Nick Banks is currently on the road following the release of his memoir, So It Started There: From Punk To Pulp. It’s packed with vivid recollections spanning from his Rotherham childhood to his present day global gallivanting as Pulp’s drummer.
I catch up with Nick mid-way through his book tour. We’re in an empty upstairs bar in Bath. We have a packet of crisps, a Diet Coke (Nick) and a lime and soda (me). We have over an hour to natter about Pulp. To get him talking I’ve brought along a bag of artefacts related to different parts of his memoir. I needn’t have done. As those who’ve attended one of his books talks will know, Nick will happily “gabber-on” with barely any prompting. The dream interviewee.
With this book, Nick’s found his voice and discovered an appreciative audience. He seems in high spirits. Pulp’s summer concerts – their most successful tour ever – are fresh in his mind, with more concerts to look forward to in November and December.
This is unashamedly a long-read written more for the Pulp fan than the casual. So pull up a chair and let’s open the bag of artefacts to see what we find.
Acrylic Afternoons (AA): Our first item is a seven-inch single. It caught your attention as the UK’s Eurovision entry in 1977, finishing second to France. You say in your book that you liked it, but not enough to buy a copy.
Nick: Ah ‘Rock Bottom’. Yes! It’s a great song. It’s a catchy tune.
AA: It got me thinking about how different a person’s musical influences might be if they had been born a couple of years earlier or later. Is that something you’ve thought about too?
Nick: Definitely. I got the tail-end of punk rock. It literally was the tail-end, but you only think of that in hindsight 20 years later. At the time it felt like it was the only musical thing to be interested in. But if I had been born a couple of years later it would probably have been New Romantic – wearing a sash, wedge haircut and some stupid buckle shoes. I got into punk in 1978 to 1979. I know everyone will think that their age of music is the best. And that’s absolutely fine. But I feel lucky at being able to get into music in that year. A lot of people say 1979 is the best year in music, full stop. I feel lucky because the explosion that followed was incredible.
AA: The first time you saw Pulp was the ‘Stars on Sundae’ event at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. You describe the event in a way that makes it seem quite polished, with the cut-out fishes as stage props and the inclusion of backing singers. Yet many who talk about Pulp performances in the early days refer to their ramshackle charm, with things not always working out as the band had hoped.
Nick: It varied with the members changing in the band. Obviously when you’re a band at school you haven’t got a clue and so it is pretty ramshackle. But for the ‘It’ record there were people in the band who could actually play. Like Simon Hinkler for instance. They were a little bit older so they could bring more experience. From what I could remember it just seemed really different and very competent. Once that ‘It’ line-up dissolved and then others came in, like Manners [Pete Mansell] and Magnus [Doyle], it went back to more ramshackle. Obviously when I joined it became a lot less ramshackle I’d like to say!
AA: How much do you remember of that performance at the Crucible?
Nick: Obviously they were playing the songs from ‘It’. I don’t think they played any songs from earlier. But it was just so different to the local bands I was listening to or experiencing. No way should I have liked it because it was acoustic and gentle with twinkly piano and a tooting trombone. There was no crunching goth guitars. It was completely different. But having said that, like we’ve all seen, you couldn’t take your eyes off this singer. He would talk to the audience. He had an actual charisma and a talent for engaging them and getting everyone on side. No other bands really did that.
AA: The Limit club was one of your regular haunts during those times.
Nick: Certainly throughout the 80s it was pretty much three nights a week. You’d go on Monday where you’d try to get in before 11pm because it was free. You’d run down the street from the Hallamshire. Wednesdays were similar. That was maybe cheap drinks night. And often a Thursday, that might’ve been student night. You’d try to avoid it at the weekend because it got somewhat uglier.
AA: A different clientele?
Nick: Very much a different clientele! I’ve been in there on a Saturday, buried under fighting skinheads. You’d comically crawl out between someone’s legs thinking, ‘what the bloody hell’s going off here?’. Every city had a dive-y disco where all the goths and punks and new romantics hung out. The drinks were cheap and the toilets were horrible. That’s the faustian pact you have to buy into to go to these places. Kids these days, they’ve got it all nicey-nice.
AA: Soap in the toilets even.
Nick: All that kind of stuff! They don’t have to wade knee-deep in shit at 1 o’ clock. I’m going too far… maybe just over the soles of your boots. But like I say, it was those kinds of places where everyone that was a bit different and into alternative music would go to. They’d go to The Limit and they’d go to the Leadmill. They wouldn’t really go to other places because they didn’t really exist. There were ‘townie bars’, as we would call them, where people couldn’t get in if they were wearing jeans. And yet these kids going in wearing their trousers would batter your head-in in a heartbeat.
AA: You certainly weren’t telling people at the top of the stairs in the Hallamshire that you weren’t letting them in to watch the band because they were wearing the wrong clothes.
Nick: No. 50p – in you go!
AA: I loved the image of Tim Allcard and Jarvis sitting with you at the top of the stairs to avoid paying you their 50p entrance fee.
Nick: We just did it to have our day every week. You’d sit there on Sunday and nurse half a larger for hours. Sit at the top of the stairs, collect the money and listen to the bands. You’d get to know all the band people; they’d often be the same folks you’d see down The Limit later on.
AA: It sounds like a scene, though you probably wouldn’t call it a scene.
Nick: No, you wouldn’t call it a scene but it kind of was because everyone would get to know each other. Bands would form and split-up, often even in the same night, but that’s just what you needed to do.
AA: Come 1986 and you’ve joined Pulp. It doesn’t get much better than joining your favourite band, right?
Nick: Not in your musical career, no.
AA: But I also think that this is the last time that Nick’s seen Pulp as a punter. So you lose something as well as gain something?
Nick: Yeah, that’s true.
AA: We’ve got a flyer from January ’86 of Pulp at The Limit, possibly one of the last times you saw them as a punter? And another flyer from December ’86 at the 100 Club which was one of your first gigs as a band member.
Nick: Very possibly I was at The Limit one and that might have been one where Jarvis was in the wheelchair. And the 100 Club was one of the few gigs that ‘Captain Sleep’ was a band member. Candida had been in and out of the band. She was very much torn between following brother Magnus and boyfriend Manners in the schism. I don’t know what happened but maybe Jarvis sweet-talked her to come back. Perhaps like me she thought that Pulp was the best band to be in, so it was better to stick with it and see where it takes you.
AA: When you joined Pulp, ’Dogs Are Everywhere’ had been out for a few months. The Melody Maker review said:
Pulp are probably the most subversively important band in the world today, and they don’t even know it.
AA: That was the band you joined. And yet, for years, nothing happened.
Nick: It was Single Of The Week in the NME. You’d think with that kind of interest that someone with clout and money would say, ‘let’s have a look at this lot properly and let’s enable them to make better records and get some publicity’. No-one ever did. Perhaps it was a London-centric thing where those bods couldn’t see what was there. I joined my favourite band, I loved ‘Little Girl’, I loved ‘Dogs Are Everywhere’, I loved the ‘Freaks’ record which came out after I joined. ‘Freaks’ had been recorded for a while but Fire Records were rubbish and they couldn’t get their shit together.
AA: And even before ‘Freaks’ was released the band were moving on from those songs to the new Portasound-inspired ones.
Nick: Because Fire took so long to get stuff out, the band had basically dissolved and a new sound was being devised. ‘Freaks’ was the songs of two years before and the sound had moved on.
AA: Did you ever get people who came along to Pulp concerts in 1987 telling you they were expecting to hear more material from ‘Freaks’?
Nick: Well no, because no-one bought it. [laughs]
AA: So they weren’t to know any different?
Nick: ‘Dogs’ had sold pitiful amounts. ‘Little Girl’ had sold a few more, but probably not even a thousand. ‘Where’s the hits?’ There were no hits! Doing these book talks, I’ve been doing straw polls, like in Bristol: “Anybody at the Fleece And Firkin gig in 1992?” One person put their hand up. But when you ask, “Who came to the summer shows?”, everyone raises their hand.
AA: Let’s talk about the FON demo in 1987. For me, Pulp had a bit of a habit of leaving some of their best songs in the recording studio. You must’ve listened to ‘Death Comes To Town’, ‘Don’t You Want Me Anymore?’ and ‘Rattlesnake’ and thought, ‘This is it. This is absolutely bloody brilliant’.
Nick: Yes. All of us thought that it was head and shoulders the best thing that Pulp had done. We were just really desperate for FON to say, ‘These are great, you’re gonna go far kids. Sign this contract and we’ll start releasing records.’ Anything to get off having to deal with Fire Records because the relationship was so sour even before we had signed again. ‘Rattlesnake’ was a firm favourite. A slight leftwards movement to the serbo-disco side of things. Very much a Russell influence.
AA: Fire have never released these three songs on any of the various compilations and reissues they’ve done over the years. Presumably they don’t own the recordings?
Nick: They won’t own them because they were funded by FON. They just gave us some studio time and we used that to do those three songs. Although not owning songs does not necessarily mean that Fire won’t release them. They’ve tried that before.
at the Sheffield Leadmill (1988)
AA: The Day That Never Happened. This was ‘shit or bust’ time for Pulp.
Nick: Yes! It was one of those moments of trying to do something grandiose but with no money whatsoever. What was on that telly should have been projections onto the white cloth draped behind me. But the projector broke and there was no spare. So we covered the telly in tin foil and showed the images on there instead. This period summed up the approach of reaching out to the stars but not getting out of the gutter. All these grand ideas to make something a multimedia extravaganza.
AA: But more stuff to go wrong?
Nick: Definitely. And as we’ve seen this year, you can do it now, but it costs an absolute arm and a leg.
AA: Tell me about Antony Genn [pictured above, playing bass guitar]. I’ve not met him when he’s been sober, but he’s such an engaging and charismatic figure that he’s someone you’d follow anywhere. I imagine he brought vibes, fun and mischief to the Pulp camp?
Nick: Yes, very much so. Antony has got an incredibly rare talent. He can get where water can’t. He’s done the soundtrack for Peaky Blinders, manages Inhaler and has done lots of amazing stuff. He’s never had a proper job in his life and he’s done it all by having the gift of the gab and lots of charm. He can be a bit of a nightmare. There are times when you wanna say to him, ‘Ants, just shut up.’
AA: Or maybe, ‘Ants, tune your guitar’?
Nick: ‘Tune your bloody guitar’ and don’t leave the drummer to do it. Exactly. He’s got a brother who is very similar, Steve Genn, who was another Pulp person and who is also very charismatic. Steve is very much ‘The Genn Project 1.0’. He mooches around in Sheffield. Whereas Antony is ‘The Genn Project 2.0’. He could see what his brother could do but he could take it to another level. Antony has also been working on a book. I’m not sure if it’s his life story or snippets of different things. We shall see.
AA: 1988 is the year of the Camden Falcon gig that Steve Mackey attended. You were the one who suggested to Jarvis that Steve could be the next bass player after Antony Genn departed.
Nick: The Day That Never Happened would’ve been Jarvis’ last gig as a Sheffield resident. Nothing was going right for the band at all. It seemed like a well-worn secret in Sheffield that this band needed wider attention. So with Jarvis moving down to London – and I don’t suppose we thought about it in an overt way – but you think, ‘We’ve got to try to keep the group together’, because it could very easily dissolve away.
AA: Without anyone taking a deliberate decision that it should dissolve?
Nick: Very much so. That’s what happens to bands that struggle for success. They get on with other stuff and lose contact. So Jarvis moved down to London and I remember seeing Steve at the Camden Falcon. I said to Jarvis, “Let’s ask Steve because he’s down there and you’re down there so at least you two can keep it going”. Not long after he joined Steve told me there was a room coming up in his squat and I said, “Well, I’ll have it”. So I moved down to London for a bit.
AA: How did Russ and Candida feel with the centre of gravity moving southwards to London?
Nick: Well Candida went to live in Manchester. Hence the album title ‘Separations’ as everyone was separating out. Russell stayed in Sheffield. There was three of us in London and Candida in Manchester. That’s why in those years, 1989 and 1990, there was very little Pulp activity because we were scattered to the four winds. Only every now and again did a little concert come up and you could get together. We could have very easily disappeared. Thankfully we could just about keep something together.
AA: I like what Jarvis said about it being like a hibernating animal’s heartbeat. Pulp were dormant but still alive.
Nick: A flicker of life. And with three of us being there we started to play more London gigs and people started to look at us from a different angle. And in the book I talk about Jarvis deciding to reinvent himself and get rid of the glasses for contact lenses.
AA: Sex symbol!
Nick: That was f**king hilarious. Jarvis is sexy? You what? Literally it floored us. You are kidding. We’ve seen him scrabbling around all the time and he wasn’t sexy in the slightest. But the taking off of those glasses was casting aside a barrier between being taken seriously and not being taken seriously. Reviews alluded to us being a bit odd:
“Looks like an undertaker’s apprentice, sounds like a heavenly choir.”
It wasn’t exactly, ‘C-mon kids this is music that’s gonna change your life’. And I think the glasses were some kind of barrier. A lot of people said Pulp were “wacky”. And that drove us f**king nuts. “Wacky” suggests not serious. We were deadly serious. All the time.
AA: “Kitsch” was the other word.
Nick: All that kind of stuff. There is a kitsch element, and that’s fine, but wacky was horrible. So getting rid of the glasses helped get rid of that stigma. Then it became Sexy Jarvis. When you’re in a band having a sexy lead singer is better than having a wacky undertaker’s-apprentice singer.
AA: And especially one that both the girls and the boys found attractive.
Nick: Exactly!
AA: The next item is a photographic booklet published earlier this year. The photographer’s from Germany but lived in Sheffield for a brief period at the beginning of the 1990s. I looked through his pictures and thought, ‘This is the city that Nick left for London’, and sadly Sheffield really did look on its arse. In your book you write about having to avoid the skinheads on Pond Street [pictured above] on your way home from seeing The Damned.
Nick: We’d have to come down from here [points to the corner of the Top Rank building in front of the second parked bus]. On the other side of the road where the flagpoles are is the bus station. That’s where we’d get the 287 Maltby bus back home. The road was a dual carriageway and linking the two sides was a dark, piss-smelling underpass. If you heard the sound of running boots behind you while you were in the underpass, you’d run as well. You’d try to get to the lights of the bus station where you were probably safe. If you got there, the last bus that would take us to the end of our street departed at about 10:45pm. So you missed the last bits of the gig. You could get another bus at 11:15pm but you had to walk about a mile and a half to get home from where the bus terminated. Often I’d get on that bus and when the driver kicked you off you were faced with that long walk. But if you said to the bus driver, “You’re going past the end of our road, so do you mind if I stay on it?”. Nearly always they went, “Well if anyone sees me, I’ll lose my job, so you’ve got to hide”. I’d say, “Can I get off at Whiston crossroads?” “Yeah, lie on the seat and don’t put your head up because if the Inspector sees me, I’m done.” You’d get to the crossroads, the bus door would open and you’d jump out and say, “Thank you very much”.
Nick: This bit here is a really important area [pointing to the pavement on the left hand side of the building in the middle]. That’s where I met Anne Murray. Anne was my gateway person to getting into the Sheffield scene. It was there that me and my brother, who was wearing his Stranglers jacket, were stood loafing around. Anne and her friend came up to us and said, “Oh my God we love your jacket, it’s amazing.” We had a little conversation and they walked one way and we walked the other way, probably to get the bus. And afterwards we thought, ‘Ooh, who are these girls taking an interest in us, we need to find them’. After a couple of weeks we tracked them down. Anne knew all the places like The Limit and the Hallamshire. I think we would have found those places eventually, but it brought it forward a couple of years.
contact Nickos at Pulp Central on 071 701 3390 (1991)
AA. So you went off to London at the turn of the decade. This is the promo blurb for Pulp’s breakthrough single ‘My Legendary Girlfriend’. You’re listed as the person to contact – “Nickos at Pulp Central” – which brings to mind an image of you as a PR sitting at a desk with a telephone and a typewriter.
Nick: That was me at the squat in Camberwell!
AA: You were sending video tapes of the ‘My Legendary Girlfriend’ promo around?
Nick: Everyone had a go at trying to advance the Pulp project. Jarvis never really seemed to do that. He’s not organised at all really. On the rare occasion he had organised something he’d forget to tell anyone. So Russell for many years was doing a lot of the pushing. When I went down to London I had a go at sending videos out just to drum up some interest. And once Steve joined he did a load of stuff by talking to lots of different people. We were trying to keep things together and to advance the project.
AA: And you secured a gig at The Venue in New Cross.
Nick: I remember ringing them up and they said, “Oh you sent us the video. No one sends us videos, we get cassettes.”
AA: With ‘My Legendary Girlfriend’ you waited four years to get a record out that you featured on, but it doesn’t even have your name on it.
Nick: But we’d got a record out so I wasn’t precious about the fact that my name wasn’t on it. And again, it was a Single Of The Week and it was saying, ‘This band are amazing’. So we were hoping we could build on it because that had happened before but nothing came of it.
AA: Our next item is a letter from ‘Harry’ at Fire Records to a Pulp fan who seemingly wrote to Fire to complain about how long it was taking them to release ‘Separations’. Fire’s response explains that they retreated from their original plan to release ‘Separations’ on the same day that Gift were releasing Pulp’s new single, ‘O.U’. So, was the timing malice or coincidence?
Nick: I think there’s a bit of arseholey behaviour. We were ready to go with ‘O.U’ and Fire chose the same day for ‘Separations’ [which was recorded in 1989]. There’s too much of a coincidence after all that delay. In hindsight I think Fire would have preferred it to come out earlier but there were massive upheavals within indie distribution and Rough Trade were struggling. But we weren’t interested in that, we just wanted our records out.
AA: In the acknowledgments section of your book, you’re quite philosophical about the Fire Records relationship. If you could go back in time and correct some of the injustices on condition that it might alter the band’s trajectory in the nineties, I sense that you probably wouldn’t go back and fiddle about. Because you got there in the end.
Nick: We got there in the end and it was fantastic. I think you’re right, but at the time if you knew you were going to be struggling for another five years you’d think, ‘I’ve not joined a band to struggle like this’. You want to join a band, write some songs, go on tour with your mates, have a great time and enjoy the limos and girls for the rest of eternity! Life sometimes doesn’t work like that. Hence why I can write a 470-page book because of the amazing and difficult story of how it all came about.
AA: After all this messing about you could have quite easily thought, ‘Well I’ve got to get another job, I’m off’.
Nick. I trained as a teacher. I was in the cafe at Endcliffe Park in Sheffield about a year or two ago and someone came up to me and said, “Are you Mr. Banks?” I said “Yes”, and she said, “You taught me at Burntwood School.” How do you even remember a teacher who was only there for one year back in 1990?
AA: They probably remember you because you didn’t set them any homework Nick.
Nick: Yeah – I didn’t give a shit! [laughs] So it’s a great story but if you had the choice you’d have wanted it to be different. If I would have left Pulp, and two years later was working in a shitty school while the band became successful, I would have ended up bitter. So you had to give it a go as much as you possibly could.
AA: I can’t let us go past 1992 without mentioning the song ‘Live On’. Once again, Pulp struggled to capture the live energy of a song within the studio. In Russell’s book, Freak Out The Squares: Life In A Band Called Pulp, he said that Jarvis felt the song was too Baggy or Indie Disco and so it lost its moment in time. Could it have been Pulp’s first hit single?
Nick: ‘Live On’, and ‘Death Comes To Town’ was another, fell between the cracks and got left behind. It’s sad. But if they don’t get something to drag them along they get lost. We did try ‘Live On’ two or three times in the studio. It was really exciting to play live. You could see the audience liked it. It had some excitement. It had some verve. But put it under the microphone in a recording studio and it just didn’t work.
AA: Was the amount of optimism and confidence within the band – that there would be plenty more great songs soon to be written – part of the reason that ‘Live On’ got left behind?
Nick: We created new stuff all the time. We put the new stuff into the set but we were only playing short sets, 40 minutes or so. So we’d add the new songs but then some other newish ones would have to get taken out. They’d end up sitting on the shelf of the archive.
AA: So let’s move on to the New Era. You write about the day you signed to Island Records: sunny day, big cheque, champagne. What else did you remember about the event? Was it quite formal or celebratory?
Nick: We went to the Island offices down in Chiswick. There was a garden out the back and we signed there. There was a clink of glasses. After all the shit we’d gone through with Fire and the failure with FON, it seemed like such a relief to realise we were with a company that was serious. Island really did court us for a long time. It wasn’t a case of ‘see you once, see you twice, boom, sign these guys’. They kept coming to see us all the time. Dave Gilmour and Nigel Coxon came to a load of gigs and they talked to us, talk, talk, talk. And it very nearly fell through at the last minute because of the horrible contractual situation that was tying us all up. We managed to get through in the end. But it wasn’t easy.
AA: There was a gap between the signing and you heading off to buy new drums. Russell said he spent the money buying a load of make-up. Was there nothing that you were desperate to run out and buy?
Nick: No, not really. Because you were still thinking that it could all evaporate at any moment. You could go into the studio for Island, but it doesn’t mean they’re going to release the record if they don’t think it’s good enough. You just wanted to keep your head down and keep trying to create stuff. So going out to buy a fancy sports car? No, not now.
AA: I understand that Ed Buller [‘His ‘N’ Hers’ producer] had, not harsh words as such, but he basically said about some of Russell’s violin playing-
Nick: That it was shit! [laughs]
AA: And you mention in the book that sometimes your drums didn’t sound right and you had to record them again. Did Buller have tough love for you as well? Did he ever say, ’Nick, you’re speeding up, slowing down, and these parts aren’t quite right…’
Nick: Sometimes, yes. He wasn’t as tough with me as he was with Russ. There’s enough technology within a studio to smooth the drums out. I wouldn’t say tough love, it was more him being helpful and encouraging to try to bring me on. But drums and violin are different. The violin has to be right and Russell wasn’t particularly one for practising. He was very much of the DIY punk ethic of trying to make something interesting rather than trying to be technically proficient.
AA: You lived in the studio’s town house around the corner on St Paul Street. Was it just you and Russ as the Sheffield contingent who lived there, or were the whole band packed in together?
Nick: Pretty much the whole band, yeah. It was convenient because the studio was nearby. I don’t know where Jarvis was living at the time, but it just seemed easy. It was a nice house and we had a cleaner come in. You’d go to the studio and we even had our tea cooked for us.
AA: There’s a funny clip on the Pulp Hits DVD from your time living in the studio’s house. Jarvis is saying to you, “Lock the door Nick” and you’ve seemingly lost the house key that you were only given the day before.
Nick: [Laughs] Like old ladies arguing, yeah.
AA: Settle this for us: were you given a key, Nick?
Nick: I’ve no idea! I’m sure we would all have been given a key… you would think?
AA: Philip Castle said he first met Pulp when he unveiled his airbrush painting for the ‘His ’N’ Hers’ sleeve. Do you remember that?
Nick: No. I was never much of a fan of bands that have paintings of themselves as the cover art.
AA: Why? Because it’s pretentious?
Nick: No, because I think it looks a bit crap to be honest. So I was very underwhelmed. But you’re not gonna say, “That’s shit… bin it.” Jarvis was very much into airbrush art at that time. And it was the theme of all the single sleeves so it seemed right to have an airbrush picture of us for the actual album. But I’m not convinced it’s brilliant.
AA: I once asked Philip if it was for sale. He said, “Well, it might be, but it’s been on our wall for years and my wife has come to like it”.
Nick: I’m sure it wouldn’t be cheap if he was gonna sell it.
AA: I’m going to be quick on ‘Different Class’ and Glastonbury because you understandably get asked about that period a lot. During the Tim Burgess Listening Party you shared this picture of a cassette that had early versions of some of the ‘Different Class’ songs. On side B is a song called ‘Microstop’. Is that a song that has a little gap in it, like ‘PTA’ or ‘Mile End’?
Nick: I’ll have to dig the tape out and listen to what it was. It was definitely a song that had a really tiny stop. What that will have gone on to be I don’t know. The mystery remains unanswered.1
AA: Even before ‘Common People’ was released and before Glastonbury, you must’ve known you were going to have a big audience. Did it change the way you thought about the process of making the record?
Nick: Not really. We never reacted to it. I don’t think it affected anything, we just wanted it to sound great.
at the V96 festival site in Chelmsford (1996)
AA: Here’s our next item. Do you remember where this photo was taken?
Nick: That would be Chelmsford V96. We went there via helicopter.
AA: For me, this is the pinnacle of Pulp’s popularity. It’s a few weeks short of a decade since you joined Pulp. You had Jackson [Nick’s first child] on the way and Pulp were about to win the prestigious Mercury Music Prize. You had four years of not much happening but those latter six years were incredible. What do you remember about V96?
Nick: It kind of was the pinnacle. It was a hot day but I’m struggling to remember anything about it. I enjoyed going on the helicopter and looking down on the festival site. This is what joining a band should be about. You arrive at a festival that you’re headlining in a helicopter. Yes… brilliant! Sod the cost and hope you don’t crash.
AA: On to the Difficult Album, ‘This Is Hardcore’. You said before now that Jarvis and Steve seemed to immerse themselves in studio life by mixing, re-mixing, tweaking this and tweaking that. And because you laid the drums down first, I imagine you’ve a lot of memories of just hanging around in the studio with not much happening. Why was ‘Hardcore’ so hard?
Nick: I think there was a crisis of confidence looking back on it. ‘His ’N’ Hers’ and ‘Different Class’ seemed effortless. We wrote the songs, went into the studio and did them, and everyone knew, ‘that’s finished, it’s done’. Confidence? Yes. It’s great, brilliant, get on with the next song. Then you come to the Hardcore stuff and it’s like, ‘Errr, we’re not sure.’ The confidence had gone. You’d put a track up on the desk and tit around with the sound for a couple of weeks, after which it sounded just like it did at the start. They’d go, ‘Hmmm, let’s put that song away for a bit and let’s get another one on’. So you’d do another song and the same thing happened. It just seemed interminable and, really, it’s the producer’s dark job to say, ‘This is now finished’. I think he tried but I just got really, really bored of it.
AA: Did you have to keep your mouth zipped?
Nick: You could stand up and say your piece. But you’re wasting your time because no-one’s gonna take your words and think, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s got a point’. So you just don’t say anything because nothing’s going to happen. On previous records everybody would be in the control room listening to the songs. Everyone would listen and say, ‘It’s sounding great’. But when this crisis of confidence comes on, people would think, ‘Oh maybe I’ll go and do something else’ and disappear. So it’s just Steve, Jarvis and Tommo [producer Chris Thomas] in the studio fannying around. Frustrating.
AA. But you got something out of that period that you can be proud of.
Nick: Yeah, absolutely. Got there in the end and a great record. As the reviewers were saying, you’re going to like it, but not a lot. Because it was quite a shift into a darker idea.
AA: I thought Pulp’s headline appearance at the Reading Festival in 2000 was a triumph. It marked the return of Pulp who I thought were still outstanding and still relevant. Then you buggered off for another ten months. By the time we got to the autumn tour in 2001 I sensed that the band wasn’t a gang anymore. You seemed to be tolerating each other rather than being as one. Did it feel tough at the time?
Nick: Because we had got used to the idea of being a ‘big artist’, there was less of a sense that we were actively working together towards a common goal. We didn’t have to be fighting the good fight anymore so we didn’t need a gang mentality as a band. So you do rest on your laurels a little bit. The band had also been living in each others’ pockets for a long time. It does get tough and people get their little foibles that start getting on people’s nerves.
AA: That period concluded with the coldest Pulp concert I’ve ever been to – Pulp’s finale at the Magna steelworks in Rotherham. I was struck by the revelation in your book that it was Geoff Travis [Pulp’s manager] who communicated the news to you that Pulp would be taking an indefinite break. Did things just fizzle out?
Nick: There was always that caveat from the stage, ‘We’re going away for a bit… see you later’. It was never, ‘that’s the end and there will be no more’. Jarvis was never the greatest communicator. Perhaps that’s because we’re blokes, and blokes are rubbish at that kind of thing. But he never sat us down and said to us, ‘everyone, I’m feeling a bit burnt out so I’m going off to do something else’.
AA: Did you see it coming?
Nick: Kind of, yeah. Given the trouble with producing ‘Hardcore’ and then ‘We Love Life’ taking equally as long but in a different way, if we were going to do another record, you knew it would be similar. It would not have been as easy and effortless as ‘His ’N’ Hers’ and ‘Different Class’. You knew it was going to be another three-year slog.
AA: When I look back at the 2011-12 reunion I’m still amazed at just how popular Pulp had become in Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Where did that come from, because suddenly it felt like France had been eclipsed at the country outside of the UK where your support was the strongest?
Nick: All the other bands we’d speak to would tell us that the Mexico audiences were bonkers. They just seem to really, really like British music, and there’s a lot of it. We went there and played to huge crowds. It was a revelation. It’s always fabulous to play to new ears and new eyes because they’ve never seen the real thing in the flesh. So to be able to go there and give it with both barrels is great. We’ve got Uruguay coming up next month and we’ve never played there before.
AA: Let’s wrap up by talking about the wonderful summer of 2023. During the band’s performance of ‘Glory Days’ a photo of Candida playing her Farfisa organ is fleetingly projected onto the screen at the back of the stage. The photo was taken the best part of 40 years ago. I then looked at Candida on the stage in front of me: same stance and the same Farfisa. It was hard not to be overcome by the emotion of the moment. The Farfisa embodies the Pulp sound for me.
Nick: Yeah, totally. Because it’s a late 60s instrument you think that it’s got to fall apart at some point, but it never has. It’s a sturdy bit of kit. I’ve watched it have water poured out of it in Poland. I thought, ‘that’s gonna be dead’, but the crew got a hair dryer on it and it turned out fine. Many years ago we tried to sample the Farfisa so it didn’t have to be taken it out anymore. Because it could be dropped, broken, all that kind of stuff, and where do you go from there? The sampling didn’t work as we never quite got the right feel of it. We even tried to buy another one. We found one in Canada but then you think that’s gonna cost a fortune to ship over and you don’t know whether it’s going to work. We did have a second one for this load of gigs. It was Bryan Ferry’s! Exact same model. Because our keyboard tech does a lot of work for Bryan Ferry. He said, “Oh yeah, Brian’s got one of them”, so we borrowed it as a back-up.
AA: Did Pulp have to give a deposit to loan it from Bryan?
Nick: I think our keyboard tech said, “I’ll not tell Bryan, but we’ll borrow it as a back-up!”
AA: The Elysian Collective’s strings brought a whole new dimension to the live Pulp sound. How did that partnership come about?
Nick: We had done shows before, one-offs, with orchestras and it was always really special. Jarvis had this idea that for these concerts to be special we needed a string section to help re-create the songs. There was a core of musicians in the Collective that did all the shows. They got other musicians to join them, a northern section for the northern gigs and and a southern section for the southern ones. We got ‘two for the price of one’ because usually these sections just play the strings but the Collective’s musicians could sing, so we got a choir as well! They were great.
AA: Did that influence the songs that Pulp chose to perform?
Nick: A little bit. It influenced where songs were placed within the set.
AA: How does a band like Pulp reach an agreement on which songs to play?
Nick: Like in 2011, there’s eight songs that have to be played at every gig. It’s just going to piss people off if those songs aren’t played because they’re everyone’s favourites. We rehearsed up to 30 songs. It was a case of seeing what worked and sounded right. We also looked at how we could approach them in a slightly different technological way. Certainly me and Mark would have liked to have taken some songs out and slotted other songs in. But obviously with all the visuals it’s pretty difficult to take one song out and play a different one because the visual effects people would say, ‘We haven’t got any visuals for that’. They worked on the visuals for months and months.
AA: I hope you and Mark can persuade the others. Last question: if it was down to you, which extra song would you slot into the setlist?
Nick: I really liked playing ‘Bad Cover Version’ so I would put that one in. The song really soars into those choruses. It has a lyrical concept that you don’t hear anybody else talking about: carbon copies are not as good as the originals.
– – – – –
Our time is up. We clear the table of debris. I give Nick the ‘Rock Bottom’ record and the Uwe Bedenbecker booklet to thank him for his time. He flicks through the booklet, then pauses and stares intently at a photograph taken at the corner of West Street and Westfield Terrace in Sheffield. He’s spotted a site where he used to paste fly-posters. Momentarily his mind is transported back to a part of his teenage years where his sole objectives were to avoid the skinheads and the South Yorkshire Police.
As we leave the pub Nick tells me he’s seeing “the chaps” this weekend. It’ll be the first time his band-mates share their verdict on the book. Except for Candida that is. Because, says Nick, she has already been texting him with encouraging feedback. Of course she has, I think to myself, for that’s what a kind and wonderful person she is.
On my way home I think of countless other questions I wanted to ask. But it doesn’t matter. I gaze out of the train window and begin to imagine the fun of seeing Pulp perform for us in 2024. We all get to be there when the next chapters are written in both Nick’s and Pulp’s stories. Bring it on.
Further reading and listening…
‘Rock Bottom’ performed live in London at the Eurovision Song Contest: YouTube
Download Pulp’s FON session from 1987: feelingcalledlive.co.uk
The Day That Never Happened: Acrylic Afternoons
Uwe Bedenbecker, Sheffield 1991-1992: Cafe Royal Books
“Suck A Dog!” Jarvis accuses Nick of losing the house keys: YouTube
Burntwood School wins the 2015 Sterling Prize: The Guardian
‘Live On’ (Live BBC session): Spotify, Pulp Wiki
‘This Is Hardcore’ in pictures: The Guardian
The Elysian Collective: Instagram
Purchase ‘So It Started There: From Punk To Pulp’: Omnibus Press
Nick Banks: Twitter / X
Acrylic Afternoons: Website, Twitter / X, Instagram
Footnotes
- Mystery solved: I’m reliably informed that ‘Microstop’ was the working title for ‘P.T.A.’ ↩︎
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