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THE FIRST TIME I INTERVIEWED PULP WAS AT

Sheffield’s Leadmill club, in spring 1992. Their single O.U. (Gone, Gone) was about to be released – it reached 133 in the UK charts, their biggest hit to date – and the show was a launch party which climaxed with Jarvis Cocker organising a game of musical statues for a can of beer, as Nevermind screeched backwards and forwards on the turntable. “Music’s the only thing that can keep you going,” Cocker told me that night, and Russell Senior, his right-hand man in Pulp at the time, noted how “a band that’s been together for a decade and has never sold any records is either very, very crap indeed or they’ve got something strong keeping them together. I can’t make up my mind which of those two it is yet.”

What followed, of course, suggests strength was key. There was Common People, Glastonbury, superstardom, Jacko, meltdowns, splits and reunions, and now there’s an excellent new album and this first Pulp interview in 23 years. As you’d hope, it’s a good one: a frank, poignant and often hilarious jaunt through the fortysomething-year career of one of the great British art-rock bands, the weirdo outsiders who became national treasures – without ever properly compromising their weirdness. “I’ve attempted to retire many times,” Cocker says now. “It didn’t last. Music is a magical thing, you know. When I sing those old songs, when you manage to inhabit the song again, it unlocks it. Some people might say it’s nostalgia, but it seems more potent to me.”