Pulp 'Disco 2000'

Chart Peak: 7

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'Disco 2000' became Pulp's 3rd huge Top 10 hit of 1995 in December... Jarvis Cocker's songs are perhaps best placed "on a line drawn between Barry White and Alan Bennett" and Pulp have been rightly deemed "purveyors of some of the most beautifully observed vignettes of English life since the Kinks."

 Now, on this occasion I do have a nice coloured 7" to show you, although it's not strictly prototypical to the era, as the single was only released on CD and cassette at the time of its original chart run: the 7" and 12" formats were released a year later as part of a re-issue programme. I'm quite glad I have this outlet to show off for my investment of £2:49 fifteen years ago, because contrary to the label (and indeed to logic) my copy doesn't actually feature the 7" mix, just the standard album version (which is very good of course, but I already had it) - I'm guessing a lot of purchasers of these formats were collectors and uninterested in actually playing the record.

I don't entirely know why the single version was called a 7" mix when no such format existed (no corresponding 12" mix was released, though other remixes do exist) but it's a track worth tracking down if you can. It's slightly longer than the album track and a bit less rocky; it was reworked by Alan Tarney, not exactly a trendy name in the mid-90s but producer of, among other things, 'We Don't Talk Anymore' by Cliff Richard. You can see why this pedigree would appeal to the Pulp aesthetic, with its ironic but genuine appreciation of vintage pop culture, especially since the main riff in the song was widely compared to Laura Branigan's hit 'Gloria', a record it's probably cooler to like now than in 1995. This mix even adds a spoken middle section from Cocker (I don't know whether it was newly recorded for the occasion or merely edited out of the album cut), something that it's fair to say had ceased to become a regular feature of hit singles by this point, and doesn't really seem to have survived the end of Pulp's own chart career, though it's not something I feel urgently needs a revival to be honest. It only works when Jarvis does it, such is his skill in walking the fine line between parody and sincerity. He's claimed that the lyric is based on personal experience, with only a small amount of artistic licence on the details; but whether that's true or not it's an effective portrayal both of unrequited teenage love (and lust) and of nostalgia for lost youth. I'm just about old enough to remember when the year 2000 seemed like the distant future (indeed, when we still called it "the year 2000") and since Jarvis Cocker's about 15  years older than me that places the main action, and the suggestion of a reunion, somewhere in the 1970s; but by the end of the song at least we're clearly hearing from the circa-1995 protagonist reflecting on his lost crush and imagining the possibility of them meeting up. It's a brilliant detail that the chorus specifies a time and place but not a date: it's both realistic (from the teenage perspective) and pathetic. You can almost imagine our man wondering whether to go there on the off-chance every day for a year... and then of course realising how sad that would be. It's this very pathos that keeps the lyric from being maudlin (as if there were a happy ending) or creepy (as it would be if he turned into a stalker). Instead it's just quietly sad and funny.

Credit is also due to Pulp for effectively banning the track from advertising and trails during 1999, which must have cost them some royalties in the short term but stopped us getting too sick of it. And whilst the video is largely outside our remit here, it seems wrong to deny it a cursory mention, if only to notice that Cocker had a sense of humour about his media ubiquity at the time, and perhaps handled it a little more deftly than Supergrass did.

Also appearing on: Now 31, 32, 35, 39
Available on: Different Class

Pulp 'Sorted For E's And Wizz'

Chart Peak: 2

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Another of Pulp's true life stories, 'Sorted', was a massive No.2 smash in early October 1995... It followed the anthemic 'Common People' into the Top 3

Another track that feels like a slight misfit, despite its nominally high chart position: it was of course a double A-side with the more obviously commercial 'Mis-Shapes', which makes this seem an almost deliberately obscurantist choice, though by no means an unwelcome one for those who like me are fans of Pulp and have bought the T-shirt. Well, actually I think it was a present, but anyway I'm wearing it as I write this, so I'm still going to count it.

What I didn't do was buy the single itself, so I missed out on the notorious sleeve that caused a tabloid storm. I have a vague memory that in the panic to be seen as doing something, the video ended up being banned, although it's actually quite innocuous live footage, rather disappointing compared to the usually more imaginative Pulp promos. And they did still get to do it on TotP. There was always likely to be a fair bit of controversy about the title and subject matter of the song in any case, no matter that the song is hardly a ringing endorsement of recreational drug use: a nuanced view wasn't what the red-top press was interested in selling back then. Presumably this is why the record company ultimately insisted on the double-A.

Our setting being a possibly illegal rave, it's clever that the track fades in with a cheering crowd, but that's not a sound effect: the basic track comes from their Glastonbury performance that summer, albeit with considerable overdubs and an entirely re-recorded vocal; even more re-recorded in the single version that appears here (sometimes called the 7" edit, though the track wasn't actually released in that form until a year later) to remove the rude word from the second verse. You can still hear traces of these origin in the reverby sound of Jarvis Cocker's acoustic guitar, and is that a trace of feedback at 2:55? The crowd drift in and out too, although that's obviously a deliberate production effect. I don't know why they chose to work on this version rather than starting from scratch in the studio, but the effect works as more than just scene-setting; there's a slightly distant ambience about the sound that mirrors the lyrical theme of a crowd playing lip-service to togetherness and brotherhood but are unwilling to bond on any deeper level. Indeed, with hindsight, it's really the emptiness of the promise that's the main lyrical theme of the song, more so than any pro- or anti-drug interpretation that might have attracted more attention at the time. At the same time, of course, the production skills of Chris Thomas make this much better than a straight dub of the live version; in particular, Cocker's vocal is masterfully phrased in a way he couldn't have guaranteed in one take, and there are a few lyrical variations too. Most impressive of all is the vocal arrangement on the chorus with multiple overdubbed Cockers: particularly on headphones it sounds like one of them is whispering right down your earhole, creating exactly the right emphasis for the ominous lyric. Between the two songs on offer this was reportedly Island's most pre-ordered single up to that point (though it's not clear whether those were customer or just retailer orders) and widely tipped to become Pulp's first Number One single, but in the end it was outdone by the aforementioned 'Fairground' by U2.

As it happens, a connection did finally emerge between this and the previous track: when Pulp won the Mercury Prize for Different Class in 1996, they donated the prize money to War Child as the Help album had also been nominated.

Also appearing on: Now 31, 33, 35, 39
Available on: Different Class / Deluxe Edition