Phil's Pulp of the Week - #1

Evenin' all. So since we've got this blog up, I thought it would be a good idea if we filled it with some musings/ramblings now and then. Make it more of an actual blog that people might read. So with that in mind I present to you the first in an irregular series of postings where I choose one song from Pulp's extensive, varied and altogether ace back catalogue and yak about it for a couple of paragraphs. With a format lifted entirely from another blog, this'll attempt to highlight some of the lesser known gems lurking in the band's past.

So we'll begin at the beginning, with 'Blue Girls' from the band's very first record, It.



Now despite what Jarvis might have said about Pulp's long pre-Island history (and there is some atrocious stuff in there), they did make some excellent music in the 80s. You can't keep true talent down. The first album might be a bit sappy and bad-twee in parts, but this one has a spare, melancholy beauty to it that they would have been almost unable to do in the glossy, high-budget 90s. It evokes chilly, damp school halls in winter in the way that Belle & Sebastian and the Smiths went on to make careers out of in their own ways (this came out in April '83, remember, predating Morrissey's band's first release by a month.) And it goes to show that so-called 'twee' music only really works when tempered with a bit of darkness, a bit of sadness.

His lyrics might be lacking a little bite, and his observations might seem a bit on the hazy side compared with the sharpness of his later years, but Jarv wasn't even out of his teens when this was made. It took years of watching and waiting, of frustration and experience, to bring that. What we've got here is a beautiful melody, an eye for detail and taste for metaphor, and some serious homemade charm. Those things never went away for him. Plus, that's his sister playing the flute. Keeping it in the family...