PULP: FROM THE FIRST TIME TO THE LAST

During Pulp’s spectacular live show last week at the Point Depot in Dublin – now known as the 3 Arena – Jarvis Cocker displayed a keen-eyed grasp of his band’s live history in the city. In a pre-amble to one of the group’s best numbers, ‘Do You Remember the First Time?’, the frontman spooled back through the decades and referenced some of Pulp’s previous appearances around the capital. Before landing a memorable punchline as he singled out the band’s first ever show in Dublin in 1993.

Pulp’s is a complicated, curious and circular history that extends back to the late 1970s and which, for years, was just a slow, meandering slog involving various line-ups, record companies and false dawns. A first album, ‘It’, featuring seven cuts written by Jarvis, was released as far back as 1983.

It wasn’t really until Russell Senior joined the fun on guitar and violin, and Cocker eventually moved south from Sheffield to study film in London, that the band developed any sort of cohesion. A second elpee, ‘Freaks’, was released in 1987 and, by the end of 1990, Pulp had at least one, meaty calling card: a cracking single that hinted at what was to come: ‘My Legendary Girlfriend’.

The band eventually signed to Island Records and their first album for a major, ‘His ‘n’ Hers’, saw the light of day in April 1994 and signalled Pulp’s intent. The Chris Thomas-produced single, ‘Common People’ spectacularly gate-crashed the mainstream the following year and quickly become one of the signature pop songs of not only 1995 but of the entire period. Uncomfortably situated in the racks alongside the likes of Suede, Oasis, Blur and Elastica as part of a rolling wall of moderately left-skewing new British pop music, Pulp were finally making hay. An overnight success after merely fifteen years, they’d landed into their moment.

The quality of Pulp’s output during the 1990s speaks for itself. And to this end, I contend that their back-to-back elpees, the effervescent ‘Different Class [1995] and it’s more introspective sister album, ‘This is Hardcore’ [1997] aren’t just among the best British releases of the 1990s, but they’re among the finest long players of the last thirty years.

As Pulp gained a commercial foothold, they now found themselves at the business end of festival line-ups, one of which was at the radically re-drawn Féile festival, bizarrely held indoors at the Point Depot, in 1996. Most recently, and in the wake of the premature death of its long-serving bass player, Steve Mackey, they played a large-scale outdoor set at Saint Anne’s Park in Raheny, on Dublin’s northside.

But the group has always been an indoor consideration. And Pulp’s most compelling and powerful live shows in Dublin – and the band has consistently emphasized the idea of putting on ‘a show’ – have all been inside, as those who caught them previously at long-lost city venues like the Tivoli, the Ambassador and SFX will attest.

But it was another, more low-key live experience in Dublin that Jarvis, in fine story-telling form, choose to reference at The Point last week.

I’ve written here previously about the time I spent working with my friend, Jeff Brennan, at The Rock Garden, a cavernous old basement venue on Crown Alley in the heart of Dublin’s Temple Bar. For a number of years in the early 1990s, The Rock Garden did more than its share for what was a burgeoning – and diverse – live scene in the city. All of which was down to Jeff, the Rock Garden’s in-house booker and resident stand-up who worked to the venue’s directors – most prominently the bearded American biker, Mark Furst – but who, for the most part, just did his own thing.

Jeff served his apprenticeship working as a teenager with his father, the late Noel Brennan, in The Underground Bar, an old-school dive on Dame Street that’s central to any credible telling of the history of live music in Dublin during the 1980s. He moved around into the Temple Bar alongside the bar licence that had transferred to the Rock Garden and enabled it to trade as a fully-fledged music venue that could also sate thirsty gig-goers with booze.

Avid readers of the British music press, from where we took many of our social, political and cultural clues, Jeff and myself were certainly aware of Pulp, even if their material was difficult to locate and they had a tendency towards the overly stagey. Long-time favourites of the late-night BBC radio jock, John Peel, they struck us as having far more in common with an exiled outfit we fancied, The Divine Comedy – whose first Dublin show had been at The Underground – than the guitar-fuelled groups with whom they’d been lumped.

Which is why Jeff took a punt and booked them for an appearance at The Rock Garden on Saturday, March 20, 1993. It was Pulp’s first live show in Ireland.

Jarvis referred to this show last week as a way, presumably, of marking how big the band has become since its first fraught visit to Dublin thirty-two years previously. Playing to a partisan and sussed home crowd, he knew he had a golden punchline for them in his arse pocket.

Back in early 1993, Pulp were out on the road again, opening for Saint Etienne and plugging another excellent single, ‘Razzmatazz’. On Saint Patrick’s night, March 17^th, they’d performed at one of central London’s liveliest mid-sized venues, the student’s union facility at London University, known to circuit regulars as the ULU. After which they travelled onwards to Holyhead – an arduous haul to this day – and then onto a ferry across to Ireland.

JMTV Rocks the Garden was a weekly music and culture strand for Irish youths that played on RTÉ2 television during the early 1990s and that sprung from the original Jo Maxi brand, about which I’ve written previously here. Airing once a week, it was filmed and shot every Friday morning at The Rock Garden, was clipped during the week in editing and then broadcast the following week.

Featuring the usual fare of music, fashion, film and books, the show also showcased weekly performance from local and visiting bands, most of which were shot at The Rock Garden. On occasion – as with a memorable shoot with Grant McLennan – the crew would record a fully live acoustic performance, but this tended to be the exception rather than the rule.

Pulp looked particularly weary when they fetched up for an early start with the JMTV Rocks The Garden crew on Friday morning, March 19^th, 1993. Then signed to Fire Records, the band – still a niche concern – were carefully minding their pounds and shillings: they didn’t have a bob. And Jarvis apart, none of them appeared to be in any way remotely ambitious either, even if they took their work as seriously as anyone. We thought a couple of them were just bemused by the whole thing.

But even as he mimed a couple of numbers for the RTÉ cameras, it was clear that the frontman had something magnetic about him. That RTÉ segment, which can be viewed here

was produced and directed by Manchester-born Angela Smith, then on a freelancer’s contract with RTÉ and who’d have been already known to Pulp. Angela had directed Take That’s first promo video and later went on to produce ‘Moving People’, one of Channel 4’s first observational documentary strands – about people moving house – that was presented by the aforementioned John Peel.

Suggested by presenter Niamh Walsh, the researcher on that JMTV shoot was Donal Scannell, fresh from a communications course at what was then the NIHE in Glasnevin [now Dublin City University] and who was cutting his chops at the national broadcaster. In his spare time, Donal was also editing a free music broadsheet, Dropout, to which a number of us were contributing regularly.

Upstairs in the booker’s office at The Rock Garden on a narrow corridor at the back of the building, meanwhile, Jeff was busy with one of the far less glamorous sides of rock ‘n’ roll: admin.

In the days before mobile technology and instant communication much of the elemental business of live music was conducted over the phone. Indeed, there was a golden period where fax machines were the fashionable device du jour, an essential tool for any self-respecting industry professional. And it was via fax that Jeff had been playing ping-pong with Pulp’s tour manager, Mark Webber, in the run-up to the show in Dublin. Mark subsequently went on to join the band as its second guitarist and is still among Pulp’s number today.

Over-and-back bartering is part-and-parcel of all dealings between bands and venues, especially with touring groups and their agents. The promotion of live shows isn’t an exact science, and numerous awe-struck wannabes have lost their shirts by straying out into the untamed world attempting to run gigs. The staging of live events isn’t for the faint-hearted or the risk-averse and its little wonder that this space has been traditionally dominated in Ireland by a select handful of the perennially connected.    

At issue in Pulp’s case was the matter of accommodation: because the band was in Ireland a full day before the show, they were hoping that the venue would pick up the tab for their hotel.

With ticket sales on the slower side of slow, and with Jeff looking at a potential scalding at the box office, he was adamant he’d locate Pulp into the cheapest Dublin hotel he could find. And so, a premises on Gardiner Street, on the edgy northern inner city, was booked on the band’s behalf and, days before the Rock Garden show, Jeff and I made our way across town to pay a cash deposit there.

The hotel in question – which I’m not going to name here but which doesn’t exist anymore – did bed and breakfast for £10 a skull and, I suspect, also provided a list of extras on a nod-and-wink basis. If any band appreciated Jeff’s approach, it was Pulp, surely?

On the day of the show, their van once again pulled into Temple Bar and Pulp disembarked for a late afternoon sound check. Mark Webber made himself known to his host but, as Jeff threw a welcoming handout to greet him and casually asked how he was, he was told that half of the band’s equipment had been stolen from outside the ULU after the London show days previously. It had been a torrid forty-eight hours for the beleaguered tour manager.

‘Sorry to hear about the gear’, Jeff told him. ‘I’m sure the rest of it will be robbed on ye tonight’.

I’m not sure if this was the response that the band was expecting but, over thirty years later, it clearly still resonates with Pulp’s frontman. And so it was that Jarvis imparted that story last week, replete with Jeff’s original punchline and a reference to the man himself, to a huge audience at The Point, all of whom were eating from his hand.

March 20, 1993, is a date etched in the memories of those of us of a particular generation. Just after noon, the Provisional IRA exploded bombs hidden near a popular shopping centre in the middle of the town of Warrington in the North-West of England. Tim Parry, a twelve-year-old boy and three-year-old Johnathan Ball were killed, and 54 others were injured. It is amongst the most vile and heinous acts, amongst many, perpetrated by the Provos during this period.

Details of this atrocity began to emerge inside Dublin’s newsrooms while Pulp went through their paces below at the Rock Garden using equipment that had been scrambled together for them and with which they were unfamiliar. And it was against this backdrop that the band took to the cramped stage later that night and put on a terrific and typically flamboyant show to less than one hundred paying punters.

The promoter had been cleaned out, those who did actually make the effort were rewarded with a night that’ll stay with them forever and the band began a relationship with Irish audiences that spectacularly outgrew its body quickly thereafter. Pulp dismantled their own backline and we waved them off into the night and onwards to their lodgings.

Less than six months later, I’d left the Rock Garden and was back in Cork preparing to launch a new music television series: a late-night, no-frills and no-budget show for connoisseurs and anoraks called ‘No Disco’. The presenter, Donal Dineen, was another Dropout contributor and I’ve also written about him, and the series, in a number of pieces here previously.

Pulp were early staples on ‘No Disco’ and the set-lists during its initial seasons prominently feature both ‘Razzmatazz’ and ‘Babies’, the actual video tapes kindly provided to us by Donal Scannell, an unsung hero in practically all of our adventures.   

I absolutely adore Pulp’s stuff and have long done so. For what it’s worth, I think that popular music is a far more interesting proposition with them in and around it than not. I’m glad that they’re back.

But the absolute juvenile that I am, I’m convinced that those couple of nights in a 10-quid-a-night hotel on Gardiner Street almost certainly influenced Jarvis’s material in the years after 1993. The formidable receptionist in the leather mini-skirt and the fishnets has surely featured in his work since? And what of the long and garishly carpeted corridors and the moaning and grunting from inside the cheaply panelled rooms along it? The beds there had certainly seen it all, from the first time to the last.

Jeff Brennan is a shy, humble and reclusive man who left live music behind a long time ago and he’ll absolutely hate being written about here. But his legacy is a formidable one and it extends far beyond the bricks and mortar of the venues he ran in Dublin city for over fifteen years from the early 1980s.

Exactly how far? Maybe Jarvis might tell us the next time he’s in town.

(Feature image – credit Paul Dowd)