Truth & Beauty: The Story of Pulp (Mark Sturdy 2003 via Omnibus Press
In 1995 Simply Red’s ‘Fairground’ kept Pulp’s double A-side, ‘Sorted For Es And Wizz/Misshapes’, off the number one slot. Can anyone remember what Fairground sounded like? No one in the office that’s for sure. The Pulp tracks however are deeply embedded in the national subconscious, instantly evoking a time and place. For that reason alone, for what they meant for a while to so many people, Pulp deserve a decent biography and Mark Sturdy has done them proud. Taking their story from schooldays in Sheffield through to last December’s Auto festival, this is an immensely detailed piece of work. Sturdy, an unashamed fan, is particularly good on the band’s early years – he captures the feeling of 80s Sheffield dole-drum days perfectly. Pulp spent the best part of a decade playing a dozen or so pub gigs a year; shedding and replacing band members and arguing with small indie labels. Though they (just) kept the faith, the sense of futility and inertia in the first couple of hundred pages here is tangible.
The reason for their ultimate triumph was the development of their songwriting and tracing this evolution is another of Sturdy’s strengths; he charts the gradual change from wilful indie weirdness to pure-pop nirvana near perfectly. The Britpop years are viewed from a distance – this is very much a book about Pulp and Pulp alone and there’s very little attempt to place their work in a broader context, which is something of a missed opportunity.
The other weakness is that, due to his fan status, Sturdy is far too ready to give the band the benefit of the doubt – they did, for example, cash-in on the Brit-Pop hype and there’s little point in pretending they didn’t. If, for instance, Jarvis Cocker could say of TFI Friday in 1998 “I hate what that programme’s become. It’s really just ego exercise for Evans. And it’s not even funny!” and given that Pulp see themselves as (and indeed are) artists of integrity, with a stubborn independent streak, why then appear on the programme in that year? There are plenty of other examples of this unwillingness to question the band. Sturdy lets them of with a caution for their unconvincing disgust at the tabloid press, which Cocker, at least, had courted shamelessly and he completely dodges the subject of drugs. However, reservations aside, this is a fine documentary study – come here for just the facts and you’ll be amply rewarded. There have been other Pulp books, but they were mid-Nineties cash-ins and woefully inadequate. ‘Truth And Beauty’, by contrast, is possibly too
much for all but the most committed. Well worth reading but unless you were in the fan club you’ll find yourself skimming a fair bit. 8/10
Martin Herron