IT'S OVER!After a boiling hot afternoon in the middle of, well, nowhere really, Pulp played their first live date of the year in a Marquee set against a backdrop of a seventeenth century semi ruined castle and the million tiny bookshops for which Hay is so well known. Everyone I spoke to said what a great little festival it was, what a strange place Hay was, and how ace Pulp were. They were joined on stage by Richard Hawley (guitar) and Pablo Cook (percussion).
The set included several not - played - anywhere - before new songs, including the fantastic Wickerman, Bad Cover Version and Trees. Other, more familiar new songs included Weeds, Sunrise and Minnie Timperley. The inevitable Common People was there too along with a great F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E., This Is Hardcore, The Fear, Sorted..., Help The Aged, A Little Soul, umm...and maybe some I've forgotten. Oh yeah - Party Hard. More reviews & photos to follow, can't stop, I'm off to Homelands!
Links to reviews:
Brief interview with Jarvis on BBC Radio Wales NME Independent Worldpop
Simon Price of the Independent on Sunday said "Pulp were always about text as much as texture, so why shouldn't they be the opening turn at a literary festival? ...In a set cleanly divided between old-ish and new, there's nothing pre 1995, but Sorted was inevitable... and F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E. has lost none of its heart stopping drama...Tonight Help The Aged reminds us all where it all went wrong, but Party Hard, their pastiche of Bowie's Berlin cocaine funk phase, and the chilling The Fear are evidence that This Is Hardcore had it's golden moments..."
And here's one from Ian Macklin:
"They began, appropriately, with ‘Es and Wizz’ – but the 20 thousand in a field in Hampshire was transposed to about 700 in a tent in Hay on Wye. The couple in the queue who had come down all the way from Scotland had been unconvinced until they spotted the (formerly) bespectacled one pottering around town in the afternoon. The publicity machine had gone into reverse and most people seemed to have got there on rumour and word of mouth. The band remained stoically unphased and produced a stunning evening.
Jarvis is a superstar, whether he likes it
or not ( and you can be sure he does.) The band are only there as his
vehicle (don't tell them that - Ed.) and if there was ever any doubt about
who is boss and what the purpose of the exercise is, that doubt was
dispelled when early on he broke off between verses to deliver a withering
verbal attack on one of his guitarists for some minor rhythmic
misdemeanour (yeah but he does this all the time! - Ed.). The depth and
quality of the sound was extraordinary – as if tents have some acoustic
quality that most modern buildings lack and you could imagine the
reverberations filtering back from the distant scarp of the Black
Mountains. But the band remained immutably statuesque – almost as in a
tableau with an absolute minimum of movement other than that required to
operate their various machines. There was even something vaguely robotic
about them as if not to distract from the gyrations of their infamous
frontman. This is a seven piece band now with extra percussion and
keyboards but, boy, do they know how to stand still. At one point Jarvis
leant heavily on the bass player’s shoulder and stared into his eyes
without eliciting a flicker of response. They know what they have to do.
He was communicative as ever. The late
start was, he said, caused by the CIA/FBI who insisted on vetting every
piece of Pulp equipment in view of Bill Clinton’s appearance 48 hours
later. But as anyone who’s been to these festival shows can tell you,
the band always start an hour late anyway – its part of the myth
(Actually they started an hour EARLY - they were due on at 10pm - Ed.).
Jarvis expressed his preference for Clinton over Bush – cigars over
bombs and showed he’d done his homework by claiming to love Bulmers
Cider. This prompted the usual response as someone lobbed a can of
Strongbow on to the stage – empty, to his disappointment. How, he
enquired did you get that past my security? I needed to know that too
having been relieved earlier of my clearly dangerous plastic cup of Coke
– but I’ll bet some security man was quaking in fear at the post-gig
post-mortem.
The music was a mixture of old favourites
and things no-one had heard before from the forthcoming album. Those we
knew sounded better than the originals, particularly a version of Common
People which started flat and ended in a frenzy. The new things were
probably chosen for their instant accessibility and showed no signs of any
external touches from Scott Walker – all very Jarvis. ‘Weeds’ was,
unusually, about refugees and ‘Trees’ about, well,
probably about, well, trees. The most interesting was ‘Wicker Man’ –
yet another return to memories of Sheffield – subterranean Sheffield in
this case with an underground storm drain driven river which eventually
surfaces at the very spot where, yes, you guessed it, Jarvis met some
young lady for the first time. The one thing that worries me about the
Jarvis muse is that it is all about the Outsider and the Failed Love
Affair both of which he returns to again and again without ever letting us
know about Jarvis now. Still, its all very seductive with great expression
in the voice both speaking and singing set against that angular manic
mime-based movement of his. No-one else could say so much during ‘This
is Hardcore’ simply by minutely examining his fingers, one by one. That
goes in there……
Each song was perfectly complemented by its own back projection which reflected Jarvis’ arty pretensions. Again for ‘Hardcore’ the pictures were wonderfully understated with a washed out, blank faced lady who only removed her cardigan – nothing else happened at all. For ‘Sunrise’ there was a hypnotic chase of the sun seen through clouds, never quite appearing.
So, if you missed it, and most people did, this was a superb one-off performance by a man who apparently has so many hang-ups he should be afraid to get up in the morning. This however, is not a band, this is hardcore Jarvis Cocker".