#126 – Have You Seen Her Lately?

Have You Seen Her Lately? (His ‘n’ Hers, 1994)
Have You Seen Her Lately? (live film, Glastonbury 1994)
Have You Seen Her Lately? (live film)
Have You Seen Her Lately? (live film, Paris 2012)
Have You Seen Her Lately? at Pulpwiki

“First you let him in your bed
Now he’s moved inside your head
And he directs all the dreams you are dreaming”

If Seconds was an ultimately optimistic portrayal of the messy compromises life throws your way, then Have You Seen Her Lately? is perhaps its evil twin. Instead of empathy we have sympathetic despair and a hopeless wailing and gnashing of teeth towards a lost cause. Instead of acceptance of the drama life throws at us we have the inevitability of death, and the death of dreams, of hope.

Once again Jarvis’s ex is in the arms of another man, but this time he’s taking it much worse. From his perspective (and as the title reminds us, he has corroboration) the new boyfriend is a bad move all round. He’s insecure (“Do you think he’ll fall apart?”), immature (“It’s time to teach him how to walk”), a burden (“a piece of luggage that you should throw away”) and somehow hugely dangerous (“He’s already made such a mess of your life”). Her relationship with him is akin to the joining of a suicide cult – she’s already been brainwashed and this is her last chance to get out before it’s too late.

If you’re thinking this all sounds a bit extreme then that’s fair enough. This song is decidedly not coming from a rational or logical place – it’s a desperate last-grasp for redemption, and Jarvis sounds more like a lonesome ghost returning to whisper dire warnings in his old lover’s ear than a human giving advice. That’s the way they play it too; singer, band and producer conspire to turn this plea into one of the oddest, but most consistent pop songs around.

From that first out of tune organ sound onward, everything about ‘Have You Seen Her Lately?’ sounds sickly. In Emile Zola’s novel La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret a young priest drives himself into a life-threatening fever through excessive worship of the Virgin Mary, and this illness has the same sort of feel. It’s utterly religious and oddly asexual – the end-point of the group’s romantic tendency when all goals and desires are rendered useless. It’s another Ed Buller symphony, but this time it’s all a little too overwhelming. The verses are normal enough, I suppose, but the chorus is essentially one long, resigned wail, and toward the close of the track the song takes you back to the haunted music room of ‘Blue Girls’ – a wistful, deeply sad anti-nostalgia, something we might call ‘hauntology’ if it were made today.

I’m impressed by ‘Have You Seen Her Lately?’ – it’s hard not to be by such a powerful piece of music – but I’m still not sure if I actually enjoy it. With earlier ballads what was required was a suspension of disbelief, but here it’s more like a willingness to go with the core idea, and I don’t know if I can do that. Ultimately I don’t trust the narrative of this relationship – the singer is too involved to present a clear picture, and there’s a lingering suspicion that he has his own selfish, desperate romantic instincts underlying his argument. Is the girl too weak, too pathetic to realise her situation, if it’s really so bad? If so, why does he want to win her back so badly? Does she not have her own free will, to join with or even follow whoever she chooses? There’s something that doesn’t quite sit right, and I just can’t shake it. This may all be deliberate, it may be that I’m missing something, but all the same it stops me diving in and going with the flow, and that’s a shame.

#124 – Lipgloss

Lipgloss (His ‘n’ Hers, 1994)
Lipgloss (music video, 1993)
Lipgloss (live film, ‘The Word’ 1993)
Lipgloss (live film, ‘Butt Naked’ 1994)
Lipgloss (live film, 1994)
Lipgloss (live film, Brixton Academy 2011)
Lipgloss at Pulpwiki

“She’s a haunted house / And her windows are broken / And the sad young man’s gone away / Her bathrobe’s torn / And tears smudge her lipstick / And the neighbors just whisper all day” – Scott Walker ‘Big Louise’

“We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion. All the cosmetics names seemed obscenely obvious to me in their promises of sexual bliss. They were all firming or uplifting or invigorating. They made you tingle. Or glow. Or feel young. They were prepared with hormones or placentas or royal jelly. All the juice and joy missing in the lives of these women were to be supplied by the contents of jars and bottles. No wonder they would spend twenty dollars for an ounce of face makeup or thirty for a half-ounce of hormone cream. What price bliss? What price sexual ecstasy?” – Erica Jong

“Men get laid, but women get screwed.” – Quentin Crisp

It’s to the credit of 1993 Pulp that a throwaway rehash of the previous year’s singles can turn out to be a near-masterpiece. Lipgloss is the result of a simple formula – “Razzmatazz x Babies = hits” – but it would be a mistake to describe it as cynical or contrived. Instead it’s just a case of “practice makes perfect.”

Why does Lipgloss work where Razzmatazz only sort-of worked then? Well, a lot of it is to do with tone. While Razzmatazz has a slight mis-match between the tragic story and the attempt to sound big, Lipgloss takes the sadness and uses it to push further. The result is a rush – an odd feeling of euphoric despair generated by facing up to your worst fears and letting yourself imagine they’re all true. Part of what makes the song work emotionally more is the complete lack of spite. That malicious empathy has gone entirely – now if anything we are the girl’s inner voice, captured at the moment she realises everything she’s known before no longer counts, and that life is out of her control, at the whims of the uncaring gods.

The title of the song came from the story of an anorexic girl who only ate lipgloss*, but this is something of a red herring as eating disorders are only referred to in a throwaway line. In general, ‘lipgloss’ here refers to an intangible magnetic quality which empowers and defines her – a close relative to ‘it’, ‘mojo’ or even ‘X-factor’. It was the main thread of her life, but she didn’t realise until it vanished. Has her lover suddenly shaken off the hold of some sort of falsely constructed feminine mystique and failed to connect with the real woman beneath? Had the relationship dulled the edges of her personality so much that a shift of perspective has revealed her to be little more than an echo? Not truthfully, not entirely, I’d like to say, but let’s remember that this is all just her worst fear. So stuck in the moment are we that all of this is little more than guesswork, but it’s all vivid enough that no back story is required.

In the last couple of weeks we’ve seen the bizarro-world version of Pulp produced by Stephen Street, and that’s where the story of Lipgloss started too. This demo version is locked (perhaps forever) in the Island vaults, a shame in a sense as it would be interesting to hear a real hit with a straightforward production style, especially as Lipgloss has a fairly standard structure and is built around a guitar-lick hook, so perhaps it would’ve been best-sided to a meat & potatoes treatment. Or perhaps not – the atmosphere generated by Candida and Ed Buller is one of the main factors driving the song in its surge forward.

Candida has a fairly minor role to play here, but an essential one. The central descending keyboard figure is hard to unhear once you’ve tuned into it* – a nursery-rhyme series of notes, it underlies everything without ever drawing attention to itself. Then there’s the other synth-line which sounds like metallic lapping water – a Stereolab song of a few years later has the same sound isolated for a few bars, but here it intermingles with the rhythm of the song as naturally as breathing in and out.

Throughout the song simply adds up to more than its component parts. The guitar sounds minimal, almost sampled, the chorus is a bit lacklustre, but there’s a continuous upward movement that holds it all together. Part of what finally sells it to me is the section starting at 2.10, where the tension of the buildup suddenly dissipates and we’re left with that heavenly, haunted synth-bed that embodies this era, and perhaps the band as a whole.

Lipgloss was the first single released on Island, and the first to have a professionally shot video after years of improvised scenes with unpaid extras. While on tour in Liverpool Jarvis had seen an “inflatable environment” called ‘Eggopolis‘ – a gigantic art project that was touring the UK. It was ideal for filming a music video, visually stunning in a unique way, but it took such a long time to find a studio to house the thing, inflate it and have it professionally lit that there was only time to film two run-throughs and ten minutes with Julie Jones in her boudoir holding up signs. Then Jarvis decided to edit the thing in Sakia’s unheated loft in November and consequently get the flu.

I can understand, then, why he’s not keen on it, but it still works, largely because of the visual brilliance of the Eggopolis itself. It’s good to see Julie Jones here too – she’s a largely unheralded figure in this story so far, but was the group’s unofficial stylist through these years, and has been mysteriously referred to as the “source of much inspiration” by Jarvis on a couple of occasions – once even saying that she was responsible for the story behind Acrylic Afternoons. Her role in the video is a little odd (she’s most certainly not the girl who’s “lost her lipgloss” and I’m not sure if she’s even supposed to be) but as a character she makes more of an impact than any other bit-part performer in a Pulp video. As well she should.

*There’s a soundcheck floating around where Candida practices her part again and again. I remember at first being unable to place it, then as soon as I had it suddenly altered the entire way I heard the song, probably to its detriment. So I won’t link it here.
**Did The Designers Republic not know the difference between lipgloss and lipstick or did they just think it looked better?

#114 – Pink Glove

Pink Glove (His ‘n’ Hers, 1994)
Pink Glove (John Peel Session, 1993)
Pink Glove (Live film, No Stillettos, 1993)
Pink Glove (Live film, Astoria Theatre, London, 1994)
Pink Glove (Live film, Reading 1994)
Pink Glove (Live film, Glastonbury 1995)
Pink Glove (Live film, La Bikini, Toulouse, 2011)
Pink Glove (Live film, Dour, Belgium, 2011)
Pink Glove at Pulpwiki

“This is a song about one of those situations where you have to wear something to keep someone else happy… it’s a trade-off between what you want for yourself and what you’re prepared to do to keep them happy and why they liked you in ine first place. I’ve never been in a situation like that, I just write about them” – Jarvis Cocker in Q Magazine, January 1995.

“Suspenders and stockings / Look more sexy than the tights girls are wearing / But even there, weren’t the time wasted? / Time that could be spent completely nude, bare, naked?” – Soft Machine, ‘Pig’ from ‘Soft Machine Volume 2’

We all play roles in life, we’re all actors playing ourselves, and the first thing an actor needs to do is get the clothes right. So, what does “faking it” or “being true to yourself” mean, then? How far does our instinct lead us and how much can it be led for others? Can this role be taken over by guilt, fear or stubbornness – and at what point does it stop being ‘you’ and become something else? These are difficult issues to address, especially when lacking any kind of emotional distance or detachment, but Pink Glove dives headlong into the fray without the slightest concern for preserving dignity or self-respect and surfaces, gasping, enlightened.

Of course, this is all within the now expected framing device of a battle of wills over a lost girlfriend, an ex he’s trying to win back. We saw this in Razzmatazz – again, he thinks she was better off with him. This time, though, there’s genuine concern mixed in with the cruel empathy. She’s gone along with things she doesn’t like for her new boyfriend, once you’ve started to pretend to like something, it’s hard to stop, and now she’s caught in a trap, lured in by inexperience, kept captive by misplaced love.

Beyond this, even, there’s a sense of disgust from the narrator at his rival’s fetishes – if he can appreciate the girl for just being herself, why does this man need to dress her up in these ridiculous costumes to get off? Doesn’t she deserve better than that? But no, of course, she doesn’t agree.

Pink Glove is an act of persuasion – “…every now and then in the evening…” – despair – “…if you touch him again then I’m going…” – loyalty – ” you got it right first time” and disappointment – “should you stop being you?” It’s a frustrated, near-distraught rant, full to the brim with self-pity and other-pity. This feeling is amplified by Jarvis’s vocal performance, woring as a fair approximation of a man having a breakdown, veering between told-you-so triumph and utter desperation. At times it even sounds like he’s crying.

Into this fray comes Ed Buller, ramping up the alienation with a Bowie-esque vocal echo and spooning on his usual layers of atmospherics on top of Candida’s keyboards*. The effect is stronger the more you focus on it – dream-pop intermingling with horror soundtrack ambient, with occasional power chords bursting through the murk, the galloping rhythm of an immense impending something driving it forward. There’s something vaguely hymnal about it, and something odd, sickly and nauseous too.

It sounds astonishing, doesn’t it – and indeed, Pink Glove has done well in all manner of popularity polls – but for some reason I’ve always found the song hard to love. It’s something about the lack of a climax, the smoothed-out, soporific production. I can appreciate it, especially when reduced to its component parts, but somehow it just feels distant. it doesn’t move me, and it should.

Perhaps Ed Buller is to blame again – a shame as by all counts he’s done a fantastic job here, and yet it’s all too much. To demonstrate this, have a listen to the John Peel session version to pull off the (beautiful) polyester veneer and reveal the surprisingly tight post-punk song beneath. There’s almost nothing in the way of production here to hide behind, and given the chance the song comes alive. Nick’s sparse, perfect drumming propels the thing along while Russell juts in with his wah-wah guitar, and Jarvis controls himself a bit more (which sounds like a loss, but it’s not.) Much as with Wishful Thinking a decade earlier, in producing something perfect-sounding, something vital was lost, and all in the name of creating a uniform feel across the LP. It’s a shame.

*In order to replicate this in a live setting, the group had to rope in Mark Webber – and since Pink Glove was something of a live staple it meant that he was suddenly needed on stage a lot more.