Garbage Days Revisited #4: Pulp - "Separations" (1991)

 

"Oh I've wasted all my time on all these stupid things that only get me down/And the sky is crying out tonight for me to leave this town" - Pulp - "Countdown"

In the summer of 1995, the question on everyone's lips was "So who do you prefer then, Blur or Oasis?" And, of course, the sensible response was "Dunno mate. I f**kin' love Pulp though."

I think my first encounter with Jarvis Cocker et al was hearing Babies on Top of the Pops in the summer of '94 - I remember enjoying seeing him wearing an "I Hate Wet Wet Wet" T-shirt which automatically scored him brownie points with me as this was in the middle of the nuclear winter of their seemingly endless run at number one with that Troggs cover from that terrible Richard Curtis rom-com. I bought it and its predecessor Do You Remember The First Time? soon afterwards but for some reason it took me until the following year to buy the excellent His 'n' Hers album.

Actually, thinking back, I do remember the reason - I had a serious crush on a girl a year older than me who I knew from my local youth club at the time ("Well it happened years ago, when you lived on Stanhope Road...") and was trying to get chatting to her one evening while a bunch of us were sat drinking cider down by the war memorial in town (as was our wont at the time before we were old enough for the pubs to serve us). I mentioned the band and how awesome I thought they were.

"Oh, them..." she replied, "Yeah, I heard their album recently, I didn't think much of it to be honest - I mean it just sounded put on to me..."

I quickly changed tack and said something along the lines of oh yeah, I guess maybe they're not that good then. Stupid stupid boy. I never did get to go out with that girl - I think she ended up going out with some guy from the rugby team instead probably. Looking back now, it was probably a blessing in disguise.

A year or so later of course, Pulp were pretty much inescapable and the story there has been told a million times. I remember listening on Radio 1 to their triumphant headline set at Glastonbury when they filled in last minute for the Stone Roses and seeing them on the Britpop TV special curated by Damon Albarn that summer. After Blur, they were probably the most commercially successful band on there at the time but while Albarn and co were floundering around with the dreadful Chas 'n' Daveisms of Country House, Pulp absolutely slayed it with Common People and within a few weeks that single would be on its way to number 2 in the charts and announce the band's arrival as bona fide superstars.

Of course though, that isn't why we're here today. We all (I hope) know about the brilliant His 'n' Hers and the even better Different Class (which for me just edges out Definitely Maybe as the definitive Britpop album) but we're talking about a slightly deeper cut in this episode of GDR. As has been well documented, prior to their chart breakthrough in 1994, Pulp had actually been an active band for a good 15 years and had been releasing records as early as 1983. The band's sudden breakthrough led to Fire, their label through the '80s, quickly re-releasing a lot of their old output, much to the band's chagrin. And, of course, as eager new Pulp fans, a lot of us went out and bought it to investigate.

Pulp's '80s albums are...well, if it wasn't for Jarvis' unmistakable vocals you'd probably be hard-pressed to identify it as the same band. Their debut album, 1983's It (the line-up at the time featuring Simon Hinkler from the Mission on guitar) was pretty much standard Smiths-style early '80s indie while 1986's Freaks and the odds 'n' sods Masters of the Universe saw a more gothy sound (with a definite Velvet Underground influence) coming to the fore. However, by the late '80s, after a few line-up changes, they were starting to hit on the sound that would eventually take them to the big time a few years later and Separations (released in 1991 but recorded a couple of years earlier - the group were at loggerheads with their label Fire by this point and the album only saw the light of day after they left for Gift records at the turn of the decade) is probably the great undiscovered gem among Pulp's back catalogue. Had they released this as their major label debut, I don't think it's an overreaction to say it would have held its own commercially among the ones that came after it.

Separations is a bit lighter lyrically than Freaks which came before it but still a bit darker than what would come afterwards - Love Is Blind's tale of waking up after a regrettable one night stand with its lyrics of "We held hands and we looked out of the bedroom window/We could see all the buildings collapsing around us/So we kissed and we laid on the bed and we waited for the ceiling to fall in/But it never did - in the morning it was all still there/The spilled milk and the dog-turds in that grey ashtray morning light". The almost Eastern flavoured Don't You Want Me Anymore with its tale of a guy returning to the town and the girl he left 18 months ago to pursue dreams of the big time only to discover she's left him for someone else and he's now a local laughing stock follows it well before the gentle '60s style ballad She's Dead and the kitchen sink opera of the title track (which really should have been the album opener) keep things ticking nicely before the Nick Cave style poison waltz of Down By The River finishes side one well.

Side two gets off to a flyer with the album's two singles - the panic attack of Countdown (the story of Jarvis realising he would have to leave Sheffield if he was serious about making it as a musician) and the creepy stalker tale My Legendary Girlfriend before Death II sees Jarvis going into almost full meltdown mode over the end of a relationship ("Now the lonely nights begin and there is nowhere left to go/But watch my spirit melt away at the D-I-S-C-O/I must've died a thousand times/The next day I was still alive"). We've all been there at some point. Which just leaves the slight oddity that is the house influenced This House Is Condemned with guitarist Russell Senior taking lead vocals to guide the thing home.

Realistically, Separations never stood a chance of being a hit album - it was released on a label that the band had already left and basically came out as an afterthought with Fire doing next to nothing to promote it. But I'd argue that it's this album which marks the start of Pulp's imperial phase and that had these songs come out on an album after they'd signed to Island (the major where they eventually ended up), they would have had the chops to have been hits in their own right. As it is, it was left for us to discover them when the album was re-released in the wake of Different Class topping the album chart and saying "Ahh, so this is where it all started..."

In a weird kind of way, when I heard Separations in early '96, it also kind of signalled the beginning of the end for Pulp - similar to how I mentioned with Carter USM in the very first Sounds From The Junkshop, they'd hit the top of the mountain and the only way to go was down. The departure of Russell Senior after twelve years with the band seemed to throw them into a tailspin and it seems that Jarvis' new persona as a Britpop celebrity was something he took to somewhat awkwardly. Either way, when This Is Hardcore finally surfaced in 1998 it threw nearly everyone for a loop, a much darker album dealing with the black night of the human soul - lord knows what the reaction of the execs at Island must have been looking for a potential single. I have to be honest, I hated that album at the time (apart from later single Party Hard which is very much NOT in any way like the Andrew WK song of the same name), it felt like the band had disappeared up their own arses but I've warmed to it in the years since having got a bit older and wiser and seen the dark and seedy side of life a bit myself.

By 2001's We Love Life, it was pretty much all over bar the shouting - the band's fanbase gained through Britpop had mostly been alienated via This Is Hardcore and the comeback single Sunrise (a great song which should have got more attention than it did) limped to just outside the Top 20 before disappearing with an anvil round its neck while the album made the Top 10 but was gone from the charts within a month. Again, a shame - it's an underrated one and a good listen.

It's one of my eternal regrets that I never saw Pulp live - by the time I got wise to them they'd just finished their UK tour to promote His 'n' Hers and by the next tour they'd graduated to the enormodomes and I couldn't afford the ticket prices. I even missed them playing festivals in Leeds twice - the first time because I was away on the weekend of the Heineken Free Festival which they headlined in 1995 (just a month or so after their Glasto triumph) then when they headlined the Leeds Festival again in 2001 I knackered my ankle on the first day and had had to go home early to sulk and take Nurofen. Maybe I'll get the chance to set that right one day - I certainly hope so. However, for those who love His 'n' Hers and Different Class, you could definitely do a lot worse than give Separations a spin as well. Had it not been sunk by record company politics and had a major label budget behind it, I genuinely believe this would have been a deserved hit.