An extra track which managed to park itself in the main set on reunion shows, Like a Friend is Pulp at their best. A song written for Great Expectations, one of the few This is Hardcore extras offered off to film companies, and arguably the best. Tomorrow Never Dies is a corker of a song, too. James Bond’s loss is our loss also. But Like a Friend has, on the Encore tour, come to redefine the post-Different Class period. It’s a change in attitude to the hopes of love heard on their beloved counterculture masterpiece. Like a Friend is a seedier example of how a Live Bed Show or Pencil Skirt can turn sour. Jaded is the word for it. Despite that, there is a positivity at the core of it, with some instrumentally strong work keeping a hopeful beat alive. It makes all the difference, so many years later, when the song is retroactively a look toward a new future, rather than the uglier past.
It’s the instrumental burst towards the end which makes the start of Like a Friend so fulfilling. A complete package of a track where the boom of noise at the end, the heavy percussion from Nick Banks and the wailing guitar courtesy of Mark Webber are an antidote to a jaded ex-lover losing cigarettes to the infatuated other. The other lover style of writing Jarvis Cocker brings through the best of Pulp’s songs is clearly defined here. It’s a rhyming structure he would break down best in Mother, Brother, Lover, but Like a Friend offers a darker side to those consistent charms. What if the lover were not longed for but lost. It’s the other side of the coin. A direct contrast to the hopeful tone of Different Class. There’s a multitude of reasons for that, but what cuts through is a need to be different. Contrast offers clarity, and that is what the best of This is Hardcore does.
Like a Friend is a brilliant song because the lack of lessons learnt is as effective as it is relatable. That car crash Cocker can see but cannot avoid is all too true. Like a Friend is cut from the same cloth as Disco 2000 and She’s a Lady. It’s a final note in a trilogy of albums which would give in not just to the excess of the decade but the hopelessness of the times. Pulp sounds as though they have quit trying to defy their hearts, and it makes for a gutting piece of work. There are spots of light throughout, and the relatability and wordplay at hand make the love within understandable. It’s a habit and an embarrassment, some sort of self-flagellation. Hope can be found where it should be lost. A song highlighting the spite but still the hope of reunification in a relationship turned sour.
Few can write with question marks hanging over every line. Each lyric is tipped with a bit of poison, pushing the song ever closer to an unsatisfactory conclusion. But the note of friendship, that despite all that has come between the protagonist and their subject, a relationship of some form has prevailed, is an uplifting final moment. Pair that with an exciting instrumental shift, and the light is found. It’s a miracle that it appears, but it does, and we are better for hearing it. Like a Friend remains a song of pleading and pleasing, and when the latter fails, the former takes its place instantly. Layers like this in Pulp’s post Different Class work were common, but there are few songs which highlight it better than Like a Friend.
