THERE’S A PROFOUND, SELF-DEPRECATING moment at the end of track one on
40 Odd Years
, a very special CD Pulp have compiled for this issue of MOJO. It’s February 1982, and the young band have just played What Do You Say? in Sheffield’s Marples pub. “I hope everything’s going to go hunky dory from now on, but it probably won’t, you know,” you can hear Jarvis Cocker tell the audience. “Life’s like that – he said, using every cliché in the book.”
At this point, Pulp have existed for about four years. For the next decade, quite a lot more won’t go brilliantly for them. But the story of Pulp is one of resilience and brilliance, of uninhibited creativity in radically changing circumstances – and of avoiding most clichés in the book as they go along. That’s the gist of
40 Odd Years
, too, and these 12 tracks dating from 1982 to 2025, most of which have never been released before. Here, you’ll find lost singles and unheard demos, legendary songs in putative form, and others evolving decades after they were written. Oh, and an improvised meditation on bees versus wasps. But let’s start back in 1982, upstairs at that pub in Sheffield… What do you say?