We Love Life

When we left Pulp at the end of Act III, they seemed ready for art-rock hermitage. Jarvis had shrugged off the mantle of class war lothario, a Sheffield Gainsbourg adopting Costello’s twin tattoos of guilt and revenge. This Is Hardcore wasn’t an easy album to love but as an obsessive study of compulsions, it rewarded repeated listening. Julian Gough hit the nail on the head when he reckoned it would find its place between Neil’s Tonight’s The Night and Lou’s Berlin as one of the great flawed masterpieces. Thereafter, Pulp took a left turn off the well-travelled path, quite literally in the case of Cocker’s excellent Channel 4 series about outsider artists.

Consequently, the presence of Scott Walker as producer on these sessions boded both well and ill – the former for obvious reasons, the latter because one despaired of the band ever finishing the damn record.

But if . . . Hardcore was a telegram from Francis Bacon’s Soho, this one’s a pastoral postcard done in charcoal. Yet however far into the ditch Pulp may stray, Jarvis can’t resist penning calls-to-arms like ‘Mis-Shapes’ and ‘Glory Days’. Here, the martial surge of the opening ‘Weeds’ celebrates the resilience of that which is deemed to have no value, refugees and social flotsam, the "weeds that grow from the pavement". In ‘Origin Of The Species’ he expands the theme, photographing the unsanctioned blossom in the wasteland, the hashish passed around at dinner parties, genetic mutations, all over an almost formless landscape of corrupted psychedelia and ambient chorales.

Similarly, the single ‘Trees’ finds the singer looking at nature not with pantheist Wordsworth-Hopkins eyes, but the detached, skewed vision of one of the quarehawks he profiled in his TV series. Here the trees in question are not touchy-feely hippy symbols but grotesques whose roots feed off the remains of their human cousins, uncaring witnesses to love’s failings. "Go and tell it to the trees", Cocker sings, and one wonders if he’s heard the Irish folk tale about the guy who whispers his secret into the bark, only to have it revealed in music when someone makes a harp from the timber.

The album’s centrepiece is ‘Wickerman’, which like the 1973 Robin Hardy film of the same name, conjures a pagan parochial Albion. Cocker makes a strange trek into the provinces of his past, painting a portrait of industrial decay in forty shades of grey. It’s the first real epic of We Love Life, baroque, literary and cinematic, the point where we can most clearly hear Scott Walker’s hand at work. Ditto ‘Bad Cover Version’ – a Gene Pitney recreation with heavenly choirs, bells and strings, Jarvis casting his eye over a former girlfriend’s settling for second best, "a bad cover version of love". "It’s like a later Tom and Jerry/When the two of them could talk," he proclaims, "Like the Stones since the ’80s/Like the last days of Southfork"

On We Love Life, Pulp are mostly playing behind a curtain, occasionally tossing off the kind of drab-romantic standard Cocker excels at – ‘Birds In Your Garden’ or ‘Bob Lind’, Mark E Smith with an early Beatles chord book. But the closing ‘Sunrise’ is at once grandiose and low-key, with the singer accepting the light that illuminates the cracks in his character and maybe learning to love it.