Why Denim - in retrospect - are better than Pulp, part one. Because Denim eschewed the Jarvis cult of personality that, in retrospect, makes us unable to listen to any Pulp ever again. This worked against Lawrence’s success at the time, because the indie kids who this record was marketed at wanted a figurehead and a personality and Lawrence’s Denim was just…weird. Impersonal. Skewed. Absent. The real radio, that real sound of faraway pop coming at you from a bored session musician and somehow alchemically transformed into something magic by the very airwarves.

We weren’t ready for it, is what it was.

Despite the indie filler tracks on Back in Denim, the proper songs on it transcend irony and 90s retro-futurism in their very purity. They stand alone in their stubborn one-track-mindedness and slightly autistic intent. And they rock. I don’t miss the early 90s at all. I was a bored, frustrated 14 year old, and I knew no better, despite the occasional glimmer of hope from the outside world. But god, the nihilistic joi de vivre of Middle of the Road, it rings true whatever age you are. At the time I just thought it was funny. Now I hear it as eerily prescient, as me and my wife (who LOVES this record beyond reason) down white wine and watch CDUK, entranced by the Kanye West videos. It was made by someone ensconsed in indie, trying to make glorious sense of a long-gone mainstream and, by and large, succeeding. In 10 years’ time we may well listen to similar evocations of the 80s (which are all over us like fucking pesticides) and similarly smile. We might. I won’t ’cause I’ll be too old by then and I’d rather buy Dave Swarbrick solo albums and recordings of 1920s Houston piano blues anyway so let’s not use me as an example. But yeah, as such things go, Back in Denim is in a class of its own. It’s an example of the power of pastiche. And we all know how powerful that is, as much as we pretend to scorn it.

night.