A totally Different Class….

There were lots of reasons why I couldn’t be at the Electric Picnic last night to see Pulp play live, but funnily enough, this morning, I can’t remember any of them. I’m sure the two kids under four ranked high in the list, followed swiftly by having to be in work this morning. Throw in the fact that I tend to only attend festivals that I can walk home from and there you have it. All perfectly sound, grown up reasons, but whatever, it’s too late now.

Because I hear they were amazing, and it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. I predicted it. I dreaded it. Because Pulp’s Different Class album has been my ‘Desert Island Disk’ for as long as I care to remember.

I’m looking at my original inlay card now. So dog –eared, faded & well thumbed that it’s hard to read the lyrics anymore. But I don’t need to, I know every, single song as well as if I’d written them myself. Which of course is ridiculous, because I’m not a song writer. But then these are not just songs. Each of the twelve tracks on this album are an individual work of divinely crafted story telling.

And I’m not even sure if the stories I read behind them are what Jarvis Cocker intended but that probably doesn’t matter. It certainly doesn’t matter to me anyway and it didn’t matter when I stumbled across the album back in 1995. I think I might have actually bought the album for my older brother for Christmas, truthfully, I think I’d stolen it back from him by New Years Eve.

I was in love.

Just gone twenty and a complete day-dreamer to boot, it was a match made in heaven. I’d heard the big tracks before, Common People, Disco 2000 but it was the lesser known ‘I Spy’ and ‘F.e.e.l.i.n.g.c.a.l.l.e.d.l.o.v.e’ that drove me insane with their angsty bitterness, choruses that screeched promises of revenge ;‘And every night I hone my plan, how I will get my satisfaction, how I will blow your paradise away’ and gritty, twisted relationships ‘But this isn’t chocolate boxes and roses, its dirtier than that, like some small animal that only comes out at night’


For reasons I’ll go into another time (maybe) it was the anthemic ‘Sorted for E’s & Whizz’ that I could identify with most ‘at four o’clock the normal world seems very, very, very far away’ and yes, I might have almost phoned my mother to say ‘Mother, I can never come home again, cos I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere ‘ in my case under a motorway bridge in Maynooth. But there you go, that feeling is universal I guess.

I won’t go into them all. But they all resonated, ‘Monday Morning’ and it’s aimlessness of middle-youth, ‘Bar Italia’ and the grim reality of ending up in some grotty cafe, hugging a tea to try and get some feeling back into your limbs wondering what exactly just happened. The beautiful ‘Something Changed’ the regretful ‘Underwear’, ok, ok I’ll stop.

So Jarvis, I’m sorry I missed you. I’m really sorry. But I’m glad you were good, and I’m glad that, despite the regret, everyone that saw you enjoyed it. Because you might come back.

And I’ll be there.

And I might even bring my baby.

Or not.