Latest news with #StoneRoses'
The Guardian
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pulp: Spike Island review – Jarvis Cocker and co's joyous second coming
It seems weirdly fitting that Pulp have premiered their first album in 24 years with a song that appears to fret about the validity of returning at all. Of all the alt-rock artists hoisted to mainstream fame in the Britpop era, they were the ones who seemed least comfortable with the kind of attention it brought them: a perennially ignored band who'd spent a decade striving to get somewhere, only to find they didn't much like it when they did. Something of the prickly, confrontational outsider clung to them even at the zenith of their success – 1995's quadruple-platinum Different Class is an album packed with waspish, witty ruminations on the British class system – while 1998's This Is Hardcore offered a paranoid and occasionally harrowing examination of their era as celebrities, something its dense, doomy sound also helped to draw to a close. Accordingly, Spike Island seems to use the Stone Roses' famous 1990 gig where 30,000 people crammed into a Widnes field surrounded by chemical factories as a metaphor for disappointment and the way nostalgia tends to burnish memories: the fact that Spike Island was famously badly organised, musically underwhelming and plagued by terrible sound hasn't stopped it subsequently developing a legendary status as a kind of baggy-era Woodstock. Perhaps Cocker is looking back on Pulp's own supposed glory days with greater perspective: Spike Island references his discomfort with fame ('I was conforming to a cosmic design, I was playing to type'), and the indifference Pulp's disbanding was greeted with in the early 00s, when a theoretically valedictory greatest hits album barely scraped the Top 75: 'The universe shrugged and moved on'. But Cocker seems emboldened at the prospect of his own second coming. He suggests that 'this time I'll get it right' and that he has 'walked back to the garden of earthly delights'. He sings happily: 'I was born to conform, it's a calling / I exist to do this – shouting and pointing'. Students of rock history might recognise the last three words as the title of an ignored 1976 album by Mott, the dogged but doomed attempt by members of Mott the Hoople to soldier on without lead singer Ian Hunter. References to 1970s pop-culture arcana are, of course, very Pulp – and so are a lot of other things about Spike Island: the disco-influenced rhythm (decorated with the distinctive sound of syndrums), the brief spoken-word section, and the sense that complicated emotions lurk behind its anthemic chorus. For all the conflicted feelings at its centre, Spike Island is a noticeably stronger song than After You, the solitary new track spawned by Pulp's previous reformation, in the early 2010s. Had Spike Island been released in their heyday – or instead of the strikingly downbeat Help the Aged in 1997 – it would doubtless have been a hit. Equally, you could see some of its reflections on the past as not dissimilar to those offered by Damon Albarn on Blur's 2023 comeback single The Narcissist. Whether Pulp's forthcoming album More goes on to attain the same degree of acclaim as Blur's The Ballad of Darren remains to be seen, but, for now, as attested by the excited texts pouring in after Spike Island was premiered on BBC Radio 6 Music, fans are likely to be delighted.
The Independent
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Pulp announce their first album in 24 years: ‘We hope you enjoy the music'
Pulp have announced the forthcoming release of their first album in almost 24 years, and shared the lead single 'Spike Island'. Frontman Jarvis Cocker said that ideas for the new record, titled More, began back in 2023, when the band embarked on a reunion tour of a number of arenas around the UK. He explained that they started with a new song, 'Hymn of the North', during soundchecks before debuting it live at the end of their second night at Sheffield Arena. 'This seemed to open the floodgates,' he said, '[and] we came up with the rest of the songs on this album during the first half of 2024. 'A couple are revivals of ideas from the last century. The music for one song was written by Richard Hawley. The music for another was written by Jason Buckle. The Eno family sing backing vocals on a song. There are string arrangements written by Richard Jones and played by the Elysian Collective.' Meanwhile, the idea for 'Spike Island' apparently came from co-writer Jason Buckle, who attended the Stone Roses' infamous Spike Island gig and was irked by a DJ who kept shouting, 'Spike Island, come alive!' More was recorded over a period of three weeks by James Ford [ Arctic Monkeys, Fontaines DC ] at Orbb Studio in Walthamstow, London, starting on 18 November 2024. 'This is the shortest amount of time a Pulp album has ever taken to record,' Cocker said. 'It was obviously ready to happen. A new press shot of the group s hows that they are now a nine-piece, featuring Cocker, guitarist Mark Webber, keys player Candida Doyle and drummer Nick Banks alongside newer touring members. Cocker used the announcement to take a swipe at the looming threat of artificial intelligence (AI) for British musicians, who have been fighting against government proposals to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without the artist's permission. 'We hope you enjoy the music,' he said. 'It was written and performed by four human beings from the North of England, aided and abetted by five other human beings from various locations in the British Isles. No AI was involved during the process.' The accompanying music video for 'Spike Island' did, however, use AI in order to animate images made of the band for their 1995 Britpop classic Different Class. Cocker said that 'all the moving images featured in the video are the result of me feeding in a still image and then typing in a prompt'. 'The weekend I began work on the video was a strange time,' he said. 'I went out of the house and kept expecting weird transformations of the surrounding environment due to the images the computer had been generating. The experience had marked me. I don't know whether I've recovered yet…' More is dedicated to Steve Mackey, Pulp's bassist who died aged 56 in March 2023. The album's full tracklist is as follows: 1. 'Spike Island' 2. 'Tina' 3. 'Grown Ups' 4. 'Slow Jam' 5. 'Farmers Market' 6. 'My Sex' 7. 'Got To Have Love' 8. 'Background Noise' 9. 'Partial Eclipse' 10. 'The Hymn of the North' 11. 'A Sunset' Pulp will support the album with a UK and Ireland arena tour taking place from 7 June, kicking off at the OVO Hydro arena in Glasgow before heading to Dublin, London, Birmingham and Manchester, before concluding in their hometown of Sheffield at Tramlines Festival on 25 July.
