Umvd Import
2006
Peel Sessions
About This Album
As Jarvis Cocker points out in his liner notes for the 2006 double-disc set The Peel Sessions, Pulp allegedly holds "the world record for The Longest Gap Between First & Second Sessions (12 years!)" -- a situation that says more about Pulp than it does about John Peel, since there is a reason why the legendary British DJ didn't quickly invite the Sheffield group back to his studios: it took them a long time to realize the potential they demonstrated at the outset of this career. This set cuts out that long decade of struggle -- since there are no Peel sessions documenting the stilted steps forward during the '80s, those awkward transitions are nowhere to be found, which makes the leap forward from 1981 to 1993 all the more startling. The tentative yet exuberant art-punk on their first session has plenty of promise -- its gangly rhythms, jittery guitars, swaths of synths, and echoed vocals all recalling Factory Records' tightly wound sound without belonging to it, largely due to Jarvis himself, whose schoolboy poetry has a beguiling innocence and whose love of pop already is peeking out behind his artiness. That artiness may overwhelm "Refuse to Be Blind," which only points the way toward the murk of Pulp's mid-'80s work, but the other three cuts from 1981 -- the insistent, surging "Turkey Mambo Momma," the cheerfully dorky "Please Don't Worry," and the understated melancholia of "Wishful Thinking" -- all show a good art-pop at their beginnings, fumbling forward but performing with a kinetic enthusiasm that makes this session better than Pulp's debut proper, It.
Track List

Disc 1 (try tracks 1,2,3,4,6,8,10,11 and 13)

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Disc 2 (try tracks 2,3,5,6 and 7)

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