Truth and Beauty by Mark Sturdy

Author:Mark Sturdy [Sturdy, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-103-5
Publisher: Music Sales Limited
Published: 2009-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

Jarvis’ team – or, more accurately, Jarvis – won 47 to 34 and, in a funny sort of way, things were never quite the same again. “I was completely pissed,” he admitted later. “I felt I’d struck a blow. Those kinds of things are important to me. I was sick of people letting you down, being crap and boring on shows like that. If you think, this person is from a group that is my kind of thing, not a cheese-master like they usually have on, then you want them to do well.”286

The thought occurred, and not for the last time, that we’d just got the kind of pop star we’d always wanted.

The metamorphosis of Jarvis from Minor Indie Celebrity to All-Encompassing Pop Messiah continued over the summer with a string of festival appearances. T in the Park, Glastonbury and Reading, all of which were televised, demonstrated that Pulp’s music was now, without a doubt, big enough to communicate itself to thousands on an open-air stage in the middle of the afternoon – as was Jarvis’ personality. His between-song chat had acquired a kind of deadpan mock-gravitas: not many people could say things like “It’s easy to get lost here, so if you want to get your bearings, you are at Glastonbury, we’re Pulp and we’re going to play some songs” sound so incredibly weighty, yet somehow funny at the same time. Pronouncements like “You can’t be anything but what you are – and that’s not a life sentence, it’s a fact” (at Reading, just after playing a new song called ‘Common People’) should, by rights, make you want to smack him for being so pompous, but instead they manage to be Godlike.

Meanwhile, Fire Records were ensuring that there was no danger of Pulp’s back catalogue getting lost in the rush toward the glorious pop future: they’d already reissued Freaks on CD, and in summer 1994 followed it up with Masters Of The Universe, a useful compilation of the Little Girl and Dogs EPs, plus the two singles from Freaks and their attendant B-sides. Jarvis agreed to write sleeve notes for the release on the understandable condition that ‘Silence’ was omitted, only to see his contribution replaced, upon the album’s release, with a piece written by Clive Solomon.

“I don’t know why,” he remarked, “because it doesn’t say anything completely derogatory about Fire.”287Perhaps not, but maybe it wasn’t the wisest move to include the ‘Tunnel’ story (from the rear sleeve of ‘They Suffocate At Night’) in its entirety, followed somewhat unfairly by comments drawing attention to the fact that the date he chose in the song for the day his life lost direction was the same date Pulp signed to Fire Records. Also, perhaps Clive Solomon wasn’t overly keen on allowing Jarvis to air his view that Pulp’s first period on Fire coincided with “the most depressing period in my life”, and that the songs were “recorded in Sheffield in crappy little studios for hardly any money”288 – not on the back of one of his own releases, anyway.

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