After two-decade hiatus, Pulp still has some juice

“I’ve come to realize over 24 years that I enjoy making music,” Cocker says. “It’s a main source of enjoyment. I mean, I enjoy being with my wife and stuff like that. But in terms of creativity, it's my favorite thing to do.”

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JARVIS COCKER had nearly given up on music in order to study English

(TOM JACKSON)

When Cocker first started making music around “15 or 16” he saw forming a band as a way for him to “navigate the world at a safe distance.”

“I was always quite a shy kid, so it was difficult for me to talk to people,” he recalls. “To talk to people from a stage, rather than to their faces ... that worked to a certain extent.”

But in the band’s early attempts to make the grade, it had fallen flat on its face. Unlike some of the group’s Brit pop peers, Pulp had been around since the '80s—Blur, Oasis and Suede all released their debuts in the first half of the '90s.

“It” came out as a mini-LP of sorts, under Red Rhino Records, with a short 31-minute run time over eight tracks.

“It was a deafening silence,” Cocker says of its reception. “It really didn’t sell anything at all... We played a few concerts, and then the band fell apart.”

He adds that at that point, he was considering giving up music, shipping off to Liverpool and studying English. He’d been offered entry into a program there, but two months before he was due to start, he got a call from Russell Senior.

“[He] asked me what I was doing, and I said, ‘Oh, I'm giving up music, it’s not working out,’” he says. “We had a rehearsal just him, me, and Magnus Doyle [brother of Candida Doyle, Pulp’s eventual keyboardist], and it was exciting.”

Notably, he remembers thinking, “I don’t want to go read English. I'm going to stay in Sheffield and see what happens.”