Jarvis Cocker at 61: Is this hardcore?

New Statesman​

18-06-2025

Photo byAre we in the era of the Mature Reunion Album? long hoped for but largely unexpected album releases lately by Blur, Everything But The Girl, Stereolab, and now Pulp, measuring the middle-age of both artist and audience.
More, released on 6 June 2025, is the eighth Pulp album (their seventh came out just weeks after 9/11.) On Friday they re-united at the O2 and, fittingly, the album topped the UK Charts that night: Pulp's audience wanted More.
When Pulp take to the stage, it is in front of a red velvet backdrop, the now expanded eight-piece band augmented by string section. Jarvis Cocker ascends the stage alone on a podium. The age-appropriate indie chug of opener 'Spike Island' is uplifting, but a little more ordinary than their 1990s material, which fused together two distinctly Yorkshire traditions: Alan Bennett observational comedy and specifically Sheffield electronic futurism.
Cocker, 61, dressed in a dark, double-breasted suit, addresses the audience with the ease and command of a broadcaster. 'Once we're alive,' says the frontman early in the set, 'we have to grow up. The first step of growing up is clapping in time.' He invites the audience to join him in this 'developmental milestone', a neat bit of crowd control that tees up Mature Reunion Album track 'Grown-Ups', and one of tonight's surprise themes.
Pulp's intergenerational appeal is apparent across the stadium. Older parents now bring grown-up children. Though their audience is noticeably broad – only a few lone aesthetes adopt the frontman's signature specs and vintage suits – Cocker remains the patron saint of people who hate stag do's and visit charity shops long after their salaries have stopped necessitating that. More than this, Pulp endure as cool, evidenced by Charli XCX's recent on stage call for a 'Pulp summer' at Coachella Festival in a way that impossible to imagine her doing for Blur.
On the London stage, each of Pulp's Mature Reunion Album tracks have an unconscious double in their earlier work. 'Farmer's Market', a ballad Cocker says tonight is about how he met his wife, in the audience – hustling her phone number at the car park of an organic food bazaar – obsesses over the same questions of chance and fate as 1995's 'Something Changed', which tonight is delivered acoustic by the four nucleus Pulp members (happily, viewed together, they still look more like a departmental meeting than an arena rock group.) Ditto new song 'Tina' is a pen portrait of late middle-aged lust on a commuter train (which also contains a good reference to Mrs Thatcher's TINA acronym.) It's a greyer haired update of 'Disco 2000', their 1995 glam rock stomp about the memory of teenage sexual obsession.
Listening to Pulp's greatest hits CD on my early teenage paper round in the 2000s, I remember feeling so scandalised and compelled by all the sex in their work that I worried I should keep this enjoyment private (lest it reveal something inadvertently awful about myself). There is less of this side of Pulp tonight, their more subversive songs about tragedies in reservoirs or exacting sexual revenge against West Londoners have been temporarily retired, to be our-age appropriate. This dulls some of Pulp's weird appeal.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe
Cocker's best writing was first as a misfit outsider in his native Sheffield, then as a geographical and class outsider in 90s media London. But that success made him something of an insider, which his writing has never really reckoned with. Cocker is one of his generation's cultural luminaries. He is a longstanding BBC broadcaster, a Meltdown curate and broadsheet arts fave whose collected lyrics are published by Faber. Now, the albums he infrequently releases seldom examine what exactly this type of life is like.
Pulp's last big statement forms the unexpected high point of tonight's set. Introducing 'This Is Hardcore', the title track of their 1998 album, Cocker sits at the top of a small illuminated staircase (metaphor klaxon), splayed across a leather Mastermind chair and sipping an espresso, which is brave at 9PM. Against a seedy, dramatic loop, which repeats and throbs like erotic fixation, Cocker purrs about wanting it now, wanting it bad. The song's lyrics were written to compare the singer's experience of fame to what he termed his 'revulsion and attraction' to pornography, all with the subtext of his then escalating cocaine use.
I had to get a little past paper round age to learn to love that part of the hits CD. Tonight, four songs come from This Is Hardcore, and it's in this material that Cocker delivers his most captivating performances of the night. Perhaps now that the album's chief obsessions of fame, pornography and cocaine have all accelerated in the 2020s, it has widened that album's appeal.
The final third of the set runs through their big, 1990s hit singles. The biggest of which is 'Common People'. 'Common People' was conceived as a fanfare, but looking around tonight it's something of a requiem for a period when strange, five-minute songs about class somehow topped the charts. But it's never typically the biggest songs that get you in arena shows. Earlier, during 'Help The Aged', another This Is Hardcore cut, Cocker invites the audience to sing a falsetto refrain that he can seemingly no longer summon as his baritone has grown older, and the line 'funny how it all falls away' flashes on the screens for our benefit. Like 'Eleanor Rigby', 'Help The Aged' is one of those rare songs that peers out from pop's cult of youth, and is alarmed by what it finds there.
'Old age isn't a battle,' wrote Philip Roth in 2006's Everyman, 'old age is a massacre.' Guitarist Mark Webber's scuzzy, vengeful guitar part sounds suitably blood-shedding. There's a line in the song about dying your hair: the one thing you can change as time bulldozes on. As the line is delivered, a woman in front of me smiles at her partner, ruffles his grey hair, and cuddles up to him. Pulp's work has found a new theme. Something scary, something you might view with revulsion and attraction, something really hardcore: getting old.
[See more: The rise of the west]
Related