This is a trailer for a book I want to work on. If successful, I will take six months off work to write it, if not, I won’t. It won’t get in the way of Centuries of Sound.
“The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.” Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jamesmerrington/freaks-mis-shapes-weeds
In 2012, I was living in China and unable to attend any of Pulp’s reunion shows, so instead I started this blog. The idea was straightforward enough: write about every Pulp song, in as close to chronological order as possible, and see what happened.
At the time I wasn’t entirely sure what sort of project it would become. I wasn’t able to provide technical musical analysis, because I’m not a trained musician. I wasn’t especially interested in writing a social history of Sheffield, because most of the information available to me was already second-hand. Nor was I attempting to write a biography of the band. Others had already done that, and done it well. I was not, in short, interested in picking apart the creative process of Pulp to be replicated.
What interested me was what these songs meant to us, and why they continued to matter, what could be extrapolated from the seed of a song as its roots, shoots and branches spread out into our culture. The listener, the Pulp Person, not as an onlooker, but as the most vital part of this process. Very few bands have addressed their audience so directly, and I can think of none that have offered up multiple manifestos of outsiderdom, so it seemed like a particularly fertile concept.
In 2014 as my second child was born and I prepared to move back to the UK, blog entries slowed, then finally stopped, just as I was starting to write about Different Class too. I had family life, a full-time job and another massive project to undertake, and despite multiple attempts to get the machine going, it never really happened, and soon a decade had passed, I had moved back to the UK, seen Pulp twice, enjoyed something I never thought would come; a new album.
What surprised me was that people kept reading the blog. Every year I would receive messages asking whether I planned to continue. New readers continued to discover the site. Old readers continued to revisit it.
And something else had happened, a new generation discovered Pulp for themselves. Not as museum pieces from the Britpop era, but as living cultural artefacts that continued to speak to listeners. Questions of, for example, class, desire, loneliness, place and identity had not become less relevant since the 1990s. If anything, they had become more so.
So then, this book is the continuation of that original project.
It is an attempt to explore every known Pulp song: album tracks, B-sides, demos, rarities, live-only songs and unreleased material. It is not intended primarily as a biography of the band, nor as a guide to what the songs “really mean”. Instead it uses the songs as starting points for a wider exploration of the ideas, histories, places and experiences that surround them.
Like the blog before it, the book proceeds from the assumption that criticism is not a science, but an artform in its own right. My responses to these songs will inevitably differ from yours, and in many cases I hope they do. What I can promise is that this book approaches Pulp’s catalogue with seriousness, curiosity and affection. Not because I believe every song is a masterpiece, and not because I think Pulp particularly require defending, but because few bands have inspired so many people to recognise parts of themselves.
The Kickstarter will fund the time required to complete the manuscript, undertake final research, commission original illustrations, carry out professional editing and produce the finished book, ebook and audiobook.
After more than a decade, thousands of words and countless conversations, I’d like to finish what I started. If you’ve ever found yourself somewhere within these songs, I hope you’ll help me do it.
A song-by-song exploration of every known Pulp recording, and life.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jamesmerrington/freaks-mis-shapes-weeds
