‘Wickerman’: Pulp’s horror movie inspired opus about the trials of being broke
“Regular visitors to The Wicker included Crazy John (the name says it all), Rabid (an aggressive punk from Chesterfield who transformed into a pleasant and placid guy after sniffing glue and drinking undiluted orange squash), Deano (a heroin addict with a pet rat that would shit in all four corners of the kitchen, then pile the dropping together in just one corner and start all over again), and General Dyson (a Bowie lookalike who had suffered a mental breakdown after being attacked by some skinheads while on an acid trip—he now wore military fatigues and sported a child’s toy rifle slung over his shoulder).” This is how Jarvis Cocker writes of those younger years spent broke, living on a rough city centre street in Sheffield—like a horror movie. He sings of it like one too.
Being broke is, in many ways, a bone-chilling experience, sometimes quite literally. It is stressful and gets scarier with the severity, but it is also usually pretty dull. For the average person, being broke is a series of cheap jumpscares that come when you check your bank account to see low or negative numbers. It’s a low-rent fright fest. But for Cocker, in the early days of Pulp, when the band were busy being a key part of the “dole-strolling” scene, their brand of broke, along with the drugs, the strange characters and the artistic perspective of their creative minds, it was more of an arthouse panorama. A cult classic, if you will.
At the time, Cocker and previous band member Tim Allcard lived in a flat on The Wicker, a main road running through Sheffield. It’s by the canals, and back in the early 1980s, it was a pretty run-down part of town. However, it was theirs, and as that news spread, Cocker wrote in his memoir Good Pop Bad Pop about how their place became a rest stop for the city’s odd characters. Knowing that they were also unemployed and aimless, the like-minded of Sheffield’s crowd started revolving around this place.
For a while, Cocker and Allcard were trying to get rid of them, even resolving to not have chairs in their place so no one could get too comfy. But eventually, they surrendered; they went limp and floated along with it: “Wherever the river may take me/ Wherever the river may take us/ Wherever it wants us to go/ Wherever it wants us to go”.
These closing lyrics to ‘Wickerman’, Cocker’s ode to this odd period, were written decades later in 2001. Similar to the wild narrative he weaves in his memoir as the visitors to The Wicker appear like movie characters around whom Cocker has no choice but to surrender to the cult of the city’s lost souls and burnouts, the song gets the same treatment. It’s a horror show of a song full of dirt and grime, but as he meanders through the city, following along the nearby canal that The Wicker led onto, it also carries a pastoral note. So naturally, it’s a folk horror, taking inspiration from, dedicating its title to, and even sampling the soundtrack from The Wicker Man, the 1973 cult film.
It’s a modern take. The original movie sees a police officer coming to find a missing girl, only to discover a cesspool of sin and social subversion and perversion in a beautiful, pastoral setting; Cocker finds the new version of the same. Tracing the rot of both a lost and failed love as well as the literal rot of a rundown patch of the city, a neglected and dirty blip in the middle of a generally lush and green part of the country. Cocker exists in that same cesspool, only now with addicts and burnouts, rather than as a pagan cult head.
