The Common Touch

Nearly 24 years on, Jarvis & co. return in life-affirming fashion.

- Jamie Atkin

Pulp
More

What happens to them all? The mis-shapes, mistakes and misfits? The revenge-obsessed, randy amateur spies? The legendary girlfriends? The stragglers who've partied too hard and mislaid part of their brain in a field somewhere in Hampshire? What happens when the passions of youth dwindle? When hedonistic impulses are curbed and the cosmic waffle of smoking-area chat gives way to small talk about commutes? When weekends revolve around farmers' markets rather than the razzmatazz of nights on the tiles? What happens when Pulp people grow up?

If you're Jarvis Cocker, you write More, the first Pulp album since 2001's We Love Life, to make sense of it all. "We're hoping that we don't get shown up," he admits on the swaggering, Camden-circa-'95 knees-up of Grown Ups, a song abandoned during the This Is Hardcore sessions - presumably as it was too Britpop - and given new life here.

But as the song finds another gear, the dread of being caught winging it at adulthood is replaced by defiance ("I am not ageing/ No, I am ripening... One last sunset/One final blaze of glory").

That determination to kick against expectations and seek out joy is everywhere here, making it a fitting tribute to bassist Steve Mackey, who died in March 2023.

That sense of seizing the day is most apparent in one of More's standouts, the exquisite Farmer's Market, all sparse piano and Penguin Café strings. As violins circle around him, Cocker recounts a sliding doors moment, echoing Different Class' Something Changed. But whereas romance fell into the lap of the narrator of that earlier song, 30 years on, a conscious decision must be made to take a chance on love where it would be easier to play it safe. “Ain't it time we started living?” he pleads, sending the song skyward.

The sentiment is seconded by the galloping spaghetti-disco of