It seems weirdly fitting that Pulp have premiered their first album in 24 years with a song that appears to fret about the validity of returning at all.
Of all the alt-rock artists hoisted to mainstream fame in the Britpop era, they were the ones who seemed least comfortable with the kind of attention it brought them: a perennially ignored band who’d spent a decade striving to get somewhere, only to find they didn’t much like it when they did. Something of the prickly, confrontational outsider clung to them even at the zenith of their success – 1995’s quadruple-platinum Different Class is an album packed with waspish, witty ruminations on the British class system – while 1998’s This Is Hardcore offered a paranoid and occasionally harrowing examination of their era as celebrities, something its dense, doomy sound also helped to draw to a close.
Accordingly, Spike Island seems to use the Stone Roses’ famous 1990 gig where 30,000 people crammed into a Widnes field surrounded by chemical factories as a metaphor for disappointment and the way nostalgia tends to burnish memories: the fact that Spike Island was famously badly organised, musically underwhelming and plagued by terrible sound hasn’t stopped it subsequently developing a legendary status as a kind of baggy-era Woodstock. Perhaps Cocker is looking back on Pulp’s own supposed glory days with greater perspective: Spike Island references his discomfort with fame (“I was conforming to a cosmic design, I was playing to type”), and the indifference Pulp’s disbanding was greeted with in the early 00s, when a theoretically valedictory greatest hits album barely scraped the Top 75: “The universe shrugged and moved on”.
But Cocker seems emboldened at the prospect of his own second coming. He suggests that “this time I’ll get it right” and that he has “walked back to the garden of earthly delights”. He sings happily: “I was born to perform, it’s a calling / I exist to do this – shouting and pointing”.
Students of rock history might recognise the last three words as the title of an ignored 1976 album by Mott, the dogged but doomed attempt by members of Mott the Hoople to soldier on without lead singer Ian Hunter. References to 1970s pop-culture arcana are, of course, very Pulp – and so are a lot of other things about Spike Island: the disco-influenced rhythm (decorated with the distinctive sound of syndrums), the brief spoken-word section, and the sense that complicated emotions lurk behind its anthemic chorus.
For all the conflicted feelings at its centre, Spike Island is a noticeably stronger song than After You, the solitary new track spawned by Pulp’s previous reformation, in the early 2010s. Had Spike Island been released in their heyday – or instead of the strikingly downbeat Help the Aged in 1997 – it would doubtless have been a hit.
Equally, you could see some of its reflections on the past as not dissimilar to those offered by Damon Albarn on Blur’s 2023 comeback single The Narcissist. Whether Pulp’s forthcoming album More goes on to attain the same degree of acclaim as Blur’s The Ballad of Darren remains to be seen, but, for now, as attested by the excited texts pouring in after Spike Island was premiered on BBC Radio 6 Music, fans are likely to be delighted.
