Standing at the apex of popular culture is something you can’t plan for: for Jarvis Cocker, this moment came in 1995 at Glastonbury during Pulp’s headlining set, the band’s rendition of Common People one of the decade’s most spontaneously blissful experiences.
Despite the whiff of class tourism around their song about class tourism, and the fact that they were late subs replacing The Stone Roses, for five minutes at least the Sheffielders and their bony ringmaster were all of us, a temporary force of unification.
This Icarian chapter had fracturing results, as the subsequent album Different Class topped the charts but the stardom it afforded ultimately lead to the band’s demise. Cocker then pivoted from ledge to ledge, finding settlement eventually with a radio show, and he has recently announced that a book is due at some point in 2020. But an invitation to play a festival in Helsinki from Sigur Rós led to one of those odd yet obvious epiphanies – that he had plenty of new songs to air, but no band.
Having recruited Serafina Steer and her Bas Jan bandmate Emma Smith, the James Taylor Quartet’s Andrew McKinney, All Seeing I’s Jason Buckle and Three Trapped Tigers’ Adam Betts, what would become the core of Beyond The Pale were songs road-tested in a number of unlikely locations, not least of which was a Derbyshire cave complex popularly known amongst the locals as The Devil’s Arse.
What emerges from a process which began semi-live is a record which – similar to Baxter Drury’s The Night Chancers – is about dislocation, libido and growing older, one free from bitterness and observed as ever from the peculiar, perceptive view of a natural storyteller.
This bemusement at the modern world first breaks cover on MUST I EVOLVE?, six-minutes-plus of tantric jam and lyrical ruminations on where we’ve all come from, bearing confused witness to now and the futility of turning into anything else. Motorik and bafflingly good, its counterpoint is House Music All Night Long, a masterpiece of understated shuffling funk and MOR flourishes that sees club music stripped of all its abandonment, a Sorted For E’s & Wizz with neither hedonism nor companionship.
The FOMO of sorts rears its head again on Am I Missing Something, the singer deadpanning: ‘Is the next stage in human evolution/Happening on the outskirts of Luton’, whilst a plaintive synth line taps sulkily. Opener Save The Whale takes its violin-led impetus from a more obvious source in Leonard Cohen whilst looking at how slogans decontextualise the issues they’re meant to represent.
Cocker is one of those obsessives who (rightly) believes that 99% of all music must be viewed through what he calls the ‘pop prism’. This means that Sometimes I Am Pharaoh – the undoubted peak of an album so far from twenties pop that they’re not even dots on their respective horizons, with its charismatic, alt-dancefloor vibes – will in his head be as much for mass consumption as the feeble autotuned jingles the painted children of now make.
Beyond The Pale isn’t going to seat Jarvis Cocker back at the table from which fame is served, nothing could. But on this admirable new chapter he revels in the fact and the realisation that conformity kills both art and the soul.
If only Common People still got that too.
