Fifteen Years in the Wilderness: The Making of Jarvis Cocker
Pulp formed in 1978. They didn't have a hit until 1994. In between: a broken hip, a failed record deal, years of obscurity, and the slow accumulation of everything that made Different Class one of the greatest British albums ever made.
Jarvis Cocker formed Pulp in Sheffield in 1978, when he was fifteen years old. He would not have a top-forty single until he was thirty. In between, he studied film at Central Saint Martins, fell from a window while attempting to impress a woman and broke his hip, spent years on the dole, and watched the music industry repeatedly fail to understand what he was offering. The wilderness years were not wasted. They were the education.
The early Pulp records are fascinating documents of a band finding its way. The debut album 'It' was released in 1983 on a small Sheffield label and sold almost nothing. A deal with Fire Records in the late 1980s produced a run of albums that were critically admired and commercially ignored. Cocker was writing about class, desire, and the texture of ordinary life with a precision and wit that had no obvious precedent in British pop. The problem was that nobody was listening.
"Fifteen years of obscurity had given him more material than most songwriters accumulate in a lifetime."
The breakthrough came slowly and then all at once. 'His 'n' Hers' in 1994 was the first Pulp album to reach the top forty. 'Common People', released in 1995, became one of the defining singles of the decade — a furious, funny, devastating account of class tourism that resonated with an audience who recognised exactly what Cocker was describing. The song reached number two in the UK charts, kept off the top only by Robson and Jerome. The injustice became part of the mythology.
'Different Class', released in October 1995, was the culmination of everything the wilderness years had built. It won the Mercury Prize. It produced four top-ten singles. It captured a specific moment in British cultural life with a clarity that has only sharpened with time. Cocker later said that the success felt slightly unreal — that he had spent so long preparing for an audience that he wasn't entirely sure what to do when one arrived. The fifteen years of obscurity had given him more material than most songwriters accumulate in a lifetime. The only problem was that he had used most of it.