Pulp: Babies (single)

Babies:
Yes it happened years ago on some damp, acrylic afternoon. I know you got your own back years later (that's another story) but it wasn't such a big deal anyway - in those days you packed people rather than divorced them. I liked it that way and still do, but then again I'm imma.

Styloroc (Nites Of Suburbia):
Happening in a cul-de-sac near you.

Sheffield: Sex City:
The morning after My Legendary Girlfriend. Trying to get things done but ending up on a tour round the fleshpots of Sheffield in a T-reg Chevette. Wybourn, Brincliffe, Intake - All these places really exist and maybe these adventures still happen there - I wouldn't know; I don't live there anymore.

Island records were interested, and the next single, "Babies", was recorded in the Fallout Shelter, underneath Island's Chiswick head office. "Styloroc" was taken from demos we'd done earlier for Island. I tried to sing along with it, but it sounded like Whitesnake, so I recycled some lyrics from an old song that never got recorded, "Nights Of Suburbia" and recited them over the top of this stylophone music.

"Sheffield: Sex City" was a bit off-the-cuff - the Sheffield place names at the beginning weren't planned. One of those little moments of magic! I started writing more about Sheffield once I'd moved away. There was an instrumental version on the CD, a bit of atmospheric, moody music - it'd be good to make love to, because it's quite long. It's not a good idea to make love to records with words because it seems someone's in the room, making a comment on what you're doing. I must say I've never had sex to it myself - I don't have sex to my own records. But I don't mind other people doing it, in fact I receive many letters from people who do.

Single of the week

This is my first taste of Pulp, the reputedly bizarre northern glamsters, and I'm astonished by the force of their desire to soar, to grasp at something monumental. Everywhere you turn, all manner of things are bursting to get out. Jarvis Cocker's fly buttons are under particularly excruciating pressure, if these urgent, hungry, wonderful songs are anything to go by.

The whole affair revels in a kind of budget magnificence, as if it's a blueprint for an epic to be constructed in a more liquid future. String arrangements are sketched in by organs and synths, and, in lieu of the Royal Albert Hall, Jarvis' stately, lubricious baritone has to make do with a deep-throat echo chamber. These restraints and substitutes are Pulp's greatest strength, the source of their appeal. In overcoming them, they produce music of unique grandeur.

Unlike Cud, Pulp don't contaminate their baroque glories with an underachieved nudge-nudge irony. There's a real erotic charge here, especially on the grotesque, sensuous, hopelessly misguided and thoroughly extraordinary B-side, "Sheffield Sex City", which comes on like a Northern Soul "Little Fluffy Clouds", then works itself up into an overblown masterpiece of Eros-and-Thanatos imagery, a lascivious scatterbomb explosion of orgasms and tarred lungs, grim deaths and petits morts. Yes, its that good.

A towering achievement.