It isn’t impressive to have met Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker when you live in Sheffield—everyone has a Jarvis story. A colleague of mine went to a barbecue with him; a uni friend waved hello at a Leadmill gig; a lecturer spotted him at the train station. I met one of Sheffield’s most celebrated sons on my 20th birthday. It wasn’t at all organic—he was at the Crucible Theatre promoting his new sort-of-memoir Good Pop, Bad Pop. A born raconteur, Cocker was as loquacious and charming onstage as one might expect, but what lingers in my memory is a sense of feeling rather out of place as he reminisced about Sheffield circa the mid-1980s to the audience’s palpable delight. I slipped out early to ensure a prime spot in the queue for autographs. After waiting for 15 minutes and spending the whole time trying to come up with something clever to say, I managed to quietly squeak out “It’s my birthday today.” So quietly, in fact, that he responded (not unkindly), “Sorry?” I was mortified. I did manage to repeat myself—my copy of Good Pop, Bad Pop bears the inscription “To Kate, Happy birthday! Jarvis x”—but I was acutely embarrassed by quite how self-conscious I’d felt.
Cocker is something of an avuncular figure these days—a BBC stalwart; the host of a cozy, faintly ASMR-esque Radio 4 show; an elder statesman of pop. My first sighting of him, however, came in my early teens via a rerun of an old ‘90s episode of Top of the Pops, and as a result (for want of a more elegant turn of phrase), I really, really fancied him. I quite liked Britpop already—my parents were fans, though my mum liked Blur where my dad preferred Oasis. Pulp seemed different, though—older, artier, less ‘laddish.’ The Britpop label both helped and harmed them—they’d been around since 1978, but only started to gather momentum once music magazines in the early ‘90s began to establish links between their brand of erudite indie pop and other emerging groups like Suede. But Pulp was always far stranger even than pouty Brett Anderson and his foppish haircut. In a fondly nostalgic Instagram post, late bassist Steve Mackey characterized their sound as “Eastern European Balkans disco with acid house and Sheffield bleep music.” And then you had Cocker, a thoroughly bizarre figure for any 14-year-old to try to reckon with; etiolated, mincing, perpetually clad in corduroy flares and some horrifically patterned fright shirt. I was utterly smitten—never mind that my mum had been ardently in love with him when she was a teenager herself, nor that even in those videos of him in the ‘90s he was in his 30s. He was funny and intelligent and mild-mannered and turned into something else entirely when performing—a 2002 article from the Times describes him as “very sexual on stage in a twisted kind of way…gyrating…like a manic puppet who has just learnt to pull his own strings.” There’s an arch edge to the sex symbol stylings, certainly, but I don’t know that I picked up on that at the time.
The formative album for me was undoubtedly 1994’s His ‘n’ Hers—Cocker pants and moans and squeals his way through the album’s ten tracks like a man possessed. It would, frankly, be hilarious if he was not so startlingly sincere—there’s no “ooh, matron!”-style bawdiness undermining the histrionic lasciviousness. The sheer profusion of sex was more than a little overwhelming for me; sex under tables, sex with strangers, sex with your friend, sex with your friend’s sister, sex in the dying heat of a summer’s day, sex sex sex. Looking back, it takes on significance as the first piece of media I used to understand male sexuality. I’d never had a boyfriend, and the concept of ‘what men want’ was totally foreign to me. His ‘n’ Hers was a possible answer; or at least, it was precisely what a sensitive young woman hopes men might want. Cocker’s lyrics might, at times, be barbed (“I don’t know if you’ve seen her lately/But God, she’s looking rough”), but always there is the sense that he would treat you right—and it is you he is talking to; almost all of the songs are written in the first person and addressed to the listener. I looked at the boys at school and couldn’t recognize any of that sensitivity, humor, or erudition. I decided that the reasons were geographical. My local environment didn’t contain any boys like Jarvis, so I’d move away in order to find them. Sheffield, I determined, was surely the prime location—thanks to Pulp, I knew that Broomhill and Broomhall were different places, that there were little Formica-topped tables at the cafe within Forge Dam Park, that it’s a 20-minute drive from the city center to Damflask Reservoir. I’d move to Sheffield, I decided. It would feel I was meant to be there, and I’d meet a socially conscious, cerebral young man cast in the Cocker mould. A boy like Jarvis would never want me to “stop being [me],” like the classmate who went from slipping album recommendations on scraps of paper across the table to ignoring me entirely when his friends began to tease him about his perceived fondness for me.
In some respects, Cocker’s persona hasn’t aged all that well. Song after song of pining, bemoaning that the girl of his dreams is simply too blind to realize that he was right there all along, sulkily skewering said girl’s meatheaded boyfriends with pithy jibes—it’s clear why some find the album’s perspective wearying. The assumed irony of Jarvis’s persona becomes rather more disconcerting by the time the listener gets to Different Class, where attitudes to women deemed stupid or slutty or frigid verge on genuinely violent. “Pencil Skirt,” for instance‚ and its refrain (“I really love it when you tell me to stop/Oh, it’s turning me on”)—makes me squirmingly uncomfortable. But it’s also a rather pedestrian piece of music, and as such, relatively easy to dismiss. The same cannot be said of “I Spy,” a thundering, savage epic wherein Cocker’s lyrics take on an overblown-but-nonetheless-infectious sense of hubris. But it’s women who are the locus of his fury, a vessel to be used in the war between the “haves” and “havent’s,” as “I Spy”characterizes these two factions. With no small degree of discomfort, I realized as I got older that I was probably closer to the blithely ignorant class tourist from “Common People” than the plucky young girl in her crocheted halter top portrayed with palpable affection in “Inside Susan.”
This suspicion on my part was compounded when I moved to Sheffield. Writing about her favorite Pulp lyrics in The Guardian, Long Blondes vocalist Kate Jackson referred to the manner in which “Sheffield is like another woman, a soft umbrella under which all his stories play out. Sheffield is all encompassing, taunting cheekily, inviting us out or telling us to stay in. I wanted to be there when I heard [“Sheffield: Sex City”], so I moved there!” I suppose I did the same thing. A monumental, almost Ballardian work that finds sensuality in concrete, bus shelters, and lampposts, “Sheffield: Sex City” is perhaps the purest distillation of Cocker’s tendency towards personification—and feminization—of the city. This hazy, dreamlike vision of Sheffield as a maze of looming apartment blocks melting in the heat undoubtedly had a huge effect on my vision of the city prior to my arrival. I would imagine that the title of Sheffield: Sex City might hold true for me specifically, though it hasn’t panned out that way. I love Sheffield, but I don’t find her especially sexy—or, at least, she hasn’t proven to be for me. But then again, I don’t know her all that well, though I’ve lived here for two years. I worry, sometimes, that she might not ever truly let me in, that I’m marked as an imposter the minute I tell people I’m from Baaah-th. Some weeks ago, my German teacher asked the class if any of us had been to the illegal rave that had kept half the city up the previous night. I hadn’t, but I wished ardently that I was enough of a part of Sheffield’s connective tissue to
spend the night in some field, cradled by the city’s seven hills.
Living here, I wonder whether I ever understood Pulp at all. I’d been approaching their music as rather generalized tracts about how it feels to be a sensitive, arty person in an environment that tries to beat that out of you. There was no attentiveness on my part to how it might have felt to have been called Jarvis in Sheffield in the mid-‘80s, to be trapped in Thatcher’s Britain watching the South get richer whilst all your friends are on the dole. I got on a bus going the wrong way last year and ended up in Intake, the suburb of Sheffield where Cocker was born, and was mortified by how quickly I was reduced to thoroughly ridiculous middle-class cowering. I love Pulp, but where once I felt like I understood them, I now fear that I’m exactly the sort of person that inspired the genuine ire that one does not have to look too hard to find within Cocker’s lyrics. I will never ‘get’ Sheffield the way those who have lived here all their lives do—Sheffield: Sex City’s reference to “the fares [going] up at seven,” means as little to me as Cocker’s nonsensical ad-lib of “no cheese tonight!” in “My Legendary Girlfriend.”
I don’t listen to Pulp much when I’m actually in Sheffield—there’s something about it that feels acutely embarrassing. I’m catapulted back to my teenage self, who was so thoroughly convinced that Sheffield was a place where I’d feel I truly belonged, and based this conviction entirely on my devotion to one of the many bands the city has produced. When I’m back in the south at my parents’ house, however, I set upon my Pulp playlists once again with a rabid intensity. I once had a conversation with my A-Level Film Studies teacher, who was from Leeds and a hardcore Pulp fan, wherein he referred to His ‘n’ Hers as “a Sheffield album that could only have been written outside of Sheffield.” I don’t imagine that I understood what he meant at the time, but I get it now. I’ve had a pretty tough year so far, and more than once I’ve found myself on the phone with an old school friend in tears, insisting that I want to go home—i.e., the South. I am at home whilst I write this, and I miss Sheffield awfully, not just because a double gin and tonic is £5 there and £10 here. I don’t imagine I’ll live there my whole life, but perhaps she’ll always be the one that got away—a place I loved ardently from afar for many years, and yet could not quite understand once she was mine. But regardless of what happens between her and myself, one thing is clear. We’ll always have Pulp.
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