Latest from the Blog
Pulp and the spectre of Philip Larkin (Part 2): “This unique distance from isolation”
Jarvis Cocker suggests that popularity is the social currency of the teenage years, but subtly implies that this is soon replaced by other kinds of hierarchy, such as money, status, success. He picks up the theme of social class again in the song ‘Common People’…
“That damp and lonely Thursday years ago”: Pulp and the spectre of Philip Larkin
“Songs contain stored energy from your past life,” Jarvis Cocker says, “that is released when you perform them again.” Some of that energy that is released in Garth Jennings’ documentary, What Do You Do for an Encore? (MUBI, 2026). The film is based on Cocker’s scrapbook-memoir, Good Pop Bad Pop (2022), and maps the development…
“Within you and without you” – John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, by Ian Leslie
This superb dual biography of John Lennon and Paul McCartney takes a more-or-less psychoanalytical approach to their relationship. If the book is a tragedy of sorts, Ian Leslie opens with the falling action after the devastating climax of Lennon’s death; specifically, McCartney’s apparently cold reaction to the news: “It’s a drag, isn’t it?” he told…
Main image: Lewis Chessmen © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
Blog content: © Benedict Gilbert 2021
