Pulp’s Fiction
How the Most English of English Bands Accidentally Seeks To Destroy Englishness Itself

3,336 words

Last week I wrote about the Glastonbury Music Festival and how it had been hijacked by a pair of black rappers named Bob Vylan to pump out a dirge seemingly calling for the colonization of England by malcontented persons of other races like them. Also playing Glastonbury at the same time, however, were one of the most quintessentially English bands, Pulp, who have just reformed and released their first new album, More, since breaking up in 2002.

Pulp’s mid-1990s heyday coincided with the Britpop boom, and was probably the last time English music still felt genuinely English – which is probably because this was the last time England itself was still genuinely English, before the 1997 election victory of Tony Blair and his New Labour Cabinet of Quislings, who decided to open the floodgates to mass immigration in order to “rub the right’s noses in diversity.”

Almost as if to emphasize the fact of their Englishness, as characteristic and unmistakable in its way as that of other bands like The Kinks or The Beatles, Pulp’s drummer, Nick Banks, was even the nephew of Gordon Banks, goalkeeper of England’s legendary 1966 World Cup-winning soccer team, the only iteration of the national side ever to have actually won a trophy. It is ironic, then, that in their politics the band now seem to have become so disappointingly and conventionally globalist.

White Noise

Pulp’s music, as seen at its height in albums like 1994’s His n’ Hers and 1995’s Different Class (the first CD I ever bought as a schoolboy) was rooted in a profound quotidian sense of place. Songs about broken biscuits, cheap, second-hand beds, piss-stained elevators, joyriders taking trips to local reservoirs in stolen cars, or a blue plaque being placed above the Sheffield street-corner where lead singer and bespectacled human pipe-cleaner Jarvis Cocker had “first touched a girl’s chest”, were deliberately parochial in a manner which seemed, paradoxically, oddly universal in their nature – universal within England, that is. Although the songs were set in places where the listener had most likely never been themselves, they were the sort of places known to ordinary English people all across the land. [1]

As such, despite being one of the Big Three of the Britpop era, behind only Blur and Oasis, Pulp don’t really have much of a mainstream following abroad. In America, they are more of a minor cult band than anything.

Following their 2025 reunion, one of Pulp’s major gigs was in Manchester, where 18,000 fans gathered to see them perform new material from More, and old hits like “Common People“, “Do You Remember the First Time?”, “Babies” and “Disco 2000”. Amongst their number was the well-known middle-of-the-road Times journalist and former Conservative (in name only) MP Matthew Parris, who observed the following curious phenomenon as regarded the crowd:

From our seats beside and above the stage I could survey the nearly 10,000 faces of the floor-crowd standing below, each illuminated by the brightly lit stage. They were like pixels: the tiny, colored points that, viewed as a whole from a distance, appear as an image in a newspaper photo. During the entire evening I failed to spot even a couple of brown or black faces among these 18,000 people. Only among the security guards were there any non-white people [this is also how English concentration camps will operate in 50 years time]. The pixels in my Pulp picture were of different age, genders and walks of life – diverse except for the one thing that united them all: they were all white and nearly all English. Pulp, I think[…] are a powerful magnet for white Englishness. Why? Is it the suppressed ardor, the almost constipated longing, the gentle irony and a kind of tenderness punctuated by stifled outbursts of passion? […] I recognize, know and struggle for the right words to express the unmistakable feeling of being a white Englishman.

These are unusual words for Parris to write, as he is a classic liberal who has in the past written about his own personal comfort with immigration, and his aesthetic (possibly sexual) preference for men of other skin colors, thinking whiteness innately ugly in many respects. And yet, confronted with the presence of Cocker and Pulp, even Parris has been forced to admit that such a thing as Englishness exists, is recognizable, and has distinct tangible characteristics, although he finds them difficult to precisely verbally define.

Like pornography or art in the old saying, perhaps you recognize an Englishman if you see one. Parris even goes so far as to claim that, somehow, he knew his fellow concert-goers in Manchester were “nearly all English” purely from glancing at them from afar. Unless they were all wearing top-hats and monocles, then how did he know? Many of them could just have easily have been Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Dutch or Polish – albeit certainly not Indian, Somali or Pakistani.

Nonetheless, it’s a welcome – if probably inadvertent – admission from Parris that such “fictions” as national character, ethnicity and race are not “fictions” at all, but purest facts. You almost wonder how such a forbidden truth managed to slip past his liberal self-censorship mechanisms, but I suppose Pulp just have that effect on people. English persons see them, and are forced, somehow, to recognize themselves in the band, an embodied illustration that the English as a people are a genuine thing, not a mere political invention of the racist Age of Empire, or whatever the current prevailing left-wing lie about such matters happens to be. Even foreign-born ancestral Englishmen – Parris was partly raised in Rhodesia before, like certain postcodes in today’s inner-city London, it was forced to become Zimbabwe instead – seem compelled to recognize their own existence in Cocker’s living, ethnic mirror.

She Came From Greece Under Freedom of Movement

One of the bands Pulp most remind me of as walking incarnations of urban Englishness are Manchester’s finest The Smiths who, if they hailed from the same ruined postcode today, would probably be called The Patels. Yet Jarvis Cocker and The Smiths’ own frontman Morrissey seem to have very different ideas about what constitutes national character. The two usually Charming Men by all accounts have something of a vague antipathy towards one another, which may perhaps have something to do with Morrissey holding sensible views on race and immigration like the following, spoken in 2007 and cited in a previous Counter-Currents article on Mozza:

Although I don’t have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England, the more the British identity disappears. So the price is enormous. Travel to England and you have no idea where you are. It matters because the British identity is very attractive. I grew up into it, and I find it very quaint and amusing. Other countries have held on to their basic identity, yet it seems to me that England was thrown away.

I quite agree, yet it is safe to say Jarvis himself would not. Following the 2016 Brexit vote, Cocker has found himself occupying the role of pop-culture spokesman for the Remain camp, persistently arguing the case for Britain to rejoin the EU, in the name of internationalism, freedom of movement, social justice, progress, and various other of the social poisons which have helped destroy the country he so inadvertently helped embody over the past thirty years. In a 2020 interview, Cocker even went so far as to declare he found it “embarrassing” to be referred to as an “unconventional national treasure”, because Brexit had made him ashamed to be English:

I was very vocally against that [Brexit] and still think it’s one of the most pathetic things ever, especially now. There’s freedom of movement in Europe and it’s so sad that we’ve chucked that away. I’m a little bit bothered about people knowing that I’m English because it’s a bit embarrassing at the moment because of this psychotic thing we’re doing.

In 2019, Cocker had already claimed that “The French aren’t any less French for being in Europe, the Germans aren’t any less German,” which rather suggests he hasn’t been to Marseille or Cologne any time recently. A bit odd, really, as he actually spent much of the past two decades living in France, having married a native fashion designer named Camille Bidault-Waddington. I know Cocker needs notoriously thick-lensed glasses, but surely even he can’t have been myopic enough not have been able to see the colossal demographic changes in the population of Paris over the last twenty years?

Brexit, Cocker theorizes, “has been an ongoing mental health crisis for the whole country” as, it having been a split vote, 52 percent leave versus 48 percent Remain, “you’re kind of pitching half the country against the other”. Much better just not to let the other half that he doesn’t agree with have its say at all, then? Appearing on the BBC in 2019, Cocker explained how the relative closeness of the result meant that, in musical terms, Brexit would only have been a minor hit, halfway up the pop charts, not even a top ten number:

I think the great unifying chart hit of today would be called something like ‘Are You Sick of Hearing, Reading, Eating, Breathing, Dreaming About Brexit?’ There is a chart-topper if ever I heard one. The UK pop charts used to be this crazy collision of rampant commerce and grassroots democracy. People from all walks of life and different backgrounds, beliefs, ethnicities, gender orientations, shoe sizes […] could find that they actually had something in common. They liked dancing to a particular song. I’m mentioning the pop charts because I actually think they do shed some light on Brexit. And particularly on the validity of a second referendum. Because that referendum result is the equivalent of single entering the UK Top 40 at 19. ‘Limping in at number 19’. You’re having a laugh! We wouldn’t have even dared to call it a hit back in the day, we really wouldn’t. We definitely wouldn’t have dared to call it ‘the will of the people’ […] Let’s do it again. Let’s have a second referendum and let’s define a margin of victory this time.[2]

I’ve got a better idea. Let’s hold it again, and let’s define an acceptable electorate this time: i.e., only actual white British people, not any immigrants, recent descendants of immigrants, or any other imported, result-rigging ethno-voters. I doubt the result would be split quite so closely down the middle this second time, more like 60:40, 65:35 or 70:30.

Cocker pretends pop charts are some kind of grand unifying expression of the collective national consciousness in which “People from all walks of life and different backgrounds, beliefs, ethnicities, gender orientations, shoe sizes” come together as one to declare their shared appreciation for a piece of valued popular music.

If that’s really the case, then why was even a mainstream liberal like Matthew Parris compelled to observe that Pulp’s Manchester reunion concert was attended only by what appeared to be white English people? Manchester, it should be noted, is these days close to becoming a white-minority city. So where were all the Pakistanis? At home listening to their instrument-less nasheeds, I guess; one of the most common strands of Islam in the UK is Deobandi, a sect in which all musical instruments are banned as being the haram tools of Shaytan and Iblis. When Cocker had his biggest hit back in 1995 with “Common People”, which reached number two in the charts, how many Muslims does he reckon bought a copy?

Morrissey has a much more realistic appreciation of the unparalleled damage mass non-white immigration has done to the continued existence of the English culture and character, but still Cocker prefers to blame anti-immigration figures like Donald Trump for raping the Western body politic and warping our entire collective unconscious:

People don’t pay so much attention to the unconscious any more, things are very conscious, but that’s where all this stuff lurks – and that’s why we end up with Trump. You know the fatberg that was found in London sewers? All of that disgusting dark cesspit, all the slime and crap that we try not to think about? That’s Donald Trump.

So the West has all been driven racially and politically mad by the likes of Brexit and MAGA, has it? To me, it’s Cocker himself who seems to have left an important part of his brain somewhere in a field in Hampshire here.

Let’s All Meet Up in the Year 3000; Won’t It Be Strange When We’re All Fully Brown?

Even more regrettably, Jarvis is also an enthusiastic supporter of Black Lives Matter. One of Cocker’s solo albums is called Beyond the Pale, and to judge by some of his credulous public statements on BLM (whose protests he once attended) this title now stands as a sort of unspoken personal demographic aspiration of his – Beyond the Pale, Towards the Tanned. He seems to link what he would call “racism” with capitalist exploitation of the poor, thus making some kind of Bob Vylan-style race-Marxist revolution not only justifiable, but necessary:

What a lot of people have pointed out is that it’s a time you can’t just be a bystander, you have to make a positive statement and make a positive action, because that event that happened [the death of George Floyd] was so horrendous that you can’t remain silent about it. All this stuff about these statues getting chucked in the water and stuff like that, well fair enough. Historically speaking you’ve got to realise that things don’t change on their own, people have to protest and, for want of a better phrase, make a nuisance of themselves in order for stuff to change, because otherwise the people who’ve created that situation will just carry on doing it. Our economies and our politics are still kind of based on the same thing that created slavery. Slavery was an economic decision, ‘How do we make things cheaply? Have a workforce that we don’t pay.’ Now you’ll make a T-shirt for 20p in Indonesia by paying people very little. They’ve watered it down a bit but it’s still the same principle, you exploit people in order to make capitalism work.

Who makes all the cheap Pulp souvenir T-shirts, mugs, posters and key-rings, then? Well-paid white upper-middle-class people living in Islington?

During the height of 1990s Britpop mania, Tony Blair and his New Labour race-suicide vehicle co-opted many of the era’s leading bands, lefty to the last man, to endorse him for PR purposes, in the pathetic belief this would cause a semi-imaginary demographic called “young people” to vote for him as an avatar of so-called Cool Britannia, a pre-Internet media meme of the day. Naturally, Pulp and Cocker were amongst the number all too happy to comply; somehow, Morrissey managed to resist following suit.

In 1996, “a girl called Imogen” called Cocker from New Labour’s London offices and sought his public support. Cocker gave it, although his own personal brand of left-wing politics were more Jeremy Corbyn than Tony Blair, economics-wise (he later went off Corbyn for Jezza’s not opposing Brexit enough) and he really felt the whole thing was a little superficial. In 1996, Cocker wrote the song Cocaine Socialism, mocking the idea of the association between politicians and pop stars, but held it back from release until Pulp’s 1998 album This Is Hardcore, lest it put people off voting Labour in the 1997 election, a measure he now deems egotistical and delusional.

Help the Asians    

Following Pulp’s original 2002 demise, Cocker enjoyed a long solo career, one of the best-known products of which was his 2006 song Cunts Are Still Running the World, often abbreviated simply to Still Running the World, good old Anglo-Saxon words like that now being considered offensive to some. But who are the “cunts” of the title? Basically, they sound like classic cartoon globalists – if he’d called it Jews Are Running the World, he would doubtless have been asked to join Bob Vylan as their new frontman immediately, Matthew Parris-repelling milk-face or not, besides finally gaining a good few Muslim listeners to boot. [3] Here are two typical verses:

Now the working classes are obsolete,
They are surplus to society’s needs,
So let ’em all kill each other,
And get it made overseas.

[Do you claim that] Your free market is perfectly natural,
Or do you think that I’m some kind of dummy?
It’s the ideal way to order the world;
Fuck the morals, does it make any money?

Cocker doesn’t really seem to understand that this is precisely the kind of borderless world neo-liberal economic attitude that his beloved European Union itself embodies, though, which is precisely why his one-time hero Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t particularly keen on the bloc. If cunts are indeed running the world, then they are EU-allied cunts like Emmanuel Macron, Ursula von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas, Christine Lagarde, etc. Doesn’t Jarvis realize that, when it comes to the free economic movement of people, assets and capital, the outsourcing of cheap labor abroad, and the simultaneous importation of cheap labor domestically, his derisive lyrics here sum up precisely why so many “Common People” voted for Brexit in 2016 in the first place?

Prior to the Brexit vote, in 2014, Cocker joked he was “an absolute traitor to my class and my background”, due to having adopted such lofty lefty viewpoints, but then spoke the following words which would tend to suggest that, deep down, even he actually knew Morrissey was right about the deleterious consequences of the Great Replacement:

The thing is that I don’t think you can get away from it. [i.e., your domestic origins and class roots] Where you’re brought up, it’s the soil you’ve grown from and even if you’re transplanted – I’m following this plant metaphor as far as it’ll go – even if you’re transplanted to the hothouses of London, your worldview is formed by that place. Maybe that’s not great if you’re in Buenos Aires, say, and you’re looking for a chip shop.

If that’s really the case, how can he honestly advocate for EU-style open borders? It genuinely pains me to criticize Cocker so much here. Pulp were the first band I ever truly liked as a teenager, they are still one of my favorite groups (albeit admittedly you may not get that impression from reading this article), and I have always found Cocker himself to be amusing, interesting and intelligent – at least until he gets on to talking about his stupid, self-defeating politics.

Perhaps the most irritatingly self-knowledgeless thing about Cocker’s ideological worldview is that, if it had been fully implemented and in place during Cocker’s own youth, growing up in the blessedly pre-Blairite England of the 1960s and 1970s, back when England itself was still actually a viable, living concern, there is no way Pulp could ever possibly have existed. Brought up in a deracinated, PC, globalized Yookay, subjected to endless left-wing queer, multi-culti, #BeKind propaganda in the massively mixed-race classroom and media, how would Jarvis Cocker have grown up to write the quintessentially English songs he actually did?

Ultimately,  it’s because I so love the things Pulp’s music so perfectly represent, that I wish to see the deluded, self-destroying, suicidal outlook its lead singer now so blindly supports so utterly smashed…ground down to a Pulp, you might say.

Notes

[1] Although in my own case, one of Pulp’s best-known songs, Sorted for Es and Whizz, did actually happen to have been inspired by a music festival held in my own hometown, at a local area of canal-bordered parkland called Spike Island, where the illegal drugs of the title appeared to be readily available. Spike Island is also the name of the first track on Pulp’s new album More.

[2] We already did define a margin of victory; one single vote over 50 percent. It’s called “a majority.” As it was, over a million more people voted to Leave than to Remain. That’s actually quite a lot.

[3] There was a campaign to get Cunts Are Running the World to be the UK Christmas number one single in 2019, but it lost out to I Love Sausage Rolls by LadBaby, another song I sincerely doubt any Muslims would have considered buying.