Pulp have played some of their biggest and most celebratory shows over the past couple of years, a run of huge headliner slots at festivals in the UK and Europe, their own mammoth outdoor show at London’s Finsbury Park and they ended 2024 with a short, triumphant tour of the US. But it hasn’t always been like that for Jarvis Cocker & co.. They had to wait longer than most for their moment in the spotlight – when their Britpop classic Different Class made them stars in 1995, the Sheffield indie-rockers had already been going for over 15 years.
Even the year before that big breakthrough, on a US tour around the release of their game-changing 1994 album His’n’Hers, they must have been wondering why they bothered. In an interview with this writer around the release of his book I’m With Pulp, Are You?, guitarist Mark Webber recalled a strange gig the band had been booked for at The Howlin’ Wolf venue in New Orleans.
“We’d been told to go to New Orleans because we were supposedly popular on college radio down there,” he said. “But we arrived to discover we were supporting a third-rate slide guitarist in an empty roadhouse. We tried to embrace the madness by wearing extra make-up and dafter clothes than usual, but no reaction was forthcoming from the ribs-munching patrons that made up a very sparse audience.”
I’m With Pulp, Are You? collects ephemera and artefacts that Webber has kept during his time in and with the band – before he was their guitarist, he served as the group’s tour manager. He said his favourite thing in the book was a briefcase he had whilst tour managing from 1992-1994. “When I opened it up, there were still some contracts, notebooks, and business cards for B&Bs inside,” he marvelled. “For me, that encapsulated the whole Pulp archive project.”
Pulp no longer have to worry about distracting uninterested crowds from their plate of ribs. This summer, they will play a big homecoming show as they headline Tramlines Festival in Sheffield. There’s also the likelihood that new music is on the way – at the end of last year, they announced they had signed a deal with Rough Trade Records, whose management arm have worked with Pulp for years.
