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Jarvis Cocker has suggested that Pulp may never return again, having said that their previous reunion tour “brought that chapter to a satisfying end”.
After going on a nine-year hiatus in 2002, the Brtipop legends played a slew of shows at the turn of the decade, including a now legendary surprise set at Glastonbury 2011 and a headline slot at Reading & Leeds that year. They haven’t performed together since December 2012 when they played a homecoming gig in Sheffield and two shows aboard the SS Coachella Cruise.
As frontman Cocker now prepares to release the debut album with his new band JARV IS…, he’s said that his Pulp days are behind him.
“We got back together in 2011 and 2012 and we did quite a lot of shows and for me, that really brought that chapter to a satisfying end,” Cocker told The Creative Independent. “We rehearsed for quite a long time and I think we’ve managed to play the songs convincingly and authentically, and by that I just mean that we managed to locate what the songs were about. They still rang true.”
While admitting that his pride in the songs and the way in which they still connected provided him with the comforting knowledge that he hadn’t “wasted his life on rock and roll or something like that”, he also admitted that the shows provided him with a self of closure.
“I did feel that the last concert tour went as well as it possibly could have. But then I thought, ‘Well, that’s it’,” said Cocker. “You can’t just keep doing that. We didn’t play any new material. I was pleased about that because it wasn’t like, ‘Here we are, we’re back and we’re going to play you some old hits, but first you’ve got to listen to some new songs’. We weren’t trying to sell anybody anything. We were just trying to play what existed and bring it back to life in a convincing way.
“I thought it was pretty much a perfect tour, really; and that was a good end to that. But then I just had to try and think about what I would do after that.”
The band haven’t released new material since 2012’s stand-alone single ‘After You‘, which was produced by LCD Soundsystem‘s James Murphy.
Speaking to NME in 2015, Cocker compared Pulp to “a dormant volcano“. “You can think ‘wow, that’s dormant’ and then the next day your house has gone, because it’s erupted,” he said. “Everything to do with Pulp or to do with me happens at such a glacial pace, that’s it hard to tell whether anything’s happening or not, but when it does, the whole geography of the planet is changed.”
Cocker and Pulp bandmate Candida Doyle did reunite last year, however, for a celebrity edition of Bargain Hunt against The Happy Mondays.
The frontman has recently been occupying himself during lockdown by livestreaming ‘Domestic Discos’ from his home and delivering weekly bedtime stories online.
JARV IS… release their debut album ‘Beyond The Pale’ on September 4.
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