Pulp On Peel

Peel - You found that (the playing of an early pulp session track) a fairly painful experience didn't you Jarvis - I think wrongly - bearing in mind it was 1981. I don't think that's anything to be ashamed of. But talk us through it as they say.

Jarvis - I think it's because I'm the singer, you know. And so when you hear your own voice and stuff it sounds like I'm trying too hard. It's like finding a bit of poetry you wrote when you were 17 - you always try and say everything about the world in 3 sentences, and it seems... too much. But I mean the main thing that irritates me on that one - that makes me kind of squirm, was that I just remembered we didn't know how to finish the song, and we were looking at all the bits of exciting machinery that were in the studio that we'd never seen before, and we were saying "what does that one do?"

Peel - Like swinging doors and things like that 

Jarvis - Yeah. The bloke started turning this knob, and the voice starts going (adopts dalek voice) "Refuse to be blind", and it sounded like a dalek and we thought it were really good, and we made him do that, even though he didn't want to, and we went back to Sheffield in the van thinking that was really fantastic.

Peel - So what were your expectations at the time? Did you think it would be a passport to fame and fortune and ultimately the London palladium, or what?

Jarvis - Yeah, I did, and it's not your fault or anything, but that was the main piece of armoury in my case to me mother for saying that I didn't want to go to university - I had a place to do English at Liverpool University - but I really wanted to do the band you see, so that was kind of a bit of ammunition, because we'd been on national radio, so I thought, yes I can be a child star, you know. I thought it was all going to happen. So I deferred my place and stayed in Sheffield, but unfortunately no-one else's parents were that kind-of liberal - especially there was our keyboard player who really wanted to stay, but his dad was headmaster of the school, and he brought it up at the dinner table, and his dad chucked his dinner at him. So that was the end of that argument.

Peel - Another promising career in ashes - or probably in spaghetti. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Nick - I kind of got involved about the end of 1986 sort of start of 1987 time, so I feel like I've gate crashed the party you know. It was just a case of the third incarnation of pulp collapsed in acrimony, and I just kind of knew Jarvis and Russell from going out in Sheffield and getting drunk and things, and just sort of said "I'll have a go if you don't mind"

Jarvis - he turned up with an English bull terrier, that was the thing. He came for the audition, and me and Russell were there at me mum's and he turned up and there was this white English bull terrier behind him, so we thought he'd brought it with him, but it had just followed you from a bus stop, hadn't it?

Nick - Something like that, yeah it wouldn't leave us alone. So instead of having an audition - like "Play us what you can do" it was like "before we can do anything we've got to get rid of this bull terrier, because Jarvis's house had a dog, which was going crazy, so we had to run round the neighbourhood trying to get rid of this dog.

Jarvis - We went to t' police first, but that was closed, so in the end we just looked for a house that looked reasonably neat and tidy, so they wouldn't butcher it or anything.

Nick - And it had an enclosed driveway.

Jarvis - And we just chucked it over the wall. That was good 'cos we'd found out we could get on and that was it, we didn't even hear him play any drums.