My, what an extraordinary and delicious curiosity shop of tunes this is. From the peculiar dramatics of the psychotic ‘Rubber Room’ to the cantankerous, wobbly sci-fi of The Fall’s ‘Lost In Music’ Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey have pooled some of the most savage and extreme mixtape burlesques in existence and still managed to give the impression they actually fit like pieces of the same grotesque puzzle.
Whilst the emphasis is squarely on the quirky, the dark and the entertaining, there’s also an unequal balance of tragedy and lipsmacking beauty to be appreciated. There’s that calm and friendly spiral of sorrows, ‘Cool Summer’ from sixties’ minstrel, Bob Lind, Gene Pitney’s typically melodramatic ’24 Sycamore’, jug-glam seventies also-rans, ‘Lieutenant Pigeon’, some mesmerizing, acid-flavoured Beach Boys, a little bedsit mania from the wacko pen of actress, model, chorus girl and cross-dressing Leonard Cohen type, Dory Previn, something a little psychedelic, retro and punky from Frenchman Fred Bigotand and his swinging electro unit, Electronicat, those folk, goth and surfy Canadians, Quixotic, goofy, cool-uncool godfather of punk, and former Modern Lover, Jonathan Richman plus Salford bard and hipster poet, John Cooper Clarke. There’s also a selection of unusual covers that includes a perplexing take on the Velvet Underground’s ‘Waiting For The Man’ from OMD, the Human League’s mechanized account of the Gary Glitter classic, ‘Rock N’Roll’ and that outrageously dodgy paean to gay love that sees Elton Motello ripping off Plastic Bertrand’s ‘Ca Plane Pour Moi’ with his very own backing band and his very own brand of sexual explicit depravity.
With the addition of some uber-cool country-fi from that colossus, Lee Hazelwood and Bobbie Bare, it’s a mixtape of misshapes, mistakes and misfits and surely has to rank as the clearest indication yet that Jarvis is willing to disclose his sources, his footnotes and musical marginalia for all to fathom.
I could go on all night — even only to make sure you get this album, but I won’t. There’s more digressions, more surprises and more broken biscuits packed into the CD’s short couple of hours than there is in a fortnight at Christmas and there’s no smack in the mouth at the end of it. It’s a Bobby bleedin’ Dazzler, that’s what it is.