Judge Rejects Lawyer's Bid to Exit Suge Knight Case on ‘Eve of Trial'
Suge Knight appeared remotely from a San Diego prison Thursday and told a judge he was surprised to hear his longtime lawyer, David Kenner, had asked to withdraw as his attorney just weeks before a major civil trial.
Speaking over a phone line from his detention center, Knight told the court he wanted to move ahead with his April 7 re-trial over a civil lawsuit tied to the 2015 death of Compton businessman Terry Carter. He said he couldn't proceed alone and rejected Kenner's claim that an 'irreconcilable conflict' had developed between them.
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'I don't want to put anyone in a bad situation, but I have some real concerns. I've known Mr. Kenner for a very long time, and I feel we still have a relationship,' Knight told the court. 'I do want to move forward. I'm very tired and want to put this behind me. I never wanted any delays in the first place.'
After the 30-minute hearing, Los Angeles County Judge Thomas Long denied Kenner's motion to withdraw, calling it 'untimely' on the 'eve of trial.' He kept the month-long jury trial's planned Monday start but ordered the parties back for a final status conference Friday. He appeared open to a possible one-week delay if the parties agree to pare down their planned evidence and testimony.
Knight, 59, is currently serving a 28-year prison sentence for his voluntary manslaughter conviction involving Carter's hit-and-run death. While incarcerated, he faced an initial June 2022 civil trial over the wrongful death claims filed by Carter's widow and daughters. That first trial ended with jurors deadlocked seven to five in favor of finding Knight liable. The trial set to begin Monday is a second attempt to resolve the case.
At the Thursday hearing, Kenner said he could no longer represent Knight after he learned something 'disturbing' during a phone call with Knight in the last six weeks. He declined to elaborate, citing attorney-client privilege. He said after the call, he felt 'anxious about being able to competently and energetically try this case.'
Knight told the court he believed Kenner was referring to recent 'death threats' allegedly made by a third party toward the lawyer. Kenner said that was not the case. He was adamant the third party had not threatened him, though he did recall feeling concerned about a witness who said something sinister when he was approached years ago to possibly testify.
'Mr. Knight is entitled to representation in which there's no conflict,' Kenner told the court Thursday. 'Both he and I are in a terrible position. I don't want to do it. I don't want to [represent him].'
Knight again made the claim that his call with Kenner involved a discussion of 'death threats.' He said there was no time to find a new lawyer and he didn't want to wait. 'I'm really in a bad position because I do feel bad about the death threats,' Knight said. 'I don't want to be in a situation where I go in a courtroom, and I end up losing because I'm by myself. I just want a fair trial, and I don't want to see anyone get hurt, let alone get killed. I don't want that on my conscience. I'm a God-fearing man. I love the lord. I'm doing everything I can to make my life better. I just want to get this behind me.'
After Judge Long made his ruling, Kenner asked for an expedited transcript of the proceeding. He said he planned to file an appeal. The judge said Kenner was free to do that but he didn't plan to delay the trial on that basis.
'The court's ruling puts me and even Mr. Knight in an improbable, impossible position, and I think an appellate court would overrule it,' Kenner tells Rolling Stone after the hearing. 'I, of course, will also be requesting a stay during the pendency of the appeal.'
Carter's family claimed Knight acted negligently when he hit the gas on his Ford Raptor truck and fatally struck Carter in a Tam's Burgers parking lot on Jan. 29, 2015. Knight denies any wrongdoing, claiming he was the victim of an armed ambush at the Compton burger stand and acted in self-defense.
Testifying from prison at the initial civil trial three years ago, Knight told jurors he accelerated because he feared for his life after another man, Cle 'Bone' Sloan, allegedly brandished a gun and started punching him through his truck window. Sloan, who also was injured in the hit-and-run, denied having a gun during the confrontation. Testifying under a grant of immunity at a criminal hearing in 2015, Sloan said the item in his hands was a two-way radio that he used as a security guard on the set of the Dr. Dre– and Ice Cube-produced N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton.
Graphic surveillance video depicting the deadly incident was shown repeatedly during the 2022 civil trial held in a Compton courtroom. In the footage, Knight's truck is seen pulling into the Tam's driveway in the hours after an alleged confrontation between Knight and Sloan outside a production office of the movie earlier that day.
Knight previously testified that he had visited the production office to speak with Dr. Dre. He claimed police had told him Dre had hired the man who shot Knight seven times at Chris Brown's pre-VMA party in the summer of 2014. 'I was going to talk to him and say, 'Hey man, I'm not going to react to what authorities say about you having something to do with me getting shot or [having] paid somebody to get me killed. I just want to make you aware they are saying this,'' Knight testified in 2022. He claimed it wasn't a big deal when Dre was 'too busy' for a meeting and testified that it was Sloan who acted aggressively toward him as he departed the movie's base camp.
Knight told jurors that Carter, whom he described as a longtime friend, called him later that day and invited him to a meeting with Dre at another man's home across the street from Tam's. He claimed Carter told him Dre wanted to give him 'some bread' amid a disagreement over Knight's portrayal in the movie. (Dre, through a lawyer, previously denied the allegation that he offered money to have Knight killed. 'Given that Dre has had zero interaction with Suge since leaving Death Row Records in 1996, we hope that Suge's lawyer has lots of malicious prosecution insurance,' the lawyer said.)
Knight's retrial in the civil case was postponed five times before it was set for April 7. The music mogul asked for more time last October as he sought to gain release from custody with claims he was coerced into accepting the 2018 plea agreement that reduced his murder charge to a manslaughter charge in the criminal hit-and-run case. A judge denied Knight's bid to overturn the 28-year-sentence in a ruling last month.
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How the Director and Stars of ‘Pavements' Brought Many Stephen Malkmuses to Life
The prevailing initial state of the two actors tasked with portraying Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus in Alex Ross Perry's multifaceted, genre-warped film Pavements was, reasonably, confusion. Pavements — which releases in theaters across North America June 6 — is nominally, and for the most part, a documentary. It follows Pavement as they prep for their 2022 reunion tour and uses archival footage to tell the story of a band of alternative-nation outsiders who made erudite, inscrutable, and irresistible tunes; navigated the post-Nirvana Nineties with blasé circumspection; broke up as cult heroes; and returned decades later as widely-recognized, era-defining greats. More from Rolling Stone 'Titan': See Trailer for Netflix Doc That Dives Deep Into OceanGate Disaster Martin Scorsese's Career Goes in Front of Camera for Five-Part Apple TV+ Documentary That Doc on Shia LaBeouf's Acting School Is Even Crazier Than You've Heard But along with parsing and probing Pavement's importance, Perry also wanted to explore the ways we bestow that importance. So, he cooked up the various kinds of cultural schlock that get pumped out when it comes time to celebrate (and profit from) legacy acts — a biopic, a jukebox musical, even a museum exhibit filled with phony and real artifacts — and combined them to create a Russian nesting doll of a film, genres stacked on top of one another, reality packed inside fiction. And for the actors Perry hired to star in his real-but-not-real biopic and musical, performing in Pavements was a confounding but also intriguing prospect. Joe Keery, the Stranger Things star and Djo musician, who plays Malkmus in the Oscar-baity biopic-within-the-movie, tells Rolling Stone, 'I didn't understand the full context of the movie until I showed up a couple of days before and we were doing the [costume] fittings and stuff. 'Then I started to wrap my mind around it. They had done the musical already, so I had the reference point of, 'It's this real thing, but it's fake, and it exists within the world of the movie.'' Michael Esper, an established theater actor, remembers his own bewilderment when Perry called him 'out of the blue' to offer him the role of Essem, the Malkmus-esque (emphasis on the 'esque') lead in the film's off-Broadway jukebox musical component, Slanted! Enchanted! 'I couldn't tell how serious he was,' Esper says. 'Like, how real do you want it to be? How much of a joke? Are we really doing this in front of people? How earnest am I supposed to be? Pavement is cool with this?' He adds with a laugh: 'It was such an insane idea, and the potential for humiliation was so high.' Perry was compelled to cram all of these sub-projects into Pavements because he firmly believes 'we don't actually want these things.' He argues, for instance, that no one is asking for a 'cliché, birth-to-death biopic' of Kurt Cobain, yet the likelihood of one existing, eventually, seems disconcertingly high. Perry also saw huge potential in this multigenre approach. 'The truth I'm reaching for,' he says, 'is [that] this format of prismatic, hall-of-mirrors storytelling is the only way to even consider approaching the truth of any great artist.' Pavement, and Malkmus in particular, is uniquely positioned for this kind of interrogation. Perry argues the frontman is up there with 20th-century geniuses like Bob Dylan and David Bowie 'because he's this enigma — he's so fascinating, and the music is so good.' Keery also uses that word — 'enigma' — while Esper, a longtime fan who was scouring zines and VHS tapes in the Nineties for anything Pavement-related, calls Malkmus an almost 'mythical figure.' And like Bowie or Dylan, Malmkus has played with personas, cultivating a distance between his public-facing artistic self and the human behind the mask. Perry notes that, since Pavement began, 'Malkmus has presented the idea that he is playing a character' known as 'The Singer.' 'He christened himself with this moniker at the age of, like, 21, to become this other personality,' the director says. 'To hide behind the idea of, 'That's what the singer would do.'' (He cites, by way of example, two early Pavement tunes in this vein, 'Our Singer' and 'Shoot the Singer.') So as Perry set out to design the Malkmuses that Esper and Keery would portray in Pavements, he made sure they had 'nothing to do with the real person.' That's certainly the case with Essem, a small-town boy with big rock dreams, who moves to the city with his girlfriend, becomes successful, meets another girl, and ultimately has to choose between the two. (That this love triangle framework maps almost exactly onto last year's Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown feels like an affirmation of Perry's feelings towards the legacy-act industrial complex.) The name Essem is, of course, a phonetic representation of Malkmus' initials, S.M. But in terms of actual similarities between character and person, there's only the vague echo of Malkmus' own journey from the Central Valley suburb of Stockton, California, to New York City in pursuit of rock & roll. 'To try and do some kind of real, authentic characterization of Stephen Malkmus in this context felt so wildly inappropriate,' Esper says. 'To try and put him in a jukebox musical just feels like it wouldn't serve what they were trying to do [with the film]. It functioned like a ride — you just throw yourself into it and perform that as best you can.' As for the embedded biopic, titled Range Life, Keery says his performance 'is not a direct reflection of Malkmus' but 'the punch-up Hollywood biopic version that they would write' if such a film were to be made. He continues: 'It's not exactly who he was. It's sort of the antithesis of the guy.' (Keery also gets to send up his own profession in several behind-the-scenes-featurette-style sequences, in which he descends into Method acting madness — asking to be called 'Stephen,' working with a voice coach to perfect his imitation of Malkmus' fried California tone, and eventually worrying he might've gone too far.) The Range Life scenes primarily fictionalize a real pivot point in Pavement's story: their brush with Nirvana-sized success with 'Cut Your Hair' and 1994's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, followed by the underappreciated triumph of their third album Wowee Zowee. It's perfect fodder for overwrought episodes in which the band and their Matador Records bosses (played by Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker) debate artistic integrity and commercial reality. The most melodramatic moments are emblazoned with an awards-thirsty 'For your consideration' watermark. And yet, it's still rooted in something real, because Perry plucked much of the heavy-handed dialog Keery delivers verbatim from the Wowee Zowee press kit, contemporaneous Malkmus interviews, and things Malkmus told Perry himself. Keery says it was 'stressful' at times to navigate this multifaceted, hyper-meta narrative, but also fun. 'I enjoyed being put into this gray area where it's like, 'Is this really happening? Is this shtick?' It felt like the perfect way to pay homage to the band.' Perry wanted to preserve a sense of mystery around Malkmus, one epitomized by an early shot of the frontman hunched over a desk, writing a set list, back to the camera. 'You obviously see him throughout the movie, but you see him from the back,' Perry says. 'We see Joe and Michael from the front, but the front has a mask on.' Mysterious as Malkmus may be, Perry's instinct reflects something that distinguishes Malkmus from so many other mythical, enigmatic artistic geniuses we scrutinize. Esper pinpoints it, too, when discussing all the time he spent as a teenager poring over Pavement lyrics, learning the band's songs on guitar, and reading any interview he could find: a wariness of ever getting 'too close to knowing too much about' Malkmus himself. This was partly because, Esper jokes, 'I felt like I would discover that he would hate me.' But it was also the sense that behind the Singer was just a normal guy. 'I did feel like to figure out too much about him, his personal history, or even what his intention was lyrically or musically, was a mistake,' Esper says. 'I had some kind of instinct around that boundary, where [with] other musicians, I would do a really deep dive. I'd want to know everything about Bowie or Lou Reed. With him, I really didn't want to know that much.' Having studied and spent time with him, Keery describes Malkmus as someone who's 'just doing things because he loves them. Or not doing things because he doesn't [love them]. Which is something I admire.' And Perry says that while making Pavements he did get to glimpse the 'big Rosetta Stone' when he watched Malkmus interact with his wife and children. 'That's the guy. That's a real person,' Perry says, while also stressing that those moments were completely irrelevant to the film. 'There is no single truth to reach with this kind of character,' Perry says. 'The movie could never singularly decode who this man actually is, nor would that be of any interest to me. The movie can only address the buffoonery of other works of art that attempt to do a version of that.' Nowhere does the film distill this ideal better than the scene where Keery is working with the voice coach and shows her what he says is a photo of Malkmus' actual throat, hoping it might unlock the secret to a perfect performance. Asked — half as a joke, but also out of curiosity to know the extent to which the bit was committed — if that was indeed a photo of Malkmus' throat, Keery deadpans, 'He wouldn't release that. That was a step too far. But I'm still hunting that down. I'm determined to get that tongue pic. I think it will reveal a lot for everyone out there.' Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Best 'Saturday Night Live' Characters of All Time Denzel Washington's Movies Ranked, From Worst to Best 70 Greatest Comedies of the 21st Century
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It's the Perfect Time For a Pulp Reunion
It's a comeback that fans have spent years praying for: the return of Pulp. Thirty years after Jarvis Cocker sang 'Let's all meet up in the year 2000,' the beloved Britpop band are finally back. Even after their wildly successful reunion tours in 2011 and 2022, nobody dared to hope for a new album from the band who made Nineties classics like Different Class and This Is Hardcore — until now. But their brilliant new album More is coming in June. 'It's 24 years since we did a record,' Cocker says. 'Which mystifies me, really.' Pulp had a historic run as the great British band of their generation, with Cocker as one of rock's genius storytellers and thrift-store trash-fashion icons. They kicked around for years as an indie band nobody cared about, in the tough Northern steel town of Sheffield. They finally blew up in the 1990s Britpop explosion, with the sex-and-shopping hit 'Common People.' But they always had their own style — Seventies glam-rock meets Eighties synth-disco glitz, in the alley between the library and the goth club. With his trademark bitchy wit, Cocker turned ordinary slice-of-life details into classics like 'Disco 2000' and 'Do You Remember The First Time?' More from Rolling Stone Watch Bob Dylan Perform a Stunning 'All Along the Watchtower' With Billy Strings Watch Bob Dylan's Shocking Cover of Ricky Nelson's 'Garden Party' Bob Dylan Covers the Pogues, Resurrects 'Mr. Tambourine Man' at Stunning Tour Launch But on More (out June 6) Pulp are boldly exploring the unknown: adult life. 'Someone told me the album is 'age appropriate,'' Cocker says. 'I don't know whether to take that as a compliment or not, but I guess I have to — I am an adult.' Today, Cocker is sitting in Katz's Delicatessen, the most legendary eatery on the Lower East Side. At 63, he's every inch the ultimate English rock-star gentleman, on a cold and rainy afternoon. He's eager to try his first taste of New York deli food — cheese blintzes and chicken soup. The deli is bustling, with a line around the corner and a famously fearsome staff, yet something about the legendary Jarvis charm makes them uncharacteristically glad to let him relax and chat for a few hours. Nobody recognizes him, but it doesn't matter. It's a law of nature: nobody ever complains about having him in the room. (He gets excited when he notices we're sitting under a framed photo of Jerry Lewis, and snaps a picture of it — the only time he even takes out his phone.) A few of the new Pulp songs are old sketches they finished up; most are totally new, fine-tuned at soundchecks and rehearsals on the band's 2022 reunion tour. ''Grownups' is the oldest one on the record,' he says. 'It's always been called 'Grownups' but I just could never get the words written. So it's kind of a relief that after nearly 30 years I've managed to write some words for it.' He blows softly on his hot soup. 'I suppose maybe that was it. Maybe the song decided to grow up.' Band reunions are often a bit sad — somebody needs money, or somebody's got hurt feelings. But this one has its own warm and benevolent spirit. Pulp remains a band of lifelong hometown friends, with the core of Nick Banks on drums, Mark Webber on guitar, Candida Doyle on keyboards. They're now expanded as a ten-piece band, with a prominent string section. The mid-life love ballad 'Farmer's Market' sums up the mood of the new album. 'We thought we were trying on dreams for size,' Cocker sings. 'We didn't know that we'd be stuck wearing them for the rest of our lives.' Pulp ran out of steam in the early 2000s, but they all moved on with their lives. Yet Cocker has remained one of global pop's most-wanted men. His band Jarv Is did the excellent 2020 album Beyond the Pale, with the quarantine anthem 'House Music All Night Long.' He's teamed up with everyone from Nancy Sinatra to Chilly Gonzalez, even playing the Hogwarts prom in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. He became a longtime U.K. radio DJ, with his 'Domestic Disco' broadcasts, and published the memoir-manifesto Good Pop/Bad Pop. He's dabbled in weird underground projects like his art-perv electronic duo Relaxed Muscle, with his friend Jason Buckle — who now plays in Pulp. The biggest catalyst for More was the death of an old comrade — longtime bassist Steve Mackey, not just a Pulp member but a right-hand-man for much of Cocker's solo career. 'When Steve passed away, it's a kind of cliche, but it gives you a reality check,' Cocker says. 'It made us realize that we had a chance to be creative. We had time to create something, while we could. If you're still around, you've still got that opportunity to make things, so this is the time.' So he convened his old mates. 'I said, 'Let's meet up early next year and just have some rehearsals. Everybody brings some ideas and let's see where we can get. And that's how it started off really. No pressure — we weren't signed to a label or anything. Just to see if we can do it.' One of the wonders of the 2022 reunion tour was that audiences went bonkers for the new tunes. 'We've brought these songs, some of which are very old, back to life,' Cocker said at their New York show, before going into every audience's six least-favorite words: 'So how about a new song?' That's where people usually dash to the bar or a bathroom break. But these crowds cheered — screamed, really — at getting to hear new Pulp material. Especially the Bowie-style synth-glam anthem 'Spike Island,' where he looks back on the dashed rock-star dreams of youth ('I was born to perform, it's a calling'), and how they fizzled out. As he sings, 'The universe shrugged, then moved on.' 'I suppose another part of it is the fact I got married in June,' he says. 'We'd been together for a long time, then in 2018 we split up for a year, then we got back together. I was very lucky that I managed to revive the relationship. Dealing with changes is the trick of life — not that I claim to know what a trick of life is—but from experience, I think that's what it is. I've always had this thing that I don't like change. But you have to try and ride it, rather than get submerged by it.' They knocked out the album in just three weeks — a big change from the old days. 'It was very quick to do it, although some of the songs have been around for a long time,' he says. 'I think the band were in a bit of shock at how quick it was, probably even more than me, because they always had to go through the pain of waiting for me trying to write the words, trying to get that right. So they were bracing themselves for that again, but then it wasn't like that. So yeah, I take that as a sign that it was a ready-to-happen kind of thing.' Cocker has been a promiscuous collaborator over the years. Yet More has the distinct Pulp sound, evoking the shabby-glam swish of His 'N' Hers or Different Class. 'I think the main thing that makes Pulp sound like Pulp is that Nick the drummer plays extremely loudly, and that makes everybody else have to make themselves heard. So it's always got quite a lot of energy because people are actually frantically trying to make themselves heard over the top. And obviously Candida's got issues with movement' — she's had arthritis since her teens — 'so she has to make her parts work with what she's capable of doing. So you get all those things that everybody has, to make it work with the other people, and that gives it a certain sound. I'm glad we've got them. You can sometimes get frustrated — all drummers are always getting told off for speeding up. But 'Common People' speeds up something ridiculous, like 20 BPM. That's what gives it its energy.' Producer James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Fontaines DC) didn't try to cover up the band's idiosyncrasies. 'When we started off, that was the only way we knew how to do it anyhow,' Cocker says. 'And there was no such thing as Pro Tools or anything, so you couldn't massage things and make them perfectly in time. But what's the point of human music-making if it hasn't got some of that personality?' After Pulp, Cocker stayed in the public eye, but his mates went back to Sheffield and embraced ordinary life. The enjoyable 2014 doc Pulp: A Film About Life, Death, and Supermarkets has a scene where Nick Banks boasts about sponsoring his teen daughter's football team, while she rolls her eyes about 'me dad's crap band.' 'Nick's in this Sheffield band called the Everly Pregnant Brothers, who play in town,' Cocker says proudly. 'They do folk-tinged covers of famous songs, but with the words changed so it's about South Yorkshire. For instance, there's a kind of sauce in Sheffield called Henderson's Relish. They take Coldplay's 'Yellow' and changed it to 'it was all Hendo's.'' So much for rock & roll glitz. 'Candida's a counselor, talking to people who've been through stressful situations. And Mark has always had an interest in experimental film — he's published some books on that. But yeah, neither Mark nor Candida have done any musical stuff in years.' What spurred them to play again? 'I just rang them up,' he says. 'We met at my house, just outside Sheffield, and we just talked about it. Then we did have an attempted rehearsal, which luckily was not recorded with the instruments in my living room. We played four songs or whatever, and we just said, yeah, let's try it out. I dunno — maybe we did it out of curiosity.' The last Pulp tour, in 2011, was devoted to playing the hits — they took pride in refusing to flog a new album, simply aiming to do right by their songbook. But it was also about unfinished emotional business. 'It was my attempt to tidy up,' Cocker admits. 'I thought that Pulp kind of fizzled out in a not-so-good way. Also [guitarist] Russell [Senior] had left the group and I kind of felt bad about that.' Senior was a major creative force in the band until 1997, when he quit at the peak of their fame; he's now a local antiques dealer. 'We invited him back,' Cocker says, recalling the 2011 tour. 'He did play with us for a while, then he was coming to America, but he won't go on a plane anymore. He tried to get on a boat, but that wasn't available either. He just gave it up.' Anyone lucky enough to have seen that tour can tell you it was a triumphant success, musically, commercially, and emotionally. 'I thought that was going to be the full stop,' Cocker says. 'To finish it in a nice way and make it a pleasurable memory, rather than a slightly painful memory. Which it DID do.' For the core quartet, there's a shared history that goes back decades. 'That's the good thing about it,' he says. 'Because we don't really hang out as friends. We might see each other, but before we started playing again, it might have been once or twice a year. So it was a pleasure to realize that we could still play together and make something together. I think everybody's been quite happy about that.' Certainly, the warmth in their onstage camaraderie is palpable even from the audience. 'I'm glad that it comes across like that — maybe we're just naive,' he says. 'I saw Fleetwood Mac with Lindsey Buckingham, before he got chipped out again. I could see why he was slightly irritating, overzealously talking to the audience, and you could see the rest of them. [Loud sigh.] We're lucky that none of us has pissed the others off. Too bad. We're still talking to each other.' Pulp have always had a tight connection with their hometown, which inspired tributes like the 1992 electro-sleaze cult fave 'Sheffield: Sex City.' One of the More highlights, 'My Sex,' describes how he and his sister grew up there, raised by their working-class mother, in a female environment. 'I grew up in a neighborhood where all the men were gone,' he recalls. 'All the dads left. My dad, my auntie's husband, my mom's best friend's husband, they all left. It seemed like they all disappeared at the same time — maybe there was a couple months. But my mother's brother had died, so the only male in my life at that point was my grandfather. And I couldn't imagine him having sex, basically. So I was going through puberty and I wanted to find out about it, and so I found out by listening surreptitiously to what my mom was talking about with her friends. They were trying to date together, so they would talk about what was going on. And so I learned about stuff through them, a very female perspective.' That became part of his adolescent sexual confusion. 'It was difficult enough for me anyway, to start dating, because I was quite shy,' he says. 'But those mixed messages certainly didn't make it any easier.' Yet that's always been a crucial part of what made Cocker an icon and an unlikely sex symbol — unlike a lot of his fellow Nineties Britpop stars, he always had a fascination with female characters, in classics like 'Inside Susan' or 'Underwear.' 'I always made friends with women easier than I did with men because I had more experiences of hanging out with women, and that's okay,' he says. 'I've written songs from a woman's perspective, presumptuously, because I don't know exactly how it feels to be a woman. But a lot of those songs are really me commenting on my own actions from a female perspective.' One of his newfound inspirations on More is a rock poet he'd never given much attention until lately. 'I started listening to Bob Dylan, for the first time,' he says. 'I started on the train. It was practicalities, because the Victoria line is really noisy. You can only bear it if you ride with your fingers in your ears. So I thought instead of doing that, I could listen to Bob, with Blood on the Tracks. I got hooked on 'Tangled Up in Blue,' and then what's the next one — 'Simple Twist of Fate.' He tells you a story in such a magical way.' For a fan as eccentric as Cocker, it figures that he'd schedule his teenage-Dylan-freak phase for his sixties. 'I started listening because I saw him in London, on the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. The stage was very dark, but I liked that — you felt like you were watching a seance, like they were trying to make contact with some spirits. He was playing the piano, just leaning on it. He did that song 'Key West' and that was just the most amazing song — it seemed so on the edge of disappearing. I looked up Key West — it's almost like an island, isn't it? But I still don't know what that song is about. 'Murder Most Foul' — when I first heard it, I really couldn't believe it.' For such a staunch advocate of pop trash, Cocker is surprisingly tuned out from modern radio. The airwaves are full of young stars spinning narratives with a Jarvis-style eye for junk detail, from Chappell to Billie to Olivia. But asked about any of them, he smiles politely and says 'I'll have to check that out.' (Just to pick the most glaring example, 'Pink Pony Club' is a Pulp banger if there ever was one.) 'I've got no knowledge of modern pop,' he admits. 'I used to listen to the chart show in the U.K. — it was always on Sunday — but I haven't done that probably this millennium. So my picture of pop is a very antiquated one. Taylor Swift, I heard her because Mark's daughter really likes her — he's taken her to see her sometimes. I don't really know the songs.' He's bemused to learn that young fans are discovering Pulp on TikTok. 'Really? I've never even been on TikTok. I tried Twitter first and I absolutely couldn't stand that — I was gone within half an hour. But Instagram I liked — it's like sending a postcard.' But the timing for More is perfect, especially in America, where Pulp are far more famous now than they were in their lifetime. Cocker is openly baffled by the band's cross-generational appeal. 'I did put a lot of my life into writing songs,' he says. 'And sometimes my real life suffered because of that, because I would say things in songs that I wouldn't say to people I was in a relationship with. That got me in trouble. Not a nice thing to do. But the thing is, you're not really in control of it. Sometimes you sit down and try to write a song, but nothing happens. It's horribly frustrating. That's why I have tried to retire a few times, but I've always come back to it. It's like a magic trick, isn't it? You're in touch with something that you don't quite understand, and the more you try to understand it, or control it, the more it slips away. If you grab at it, it'll disappear.' 'Grownups' is a song he spent years trying to grab, but it ended up as the centerpiece of More — in so many ways, he and the song grew up together. 'I was shivering on crutches,' he sings. 'More dead than alive/It was Christmas 1985.' It's an autobiographical tale of his shambolic youth, from when he was 22. 'That was when I got out of hospital,' he recalls. 'I'd fallen from a window, and they let me out the day before Christmas. I suppose that was a step in me growing up. I'd left school and was trying to do the band and it wasn't really working. But I ended up falling out the window and that gave me quite a lot of time to lie there and think about stuff. I decided that I was going to have to get out of Sheffield and go try something else.' That winter he also entered what turned out to be a long-term romance. 'The night I describe in the song, when I went around to her house for the first time — that was a very pivotal moment for me,' he says. 'It was strange actually because the next morning there was news about the [Challenger] space shuttle that exploded. At that point in my life, I used to take any events in the outside world as portents. I was a child who thought, 'I'm going to space when I grow up!' But the fact that the spaceship blew up made me think, 'Oh, that's it. Now you're in a relationship and you can't go to space anymore.' Very immature thought patterns, anyway.' But that immature 22-year-old ended up crafting this song for years, turning 'Grownups' into a grand statement of purpose. 'The last part I finished was the spoken section about that dream of going to another planet, looking back and seeing where you come from, but you can't get back there. That was a dream I had ten years ago. It seemed to fit in with the mood. It's the oldest song, but it's also now the longest song on the record—it's got the most words in it. So at least when I finally got around to doing it, I put some work in on it.' For a career full of lucky accidents and bizarre disasters, More is a summary of how Cocker and his Pulp bandmates have traveled through the years. 'It felt quite easy,' he says, with a slightly guilt-ridden grin. 'Which might seem like I'm lazy or whatever, but that's something I've learned — when things are working properly, that's what it's like. You have to be ready to accept the message when it's there. And if you're thinking too much, then it kind of bounces off you. But if you're open to it, then it comes through, and then you alter it a bit as it passes through you. But it's not like you made it. Some of the songs are old, some are new, but it was all just ready to happen. It could only have happened at this moment, after going through all the other stuff that hasn't been that pleasurable.' It's in his nature to be wary of good fortune, but he's finally learning to accept it. 'Music is supposed to be simple,' he says. 'I mean, LIFE is supposed to be simple, but it isn't always. So it's great when it is.' Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
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Song of the Summer, Again? Sabrina Carpenter Drops ‘Manchild'
Just as she did with 'Espresso,' Sabrina Carpenter is ready to own another summer. The pop superstar has returned with the new single, 'Manchild.' Produced by her collaborator Jack Antonoff, the track opens with a cheeky 'Oh boy!' as Carpenter radiates in feel-good disco energy, tearing this guy to shreds. 'Manchild, why you always come a-runnin' to me?/Fuck my life, won't you let an innocent woman be?' she sings on the chorus. 'Never heard of self care/Half your brain just ain't there/Manchild, why you always come a-runnin', takin' all my lovin' from me?' More from Rolling Stone Sabrina Carpenter, Lil Wayne, Addison Rae, and All the Songs You Need to Know This Week Ariana Grande, Pedro Pascal, Sabrina Carpenter Sign Letter for LGBTQ+ Suicide Prevention Funds The Pop Queens Are the New Rock Gods Is this the song of the summer? Oh boy, yes. Carpenter began teasing 'Manchild' on Monday, with a clip of her in Daisy Dukes, a white button down, and heels, standing on the side of a dusty dirt road with a suitcase. She sticks her thumb out to hitch a ride, uttering the 'Oh boy!' Just as she did with Coachella last year, billboards advertised the single, which she co-wrote with Antonoff and Amy Allen. She also posted a reel of her singing the opening lines to Lana Del Rey's 'Norman Fucking Rockwell': 'Goddamn, manchild.' Get it? In an Instagram post following the single's release, Carpenter shared a series of behind-the-scenes photos from the video. The singer-songwriter said she wrote the song 'on a random tuesday with amy and jack not too long after finishing short n' sweet and it ended up being the best random tuesday of my life.' She said 'Manchild' has become 'something I can look back on that will score the mental montage to the very confusing and fun young adult years of life,' adding, 'it sounds like the song embodiment of a loving eye roll and it feels like a never ending road trip in the summer ! hence why i wanted to give it to you now- so you can stick your head out the car window and scream it all summer long! thank you always and forever for listening and thank you men for testing me!' Carpenter is releasing 'Manchild' on a 7-inch single, with the B side 'inside of your head when you've just won an argument with a man.' The track marks Carpenter's first new music since the deluxe edition of Short n' Sweet, which included a 'Please Please Please' duet with Dolly Parton, the fan favorite 'Busy Woman,' as well as '15 Minutes,' 'Couldn't Make It Any Harder,' and 'Bad Reviews.' 'Manchild' arrives a day before Carpenter headlines Primavera Sound 2025 in Barcelona, alongside Charli XCX and Chappell Roan. Next month, she'll perform two nights at London's Hyde Park, followed by stops at festivals Lollapalooza (Aug. 3) and Austin City Limits (Oct. 4 and Oct. 11). In the fall, she'll kick off another North American leg of the Short n' Sweet tour, which includes a return to Madison Square Garden for three shows. Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
