Sheffield is not New York or London or Paris, but it does not need to be a city with its own music. Nestled in the very heart of the United Kingdom, Sheffield has been cast in the imagination of pop and rock lovers by Arctic Monkeys, which is undoubtedly the most important British group of the 21st century, but before there were others: Pulp. A prodigious band with a select creator like Jarvis Cocker, but also who welcomed during his existence another type of a huge talent like Richard Hawley.
On Filmin you can see the documentary Pulp: life, death and supermarkets by Florian Habicht. The tape is from 2014, but it is good to rescue it to highlight the elements that make it possible for a band to be so transcendental that, as if by magic, their music was impregnated throughout an entire city. That is, how a group ends up becoming an emotional issue that illustrates the environment from which they come with surgeon precision. In the film, which departs from the classical norms of musical documentaries, it is traced in the population of Sheffield as the entire universe of Pulp slides, a group that since the early 1980s embarked on a great journey of stupendous compositions .
After the arrival of the last English concert of Pulp, locals from Sheffield of all kinds and conditions (old women, children, teenagers, fans ...) comment on what they think of a group that some confuse with Queen (or Jarvis Cocker with Joe's nephew Cocker) and others say it is the band of his life or the one with "better lyrics than Blur" or the one that makes you dance on the dance floor like crazy. All the comments, sprinkled with interviews with the members of the formation, serve to demonstrate that Pulp is not understood without Sheffield and vice versa.
If Blur were the skillful strategists of brit-pop and Oasis the working-class heroes, Pulp represented the most refined and furthest proposal from the media circus. His lyrics were richer and his universe, always pivoting around Sheffield and Cocker's ideological support, was always a recognizable place as if it were a true movie with reality. Pulp's songs showed the lives of the people of Sheffield. Of those single mothers, of those neighborhood vendors and of those teenagers who aspired to a gram of hope in the well-known city of steel . As a specialist in the group's work states in the documentary: " Different Class had to do with the accent of the area, with its manners, with its origin ...".
Released in 1995, Different Class is a masterpiece of British music, one of those albums you enter to stay on. It's not just about hymns like Common People or Disco 2000 , but about all that acidic customs that it keeps. Effusive and melancholic, it is the great height of a band that since its beginnings in the eighties with It and Freaks mixed progressive mattresses with tributes to Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker. Jarvis Cocker, with his mischievous figure and biting language, had a power of seduction similar to those poetic crooners . Romanticism was Pulp's great asset. A romanticism that, without ever losing acid vision, was in a middle class (those common people of his magnificent song) without ambitious vital aspirations like wallowing with a fleeting fleeting love in a small hotel at midnight. Something ephemeral, but that is not forgotten as crazy and unpredictable.
As told in the great book by Juan J. Vicedo, Streets That Were Ours (Silex), Sheffield went from being in just two decades a city destined for the avant-garde to a marginal refuge. Boarded up and demolished buildings, closed factories, whole disappeared neighborhoods… and young people like Cocker remembering those street signs under the motto: “Sheffield, the city of the future”. "Posters showing people painted in space suits. They made them see that they would travel to Mars in the eighties, but the reality, as she sings in Glory Days , is that the eighties have arrived and the only thing they offer is to clean latrines, ”writes Vicedo. Sheffield would end up with the blockbuster The Full Monty, a 1997 film where a group of impoverished men become strippers to earn a living.
Jarvis Cocker told The Sheffield Star : "The future has been canceled due to lack of interest." And the group, after the success of Different Class, even knew how to anticipate the end of brit-pop in This is Hardcore , a work that should be more vindicable. On that album, as Cocker explains in the documentary, he thought about what his generation would be like when they were retired. Today, the present tells us that that future is called Brexit , with all the harsh causes and consequences of this earthquake for the United Kingdom. Before showing that future, This is Hardcore immediately addressed the present with solemnity. "Bergerac is over / hangover is over / men are over / women are over / cholesterol is over / tape recorders are over / irony is over / bye-bye, bye-bye," Cocker sings in The Day After The Revolution.
It was Diego A. Manrique who first read to him that, when it came to choosing between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he always kept the third track: the Kinks. Applied this premise to the era of brit-pop , a musical movement inflated by the British press without the same artistic significance of the glorious age of British pop in the sixties, when it comes to choosing between Oasis and Blur, I always say: stick with Pulp. Safe guarantee.