Pulp in the Forest

Sounds pretty magical to me. Except for the loud audience part...

jesus how horrible people a bit different from you

Yeah I love seeing my girlfriend being groped by a big drunk skinhead and two pissed up men trying feebly to put touch her.

Really, grow up and don't insult me with that shit.

A lesson here - don't go and see Pulp. The audience will be strange.

yeah sorry calum i meant to say, blimey what a jerk you don't come across as

mark, be reasonable. There were *bikers in leather* and *skinheads*.

I had a similar experience to this when I went to see Siouxsie and the Banshees in Inverness Ice Rink in 1982. Well apart from there being no "ugly ginger birds" there and indeed no scarey uncooth types at all in evidence- apart from John McGeoch. I can well imagine that such ruffians would ruin a gig for us aesthete city dwellers.

Oh man it's not that. I'd seen Pulp 3 times before this and I never thought they'd attract the Oasis crowd.

It's just when you find yourself not watching the gig but rather watching fat drugged up arseholes stumbling around because you really don't want them to tumble onto you (and they try, bless them they try, to bounce during the faster songs - leading to disaster) and you have morons trying to fondle your girlfriend (and anything else in a skirt).

Basically, if they want to spend their time throwing beer about and pushing people over and throwing shit on stage and just being a pain in the arse then that's up to them but some of us like to enjoy our gigs you know?

Richard Hawley didn't make it, so there was only one support band -- British Sea Power, who were awful. I didn't think Jarvis & co. looked peeved, but then I was maybe too busy going back and forth to the beer tent to see if any more lager had arrived yet. (It hadn't). V. mixed audience: lots of middle aged folk with kids and picnic baskets... I haven't seen Pulp for a couple of years, and they've never struck me as a particularly convincing live band -- ie never anything totally wild about it -- but this didn't seem below par. Last time was in Edinburgh just after they'd played at the Biennalle (sp.?) so they played for half the set behind a Venetian blind. It took me half an hour to get the awful joke.

Reasons not to hold a rock gig in a forest clearing:

1) men drinking beer then peeing against trees all round the clearing.

2) F*restry C*mmission deciding to host a gig so far from anywhere that everyone has to drive there. But then FC = environmental antiChrist I seem to have gathered from reading about their policies somewhere. (Please don't sue me!)

3) See comment re: not being enough beer.

4) My girlfriend reckons the birds went beserk during Feeling Called Love -- surely that can't be right?

Reasons to hold a gig in a forest clearing:

1) SOLSTICE!

2) Erm, fresh air so you can't smell the audience.

3) Going swimming in the sea afterwards and standing around on the beach until it's your birthday at midnight!

I saw the Edinburgh gig you are spekaing about - it was in August 1999. A short set designed as a sort of 'Pulp unplugged', it was good but not a proper Pulp gig by any means. For a start, besides only doing an hour, they played mostly new and unheard songs - and every song was soft and melodic.

I saw Pulp at Brixton last year and they were first class, I also saw them at T in the Park in 98 and they were on fire. The Elgin gig was good, but the audience was made of arseholes and I dunno about you but when I spent big bucks to see a band I want to enjoy it and remember it. The mentality of getting wasted during a concert is beyond me...

I think my first Pulp gig would be hard to beat -- Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, December 1994 or 5 I guess, supported by Menswear. Everyone junped up and down so much the management thought the circles would fall in on top of the stalls. I've not been a big Pulp fan recently, so I can't really say how it compares to recent gigs, but I was curious to see what this would be like.

I think I pick gigs to go and see based on the overall experience of the event, so a big part of the attraction was having to get to the middle of nowhere, and getting to spend time with some people I like loads who I don't see often enough. The wierdness of the crowd, and the kind of make-shift atmosphere of the whole thing added to the fun for me.

We stood about half-way back and nodded along rather than danced, so didn't see any trouble, apart from beer-can throwing, which is kinda tedious.

Proving once and for all that indie kids have no sense of humour...

apologies to mark s (its a slow day at work)

Oh man it's not that. I'd seen Pulp 3 times before this and I never thought they'd attract the Oasis crowd.
But Calum...you're an Oasis fan...at a Pulp Concert...of course Pulp attracts an Oasis crowd. Oasis == warmed over Who; Pulp == warmed over Kinks. Even yobbos need to feel smart.

pulp=warmed over kinks

dude, that is harsh! i think pulp exceeded the kinks personally, i think the connection is tenuous as well (i know i made a more tenuous connection elsewhere, but i don't really see that one)

I don't see any connection between the kinks and pulp either. Warmed over kinks? What the hell are you on about man?

Oasis/Who == Anthems for Yobs. (Not a value judgement, just an observation.)
Pulp/Kinks == Slice of life vignettes, not as agressively tuneful as the the Oasis plagari^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H homage, but it has very pithy lyrics. The only major difference was that Jarvis Cocker is 'naughtier'.

hmmmm...the slice of life bit, OK, but musickally, they're a looong way apart, I think. Blur were more yer kinks knock off at one point, yes?

like me, lord custos never actually listens to any of the music he talks about => this is convenient on many levels

But Jarvis Cocker IS naughtier...

Blur were more yer kinks knock off at one point, yes?
Hmmm. Good Point. But Pulp has better lyrics, I think. Hence very similar to Kinks in spirit if not sound.

alext - you probably can't answer this, but did the Drury Lane gig feature a song called We Can Dance Again? ('We can dance again, take a chance again...') One of their best tunes, and they never played it again. Wish I'd been there.

Sorry, Ciaran, I'm afraid the tides of time have washed that detail out of my brain. All I really remember was that they ended with Pink Glove which was definitely my favourite song of theirs at the time, so I was very happy about that.

oasis = who, maybe pulp = kinks, no, it's blur = kinks as everyone knows

w..wait, how did I let that oasis=who thing slip past? Since when did The Who produce anthems for yobs (unless you mean "fiddle about")? I mean, union jack aside the two are night and day.

There are definite 'yobbo' elements to the Who - Daltrey's Shepherd's Bush thuggery, 'the smashing of the amps', the early links w/the Mods and their pilled-up passion for Soul/R'n'B (eg Daltrey's James Brown impersonations on the first alb) - but it's always in conflict w/ Pete's mystical art school poetic 'heavy soul', as well as public school posho Kit Lambert's taste for opera and high culture. Big prob for Oasis: their 'poetic' side is either pisspoor or virtually non- existent - and now they're not 'kings of the world' any more, all their swagger and bluster just seems silly and hollow.

I'm not sure I know what Custos means by 'naughty' (tho' I am sure I don't want to know), but the Kinks had a number two hit (in 1970) w/ a song abt a transvestite, and Ray Davies performed it for the Queen this year... So yeah I dunno...

I'm not sure I know what Custos means by 'naughty' (tho' I am sure I don't want to know), but the Kinks had a number two hit (in 1970) w/ a song abt a transvestite, and Ray Davies performed it for the Queen this year... So yeah I dunno...
Ray wrote one song about a trannie. But Cocker contantly oozes a pseudo-kinky voyuerism. Every song I've heard by him feel vaguely smarmy (I don't know if I mean that as a compliment or an insult yet...I'll have to break down and buy a whole album instead of cherrypicking mp3s.); Simon Reynolds even referred to Jarvis as a "pervy poet, a saucy sex maniac..." and muttered "you'll find plenty of titillating ditties on Different Class"; I'd say the concencus is Jarvis Cocker == Naughty.

Somebody, get a hold of Momus and see if Jarvis was the Tender Pervert he wrote songs about.

But Cocker contantly oozes a pseudo-kinky voyuerism.

Jarvis is one of maybe two or three people whose lyrics I will actively seek out (though in accordance with his wishes, I never read them while the songs are playing ;-)). Seems to me that his songs are trying to attempt more of a pseudo-realistic voyeurism -- in otherwards, within the context of a fictional narrative, he's not aiming at something glamourous or thrillingly forbidden about sex and relationships, but trying to convey the senses about how things 'really' are and how they can go wrong. Certainly that's what he's aiming for with songs like "Live Bed Show" and "Underwear," for instance -- the idea being that we the listeners are supposed to be getting off on the sigh of realistic acknowledgment about the material.

like me, lord custos never actually listens to any of the music he talks about => this is convenient on many levels

-- mark s (mar...) (webmail), June 25th, 2002 8:00 PM. (link)

ha

Actually, THIS is the funny part:

---

jesus how horrible people a bit different from you

-- mark s (mar...), June 23rd, 2002.

Yeah I love seeing my girlfriend being groped by a big drunk skinhead and two pissed up men trying feebly to put touch her.

Really, grow up and don't insult me with that shit.

-- Calum Robert (calumr...), June 23rd, 2002.

i don't think it's funny when someone gets mad and makes an ass of himself

it just makes me sad

It's all contextual.

no, i think we just have different senses of humor. which is, of course, perfectly ok.

i'm still astonished that calum has a girlfriend, but then again they *did* just discover the remains of a long-necked sea monster that sucked in its prey, so anything's possible

"has"

I sympathise with anyone who has to spend a night out in Elgin. The population consists of the usual bizzaro highlanders and a few thousand teenage hooligans from England, aka. the RAF. Chuck in some drunk Glaswegians and you've got a perfect storm of depressing nastiness.