24 years later, Pulp is ready for 'More'

Jarvis Cocker knew it was the right time for a new album: 'It was just, “OK, it’s ripe.” '

- BY JULIUS MILLER

TOM JACKSON

MARK WEBBER, left, Jarvis Cocker, Candida Doyle and Nick Banks of the English rock band Pulp.

On a recent Friday afternoon in London, Jarvis Cocker, 62, is musing over the suit he’s just picked up from the Portobello Road Market: “I'm quite pleased with it,” he says.

He’s also grabbed some clogs — not to wear but to look at — and he notes that his wife “hates them,” but he’s happily in awe of the pair.

The outing represents a blissful break for Pulp’s leading man; it’s been a little more than two months since the group’s eighth studio effort, which debuted at No. 1 on the U.K. album charts.

“More” comes more than two decades after their last project, “We Love Life,” released in 2001.

“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.”

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.”