Someone I knew called… Russell? God, I'm bad with names. Anyway, Russell worked at Rough Trade Publicity, who took on extra labels as well as promo-ing rough Trade rekids. A woman called Caffy St Luce worked with him too, who I remember as being lovely. Anyway. I was down seeing him one day, and he said the usual "Take your pick" type of thing waving his arm at the shelves of 12" discs he had sitting on shelves. There were a few weird oddities there, like "The smashing Pumpkins" early record, and all sort of nonsense - I've still got that Smashing Pumpkins thing - I can't even remember what it was, but I don't think I ever actually played it. ANYWAY! There was a single there by this band called "Pulp", which was kind of interesting-ish I thought, since the Poly magazine was called Pulp. They were from the north too. So, I went back up north to Manchester with an armful of records and put on this single by this band when I got home.

Brilliant. Amazing. The sexiest fucking song I'd heard in ages. For ages afterwards, being a single girl I used to use it to start feeling, er, erotic? (I'm talking about wanking, basically, but I'm too embarrassed to say it). Reminded me a bit of "World Of Twist", a fantastically underrated Manchester band, who did some just such good singles - retro funky sixties stuff well before any "Loungecore" movement (ech, I hate that 'Loungecore' word - everyone's a fucking righteous-cool merchant, aren't they. Bloody nonsense). A bit Moog-y, but basically very European and keyboardy and…. Fantastic. I phoned up Gina and said "you've got to interview them. You just have to, it's fantastic". She said someone has beaten her to it, and that Wednesday they got 'Single of the week' in the NME.

I went down to Sheffield to interview them, and I've still got the tape somewhere. One day I might put up transcripts of all my interviews with comedians and so forth, but really - it's all a bit tedious to do, and serves no desperately interesting purpose. What do I remember from the interview… Candida had been working until very recently in a fantastic toy shop in Didsbury where I used to go and get my friends' presents, so it's more than likely that I had bought several 'put it together like a jigsaw' wooden dinosaur models from her. But Jarvis cocker was… very focussing and demanding of your attention. Fairly soon, the rest of the band might as well not have been there. I remember Russell being really very lovely, but the overall impression was of this gangly, weird bloke in seventies style red cord trousers, an old brown cord jacket and terrible, truly awful shoes (a habit he hasn't lost, looking at pictures of him in flip flops on the front of Time Out) kneeling on the floor in front of me. I remember I was cross legged on the floor… he was wearing glasses and would push them up his nose while he expanded on whatever old nonsense I put his way.

Maybe I could RA some of the interview. Anyway, Pulp Magazine never used the bloody interview, stupid nits, so I went down for nothing. Well, fuck it. A couple of years later the band put out "His and Hers" which was just brilliant - oh, they put out "Babies" first didn't they. Boy, that was good. They played the T&C and it was joyous, celebratory… I laughed, jumped up and down. Great.

The next time I saw them it was a bit weird. "Common People" and a whole load of the tunes from whatsit… "Different Class" were vicious, nasty, sneering. Amazing and powerful, but it felt a bit as if the joy that was in the tunes of songs like 'Razmatazz' had gone somehow, despite the fact that they had always had pretty sharp lyrics, those songs.