By Jason Barnard
Mark Webber’s route into Pulp begins in Chesterfield with a schoolbag full of records and a fanzine called Cosmic Pig. He is the kid at the Art College soundcheck with a cassette recorder, the teenager who books Pulp at the Conservative Club and sleeps on floors after gigs. From there he becomes the organiser with a briefcase, runs the fan club, then edges on to the stage with a Stylophone and guitar. By the time Island Records step in and His ’n’ Hers lands, Webber is no longer looking on. The first half of Mark’s story recounted to Jason Barnard at The CAT Club, traces that shift from outsider freaks, to everybody’s favourite group at Glastonbury in 1995.
Nights of Suburbia
When Mark Webber first heard Pulp, he was a 15-year-old in Chesterfield with a taste to the left of the mainstream. “I was born in 1970,” he says. “When I was a teenager there were three record shops in Chesterfield. There was a second-hand shop called the Record Box and there was Hudson’s, which was the long-established shop in the centre of town. There was also a newer alternative shop called Planet X and one of the two people running that was Henry Normal. He was a poet and was later well known for writing and producing sitcoms. He knew I was a huge Velvet Underground fan, and one day he said, ‘There’s this new record by a band from Sheffield and you might like it.’ It was the ‘Little Girl with Blue Eyes’ 12-inch and he played it, and I did love it. I bought it as soon as I was able.”
It was 1985, and Pulp were already veterans in their own way. Jarvis Cocker had formed the group at school in 1978, releasing independent singles and EPs that had made little dent outside of Sheffield. “When I first encountered them, I didn’t know about this history,” Webber says. Like many curious teenagers of the post-punk era, Webber channelled his enthusiasm into print. “I had a fanzine called Cosmic Pig,” he recalls. “I was still at school so it was mainly about local bands because that’s all I had access to at that age. When Pulp played the Chesterfield Art College, I went along to the soundcheck and interviewed some of them.”
Pulp’s gigs had a reputation for being unlike anything else coming out of Sheffield’s guitar scene. Long before Webber became part of the operation, the band had begun to dress their stages with everyday materials. “They always had an idea that a concert should be something more interesting than just a bunch of people on the stage playing instruments,” he says. “They were not really like musicians in the normal sense, they were not very accomplished, so they tried to make a concert interesting by dressing the stage. And for a while, toilet roll was a cheap way of doing that.”
By 1986, Webber’s obsession with music had pushed him into organising gigs of his own. “My first band was called Siegfried’s Magick Box because me and my friends were like psychedelic teenagers, there weren’t many like us in Chesterfield at that time. I organised a concert at the Chesterfield Conservative Club in May 1986, it was just a venue you could hire.”
He booked Pulp as headliners, putting his own group in the opening slot. The show captured Pulp in their most eccentric phase. Talking about their sound he recalls “There’s something quite unique about it. I guess that’s one of the things that excited me. On the one hand, they had quite conventional ballads, really good songs. And then on the other hand, very abrasive, unpleasant music as well. And they were just such a bunch of weirdos.”
The Day That Never Happened
By 1987 Pulp’s fortunes were faltering. Their second album Freaks had been recorded but its release had been delayed by the label and the group splintered. “They felt the band wasn’t going anywhere,” Webber says. “The group kind of split up for a while and then Nick joined as the drummer. They went through a few bass players before Steve joined. Candida left for two concerts then came back. Then they started writing songs that were slightly more accessible, and they also played East European disco type music. It was interesting but people weren’t exactly flocking to the gigs.”
Still, their ambition for spectacle persisted. On 9 August 1988, Webber helped the group stage what they called The Day That Never Happened at the Leadmill in Sheffield, “At the time the Leadmill capacity was probably 500, and Pulp could fill the Leadmill, but outside Sheffield, they would still be doing concerts with maybe 20 people.” This special show was a multimedia performance that verged on the surreal. “It was meant to be a spectacular event. They planned a concert where every song had a theme or a mood. There was a lot of tinfoil, dead tree branches sprayed white, and Russell had made homemade dry ice, which was pathetic – it barely spilled off the edge of a saucer. He also made some incense with different smells for different songs, but in a lager-stained venue it didn’t make much of an impression. The concert was supposed to culminate in a song with gentle snowfall. I don’t remember what the snow was made of. It might have been, like, bits of paper or something. But it all came down straight away when it was released at the start of the song. Me and my friend, Michael, who were helping them stage the show, had a pair of leaf blowers, like vacuum cleaners on reverse. We had to try and blow this snowfall back up into the air while they were playing a very sensitive ballad. It was very funny, but Jarvis was kind of horrified. This moment was supposed to be the culmination of his life. So after that, he thought he’d give up music and go to London.”
Mile End
As the 1980s drew to a close, Cocker and Webber separately made their way to London, “It was a coincidence,” Webber explains. “Although I was helping the band here and there, it wasn’t a job. I would often go down to London film screenings and concerts … because there’s not a lot of culture in Chesterfield. I ended up being a civil servant working for the Public Trustees Office. That was the same time Jarvis was at St Martin’s, but I saw him only two or three times that year.”
While Webber was navigating bureaucracy, Pulp were beginning to find momentum. The February 1991 release of ‘My Legendary Girlfriend’ gave them a cult following. In NME’s single of the week review, Stuart Maconie described it as “a throbbing ferment of nightclub soul and teen opera.” Webber recalls “That was when people started coming to the concerts, and within a year or two it seemed like they might actually have a career.”
Webber lasted a year in London before moving back to Chesterfield, living with his parents and helping the band whenever they needed an extra pair of hands. “I’d carry gear at concerts and help with whatever needed doing,” he says. “Then Russell asked if I’d be the tour manager.”
He laughs remembering the makeshift professionalism of those days. “I used my dad’s old briefcase when I became tour manager. There weren’t any BTEC courses on how to do that sort of thing then, so I made it up as I went along. I’d been to a lot of soundchecks, hanging around hoping to meet bands, so I had an idea how it worked. I got busy booking transit vans and finding floors for us to sleep on after concerts.”
Managing Pulp was no small task. “It was like a bag of cats,” Webber smiles. “They were not a nightmare, but there wasn’t much incentive then for them to turn up on time. Jarvis was a pretty bad timekeeper. Often, we’d have to bang on his door in the bed and breakfast to wake him up. But it was exciting.”
At this point, the band were divided between London and Sheffield. “All the rehearsals were still at Cattcliffe, just outside Sheffield, which was above Nick’s mum’s pottery warehouse, Bank’s Pottery.”
The Separations album, recorded for Fire Records, remained on the shelf for over two years, and Pulp were eager to move on. “They tried to get away from Fire. They tied themselves into a really ridiculous contract basically because no one else was interested in them, so it wasn’t easy to just leave and go to another label. That extraction process took a while but then those three singles were released on Gift Records, which was a subsidiary of FON in Sheffield, ‘OU,’ ‘Razzmatazz,’ ‘Babies.’ That was 1992, when it really started to pick up.”
During this period, Cocker and bassist Steve Mackey were living in Mile End, East London. “They had a squat,” Webber says. “The sink in the kitchen, I don’t know what had happened to it, it was sort of melted. Totally unusable. It was pretty bleak.”
Despite the surroundings, Pulp were gaining traction. From 1991 to 1995 Webber’s role continued to expand. By the release of ‘Do You Remember The First Time’ he was “playing all the songs with them on stage, something which started slowly from 1992 onwards. Then I was tour manager, extra musician and running the fan club.”
Disco-very
Webber’s instinct for archiving and fan communication led him to revive his teenage fanzine sensibility in the band’s official fan club, Pulp People. The two magazines he produced in that period Disco-very, were produced “cut-and-paste style. Maybe some computer typesetting by the second one, but mostly photocopying and sticking things down.”
Running the club involved a kind of homespun inventiveness that matched Pulp’s aesthetic. “We liked to give things away,” he says. “I once asked Jarvis if he had a pair of trousers he didn’t want. He gave me some, and I cut them into 500 pieces, put them in little brown envelopes and stamped each one. We sent them out to members, all numbered like a limited edition.”
Another giveaway was even stranger. “Jarvis had an Hillman Imp car. When it finally ground to a halt he decided to crush it, so he had it compacted into a cube and we gave it away in a competition. Two of the roadies delivered it to someone’s parents’ garden. Later I heard it was donated to the chairman of the Hillman Imp Society, so it still exists somewhere.”
The fan club newsletters were labour-intensive but essential. “We’d send them out every couple of months,” Webber says. “In the early period concerts were intermittent, and people who came from somewhere like Halifax were really enthusiastic but had no way of knowing when the next one was. So we kept their addresses and sent postcards, ‘We’re playing in Featherstone next week,’ that kind of thing. Then we started charging a small fee to be a member.”
The band still held day jobs. “Nick was a schoolteacher in London for a while. Candida moved to Manchester and worked in a toy shop. Jarvis was probably on the dole most of the time,” Webber adds dryly.
Babies
As Pulp’s profile began to rise, their DIY spirit never vanished. The first ‘Babies’ video was a home-made production, shot with borrowed equipment and favours from friends. “There was a very small budget,” Webber says. “Jarvis had been to film school where one of his friends was Martin Wallace, who’s now a filmmaker. Steve studied film at the Royal College of Art and was more into production. So they made it themselves. Half of it was shot in a photography studio. They didn’t have a dolly for the camera, so they sat the cameraman in a shopping trolley and pushed him round the studio. The other half was filmed in Jarvis’s flat which by then was in Sceaux Gardens, Camberwell.”
Casting was equally informal. “One of the girls was Bob Stanley’s girlfriend, the other is her sister,” Webber says. “I was the tape op, we had a Nagra four-track and I was in charge of cueing the playback.” When the finished clip appeared on ITV’s Chart Show, it was a revelation for the band. “We were on tour and had played Bristol the night before,” Webber recalls. “We couldn’t afford a B&B so we were sleeping on the floor at a students’ flat. The next morning we watched the video when it was broadcast the first time.”
As Pulp’s live sound grew, Webber began to step into the lineup. “It started with me playing ‘OU’ on the Stylophone,” he says. “They were writing songs that needed an extra pair of hands, so I played keyboards on a few. Later, Jarvis wanted to concentrate on singing rather than playing guitar, so he taught me his parts and I replicated what I was told.”
By 1993 and 1994, Webber was on stage for every song, even if he wasn’t yet appearing on the recordings. “I’d had a couple of bands with friends but never recorded anything, hardly played any gigs. I taught myself guitar at home, playing along to records I liked. So this was quite a leap,” he says.
That leap coincided with the end of Pulp’s long struggle with Fire Records. “There was interest from Island Records, which was impressive because they were a major label,” Webber recalls. “But they couldn’t sign straightaway because of the legal problems. Island subsidised some of the Gift Records singles and helped fund the recordings and promotion. Eventually they made an agreement with Fire that let Pulp leave and sign to Island, which led to His ’n’ Hers. Fire did very well out of it, they continued to earn royalties from future releases for many years.”
Do You Remember the First Time
By the early nineties, Pulp were shaking off the eccentric underground life that had defined them for over a decade. Their sound was sharper, Jarvis Cocker’s lyrics more confident, and Mark Webber had become indispensable, moving from roadie and fan-club organiser to musician and contributing to writing.
“That was the first one I had that kind of involvement in,” Webber says of ‘Do You Remember the First Time?’ “Until very recently, all the Pulp songs pretty much were written with everyone in the rehearsal space, just making a noise and seeing what would come out. And they were still in this period in Nick’s mum’s pottery. I was there probably because they were teaching me parts to play for concerts or something. They were working on this new song which had something about it, but they were having trouble developing it. They all went off and had a cup of tea or something, and I picked up the bass guitar and started messing around and kind of wrote the bass part for it. They liked it and adapted it, and then soon the song was fully formed. The bass line is not unlike Heroes.”
The song’s blend of self-examination with the influence of David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ captured a new maturity at a time they had a kinship with the blossoming British indie scene. “From around 1991, 92, there were bands that we were playing concerts with that we seemed to have some things in common with. The first time Pulp played outside of England was in France, and it was a festival organised by the French equivalent of NME, Les Inrockuptibles. We played their festival with Blur and Lush. We played a few concerts with Lush, and, though we didn’t really have anything in common with them musically, they were nice people to hang out with. Then Pulp did a tour supporting Saint Etienne in ’93, and we played quite a few concerts with Blur in 1994. The first time we went to America was supporting them. Suede supported Pulp in one of their first concerts, then about a month later, Pulp had to support Suede!”
Common People
When ‘Babies’ was re-released in 1994 and reached number 19, Pulp were suddenly national. “I wasn’t on the record, so it was a surprise when they asked me to go on Top of the Pops,” Webber recalls. “It was a sign they felt I was part of it.” Jarvis even used that platform for mischief: “He had a notices inside his blazer that said I hate Wet Wet Wet, because they were omnipresent at number one.”
The glamour of television soon turned into routine. “The first few times it was exciting,” he says. “but like anything, if you do it too much you get to resent it a bit. There were many days spent sitting around a TV studio in the outskirts of London, all for just three minutes of action.”
The real breakthrough came the following year. “‘Common People’ was first played at Reading ’94,” Webber says. “No one in the audience had heard it, but it just had this instant reaction.” Jarvis pushed Island Records to release the song early the following year, as soon as it was recorded, rather than wait for the album. “The label wanted to hold it back, but he insisted. It came out about six weeks before Glastonbury and got to number two.”
When the Stone Roses cancelled their headline slot at Glastonbury ’95, Pulp were asked to replace them. However, they were in the middle of recording what would become Different Class “We were given eight days’ notice, and frantically rehearsed in the studio.” Webber says. “Before going on stage we were in a portacabin and asked everyone to leave. We stood there terrified, while Jarvis tried to make an impassioned speech about what we were about to do. Then we were off. It just didn’t seem like it was very good in the moment. It was really strange. This was probably the first time we’d been on a stage that big, definitely never headlined a festival. Hadn’t had a soundcheck. It just felt like we were all isolated from each other and couldn’t hear ourselves very well in the monitors. It just didn’t really seem to be going off … until we played ‘Common People’ at the end, and the audience was lit up and we could see how far it went. And they were singing the song back as loud as we were playing it. Then it started to seem like maybe it’d been all right.”
Webber highlighted the recording of the Glastonbury concert that is included in the 30th anniversary box set of Different Class. “We remixed most of the concert about a month after it happened, for, I think, BBC World Service. But the BBC never seemed to use that version. So we’ve taken matters into our own hands and we’re releasing it. It sounds much better.”
Notwithstanding, that performance as originally broadcast live, transformed them from cult outsiders to household names. “After that had happened, it just seemed inevitable that what we did next would be more successful,” he says. “We were on a roll.”
By 1995 Mark Webber was no longer the kid with a fanzine. The boy who ran Cosmic Pig, booked venues and learned guitar parts in Nick Banks’s mum’s pottery warehouse now stood under the lights. When Pulp walked on at Glastonbury, he walked on with them.
