The whole point of this blog is that it’s supposed to be for writing about new music, stuff that’s flying under the radar, that kind of thing. But today is different. Today is for writing about Pulp. Not about the new song that came out last week though – which I think is majestic – but about their final album… or, rather, what was their final album until a couple of weeks ago.

On Saturday I saw Beck at the Royal Albert Hall, performing with the BBC Concert Orchestra. It was probably the best show I’ve ever been in the audience for, with a setlist leaning heavily on peak sad Beck material from Mutations, Sea Change, Guero, and Morning Phase. Anyway, this is supposed to be about Pulp! So, yeah, during the orchestra part of the show Beck drops note perfect covers of It’s Raining Today and, a few songs later, Montague Terrace in Blue. Now I’m not for a single nanosecond suggesting that his voice is anywhere near Scott’s, but both renditions are beautiful. Warm, fuzzy, hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck beautiful. When he starts strumming the opening chords to Round the Bend immediately after It’s Raining Today I find myself in the moment thinking about what a tremendous tonal link it is.

As is the wont of the universe, those early Scott Walker albums find their way back onto the stereo following the concert. All of this leads to Friday morning, when I’m painting some studio walls while some of my students have come in on their day off to work on their projects. One is painting beautiful compositions of indentations left by family in soft furnishings, while another is busy building a full-size car from smashed up pieces of cars that he has collected from various hedges and roundabouts in Essex in the dead of night. It’s a wild thing to watch an eighteen-year-old boy do, and as I watch them tinkering away I think about how I wish I’d had the confidence to do something as bold at that age. But there are walls to be painted in preparation for our big end of year show that’s creeping closer each day so I must crack on. As you do, I pick up my phone, connect it to the Bluetooth speaker, and click on that little green icon with the white lines. I consider asking the students what they want but then think better of it. One of them was listening to Save Your Love on Tuesday.

Scott Walker is still on my mind, and I consider either Scott 3 or Scott 4, but know deep down that it will be an intensely unpleasant experience for everyone in the room who isn’t me. I decide instead on We Love Life, produced by Walker with its songs about birds and trees and all that. It’s a record that I loved from the first time I heard it, actually more so than This Is Hardcore, but I don’t think I’ve listened to it for at least a decade. My palms feel increasingly clammy as it dawns on me that maybe my memory was playing tricks. Maybe it was worthy of the level of general ambivalence it has received for over twenty years.

But, man, what a record it is. I was grinning from ear to ear. The students weren’t, but that’s okay. It’s funny really, how when you’re young, you have all the time in the world to listen to music. You can never get enough of it either. I distinctly remember thinking in my early twenties that it’ll never happen to me… that I’ll never get to the point where I stop listening to new stuff. Of course, it comes to everyone. I was saying to the students how you reach a stage when you hit your mid-thirties, as a man especially I think, where you tend to listen to music made largely by middle-aged men about how sad they are. What all that is about, fuck knows. Anyway, I don’t know where I was going with all this. I just wanted to write. Music is a funny thing isn’t it.