Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker has confirmed that one former member of the band convinced him to keep going with music.
Cocker, who reformed Pulp in 2023, says that a key member of the band’s early days was crucial in keeping his focus on music. The group was founded in 1978, but it would not be until the mid-1990s that Pulp found themselves within reaching distance of success. Pulp would go on to headline Glastonbury Festival in 1995, and the success Cocker and the band received at the time is, the frontman says, because of a band member who pushed them to keep on performing. Speaking to the Ultimate Record Collector Magazine, Cocker confirmed that violinist Russell Senior, who departed the group just before the release of Help the Aged and This is Hardcore, was instrumental in keeping the band alive.
Cocker said: “Russell brought an awful lot. An attitude to things. Pulp wouldn’t have existed, because I was ready to take up my place at Liverpool University. I’d got a place to read English there, but because we’d had the John Peel session, I thought that was going to mean that we were going to get signed and become famous immediately. I deferred my place to go to Liverpool, but then I think I deferred it two years, and on the third year they said, ‘Well, you’ve got to come now, or we’re going to rescind your offer.’
“So I was getting ready to go there, and Russell had just finished his degree in business studies, I think it was, in Bath. He’d come back to Sheffield, and he said, ‘What do you want to do musically?’
“I said, ‘I’m giving it up. I’m going to go to Liverpool to read English.’ And he said, ‘Why don’t we have a rehearsal?’ So we had a rehearsal with him, me and Magnus Doyle. Russell had a few songs from a band that he’d been in called The Masons; he played those and I had a go at them.
“It had a bit more aggression again after we’d done this very soft album, and it didn’t really get anywhere. So I thought, ‘OK, this seems like it’s got something to it.’ Russell was a very interesting character. He’d written a play.
“In fact, I think the first thing we did after he joined the band was we did a play upstairs at the Hallamshire Hotel. It was called Fruits of Passion, a kind of Dadaist drama, which ended with me eating a plate of pretend shit.”
Senior would rejoin the group in 2011 for the first run of reunion shows though did not appear for the second reunion tour, nor for the More sessions.
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