#92 – My First Wife (2)

My First Wife (Live 15 July 1987, Barracuda Club, Nottingham)
My First Wife (2) at Pulpwiki

Poor old Pulp, brimming with ideas, yet having to recycle song titles. And poor ‘My First Wife’ – not only existing as one great lost song, but as two, and the second one even better than the first. This time, though, instead of continuing down that flowery, pastoral path, we’re chugging down a more industrial route – albeit one which would immediately turn out to be a dead end.

Because yes, this is for better or worse, the final outing for Slavic Pulp. It’s uncertain why the band suddenly decided to cut off one half of their sound, but it seems likely that it has quite a bit to do with Russell’s waning involvement in the song-writing process. With a baby on the way and an antique glass business to run, there was less and less time for the organisation of a group who might have been finished anyway. Jarvis, meanwhile, was heading down to London with Steve Mackey, and the Slavic thing doesn’t seem to have been relevant to their world of raves and squats.

For a last shot, though, it’s a good one – up there with some of the best of this era. On the surface just another rejection of a lost love affair, it’s actually a pretty powerful rejection of letting your freedom and vitality be taken by formless, nostalgic love – a contradiction to the first ‘My First Wife’ in a sense. With every other song about moving on or moving out, 1987 seems to have been a year of shredding ties with everything that had made the previous five years – a moment which had to happen, perhaps.

The start, to be perfectly honest, isn’t that special – Nick provides another rolling polka beat, Russell picks away with his fairly accomplished gypsy guitar, all nice but done enough before. Things do slowly start to build, but not quite quickly enough, and the song threatens to wither and halt at all times. Jarvis’s intimate, cynical vocal does help matters, though – he seems to almost spit out the words with disgust, and a couple of semi-power chords keep things going well enough. It isn’t until the midpoint of the song that things really take off, with the continual upping of the pace thrusting the song into a series of faster and faster sections, and a full-on Slavic disco onslaught finally ensuing, like Rattlesnake but much more primal and aggressive. It’s almost as if they’re willing it on to be brilliant and almost getting there by just pushing it hard enough.

The song didn’t really last that long – by the time the group were on hiatus it had already been lost from the set, and nothing like it would appear again. Fortunately for fans, it did emerge at the end of the year on a tape compilation put together by the young Mark Webber, alongside The Inspiral Carpets, Television Personalities, Jazz Butcher and Spaceman 3. In a parallel dimension, it’s the b-side to ‘Rattlesnake’ – wouldn’t that have made a great single?

#91 – My First Wife (1)

My First Wife (Live, 3rd March 1987 – The Limit, Sheffield)
My First Wife (1) at Pulpwiki

“My First Wife” – that’s quite a good name for a song, isn’t it? Marry a series of hazy reminiscences to a name like this, pair the stark with the indistinct, and you’re setting the listener up for mystery and intrigue. A good idea, then, yes, and that’s presumably why Pulp used the title twice for different songs within a few months in 1987. Both songs were subsequently abandoned, and both only came to light much later when more obscure bootlegs began to circulate. This is the earlier of the two, though (confusingly enough) it’s the most recently unearthed, and beyond a title it has nothing at all in common with its namesake.

The song occupies an odd mid-point between the amateur dramatics of ‘Take You Back’ and the more refined, wistful, ‘David’s Last Summer’. Introduced with the words “nostalgia time”, we open with a cheap Portasound waltz rhythm, sounding like a broken old music box, a souvenir of some more innocent time. It’s presumably just a pre-set rhythm, but the remainder of the song is built over and around it to pleasing effect.

The meat of the piece is Jarvis’s monologue – not a first, but sounding here more like a poem than the meandering, dream-like stories we get elsewhere. A series of nostalgic images of a summers day, it forms more of a picture than a story, vivid yet subsumed by a pleasantly drowsy summer haze. From time to time this is punctuated by curious violin phrases from Russell, then Candida joins in with a slightly out of tune chiming keyboard effect. Oddly enough, it’s this part that shows the most promise, sounding somehow fresh and shocking, though at the same time it also lets the song down by being ill-timed and out of tune.

Towards the end we’re suddenly and unpleasantly thrown down into one of Jarvis’s impassioned screaming sessions. A subtle idea like this can’t really survive being plunged into melodrama, and it’s telling that this is the last time we’ll hear him trying anything along these lines. Rolling timpani, Magnus Doyle style, appears on top of the violin, then suddenly Jarvis reverts to his lounge-singer croon for a few lines. It’s all a bit of a mess – a shame for something that started so well, but not every experiment can make it.

We’ve seen many promising songs disappear into the ether through the eighties, but thankfully this time something was salvaged an put to better use. The descriptions of summer in the first half of the lyric were reused as a basis for ‘David’s Last Summer’ a few years later. If it hadn’t been abandoned in the first place, perhaps its much more successful descendant would never have seen the light – so maybe it was all for the best.

#90 – Love Is Blind

Love is Blind (Separations, 1992)
Love is Blind (Live film – Town & Country Club London, 20th July 1991)
Love is Blind at Pulpwiki

KING HENRY V
Yet they do wink and yield, as love is blind and enforces.
BURGUNDY
They are then excused, my lord, when they see not what they do.

What’s the difference between “love is blind” and “beer goggles”? I suppose it’s just that with the second one you have the chance to blame the alcohol. How about the difference between “suddenly I realised that I love love” and “love falls in love with itself again, like it never should”? You could put it like this: a first romance blossoms, but then wilts as summer turns to autumn. After winter there’ll be many more springs – but the magic and innocence of the first one is lost forever. Let’s quit this silly cliché – there’s no use being nostalgic, that first time was really the worst time – now we’re stronger, we know the rules, we know it’s just a (magnificent) game. A decade in Sheffield, and we’ve broken through the lethargy and self-pity to find that, yes, dreams are all fair and good, but there’s only so much time for wallowing; life is short, time to go out and grab it.

“Love is Blind” is about growing up, finding yourself in a brave new world of self-knowledge, and as such it works perfectly as the first track on “Separations” – a fact that the band were well aware of even as they recorded it. While generally a good album act, Pulp tend to open with a slightly misfiring statement of intent, then spend the first half getting to the meat of things. This is the sole example where we’re plunged straight into the action – which here means a stomping, slavic cabaret number.

That wobbly bombom-pah-bombom-pah, later (accidentally?) recycled by Blur for ‘Sunday Sunday’, a woozy synth line, agonised wailing in the background from Jarvis, then the decisive “Oh.” From this point we’re taken on a tour of startling, but seemingly disconnected images. Was this song cobbled together from pieces of three or four different unfinished ones? If so, then it’s not exactly to its detriment. If our theme is restless creativity, then isn’t this the ultimate example? Jarvis’s vocal flips between the personal and the general, the angry and the laid-back, and musically, the track lives up to this principle too – it’s a massively populist cabaret stomp from start to finish. A few years later the group would (sort of) film a music video at the Moulin Rouge, and it seems a shame they didn’t get inside to film a performance of ‘Love is Blind’, can-can dancers and all. Then there’s Candida’s cheeky call-and-response keyboard phrase which alternates from left to right throughout. All fairly camp and excessive, but never leaving a bad taste in the mouth.

The song’s best moment is undoubtedly the spoken word section, an apocalyptic vision of taking a last chance for love while the world crumbles. Then, the next day, it’s all still there, “the spilt milk and the dog turds / in that grey ashtray morning light” – the worst has passed, nothing’s perfect but we’re all ok. That odd poetic urban realism would soon be one of the band’s greatest strengths, and this is perhaps its first outing. Just as this section is a success, the next is a bit of a letdown, an angry-sounding metaphor about someone being a “butcher” which seems redolent of all the melodramatic excesses of the era we’re leaving behind. Any grab-bag assortment will have something you’d rather leave behind, though, and we’re soon back to the gist.

An obvious first single, Love is Blind now sits firmly in the shadow of Separations’ two big breakthrough tracks. Too ‘big’ a track to be an interlude between hits, it suffered from being perhaps too ahead of its time, and was dropped from the band’s set to make way for the likes of ‘Babies’ before the album was released – a shame, perhaps, but not really – this will forever be the opening of the first modern Pulp album, and that should be enough.

#89 – Separations

Separations (Separations, 1992)
Separations – Live Film, Town & Country Club, London (20th July 1991)
Separations – Live Film, The Leadmill, 1st September 1991
Separations at Pulpwiki

Before my bed a pool of light –
Can it be hoar-frost on the ground?
Looking up, I find the moon bright;
Bowing, in homesickness I am drowned. – Li Bai (701 – 762AD)

“The barbarians are inside the gate. They’re playing Muzak in Jenners.” – Letter in The Scotsman, 2007.

I received a CD of ‘Separations’ one Christmas in the mid-90s. My family were staying at a relative’s house and their stereo was hidden in a nook above a full-piano-sized 1970s electric organ, possibly a Hammond, with switches that produced backing beats like “waltz” and “rhumba”, another to adjust the tempo, and a series of long wooden foot pedals, the use of which escapes me. As I played the CD and we reached the climax of track 4 – the title track, no less – the swirling mass of strings suddenly disappeared to be replaced with the cheapest possible Casiotone beat, cheaper, in fact, than one I’d been playing on the organ before I even put the CD on.

Was this a joke? It seemed likely. Cheap-sounding keyboards and Muzak were a common butt of jokes in the early 90s, from Rimmer’s enthusiasm for “Reggie Wilson’s Lift Music Classics” on Red Dwarf to stand-up rants about supermarket background music. It was just one of those things which seemed to universally be regarded as ‘bad’, and it wasn’t until I listened to Denim’s ‘Novelty Rock’ a couple of years later that the pieces finally clicked. These sounds are ours – they might sound “naff”* but they are all around us nonetheless, we’ve grown up with them – and I bet a 1980s suburban Proust would maintain that they have the power to be as evocative as anything else. They are ours to use. Admittedly, this will only get you laughed at, but if you want to be a pop star “ridicule is nothing to be scared of.” Audiences are there to be challenged, after all.

That one moment dominates my memory of the song so much that it was hard to focus on anything else – which in fact might be a failing, as there’s plenty to admire here. Built from that bare chord progression, and originally called “Eastern Eurodisco”, by the time it was recorded ‘Separations’ had morphed into a sprawling beast of a song, with a cyclical operatic structure in place of the usual verse-chorus-verse and a complex storyline with roots in romantic baladeering and gothic fiction – all presented in less than five minutes.

The first two minutes are dominated by Russell’s Slavic violin – here built up in stature to something like a towering Stravinsky requiem, performed at the funeral of a beloved Transylvanian monarch. The rest of the strings (unbelievable these are just samples) soon join him, and as they are building to a climax Jarvis begins his melodramatic telling of a story of separated, lonely lovers. She’s deserted, all alone.

Then we break down into that Casiotone rhythm, and after a few moments the rest of the group join in, and we continue with “him” – He’s in a new town, getting off a train (haven’t we heard that somewhere before?), filled with optimism and determined to forget the girl he’s left behind. Things quickly turn bad, though, life and nightlife are shallow and unsatisfying, “the drinks won’t do a thing for him / but revive some stupid memories” – and looking to the sky he sees the same moon “she” is looking at.

It’s no wonder that this (often forgotten) song ended up being the title of the album – it seems emblematic of all the changes that the band were going through at the time. Slavic baladeering morphs into suburban lust, gothic romance into electro-pop, cathartic melodrama into that 1990s sense of nostalgic un-belonging. Each side sounds captivating – the first perhaps even more so, thanks to what must be Russell’s greatest single performance. As a centrepiece to the album, as a bridge between the two halves, it does the job perfectly, and while it’s too damn odd to be anyone’s favourite, it’s nevertheless a genuinely passionate, atmospheric piece of work.

*Isn’t it funny how, in 2013, the word ‘naff’ now sounds, well, naff.

# 87 & 88 – A Tale Of Two Bass Players

Steven Havenhand performing ‘And The Sun…’ and ‘Don’t You Want Me Anymore?’ (video)
And the Sun… at Pulpwiki
200% and Bloody Thirsty at Pulpwiki
The Day That Never Happened at Pulpwiki

We’ve had a few of these entries before, back at the other end of this decade, detailing missing songs which are un-recorded or at least not circulating. Happily, these dry up as the group starts recording more, and gigs are more frequently circulated. This is, then, the last of these summaries we’ll have to do until we get to the late 90s (and with a little luck the remaining ‘We Love Life’ demos will have been released by then) – and a bit of a measly one at that, containing a song that never made it, and another which might not really count. Interestingly enough, though, each tells us a little about two members – both bassists – who pass fleetingly through our story at this point.

The first of these is Steven Havenhand, who I’ve mentioned (briefly) before. Former singer with the legendary Lay Of The Land (who later became Warp Records, invented IDM, etc) and, perhaps as importantly, Russell’s sister’s boyfriend and later father to his nephew. Naturally, he was also a fan of the group – they’d been gigging regularly in Sheffield for six years by this point, and had a dedicated following among the otherwise slim pickings of the mid-80s scene.

1987 doesn’t seem to have been a particularly good time for Stephen to join. His previous group had fired him for “being disruptive” and he appears to have been in a pretty dark place generally. A talented musician in his own right, he nevertheless had a hard time fitting in with the group, largely due to his bass technique. It wasn’t that he as bad as such – just that he was too quiet, especially when the group were getting into their Slavic thrash and electro, and the low-key balladry of ‘She’s Dead’ was still a year away. Though he played on the FON demos of “Don’t You Want Me Anymore” “Rattlesnake” and “Death Comes To Town,” some studio trickery (and perhaps even re-recording) was needed for his parts. By the start of 1988 the probation period was over and it was clear things weren’t working out. Over a coffee at the Union bar, Jarvis told him he had to go.

In the last few years Steven has surfaced again as a singer-songwriter in Cornwall, working with The Friday Night Band. One of the most open and approachable of former members, he’s even helped out by uploading what he can remember of a song which didn’t make it out of rehearsals. A simple progression from A to A-minor, it features the lyrics “And the sun that continues to shine…” and sounds like a slower ballad – beyond this, there seems to be very little to say about it.

At times when Pulp is on hold, Jarvis tends to go off and work on other projects and collaborations. This time he spent a day in the studio with John Avery of Hula, writing and demoing a song called “200% and Bloody Thirsty” for a theatre performance of the same name. The song, described as “acoustic and raw” was not used in the final production, but it did receive one live performance at the most infamous Pulp concert of the 1980s, “The Day That Never Happened”

With the FON sessions showing no sign of being released, the membership still being in flux, and Jarvis weeks away from moving to London to start his degree course, Pulp were about to go into a couple of years of hibernation. What better way to mark this than by holding the most extravagant live event they’d ever attempted? Pulp concerts had always been as much about the visual as the auditory, and by this point the group were caught in a loop of trying to top their previous appearance every time, so much so that they may have been spending more time on set decorations than on practicing the actual music. Looking back now, it seems obvious that this level of ambition without funds or professional help to carry it out was bound to backfire at some point, but it must have been easy to get carried away at the time. Mark Webber later described the ensuing fiasco in an edition of Pulp fan club magazine ‘Disco-Very’:

The Day That Never Happened… featured the usual films, slides and tin-foil, along with a few trees (sprayed white), dry ice (home-made and very poor – it barely spilled over the saucer it was in), smells (Russell had made some charcoal incense, but of course the Leadmill is a big place so it didn’t carry too well), video projection (but the projector broke and we made do with a television on stage), and the most sensitive moment was to be a snow fall during a slow ballad … that ended up a total farce with people running around the stage carrying big hair-dryer things.

If the music had been up to scratch then this fiasco might’ve been charming, but this turned out to be equally problematic, partly due to problems with their new bass player, Anthony Genn. The younger brother of Steve Genn (who performed with Jarvis in ‘Heroes Of The Beach’ back in 1982), he was an outgoing, extroverted character, only aged 15 or 16 at the time. Like Magnus before, he was very much into the local psychedelics scene, and before long was declaring that “acid is the only reality.” Racking up debts of £760 and beginning to panic, he was pleasantly surprised one day to find a cheque for the exact amount needed on his doormat. Later that day a group came around from a Christian group
called The Nine O’Clock Service which turned out to be something like a cult. By the time The Day That Never Happened happened, Anthony had been persuaded to leave the secular world of Pulp behind, and had already announced his intention to quit. If he hadn’t, though, he might have found himself fired anyway. In ‘Truth & Beauty’ Nick described what happened next.

“We were all setting up, and I went ‘Anthony, tune your bass’ and he went ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll get round to it.’ He was fannying around with something ridiculously unimportant. ‘Anthony, tune your bass.’ ‘Yeah, yeah.’….he was on stage and I could see him going ‘It’s out of tune!!’ Oh, for fuck’s sake… He had to have coloured stickers on the neck of the guitar to know where to go, it was that level of incompetence.”

Anthony spent the next few years in The Nine O’Clock Service before escaping its clutches and getting his life back on track. He was next spotted dancing naked on stage with Elastica during Glastonbury 1995, after which he actually joined the group on keyboards for a year or so. After helping Pulp with ‘additional programming’ on Different Class (whatever that means), he joined The Mescaleros, Joe Strummer’s backing band, and ended up co-writing and producing their first album. In the last decade he’s gone on to a fair amount of success with the band he formed with another ex-Mescalero, Martin Slattery,The Hours. Quite a life already, then, and he’s still only in his early 40s.

Two bass players down, then, and the great Pulp revival seemed to be stalled and rudderless. But appearances can be deceptive – one new bass player and the classic lineup and sound would be complete.

#86 – Rattlesnake

Rattlesnake (FON demo, 1987)
Rattlesnake at Pulpwiki

“You can dance to our music, but it’s easier if you’re a Cossack.” – Russell in “Cut”, circa August 1987

How much of the value of a piece of music can be put down to scarcity? ‘Rattlesnake’ was once the holy grail for Pulp fans – a legendary professional recording of a raved-about* live favourite, slated for release, shelved indefinitely, and now lost to the mists of time, while rumours of DAT copies circulated for hundreds of pounds. Then, suddenly, it was leaked, and not long after used on the closing credits of Sheffield scene documentary The Beat Is The Law. We’ve all seen these cases before – the gem is unearthed, and turns out to be just another lump of coal – only this time, somehow, the song lived up to the hype.

Even after a thousand listens, it’s an odd thing, though – such an archetypal ’87 Pulp song that it doesn’t seem to even be real. All the usual influences are there – Slavic folk music, of course, but also Scott Walker – Mark Sturdy has pointed out the similarity of the introduction to the start of “The Seventh Seal” from Scott 4. Lyrically, we’re also retreading familiar old ground – a melodramatic treatment of a return to a regrettable relationship. This time, though, we’ve taken a massive leap forward. Everything sounds bigger, better, more professional. It might be entirely to do with the strain of writing this blog (poor me, etc), but there’s something almost shocking about hearing this modern Jarvis clearly expressing himself, talking about return to a bad relationship as usual, but now with an underlying current of sexual tension, whilst at the same time behind him there’s no smooth Chris Thomas stadium-indie product or even electro-pop, but instead Russell goading the group to a frantic Slavic stomp-rock climax. What if the group had been given this level of expertise and studio time for the recording of ‘Freaks’?

No use crying over spilt milk, though, is there? What we have here might be the only decently-produced remnant of this phase, but at least they chose the right track. The absolute apex of Russell’s Eastern-European campaign, ‘Rattlesnakes’ sounds for the world like the Klezmer band at the gates of hell, raising the massed demons to a climax and sending them out into the world to undertake a campaign of shock and awe. To my mind at least, that’s what proper Slavic folk should do, and (strange as it is to say) on this evidence they seem to have a real knowledge of the form. The effect may be down to the presence of a string quartet, hired for the day – or rather a string trio, as one member failed to play to the standard required and had to be embarrassingly let go halfway through the session.

“And the hardest part…. the hardest part is when you stop!”

It’s hard to begrudge them the trick ending – every band is allowed to do this one time, and it’s hard to think of a more suitable time to try it. Then they come back even faster and harder, and we’re cruising.

Suffice to say, it’s a massive shame that FON never got around to releasing this single, and perhaps the disappointment felt by the group explains the dropping of the song from the set and its non-inclusion on the remastered ‘Separations’ in 2012. For us, the something-more-than-casual listeners, though, it’s just good that it’s out there, a little reminder that digging down sometimes gets you a nugget of gold.

*In Melody Maker and Sounds, no less.

#85 – Heart Trouble

Heart Trouble (Live at The Limit, Sheffield, 3/3/1987)
Heart Trouble at Pulpwiki

“This song’s about dying.” – on-stage introduction

On the 3rd of March 1987, in a nightclub in the basement of a disused Jeans factory / warehouse, a new group took to the stage for what Russell Senior had recently called a “multi-media cosmic tangerine experience” on local radio. The stage was bedecked with the usual rolls of kitchen foil, which must have done something at least to dispel the gloom of the place.

“At the end of its time it had enjoyed a sorry reputation for violence, drugs and sleaze. But the place was certainly legendary. The atmosphere inside was always dark and dingy, due to the insides being painted black, the roof was very low and there was always the smell of marijuana, which hit you as you went down the stairs. The carpet was very sticky, and Mark’s friends used to say that the only reason you didn’t bang your head on the roof was because you were stuck to the carpet. In fact the floor was in such a state, with spilled beer, that it seemed to be covered in tar. And the next morning you would find this horrible tar down the bottom of your trouser legs. All drinks glasses were plastic, due to the amount of glassing that had occurred in the past ( allegedly )” – from thewookie.co.uk

This group were a fair bit different from the one that had bowed out at The Leadmill the previous November*. The rhythm section were gone – off to India, or a regular job – and while Candida had returned to take the place recently vacated by the unreliable Captain Sleep, Magnus and Manners were gone for good, barring a bit of ‘additional programming’ and a famous stage invasion in the 1990s. The new bass player was Steven Havenhand, former singer for Lay Of The Land, a minor band on the local indie scene whose other members would go on to found Warp Records a few years later.

And on drums, Nick Banks – former member of Phono Industria, promoter for The Hallamshire Hotel, nephew of England goalkeeper Nick Banks, future proprietor of Banks Pottery and (of course) a member of Pulp for the rest of their natural lifespan. He had applied for the job after seeing an advert in The Leadmill, and instead of auditioning ended up going on a trek round the city to try to get rid of a pit bull terrier which had followed Jarvis home. The creature was dispatched over a fence, and since the ice had been broken and they got on well enough, he was accepted into the group before they’d even heard him play.

The gamble paid off. Magnus had been a great drummer, but his eccentric style would not have suited the new direction the group were about to take. Nick’s steady professionalism was what they really needed – though you wouldn’t guess it from the likes of ‘Heart Trouble’.

As a set opener for a comeback gig the song is nothing short of bizarre, not to say willfully aggravating. We start with a thumping drumbeat, which is supposed to replicate a palpitating, over-stimulated heart – a concept lifted wholesale from Madness’s ‘Cardiac Arrest’ – and a wheezing, stuttering thread of violin, simulating strained breathing. This is all acceptable, at first, as are the muffled lyrics about not fearing death, but forty seconds in, the violin line turns into what can only be described as a very unpleasant, almost ear-splitting noise, which continues for the remainder of the song. If that wasn’t enough, Jarvis’s vocals transition into some fairly challenging caterwauling – the sort they probably should’ve learned to avoid after the recording of ‘Silence’.

What must the audience have thought? Fortunately at two and a half minutes long there wasn’t enough time for the audience to decide to walk out of a concert they’d paid £1.50 to see (£1 for anyone with a UB40) – and as the song came to its unearned climax, without a pause the group launched into ‘Death Comes To Town’ – which must have come as a relief to all present. ‘Heart Trouble’ was dropped from the set soon after, and replaced by much more audience-friendly set-openers like ‘Love Is Blind’ and ‘Space’. The days of truly audience-challenging, avant-garde Pulp were over for good, and probably all for the best.

* In the meantime there had been an odd performance art piece about the devil coming to Sheffield, which had taken place at the Leadmill in January or February, but this seems to have been one of Jarvis’s side projects and not an official Pulp concert by any means.