Time has been particularly kind to Pulp. As Jarvis Cocker points out on Spike Island, the lead single from their first album in 24 years, their 2002 split went largely unlamented: they had already succeeded in considerably reducing the size of their audience with 1998’s claustrophobic album This Is Hardcore and 2001’s Scott Walker-produced We Love Life. An ostensibly valedictory greatest hits album spent a single week in the lower reaches of the Top 75. And the year after their demise, John Harris’s Britpop history The Last Party noted tartly that Pulp’s music had “rather dated”. “The universe shrugged, then moved on,” sings Cocker, which is a perhaps more poetic reiteration of what he said at the time: the greatest hits album was “a real silent fart” and “nobody was that arsed, evidently”.
But subsequent years significantly burnished their memory. It was frequently noted that, besides the Manic Street Preachers’ A Design for Life, Common People was the only significant hit of the Britpop years that might be described as a protest song, a bulwark against the accusation that the era had nothing more substantial to offer than flag-waving and faux-gorblimey. At a time when ostensibly “alternative” rock bands had seemed suddenly desperate for mainstream acceptance, Pulp had become huge by sticking up for outsiders and weirdos. Mis-Shapes, for example, hymned the kinds of people one suspected some of Oasis’s fans would have happily thumped.
