned beforehand, based on his experience of living in a terrible Mile End flat in the late 1980s.
“We were making the Different Class record, and we’d recorded pretty much all the songs, and then we got this message saying, ‘There’s a guy making a film and could you write a song for it?'” Cocker revealed. “As luck would have it, we had a song called ‘Mile End’ that we’d recorded but didn’t really fit on the album. And so we said, ‘Could you use that?’ That was a bit of serendipity.”
Appearing alongside the likes of Blur, Sleeper, Iggy Pop, Underworld, and Primal Scream, Pulp’s track is one of many standouts on the soundtrack. Boyle seems to understand the impact of a song that can slot into a scene with ease, which is the case for ‘Mile End’, a track that plays when Begbie appears at Renton’s mouldy flat with a gun, and we see various shots of his home, if you could call it that, in disarray. It’s bleak.
According to Cocker, living in the Mile End flat that he wrote the song about was “the worst nine months of my entire life.” Clearly, his experience of living in such a shithole brought him closer to the world of Trainspotting, though, allowing ‘Mile End’ to see the light of day after all.
