The music industry can be a dangerous place, and rock 'n' roll history is littered with countless tragedies of gifted artists lost too soon. As far as we're aware, however, only one superstar musician has faced the prospect of being trampled to death on his own farm.

This was the fate that Blur bassist Alex James once faced on his Cotswold farm, according to a story the 56-year-old musician has shared in a new interview with The Times.

Though he doesn't specify exactly when this near death experience occurred, James has a vivid memory of the incident, which occurred when he and his partner started cattle farming on their 200 acres property.

“I was going to Chelsea Flower Show,” he recalls to writer Polly Vernon. “I put on my Versace suit. Walking down to the station - it’s a nice, breezy walk - and the steers [young, neutered bulls] had been moved. I saw them in the corner of the field. Thought, Fuck, the steers are in there. They’re the only things you meet in the countryside that really aren’t scared of you. They just stare straight back at you.

“So they were right in the other corner. I thought, Well, there’s a pond in the middle, barbed wire fence round it. If it does all go to shit, I should be able to make it there before I get trampled to death. And I was exactly halfway and they all started running towards me. Couple of dozen. Weigh more than a tonne, these things. Fucking huge.”

The normally unflappable bassist admits that he “ran for my life”, and details how he ultimately escaped the hooves of doom.

“Put my hand on the fence post, vaulted the barbed wire fence. Up to my knees in the pond in my Versace suit. Completely exhilarated, completely out of breath.”

Asked whether it is more dangerous to be a rock star or a farmer, James is unequivocal.

“Oh my God, farmer,” he says. “Farmer.”

Shed Seven are in the running for a Number One record in the UK Album Charts this week, a triumph that would cap off a winning 2024 for the Britpop veterans from York. Earlier this year, they hit the top spot with their sixth studio album A Matter Of Time with their latest, Liquid Gold, seeing Rick Witter & co. rework some of their classic hits with added orchestral flourishes. One such song to be given a sumptuous makeover is their 1996 hit Going For Gold. The song has long been one of their biggest anthems but, as frontman Witter told this writer a few years ago, when the group originally wrote it, they didn’t even think it would be a single.

“I remember it being one of the more difficult songs to complete off that album,” Witter recalled. “There were certain songs that were more of a struggle than others but around the time we were writing Going For Gold, we were also writing Getting Better and On Standby and Parallel Lines, which flowed a lot more easily. But with this particular track, it took a while. We were writing bits of it but we just couldn’t work out a way of completing it, making it a whole. When we eventually did demo it, I actually remember saying to the rest of the band, ‘this is a really good B-side’. We sat on it for a while and then re-recorded it and added all the brass, which then made it start to feel a little bit more like a single. We’d written a lot of the other songs by then and it seemed to fit better after we’d re-recorded it. Before that, it felt weirdly out on a limb compared to all of the other songs we were writing.”

Witter comically remembered the occasion that Shed Seven were summoned to their record label to play them some new songs and Going For Gold not even going for bronze. “We had to go to Polydor, who we were on at the time, and play three or four songs in front of the Managing Director,” Witter said. “It was like that scene in The Fast Show, very, very traditional, sat there in a long camel brown coat, cigar in mouth, ‘Come on guys, impress me’. It felt like career make or break, to be honest with you. Going For Gold was one of the four we played him… I don’t think he was that impressed.”

Turning his mind to the song’s themes, Witter said it has zero association with the 90s game show of the same name (incidentally, the theme tune for the programme was written by up-and-coming composer Hans Zimmer). “I can certainly put it to bed now that Going For Gold is nothing to do with Henry Kelly,” Witter clarified. “It’s about how if you want the treasure then I’m the treasurer - are you coming for me, are you going for gold? Most of the songs and lyrics I write are about me, and it’s either about love, loss, sex, all of the common feelings that you would feel as a normal person. I think that’s another reason why certain people zoned in on us because they can relate to it, because it’s every person you know.”

Witter recalled hitting the promotional circuit to support the single release and getting disparaging looks from Richard Madeley when they appeared on This Morning.

“We’d stayed in a hotel in Liverpool, got too drunk and ended up miming it in a ridiculous fashion in front of Richard and Judy’s faces, which was quite bizarre. We met them and said a quick hello. It was one of those classic bored band things, I think Paul and Alan swapped instruments. I don’t think the telly programme found out until we were long gone and it had been aired. I’m not sure whether they were very happy about it. We were never invited back, but these things happen!”

Listen to the new version of Going For Gold below:

That Supergrass announced a 30th anniversary tour for their debut I Should Coco with a cheeky little Oasis dig – “no dynamic pricing included” - will have been no surprise to anyone who is a fan of the Oxford trio. The brilliance of Gaz Coombes, Mick Quinn and Danny Goffey was built on cheekiness, a band who were the little rascals of Britpop, a group whose debut hurtles along with the mischievous restlessness of a band who sound like they needed to get it recorded before being busted for doing something they shouldn’t have been doing. Which is exactly, as it turns out, what one of I Should Coco’s finest and most riotous songs is about. Caught By The Fuzz, which turns 30 in a few weeks, was Supergrass’s debut single, a perfect introduction for a band whose early days were characterised by a blend of classic British pop, punk’s chaotic energy and a Monty Python-style offbeat mania.

A few years ago, they told this writer how their classic caper of a debut single, which is a true story about frontman Coombes being arrested as a teenager, came about. “With Caught By The Fuzz, we were just sort of messing around,” recalled Coombes. “I remember being sat in the car the day after it all happened when I got arrested, and Danny was coming up with lines in the car, just going ‘Caught by the fuzz’, laughing. We had no idea it was gonna take off like it did.” “I was playing it on guitar,” added Goffey, “and this guy Darryl was in a towel and stuck his head round the corner and went, “I was still on the buzz!”

Coombes said that the’s song’s done-on-the-hop creation was how many of I Should Coco’s classics came together. “I remember a few just on our way out to the pub in the village then picking up an acoustic as we were going out the door and going, “look! We’re Not Supposed To…” they all came about like that, without trying to force the issue. We weren’t trying to think, “We’re gonna be this incredible band…”, we were in our own little mad world writing mad songs.”

Caught By The Fuzz will be present and correct at their reunion shows next year, which promise a full run-through I Should Coco as well as hits from the band’s other records.

Britpop was an excellent time for singles, huge indie-rock anthems that have stood the test of time (longer than a lot of the bands lasted, actually). But there was also a literal bonus flipside to all the hits, and that was the sheer magnitude of brilliant B-sides. Even better was that it was the era of both the maxi CD and bands being forced by their labels to release two versions, all backed with a plethora of bonus material to throw yourself into. For some bands, this extra homework resulted in songs to match the A-sides. Here are some of the best Britpop B-sides, crack cuts that never made a Shine compilation:

Ash – Sneaker (1996)

Northern Irish trio Ash were one of Britpop’s finest singles bands, their songs a perfect balance of punk-pop chaos and classic melodicism. If their lead tracks required something a little more refined, it was on their B-sides where they really cut loose. Their B-sides usually fell into two categories: cover versions of the sort that you didn’t see their more serious, frowny-faced peers attempting (John Williams’ Cantina Band or ABBA’s Does Your Mother Know, anyone?) or the sort of sonic carnage you save for the final ten minutes of a particularly drunken band rehearsal. From the Goldfinger single, Sneaker is one of the best from the latter category, a thrashy and riotous three and a half minutes that was a sort of cover version – the song was originally by a band of the same who featured Ash’s Mark Hamilton and Rick McMurray in their line-up.

Blur – Young And Lovely (1993)

It was around their second album Modern Life Is Rubbish that Blur really became Blur. Burnt out by an exhausting US tour, they returned to the UK determined to tap into a more British, homespun sound, emerging with a collection of songs melding Damon Albarn’s Kinks-y hooks with Graham Coxon’s Smiths-style guitars, Albarn's lyrics exploring the mundanity and melancholy of humdrum Britain. In doing so, they found their natural selves, to the point that classics such as this lovely, swaying number was relegated to a B-side, featuring on 1993’s Chemical World single. They’ve made sure since that it’s had its moment in the spotlight, featuring as part of the setlist in some of their warm-up shows in 2023.

Oasis – Acquiesce (1995)

Peak Oasis were so good at B-sides that the album collating them all, 1998’s The Masterplan, ranks as one of their best. In fact, if Noel Gallagher hadn’t been quite so antsy to get all these gems he’d written out there as soon as possible, then there might well have been a third classic Oasis album to sit alongside Definitely Maybe and …Morning Glory instead of Be Here Now and, you know, the other ones. There is a lot to take your pick from amongst their B-sides, whether it be Noel Gallagher in acoustic, contemplative mode (Talk Tonight, Half A World Away), one of their punkiest moments (Headshrinker) or straight-up how-the-hell-is-this-a-B-side epics (The Masterplan) but Acquiesce gets the nod. It’s an Oasis all-timer, combining a chest-pumping rock’n’roll groove with soulful vocal interplay between Liam and Noel Gallagher, the only time they duetted on an Oasis song. Surely, as they did around its release, they’ve got to open with this next summer?

Mansun – Ski Jump Nose (1996)

At their best, Chester quartet Mansun were wonderfully strange, both a prime Britpop band whose rattling indie-rock had super-powered 60s pop melodies but who were also too restlessly weird to properly fit in. By the time of their 1998 second record Six, they had mostly shaken off their poppier moments and become a sort of awkward indie-prog hybrid but with their debut album and a number of singles and EPs, they left behind plenty to mine for gems. From their ’97 Closed For Business EP, the pulsing, skulking Everyone Must Win deserves an honorary mention but Ski Jump Nose, from 1996’s Egg Shaped Fred single, is Mansun at their finest, giddy and silly and armed with a big riff and infectious, holler-along chorus.

Elastica – See That Animal (1994)

Led by the insouciant singer and guitarist Justine Frischmann, London quartet Elastica were one of the 90s most effortlessly cool guitar bands. Their best singles are draped around that streak of whateverness nonchalance – their big hit Connection might as well have been called I Don’t Actually Care If You Don’t Listen To Me – and their B-sides were just as soaked in art-school attitude. This one, which backed up Connection, is an excellent whirlwind of stomping drums, clanking guitars and Frischmann’s vocal eye-rolls.

Radiohead – Talk Show Host (1996)

Are Radiohead Britpop? Definitely not. Would they blacklist me for life if they saw I had put them on a Britpop list? Almost certainly. But if you consider Britpop to cover British bands with guitars making music that took a 60s template and put a modern spin on it then you can (sort of) include Radiohead. Just don’t tell them, please. Radiohead pushed things further forward than most, though, and Talk Show Host isn’t just one of their best B-sides, it’s one of their greatest songs, period. With its minimalist minor chord riff, stop-start, hip-hop-tinged rhythmics and a mesmeric Thom Yorke vocal, it’s the sound of a band beginning to turn rock music inside out. It was a blueprint for their next move, and their next move was OK Computer.

Manic Street Preachers – Dead Trees And Traffic Islands

Well, I’m playing fast and loose now, aren’t I? The Manics were not Britpop before Everything Must Go (if they were, 1994’s proto-Faster cut Comfort Comes would be in this list instead) and they weren’t Britpop after, but for a brief moment around 1996, they were definitely part of the Britpop parade. They were even on the bill at Knebworth, which is basically the gig version of getting a tattoo that says We Were Part Of Britpop. Plus this B-side to the era-defining A Design For Life is a proper little gem, a curio in their catalogue because (a) it contains a flute, (b) James Dean Bradfield sounds a bit like Sting on it and (c) it’s really good.

Supergrass – Wait For The Sun

The run of singles around Supergrass’s debut I Should Coco were basically E number rock’n’roll, fantastic and frantic indie anthems that were gone before you could get to grips with them. But in the Oxford trio’s B-sides, they were already hinting at something a little more contemplative to come. There was the doleful splendour of Odd?, which backed up the bouncy Mansize Rooster, and this, from the Lenny single, a plaintive acoustic number with lush melodies and a gentle sadness in its soul.

Suede – My Insatiable One

Even more than their albums, B-sides were where Suede fully and wholedarkheartedly embraced maximum Suedeness. It was a standard they set from the off – My Insatiable One featured as the B-side to their Britpop-igniting debut single The Drowners, setting a standard that they rarely let slip (well, until they got to Head Music and A New Morning, anyway).

Super Furry Animals – Guacamole (1996)

Welsh rabble Super Furry Animals were one of Britpop’s most inventive bands and they didn’t curb their wildly imaginative ways on B-sides, as this shows: it sounds like Elvis singing a Ziggy Stardust-song from the middle of a sleep psychosis breakdown. Glorious stuff.

Blur were getting sick of trying to nail what would become the title track to their era-defining third album but the answer was right in front of them in their studio. It is 30 years later this month that Damon Albarn & co. released their Parklife single, having released the album of the same name a few months earlier. The song helped to move Britpop from indie explosion into mainstream phenomenon, but it nearly never was.

“Damon wasn’t comfortable doing the verses, he just couldn’t get into character,” Graham Coxon told The Guardian in 2012. Luckily, the band had invited Quadrophenia actor Phil Daniels into the studio to recite a poem over their song The Debt Collector. That wasn’t working either (The Debt Collector ended up as an instrumental) but Coxon suggested that maybe Daniels could have a crack at the Parklife character. “At the line, ‘There was a piece of my heart’, Phil said, ‘Should I drop the ‘h’? If I pronounce it, it’ll sound more adorable,” Coxon recalled. “We didn’t want it to use a forced mockney accent, so he pronounced the ‘h’.”  

“The band and I were already pretty sick of that song,” added producer Stephen Street. “But he invigorated it and we were interested again.”

For his part, Phil Daniels reminisced about appearing on the track during a Radio X interview in 2019. “I used to play football for [defunct music paper] Melody Maker at the time and Steve Sutherland was the Editor and the manager and he said, ‘Some young band are interested in you singing this song’,” he recounted. “I said, ‘I haven’t heard of them and then I got in contact with Damon and we had a chat. He sent me a tape and did it and it was about 40 minutes and that was it. I thought little of it really.”

Daniels has appeared with the band at some of their biggest shows to perform the song, including last year’s gigantic two nights at Wembley Stadium. He says getting to do that is an added bonus. “I’ve been all over the world doing it,” he said. “Damon always said, ‘You can do it whenever you like. I’ll tell you when we’re going to an interesting country and you can come along if you want’. So I’ve been to Japan, South America, America… all over the place.”

He also performed Parklife with the band at their legendary 2009 Glastonbury headline. Watch that brilliant rendition below:

Pulp have announced a short North American tour dates to take place in September.

Jarvis Cocker's reunited band will play gigs in Chicago, Toronto, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, their first shows in the US and Canada since 2012.

“So, the encore continues,” Cocker says in a statement announcing the tour. “The songs came back to life and they want to be heard. They need to be heard. Come out and have some fun with us. You deserve it. Yes. You do.”

The Sheffield band will entertain the common people at:

Sep 08: Chicago Byline Bank Aragon Ballroom, IL
Sep 10: Toronto HISTORY, CAN
Sep 13: Brooklyn, NY Kings Theatre, NY
Sep 16: San Francisco Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, CA
Sep 18: Los Angeles Hollywood Palladium, CA

Following a string of sold out shows in the UK in the summer of 2023, Pulp played a handful of dates in South America - debuting a brand new song, Background Noise in Mexico - before closing out the year and ushering in 2024 with a Hogmany show in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The band also have European shows booked for this year, including scheduled appearances at Primavera Sound in Barcelona, Flow Festival in Helsinki, and Way Out West in Gothenburg.

When Roddy Woomble looks back over Idlewild’s career, he sees a band constantly out of step with whatever is happening around them. With the hindsight of being in a band whose 30th anniversary is starting to come into view, the frontman thinks it’s probably done the Scottish rockers a favour. “It’s allowed us to do our own thing,” he says over Zoom. “It’s not been a consideration if it fits in with the current trend or what people are listening to, it exists in its own little place.”

Woomble is not the sort of person to go sticking on his own records at home but he made an exception recently for his band’s 1997 mini-album Captain, reissued last month as part of National Album Day. “When you listen to an old record like that, it’s a bit like looking at a photograph of yourself when you were younger – you recognise that as you but at the same time you feel completely different from that, it feels a lifetime ago,” he says. Woomble was 19 when Idlewild made Captain and now he’s in his mid-forties. His life has been documented and reflected in the music he’s made.

Idlewild have released eight records since then, each one turning the dial. In the beginning, they were a thrillingly chaotic, punky mess. Then the youthful snarling was gone and they were erudite indie-rock melodicists trying to make sense of life in their mid-twenties. Over the intervening years, there has been jangly college-rock, yearning anthems, contemplative, countrified and wearied songs, poppy, bombastic and hopeful songs. At their peak, Idlewild could seamlessly go from sounding arty and abstract to rolling out an indelible hook that you made you think, ‘Well, that’s going to go in the Top Ten’, sometimes in the same song.

Captain captured the group – then a four-piece consisting of Woomble, guitarist Rod Jones, bassist Bob Fairfoull and drummer Colin Newton – in the sort of raw state that can’t be replicated. “It’s not dated because it’s literally four people playing live in a small studio,” reckons Woomble. “There’s not many overdubs and it’s what the band sounded like live.” The band were so unschooled at the time, he recalls, that they were baffled when producer Paul Tipler asked them to do a second take.

They were quick learners, though, and they had to be – as 1997 turned into 1998, Idlewild were being tipped as one of the hottest new bands of the year. Captain had been recorded for Deceptive Records, the indie label founded by Steve Lamacq, but by the time it came out in January 1998 Idlewild had been snapped up by Food, a subsidiary of Parlophone and EMI. Studio chops could wait, the label decided, with the opinion that the best way for Idlewild to break through was by people seeing their exhilaratingly fierce live show. “The whole year was spent in a van,” Woomble recounts. “We did support tours, club tours, we played everywhere and that really is what got us our fanbase. It was cool because - I’m not slagging off these bands cos it’s wrong to do that - but they put us on tour with bands that, basically, we were better than. It reflected really good on us because we’d go on, be jumping around, falling off the stage and just being really chaotic, and then the Warm Jets would come on and stand still and sing their songs.”

Woomble thinks a crucial part of why they made a connection with fans in those early days is because they were pretty much the same age as their crowd. “We were only 18, 19 and our audience was 15-20, so there was a real union there between the band and the crowd,” he states.

Another reason might be that the musical landscape Idlewild emerged into was basically a scrapheap. Britpop was long over, and its main players had either creatively run out of puff (Oasis, Suede) or gone off in search of fresh territory to explore (Blur, Pulp). There was a dearth of new bands to get excited about because there was a dearth of exciting new bands. To hammer home this point, a swathe of young groups began turning to the acoustic guitar – never a good sign that something interesting is about to happen. 

And then, writhing about on a stage floor seeing what damage he could do to his larynx, was Roddy Woomble and Idlewild. “You can look at that two ways,” he says. “One, we had our own appeal, we were on the fringes and it made us unique, but on the other hand we missed out on jumping on bandwagons that bands have had a lot more success by being able to do. It was post-Britpop and everyone was bored with what was going on and were looking for something new, and it was before The White Stripes and The Strokes and all the American bands came over in 2001.”

Being out of whack became a running theme throughout Idlewild’s career. By the time a new wave of British groups were making guitar music popular again in the early-to-mid ‘00s, they had moved on. “That was when Warnings/Promises came out and we were making like 60s and 70s Laurel Canyon-inspired country-rock, so we were totally out of step with that too!” he laughs.

By that point, their label Food had been fully incorporated into the major label machinations of EMI, a change that wasn’t wholly positive for Idlewild. “Food was quite small,” Woomble remembers. “Even though it was part of EMI, it was run out of a small office in Camden so it felt like a family-based thing, you got to know all the people really well.”

Artistically, Idlewild were on fire at the turn of the millennium, their second album 100 Broken Windows fusing the barbed attitude of their early work with a deft appreciation for songcraft, but the world around them was changing rapidly and they began to feel like the runt of the litter. “We were label mates with Kylie Minogue, Radiohead, Blur, Coldplay and we were obviously at the bottom of that pile in terms of popularity,” Woomble says. “Even though we were doing quite well, we were still like, ‘Wait a minute, now we’re being judged against these bands’. Being on a label with these worldwide massive acts when you’re struggling to get an audience outside the UK and even in the UK you’re selling 100,000 records instead of 500,000 records, which then on a major label wasn’t much of a success. We always got a sense that maybe we didn’t belong there.”

Despite that, they kept getting better. Their third record The Remote Part introduced epic anthems into the mix and signalled a commercial breakthrough, going to Number Three in the UK Album Charts. From the outside, it appeared that Idlewild were on the crest of a wave but there were tough times to navigate inside the band. Rather than remembering the period as a triumphant victory lap, Woomble looks back on it as failing to seize their moment. “That record was really popular in the UK and there was a lot of expectation for us and then everything sort of fell apart. Our bass player [Bob Fairfoull] left and we were doing these big shows and we weren’t really that good. It really felt like we missed our opportunity, just being unprepared for that moment and also realising how quickly the spotlight moves on.”

By the time Idlewild returned with 2005’s Warnings/Promises, they felt a little like yesterday’s men, bands such as Franz Ferdinand and Kaiser Chiefs now hogging the limelight. It wasn’t all negative, though – in 2003, Idlewild were taken out on tour to support Pearl Jam in the US for a month and Woomble looks back on the experience with fond memories. “It was their bass player Jeff Ament, he was a big Idlewild fan and they always ask bands they like to tour with them, they’re famous for choosing good support bands and treating them well,” he says. “It was just great. They play to 25,000 a night in these really cool venues and they were just so nice, such lovely guys, and if the place wasn’t busy before we went on, Eddie Vedder would go out and sing a few songs on his own and he’d introduce us onstage so we’d always play to a big crowd. If they wanted to have a drink with you, they’d hire a bar, not in a flashy way, just a neighbourhood bar and they’d hire it out so we’d all go for a drink and they wouldn’t get bothered by millions of fans. Nothing but good memories from that. And also we got to watch them every night, and they’d change the setlist every night and play long sets and very fan focussed, it was great. It was a brilliant month.”

Ups and downs for any band who manage to stay together for almost 30 years is inevitable – the trick is learning how to navigate them. It’s been almost five years since the last Idlewild record, but Woomble is confident that if the band, who are now a six-piece, can all get in the same room to work on new material, it’ll come together quickly. “The pandemic took it out the band a bit because we all live in different places and we were so separated from each other for a few years,” he explains. “We did plan to follow up the last record relatively quickly but now it’s been four years since that came out, five years nearly. We’ll definitely do one at some point.”

Woomble thinks that the various line-up changes they’ve made over the years around him, guitarist Jones and drummer Newton are what’s helped them carve out a long career. “Whoever has come in has brought in different dynamics and influences and challenges so it’s never been the same band but kept the core the same.” The same, but different. Always out of step, existing in its own little place. Roddy Woomble wouldn’t have it any other way.

BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge segment, in which artists are invited to record a song by another musical act, has thrown up some unexpected and left-field delights since its inception: who would have expected to hear Alesha Dixon covering Biffy Clyro's God And Satan, or Biffy Clyro covering Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's WAP, or Queens Of The Stone Age covering Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines, to name but three inspired choices.

When New Jersey emo kings My Chemical Romance were invited to make their second Live Lounge appearance on March 31, 2011, Gerard Way's band chose to salute one of Britain's true national treasures, Pulp, by recording their take on the Sheffield band's 1995 single Common People. Those familiar with MCR would have been fully aware of the quintet's love for Britpop - a fact telegraphed by their decision to cover Blur's Song 2 for their first Live Lounge performance - but those less versed in My Chemical Romance's history may have wondered how exactly Jarvis Cocker's scathing portrait of poverty tourism struck a chord with a bunch of American punk and metal kids once dismissed by lumpen indie-rockers Kasabian as "weird and dark."

Speaking to Radio 1 during after his band's second visit to the Live Lounge, Gerard Way filled in the blanks.

said: “This is a song that, growing up in New Jersey, it was very important to me and Mikey [Way, My Chemical Romance bassist]. It was very relevant to us, feeling like you were in a place you could never get out of, that you were never going to escape.”

He added: “I remember pushing carts at a supermarket listening to this song on headphones on a cassette player and wondering whether the hell I was ever going to get out of New Jersey.”

"It speaks to regular people and that’s why it’s so great. And they’re an amazing band.”

Way later told Vulture, "To me, Pulp really solidified what Britpop was. That was the band. When I think of Britpop, I think of Pulp. I followed them through Different Class and then discovered their back catalogue. And then This Is Hardcore came out; that’s my favorite Pulp album."

Watch MCR record the segment below.

When there’s a cultural movement as huge as Britpop was in the mid-90s, there’s going to be plenty of folks trying to jump on the bandwagon. Whilst the likes of Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Elastica, Supergrass and Suede created some genuinely classic albums during Britpop’s heyday, there were also a lot (and we mean a lot) of their peers who weren’t fit to zip up Liam Gallagher’s parka. In fact, even some of the big hitters could drop the ball and only get it together for three and a half minutes. Here’s 10 Britpop albums with only one song worth your time.

Oasis – Go Let It Out (from Standing On The Shoulder of Giants, 2000)

Yeah, let’s get this one out of the way early doors; Oasis’ fourth album is an embarrassment. Songs such as I Can See A Liar and the career-low of Little James would be bad for a bunch of Year 10’s entering their first Battle Of The Bands, for one of the biggest bands in the world at the time, they’re truly pathetic. It’s actually the opening one-two of Fuckin’ In The Bushes (which we’re calling an instrumental intro rather than a song) and first single Go Let It Out that stop this album from being a total, irredeemable disaster. Sad for it, more like!

Dodgy – In A Room (from Free Peace Sweet, 1996)

At the height of the Battle of Britpop, Dodgy were asked to pick sides but the London trio declared that it was irrelevant - Blur and Oasis were The Byrds and the Stones, they said, but they were The Beatles. We admire their confidence, but we don’t admire their music as much. Third album Free Peace Sweet contained their biggest hit, the deeply annoying Top Five single Good Enough. We’re not picking that, though, going for the first single and clear highlight In A Room, which promised something that Dodgy never again delivered.

Kula Shaker – Hey Dude (from K, 1996)

The success of Kula Shaker remains one of the great mysteries of the era. Crispian Mills’ “Eastern-inspired” psychedelic nonsense sounds like the very worst gap-year-posh-boy-in-India cliches, and would, at best, be described as cultural appropriation these days. Yet K was a number one album that eventually went double Platinum in the UK. Baffling. If everything on the record was as good as the straight-ahead retro-rock of Hey Dude then maybe we’d get it, but it really isn’t.

Ocean Colour Scene – Hundred Mile High City (from Marchin’ Already, 1997)

Ocean Colour Scene’s Moseley Shoals album is one of Britpop's standouts and featured a string of excellent hit singles. Due to its success, follow-up Marchin’ Already had a lot of hype surrounding it, but by the time it came out in 1997, Britpop was flagging and the Birmingham quartet were running out of ideas. It was a ploddy attempt to recapture the glory of the last album and the only time they managed it was really going for it on the slaloming rhythms of opening track Hundred Mile High City.

Marion – Sleep (from This World And Body, 1996)

So, The Smiths were good eh! We all loved them. We didn’t mind that Pulp, Suede, The House Of Love and a few others took healthy dollops of Morrissey and Marr and stuck it in their music, but by 1996 those aping the Manchester legends had started to get a bit... well, crap. Macclesfield four-piece Marion were one such band, exclusively copying The Smiths over a pair of forgettable albums. At least on the first one, 1996’s This World And Body, they had the upbeat and boisterous Sleep, which is a banger.

Gay Dad – To Earth With Love (from Leisure Noise, 1999)

London’s Gay Dad had possibly the worst name in 90’s music, a decade that saw the emergence of Limp Bizkit and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. You can get away with those sorts of names if you make decent music, Gay Dad did not. Debut album Leisure Noise arrived long after the party was over, and it sounded it, a mess of Pavement-style alt-rock, Britpop chirpiness and pure wackiness. It was all over the shop, but the album's first single To Earth With Love was maybe the only time they harnessed their chaotic energy into something that actually worked.

McAlmont And Butler – Yes (The Sound Of McAlmont And Butler, 1995)

Okay, we admit this is a harsh selection. When former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler and vocalist David McAlmont began working together, it was initially only because Butler wanted someone to sing a song he was working on called Yes. The song, an orchestral indie-rock anthem, was a commercial and critical smash, and to this day still sounds like one of the very best songs of the 90s. It was so good they decided to try and write some more material, which became 1995’s The Sound Of McAlmont And Butler. It's a perfectly serviceable album in the main, but is completely, utterly and totally dwarfed by that one masterpiece of a single.

The Seahorses – Love Is The Law (from Do It Yourself, 1997)

John Squire’s guitar playing was an essential element that made The Stone Roses one of the greatest British bands of all time. When he left, they went to shite so disastrously that a few people wondered if Squire was the thing that made the Roses so special. Those questions were answered in no uncertain terms when his next band, The Seahorses, came along. One remarkably average album of bog-standard Britpop with endless Squire noodling called Do It Yourself showed that, no, The Stone Roses were no one man band. Saying that, debut single Love Is The Law, is a lovely song. One that would be one of the best songs on The Second Coming in our opinion. It wouldn’t get on the debut though, chill out.

The Charlatans - Can’t Get Out Of Bed (from Up To Our Hips, 1994)

We all love Tim Burgess and his listening parties these days, don’t we? And when you think about The Charlatans’ back catalogue, it all feels pretty bulletproof from a distance; early adopters of a baggy aesthetic who transitioned into Britpop elder statesmen with a slew of iconic hits. History seems to have written out the ropey mid-90s period just prior to their Tellin’ Stories comeback-era now, though, but we haven’t forgotten. Up To Our Hips, from 1994, is a deeply unfocussed and rambling set of psych-rock bumbling, saved by the excellently summery first single Can’t Get Out Of Bed.

Suede – Electricity (from Head Music, 1999)

To many people, Suede are the definitive Britpop band; they were one of the first, they’ve got at least two classic albums and their excellent recent 2022 record Autofiction proved they’ve still got it. However, even they weren’t immune to the decline of the genre toward the end of the 90s. Their fourth album Head Music was a rather exhausted set of ideas, retreading the familiar ground of 1996’s Coming Up with far less in the way of memorable tunes. Some people like She’s in Fashion, we’re not dead against Can’t Get Enough, but the only song we’d really go to bat for is the luminous glam of Electricity. Think we’re being harsh? Wait until you hear what we think about its stinking follow-up A New Morning.

By Jarvis Cocker's reckoning, Pulp's return to their hometown of Sheffield comes just a month shy of their first show as a band, 43 years ago. It's a handy reminder that while the band rose to fame in the Britpop era, Pulp coalesced while the key players in 'Cool Britannia' were still sharing drags on cigarettes behind school bike sheds, and were actually birthed in the shadow of grandiose art-pop, brooding post-punk and sleek new wave.

"You will remember this show for the rest of your life," declare screens either side of the stage tonight, and sure enough the band's arrival is a grand affair worthy of occasion. A multi-tier stage set-up sees a string section underpin a powerful, protracted intro for I Spy, with Cocker's brooding baritone issued from the depths as he arrives on a rising platform.

For all the moodiness of the intro, it isn't long before the spell is broken. "Y'alright?" Cocker drawls at the song's end. "We’re Pulp. I’ve a question for you - are we going to have it, or have it?”.

And with that, the hits start to flow, a strutting Disco 2000 met with the exalted sounds of a city belting out anthems birthed in its confines. Cocker acknowledges as much a little later, stating that "playing Sheffield is just different, because you know where these songs come from."

For all the trappings of arena-level production that Pulp bring - confetti, streamers and laser shows, the whole nine yards - it's a remarkably relaxed, convivial atmosphere for their comeback. Cocker addresses the crowd like friends he's run into down the pub, resembling a strange, favourite teacher more than the typical rock star as he gives pithy monologues, and at one point throws chocolates and grapes from his pockets out to members of the audience. 

Unsurprisingly, the band's '90s era dominates their setlist - practically all of Different Class makes an appearance - but the sheer variety on display is testament to how supremely iconoclastic the group remain. The funky new-wave-by-way-of-disco beat of Mis-Shapes gives way to poignant, emotional alt rock on Something Changed - Cocker strapping on an acoustic guitar and dedicating the song to late bassist Steve Mackey who passed away in March - while elsewhere the band indulge in arch kitchen sink melodramatics on towering renditions of F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E. and This Is Hardcore, the latter's string-accompaniment and noir stylings making it feel like a Bond theme birthed in the ruins of a decaying empire. 

The solemnity of the instrumentals is often undercut by Cocker's playful stage presence; more than once he delivers lines whilst lying flat on the stairwell, while Britpop-era hits Pink Glove, Do You Remember The First Time? and Babies see him throw shapes that, given his clean-shaven visage, feel like he has found some miraculous portal back to the mid-'90s and will moon Michael Jackson at any moment. A swaying, triumphant Sorted For E's and Whizz even brings whimsy to the set, it's psychedelic light show accompaniment and bouncy beat evoking shades of Bowie. 

Support act Richard Hawley joins the band on guitar for a powerful Sunrise, the song building to an enormous crescendo as a multi-bulbed sun prop is raised with Cocker's silhouette at its centre, a suitably dramatic and epic moment to close the main set. An encore of Like A Friend and Underwear get the crowd riled up for a tub-thumping finish; Common People is amplified by some 13,000 voices roaring along.

Somehow, even that isn't the big finale. The massive clubland funk of After You captures the ecstasy soaked era that saw Madchester give way to Britpop itself and the band finally round out the night with Razzmatazz and the perfectly titled Glory Days, the screens now showing a supercut of Pulp videos and footage for a final blast of heady nostalgia. 

In an era where "massive comeback" often yields only a combination of massive pound signs and diminishing returns, Pulp's own encore feels in keeping with the spirit of a band that rose to prominence during one of Britain's most creatively fertile periods but could never be stylistically squared away as following the crowd. Cocker's misfits-celebrating crew are still very much marching to their own beat and proving that their inimitable, iconoclastic status still remains potent four decades on from their debut, with  vibrancy that makes their set feel like a truly special occasion. Common? Not in a million years, cocker.

Pulp Setlist Sheffield Friday July 14 2023

• I Spy
• Disco 2000
• Mis-Shapes
• Something Changed
• Pink Glove
• Weeds
• Weeds II (The Origin Of The Species)
• F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.
• Sorted For E's & Whizz
• This Is Hardcore
• Do You Remember The First Time?
• Babies
• Sunrise
• Like A Friend
• Underwear
• Common People
• After You
• Razzmatazz
• Glory Days

Blur's reunion activity is not going to be confined to live shows, as the group have announced the forthcoming release of their first album in eight years, The Ballad Of Darren.

The follow-up to 2015's The Magic Whip is being teased by the release of a new Blur single, The Narcissist.

Each member of the band has made his own individual statement about the forthcoming record, Blur's ninth album, which was produced by James Ford and recorded at Damon Albarn's Studio 13 in London, and in Devon.

“This is an aftershock record," says vocalist Albarn, “reflection and comment on where we find ourselves now.”

“The older and madder we get, it becomes more essential that what we play is loaded with the right emotion and intention," adds guitarist Graham Coxon. “Sometimes just a riff doesn’t do the job.”

Dave Rowntree chips in with, “It always feels very natural to make music together. With every record we do, the process reveals something new and we develop as a band. We don’t take that for granted.”

The bass player said something too, but nothing important.

The tracklist for The Ballad Of Darren is:

1. The Ballad
2. St Charles Square
3. Barbaric
4. Russian Strings
5. The Everglades (For Leonard)
6. The Narcissist
7. Goodbye Albert
8. Far Away Island
9. Avalon
10. The Heights

Listen to the single below:

Blur play an intimate show at Colchester Arts Centre tonight (May 19) and have underplay shows in Eastbourne, Wolverhampton and Newcastle next week ahead of a string of festival appearances in Europe, and two nights at London's Wembley Stadium in July, at which snooker legend Steve Davis will support. 

Due to Britain’s richest family pocketing £100 million from public funds to under-write some antiquated ceremonial cosplay verifying a system of hereditary power and elite privilege built upon theft, slavery and genocide, much of London is currently bedecked in red, white and blue, the colours of the Union Flag and the long-faded ‘Cool Britannia’ brand.

But not the northern edge of NW1. For running parallel to the pageantry, posturing and piffle, this weekend Camden is playing host to an altogether more egalitarian celebration, the 11th staging of DesertFest, the UK’s premier stoner rock, doom, psych, punk and sludge weekender. As a result, the spiritual home of BritPop is painted 50 shades of black. 

FRIDAY, MAY 5

This means that while dissenting anti-monarchist voices elsewhere are silenced via legally-questionable arrests by the capital's institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic police force, on Friday night Bad Breeding paint an unhappy, inglorious portrait of modern Britain, a reality-based counter narrative to the media’s uniformly sycophantic commentary on the world’s most expensive tourism ad.

Bad Breeding, it’s fair to say, are not a band entirely attuned to the archetypal  ‘Beards+Bongs+Bass+Booze’ DesertFest vibe. 'We are actively dissuaded from believing in solidarity and altruism by the ruling classes and the system of late capitalism that we live under,' runs one section of Atoms, an essay accompanying the vinyl edition of the group’s most recent album, Human Capital. 'The road ahead will be more treacherous than that already behind us… the desire of the wealthiest to preserve what they have hoarded will solidify and likely be enforced by violent methods.'

If holding such beliefs surely torpedoed the possibility of Bad Breeding receiving an invitation to perform at Windsor Castle this weekend alongside Take That and Katie Perry, they also mark out the Stevenage quartet as somewhat unlikely post-work Friday night party-starters. But the original Palm Desert scene grew out of punk rock-inspired DIY ethics and rebellious, anti-authority attitudes, and those descending into The Underworld are treated to one of the weekend’s most committed, passionate performances and a clutch of furiously uncompromising highlights from one of the finest, fiercest punk albums released last year.

Germany’s Kadavar are a much more ‘on brand’ DesertFest booking, and with the Electric Ballroom still buzzing from Church Of Misery’s well-received early evening set - a performance so well-attended that the full-to-capacity venue had to adopt a 'one in, one out' policy resulting in a sizeable queue up Chalk Farm Road - their appearance is greeted by roars of anticipation. Introduced by a tone-setting airing of The Beatles’ 1967 single All You Need Is Love, the Berlin group’s warm, fuzzed-up retro-rock sound is as welcoming as a bear hug from a life-long friend, and from the moment the rolling riff of Last Living Dinosaur kicks in, Kadavar deliver a set-of-the-day contender. The stomping mid-song breakdown in Come Back Life tees up the set-closing one-two of Doomsday Machine and a spacey, hazy Purple Sage, which successfully evokes the free-wheeling, experimental rush of London’s fabled UFO Club.

Back at The Underworld, a fired-up Discharge are a much spikier, nastier proposition. Given that Metallica, Anthrax, Machine Head, Napalm Death and many more have covered songs by the veteran Stoke-on-Trent punks - fronted for almost a decade now by New Jersey-born vocalist by Jeff 'JJ' Janiak - they’re a band that most metal fans, even if unfamiliar with anything beyond1982’s Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing, understand are influential. But tonight that seems to translate into lots of people showing up for 10-15 minutes in order to say they saw Discharge, rather than to actually watch Discharge, and the crowd thins out substantially by the time Decontrol closes the set. That said, if there was a wilder pit anywhere this weekend, we didn't see it.

Those who exited early in order to catch Graveyard at the Electric Ballroom may have regrets. A reliable regular fixture at DesertFest events in London, Berlin and Antwerp, tonight the Gothenburg quartet are polished, professional and - sorry - unforgivably boring. The likes of Bird Of Paradise and It Ain’t Over Yet are undeniably tasteful and classy retro blues jams, but when a former colleague wanders over to mutter, “It’s like watching Eric fucking Clapton”, en route to the exit it’s not intended as a compliment. Maybe it makes more sense when you’re stoned, but observed while stone cold sober the Swedes are decidedly heavy going, and not in a good way, and they close out DF ’23 day one in anticlimactic fashion. 

SATURDAY, MAY 6

The following afternoon, back at the Ballroom, fellow Swedes Dozer show how it should be done. On the day that the legendary Frank Kozik, owner of their former label Man's Ruin sadly passes away, the Borlänge quartet's set serves as a mighty elegy. Released just last month, Drifting In The Endless Void, the group's first album in 15 years, might be their best yet, and given its UK premiere here, seven-minute-plus opener Mutation/Transformation is an absolute monster worthy of comparisons to Kyuss, while 'legacy' cuts Feelgood Formula, from 2003's Call It Conspiracy, and Born A Legend, from 2006's Through The Eyes Of Heathens sound more vital than ever. A UK tour is long overdue.

With OG Palm Desert vets Mario and Larry Lalli, formerly of Yawning Man, having initiated today's royal rumbling at the Ballroom with Fatso Jetson, North Carolina's Weedeater are the second of four US acts to grace the former dancehall's stage today, and arguably the most engaging. Following an opening three song barrage from 2011's Jason... The Dragon (see what they did there?) the trio delve deep into its predecessor, their 2007 Southern Lord debut God Luck and Good Speed, for no fewer than six songs, including a crushing Wizard Fight, their sludgy cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd's Gimme Back My Bullets and a set-closing slow and low Weed Monkey, introduced by Dixie Collins with the words, "I hope you fucking hate it just as much as I do." Marvellous. 

Man cannot live on riffs alone, apparently, and the need to eat means missing out on Crowbar, but Corrosion Of Conformity swiftly dispel any lingering FOMO vibes. Having been forced to drop off last year's festivities, Pepper Keenan's band are clearly keen to make up for lost time, and their set is one of the weekend's strongest.  Curiously, they choose to play nothing from their most recent release, 2018's rather fine No Cross, No Crown, but a focus on mid-90s classics Deliverance and Wiseblood was never going to disappoint. There's a welcome and unexpected run through Vote With A Bullet too, before a stunning, soaring Albatross and Clean My Wounds wind matters up magnificently. 

Bailing on COC during their set closer to bomb over to The Underworld, Saturday concludes with Unsane sounding blunt, brutal and belligerent, exactly as desired. With limitations to scientific and technological progress meaning humans remain incapable of being present in two locations simultaneously, we've missed out on some prime cuts from Chris Spencer's reactivated noise rock trio - the likes of Maggot, Slag and Organ Donor from the NYC group's self-titled 1991 album being hurled out early doors - but Only Pain, We're Fucked and 'hit' single Scrape sound immense, offering reminders of how visceral and exciting New York's gritty early '90s noise scene was at a time when grunge was beginning to morph into arena rock. 

SUNDAY, MAY 7

Based on conversations conducted and over-heard across the weekend, for many, Sunday at DesertFest was always going to be about one band: Boris.

While it's initially disconcerting to hear the word 'Boris' spoken minus its traditional suffix 'is a cunt', it quickly becomes apparent that much of the anticipation for the Tokyo trio's Roundhouse performance stems from the fact that no-one has the slightest idea what's in store. Festival sets are rarely an appropriate forum for experimentation, particularly when artists have 30-40 minutes to make an impression upon the curious and uninitiated, which results, understandably, in most acts delivering sets as predictable as Spurs' end-of-season trophy haul. But Boris' expansive catalogue - 29 studio albums, three of those emerging in 2022 alone, plus myriad EPs and collaborations - makes second-guessing their intentions impossible. 

En route to The Roundhouse, which today replaces the Electric Ballroom as the event's largest venue, a stop off in The Devonshire Arms aka The Dev, brings a pleasing encounter with Edinburgh's Earl Of Hell, a likeable bunch with a quick-witted frontman, and hooks, riffs and grooves to burn in the likes of I Am The Chill and Hang 'Em High, the latter prefaced by some crowd-assisted 'Yeehaw!'s.

Boris, predictably unpredictable, are something else. It's genuinely heartening to see The Roundhouse so busy for a band so challenging, and those in attendance are rewarded with the set of the weekend. It's drawn largely from 2020's savage NO set and 2022's Heavy Rocks - not to be confused with the albums of the same name which Takeshi, Wata and Atsuo issued in 2002 and 2011, obviously - which, in theory, should make for a more 'conventional' show, but oh boy, where to start? Picking apart the 13-song set would be reductive as it's an all-in, immersive sensory experience, low drones merging into white noise into blast beats into delicately picked Japanese folk melodies into shoegaze fuzz: it's a lot. During Nosferatou, Londoner Holly Amber shimmers across the stage like a belly-dancing angel en route from Heaven to Hell, after which it seems pointless to do anything but feel the noise as it crashes and seduces and terrifies and soothes in turn. A remarkable performance.

It's to their great credit that headliners Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats are able to follow Boris without becoming a mere footnote. Drawing influence from '70s occult rock (Coven, Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult), The Beatles, Alice Cooper, vintage horror and B-movies, Kevin Starrs' band were such a breath of fresh air when they first broke through with 2011's Blood Lust, and it's tempting to wonder how big they might be now had former Rise Above labelmates Ghost not emerged from similar shadows around the same time. Whatever, with Rise Above boss/national treasure Lee Dorrian looking on, tonight the likes of 13 Candles, Death's Door and Ritual Knife are doomy delights, and a reminder of what a fiendishly under-rated joy the Cambridge band are.

Can we fast forward straight to DesertFest '24 now pretty please?

It remains one of music's great ironies that Pulp spent the best part of two decades trying to become a massive, crossover, guitar pop band, and when that finally happened, they realised they hated it and almost immediately did their very best to retreat.

In 1998 they released an album of sombre, baroque pop with no obvious singles which disappeared from sales charts worldwide almost as soon as it entered them. Yet, seen as a failure by many at the time, 25 years on, This Is Hardcore may actually be Pulp's most respected record.

Formed in 1978 in Sheffield by a teenage Jarvis Cocker, but really finding their identity in the early to mid 80’s when keyboardist Candida Doyle, guitarist Russell Senior, drummer Nick Banks and bassist Steve Mackey were added to the lineup, Pulp spent the majority of their first decade in existence as an underground indie pop band with a small cult following.

By the time the 90’s rolled around, no one really could have expected much more than the meagre chart placings and occasional Mercury Prize or NME Award nomination that the band were achieving. The quality of 1994’s His ‘n’ Hers, with magnificent singles Babies and Do You Remember the First Time, was sky-high and yet Pulp remained nearly men (and woman).

Then Common People happened.

Arguably the definitive song of the Britpop era, the first single from Different Class propelled Pulp's fifth album to the top of the nation's album chart, and then far north of one million sales in the UK alone. It transformed Pulp into an inescapable part of British pop culture, turning them into Glastonbury headliners and the pop stars they had always seemingly wished to be.

As is so often the case, this success came at a price. Jarvis Cocker went from 'indie darling' to 'national treasure' to 'tabloid target' with indecent haste, particularly in the aftermath of his infamous invasion of Michael Jackson’s performance at the BRIT Awards in 1996. Now his every move was scrutinised, and he was judged less for his music, lyrics and performances, and more on his style and the wittiness of the quips he’d deliver on TFI Friday. 

After this whirlwind period, Pulp were exhausted, frustrated, struggling with media attention, substance abuse and each other. “You dream about what being a pop star will be like,” Cocker told Time Out in 1998. “and, like most things, when you get it, it isn't how you imagined." In the eye of the storm Senior quit the band, believing it “wasn’t creatively satisfying to be in Pulp anymore.” At their peak, the Yorkshire band excused themselves from the Britpop party.

Good job too, as, in their absence, it all turned sour. In 1997 Radiohead released their groundbreaking OK Computer album, a record of dense, dark, complex and emotionally fragile material that completely captured the public imagination, as did The Verve’s similarly downbeat, self-reflective Urban Hymns. Contrast the reaction to those landmark releases alongside undisputed Brit-pop kings Oasis’ third album Be Here Now, also released that year, which was derided for its bloated, cocaine-fuelled excesses. The cheeky chap, aspirational, good time vibes that defined Britpop had been usurped by feelings of deep melancholy. How were a band that only a few years previously were telling us all how to get Sorted for E’s & Whizz going to fit into this new landscape?

Rather well as it happens. Cocker began to craft new material whilst the fall of the Britpop empire was happening, taking well over a year to piece together the follow up to Different Class in isolation from the rest of his band, and away from the glare of the British press, in New York. Much of the crux of the album would come from his hang ups and neuroses about the success Pulp had achieved.

"Maybe I was too acquiescent," Cocker reflected to Time Out when asked about his period as a tabloid mainstay. "I just did everything that I was asked to do. This has been a fundamental change in my views. I used to be very hung up that I was from a sector of people who had been marginalised. ‘What, indie singers? No, no. Dole-y scumbags. The victims of Maggie Thatcher's ‘There is no such thing as society’ thing.’ So, I felt that if there was an opportunity to infiltrate the mainstream, I should take it and go and do all this press."

"What I've realised is that the mainstream has an emasculating or castrating effect. You invent this thing, this shield with which you protect yourself against the world, and you lose control of it. Suddenly the tabloids, whose moral values I don't subscribe to, have an opinion on what you do."

Cocker felt as if he had lost control, and, struggling to once again find his voice, the creation of the new album became an arduous task.

"I wanted to carry on for the right reasons," he continued to TimeOut. “if you carry on because it pays the mortgage, or because you wanna be in magazines, then it's wrong. It did cross me mind that we'd done all we were capable of. I don't like being self-analytical, but I had to examine my motives.”

Such was the levels of exhaustion in the band, that the new album’s debut single, the arch chamber pop of Help the Aged, was the only completed song the band had for some time. Released as a single on November 11, 1997, reaching number 8 on the UK singles chart, it was well received by critics, but proved something of a shock to folk expecting another Disco 2000 and getting a song with Cocker confronting his own mortality.

"People said Help The Aged slunk out like a wet fart," sighed Cocker. "I thought, maybe naively, that the best thing to do was release something and let people make their own minds up about it."

With the creative process a painful one, relationships within the band fraught,  and the themes of the album far more dour and resigned than previous material, This is Hardcore slowly but surely began to take shape as Pulp recorded at The Townhouse and Olympic studios in London with producer Chris Thomas. Cocker described the album as being about “Me trying to find a reason to carry on.”.

Released into a post-Britpop world on March 30, 1998, it topped the UK album charts after selling 50,000 copies in its first week on sale, this some way down on the 133,000+ Different Class sold upon release. In critical terms, Pulp’s willingness to explore new territories was lauded, but very few appeared to truly embrace it. “That which doesn’t kill you, makes you stranger.” shrugged the NME in their 7/10 review.  It wasn’t long before the album was being referred to as a flop. The mainstream, it appeared, had rejected Pulp. 

But, more accurately, this was a mutual decision. Pulp had decided to reject their own pop star status, and they vanished again for a few years fairly immediately after the album was released. Following an arena tour of the UK at the end of 1998 they only played another seven shows in the next two years, before briefly popping their heads up to release 2001’s We Love Life and splitting in late 2002.

In the years that have passed, the legacy and appreciation of This is Hardcore has grown massively. As we celebrate a quarter of a century since its release, we’re not the only outlet that would proclaim it as the finest record of Pulp’s career. Its cinematic, swooping, wry, seductive and hushed explorations on the price of fame, the seedy underbelly of mainstream success and the regretful damage it can do to your psyche is just so fantastically and consistently realised here. 

From the moment Cocker wails "The end is near again" during the chorus of the warped Broadway stylings of opening song The Fear, it’s clear This is Hardcore is going to be something very different. Neneh Cherry turning up to add a Medusa-like performance, filled with slink and menace, on the 8-minute plus Seductive Barry is a masterstroke, the 'Bowie does death disco' of Party Hard is the grittiest Pulp have ever sounded and Sylvia is a borderline power ballad made by people who rejected Whitesnake for Scott Walker.

Best of all though is the title-track, perhaps the very best song of Pulp’s entire career. A six and a half minute long epic, it has the huge drums, marching horns, delicate keys and sweeping strings of a Bond theme, albeit one comparing the life of a porn star to being the famous singer in a successful pop band. It’s a genuinely magnificent song, and really should have been as definitive a song in the band’s back catalogue as Common People or Disco 2000, instead, much like Blur’s The Universal, it was underappreciated at the time, only reaching number 12 on the UK singles chart.

"That really broke my heart," said Cocker. "Because I'm really proud of that song. It was a shame it didn't do better. I suppose times are different.” Only now is it seen for the masterpiece it is. 

Which is also true of the album on which it is the centrepiece. Revisited, or discovered by fresh ears that are not muddied by the context and expectation of the time, it regularly appears now in 'Best of' lists, with everyone from Pitchfork to Metro Weekly proclaiming it as something of a lost classic. Twenty-five years after it ostracised its creators from the mainstream, This is Hardcore has finally, and deservedly, found an audience that can appreciate it. 

When I was younger, probably 11 or 12, I was very much a Britpop kid. I was into the big tunes and the larger-than-life characters. I was into everything from the Lightning Seeds to Blur to Stereophonics.

I remember buying Spice Girls’ Spice World on tape, but it’s not something I’m proud of. But first album I bought was probably by Oasis. I specifically remember buying Be Here Now. They were the first big band I got into and bought all their albums.

I was drawn to the big songs and Noel Gallagher’s amazing songwriting. I started learning guitar when I was around 11 or 12 and the first book I got was a chord book for The Beatles. I learned that from cover to cover, and I guess the next logical next step into the modern world was to throw myself into Britpop and that’s kind of what happened.

• Six Pack: The Philosophy of Rou Reynolds
• The 10 best Enter Shikari songs as chosen by Rou Reynolds
• Enter Shikari's note to young people: Broaden your music taste
• Enter Shikari to headline Slam Dunk 2017

I saved up money from my paper round and managed to see Oasis twice, including their big show at Finsbury Park in north London in 2002. Because of seeing bands like Oasis and Muse , it’s meant that Enter Shikari are never completely content with playing a little venue circuit, we’ve always very much enjoyed becoming – not theatrical – but grander.

Listening to Be Here Now was a lesson in songwriting, at least in terms of structure; having grown up with Motown and northern soul, melody was something that I loved, and that’s something Oasis were really good at. I guess they were quite punk as well, in some sense of the word. They seemed to just do what they wanted. They’ve definitely had an influence on what I do.

Live at Alexandra Palace – Bootleg Series Volume 6 is out now through Ambush Reality. Enter Shikari headline Slam Dunk in May 2017.

Rou was speaking to Luke Morton.

Oasis - Be Here Now album review

After leaving Mansun in 2003 following an ill-fated effort to reassemble for a fourth album, Paul Draper helped their label put together the compilation Kleptomania. After that, he says, he banished any thought of the band from his mind.

“I just forgot about it for quite a while,” he says. “It didn’t mean anything to me. I thought it was a pop group that would be assimilated into the history of many other pop groups that have come and gone over the years.”

But Mansun’s albums would outlast the band, particularly their surprising second album Six which was written in a fit of obstinate creativity after their label failed to deliver on promises around the scale of support they’d give their debut album Attack Of The Grey Lantern in 1997.

This, combined with excitement around Draper’s collaborations and productions –particularly with Catherine AD recording as The Anchoress – has brought Draper to the point where he’s able to release two EPs ahead of his first solo album, Spooky Action, in 2017. But for the moment he’s willing to look backwards, selecting 10 personal favourites from Mansun’s back catalogue.

“I haven’t chosen Taxloss or Wide Open Space or any of the really big ones,” he says. “Obviously people remember the video of us throwing away the money to show that we were a tax loss – which we did genuinely do – but that’s because the label never put out the single Disgusting, which was going to make a shitload of money. Instead, we were written off. It was just organised chaos. But it was remembered.”

10. Comes As No Surprise (Little Kix, 2000)

Paul: “This started off as a song I wrote about Black Rock Sands, a beach in north Wales that we used to go to, but the lyrics seemed a little too specific so we made them vaguer so that they’d paint a picture. Prince or David Bowie could paint pictures with lyrics that weren’t too specific and that’s what I tried to do, move in that direction. I remember the verse and chorus were two separate pieces on the dictaphone – I’d keep things on dictaphones then bring them all up and listen – and glued them together, the two different bits that I’d done at different times. But as with everything I do, I write all my songs out of pure laziness. When I get to a chorus I have to go into this ridiculous falsetto. I wish I didn’t have to do it.”

9. I Can Only Disappoint U (Little Kix, 2000)

“This song started out with a few chords and I was singing loads of melodies over the top. I found it really difficult to write a song with just two chords in it. I could do a song with three in it, that was easy, but two – now you’re asking. We had about fifty different melody lines. I remember saying to our guitar player, ‘I like this bit and this bit, but this bit sounds like U2’. He said, ‘No it doesn’t sound like U2. We’re keeping it in.’ And so I put a little jokey reference to Bono in the first line: “You travelled from Dublin, you said you’d change the world…” That was just our dark little sense of humour in that track. This became our biggest hit really, into the top ten and later covered by Blood Orange. An odd song, a track pieced together like a dance record, but I have relatively fond memories of it.”

8. Serotonin (Six, 1998)

“I was always looking for different directions and ways to play rhythm guitar, so you didn’t just do the same strum you naturally did. Serotonin came out of that brief. A chugging guitar riff. I’d like to start with different styles. Quite often I’d start in a James Brown or Prince kinda funky way – but I could never get away with it, coming from Liverpool. So here I came up with a very angular, new wave, odd riff. The song’s a maze of interconnecting riffs but inside there’s a very basic song which is sort of partly about where I grew up. It came to life with the arrangement and it’s probably one of the purest things we ever did. Off-the-wall, and without any reference to anything that was going on at that point in time in music. It’s just odd.”

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7. Everyone Must Win (Closed For Business, 1997)

“We did this with Howard Devoto from Buzzcocks and Magazine, who did lyrics and gave them to us. The guitar player from Mansun had a kind of Joy Division-inspired riff and I did the melody. My input was fusing the guitar part with Howard Devoto’s lyrics. It was an easy job – I wouldn’t say it’s the greatest melody ever – but on B-sides we were always freer, free to be who we wanted to be. Bands can have different sides to them. I remember Bobbie Gillespie, a very clever guy, saying that Primal Scream had their pop side to them but they also had their art-rock side. Mansun was very much like that. We’d do something like Taxloss which was obviously a parody of Taxman and we’d think we were being all leftfield and intellectual and sticking two fingers up to the establishment. Then we’d do our B-sides and it was just more naturally who we were, much more of a dark rock band.”

6. Disgusting (Attack Of The Grey Lantern, 1997)

“This was going to be the big single from the first album. We were going to have a massive marketing budget and go around the world for 18 months on the back of open-top Ladas in Bulgaria throwing flowers to the crowd and stuff. But it was all pulled, and instead they put Taxloss out as a tax loss. I don’t know who fucked it up, but someone somewhere fucked it up. Disgusting never became a single. But that was supposed to be our biggie, the song that was going to break the band as a massive pop group. The whole thing disintegrated and we never ever played it live. But now I think it’s one of the better songs on the first album. I wrote it in about 20 minutes and it’s one of those rare moments of inspiration over perspiration.”

5. Being A Girl (Six, 1998)

“Here I mean the full-length version. The original album version is alright, like a new wave, punky-type thing but the full-length version is brilliant, I think. The guitar playing’s brilliant, and I don’t know what it is, what type of music – I couldn’t even describe it. An odd, long-winded digressive piece of music with something about Communism and hating who you are and where you are, and Marxism and whatever baloney I was reading at the time. We were in Olympic Studios in London, in Studio One where Led Zeppelin and John Bonham recorded their drums. We got the drumkit and put it in the kitchen area, in a tiny little room, and recorded the drums completely dry. Andie Rathbone did a stunning piece of creative drumming on this track. It’s all about the drums and odd guitar sounds. I remember that being an odd direction for us to go, after being on the cusp of our pop superstardom with Disgusting.”

4. The Chad Who Loved Me (Attack Of The Grey Lantern, 1997)

“This was originally called Desperate Icons but when we put strings on it we realised it sounded like a James Bond theme. We didn’t mean it to sound like a James Bond theme but it did, and we had all sorts of names going round like Chadfinger. I must have been about 15 or 16 when I wrote this, but minus the orchestral start. My song started where the lyrics come in: ‘All come crashing down, your desperate icon…’ That’s how it came about and we then went in with a big orchestra, who played it separately, and when we got to the mastering stage we glued it all together. It sounds like we were there with the orchestra but we weren’t. We pieced it all together, in true progressive rock style.”

3. Cancer (Six, 1998)

“This was originally called Pentagram, as a joke, because we wanted to do a song with six different sections in it. Everything on the album Six has to do with the number six. Don’t ask me why – well, I do know why – I wanted the album to be about The Prisoner, who was Number Six, played Patrick McGoohan. We decided to do a song with six sections. We did a couple, actually, but renamed this Cancer after we did another song called Six. It’s a long story. But here, there’s a bit where I play the piano, there’s a bit of guitar playing, there’s a bit of Bowie influence, but it’s mainly us messing around in the studio with six half-finished ideas, really. We recorded it all from start to finish on a piece of tape, and we’d get so far on the track and come back the next day and think, ‘What are we going to do next?’ At the very end we go back to the original melody. It’s the single most complex thing we ever did, I think. That’s probably why people still remember the album – it’s just fucking bonkers.”

2. Six (Six, 1998)

“This was a challenge I’d laid down for myself. Our manager had told me that any real artist would never do a track in any one particular style of music. That with real artists it only ever comes out of them like a conduit from God or something like that. Which I just thought was a crock of fucking shit. So I decided to do a song that had six completely different styles of music all blended into each other. I would say ‘seamlessly blended’ but it just sort of jumps all over the place. Then I argued that too could be a piece of art. But they said it wasn’t, and it all turned to shit. So I lost that argument – maybe in the short term – maybe in the long term people disagree. It starts off as a new wave track, then progressive rock, then jumps into a punk rock track, then Motown, then comes back into punk rock and ends on new wave. It just depends upon whether you enjoy it doesn’t it? I don’t think there are any rules, but apparently that was against the rules and there were all sorts of financial penalties and everyone said it was rubbish. I really did it because I was an angry young man and if anyone told me you couldn’t do something I’d do it. When we did the second album we were told, ‘You’re not allowed to do any prog rock on the third album.’ So the third album fades in for one second longer than Dark Side Of The Moon.”

1. Keep Telling Myself (Kleptomania, 2004)

“This was probably the best song I ever wrote for Mansun. All we’ve got is a basic mix. I wrote it on September 11, on the day the Twin Towers got knocked down. I remember waking up and watching the second plane go into the tower, and as you do, when you’re immersed in ‘being an artiste’ I picked up the guitar. There’s something about ‘keep on moving forward’. I think I was taking to myself. The whole world seemed to be imploding at that point – my own world and the wider world, on that day. I didn’t get the words right, but I re-wrote them in the studio. I think I have to have a spark for a song, and I think my spark on this was to move the chords every two beats in a bar, keep them moving round, which felt like more of a challenge. The band wanted to do it in the style of Neil Young, but they had their own reasons for that. And my song was my own. I think it’s one of the best songs – if not the best – I ever did.”

Paul Draper’s EP TWO is out now through Kscope.

Buzzcocks: 10 Of The Best

Twenty years have not been particularly kind to the ego-pumped indulgences of Oasis’s Britpop-murdering third album Be Here Now, famously the sound of cocaine turned up to 11. The lengthy plod-outs, dusty country interludes and oceans of ‘look ma, we’re The-Beatles’ bombast that turned the fastest-selling British album ever (at the time) into the album most flogged to second-hand record shops grate as harshly today as they did in 1997.

Fade In-Out remains a pointless Doorsian frippery, the title track a crunchy Quo, D’You Know What I Mean and Don’t Go Away a brace of painfully stretched Wonderwalls, the ludicrously overblown All Around The World a 10-minute audition for a West End panto production of The Magical Mystery Tour, directed by Wagner. Only It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!) and the mighty Stand By Me have grown in stature, the latter as deathless a classic as when Bowie first wrote it as All The Young Dudes in 1972, but all the meatier in the hands of Oasis in full pomp.

But the additional CDs redeem the era. Every B-side here is superior to half the record – Stay Young, (I Got) The Fever, The Fame and the frankly incest-y My Sister Lover are the kind of vivacious glam-pop that could have lifted the album out of its quicksand of pure gak – and the original Mustique demos, sung by Noel, have intriguing flecks of psychedelic grunge. So Be Here Now was never going to epitomise Britpop, but it needn’t have been its cyanide pill.