Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker has “attempted to retire” several times.
The Britpop legends are set to release their first studio effort in 24 years, ‘More’, in June, and the singer has admitted there have been occasions throughout their decades-long career that he has wanted to call it quits, but the power of music keeps drawing him back.
He told the new issue of Mojo magazine: “I’ve attempted to retire many times. It didn’t last.
“Music is a kind of magical thing, you know. When I sing those old songs, when you manage to inhabit the song again, it unlocks it. Some people might say it’s nostalgia, but it seems more potent to me. You’re tapping back into the energy of what you felt, and it comes back to life.
And Pulp … I don’t expect it to cure me, or anything, now. I think that makes it a much more pleasurable thing all around. I’m just happy that we managed to make a record that moves me.”
Commenting on how the follow-up to 2001’s ‘We Love Life’ came to be, Cocker said: “I’d written this song ‘Hymn Of The North’ which I thought was all right, so we tried it out in soundchecks and we played it at the Hammersmith Odeon and I dunno, it just felt good. So I thought, ‘Well, let’s see how far we can take that.’”
The ‘Common People’ hitmaker was hesitant to define the band’s future, noting: “Well, it’s More. It wasn’t conceived as, ‘Right this is our grand full stop.’ But it might be. Or it might be more of a comma – a grand comma. Because y’know, nothing ever really ends.”