Pulp in the hospital

v.l.n.r.: Linus Volkmann, Thomas Venker, Jarvis Cocker (Photo: Dominik Gigler, 2001)

In the 47th year of the band’s existence, Pulp landed their first number one hit in the United Kingdom with their eighth album ‘More’ (in Germany it reached number 9). However, what was supposed to be a normal record review turned into a week-long deep listening trauma for Thomas Venker due to a failed routine operation.

“It’s just a Sunset” / Someone said / “Something is coming to an end” / “Yes it’s a sunset”
(Pulp, „A Sunset“, 2025)

When I started the research for my review of the new Pulp album on 19 May, everything was (almost) still okay. Contrary to all my expectations – what else was there to come apart from admin? – I was immediately mesmerised by “More”. If I remember correctly, I listened to it three times through before I even started to read the lyrics and liner notes and only then realised that my friend James Ford had produced the album (whose record hasn’t he produced recently? Beth Gibbons, Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, Artic Monkeys, Blur…). I shared my enthusiasm with him and continued working on my text, unaware that it was going to be the longest and most painful review genesis of my life so far.

Just 48 hours later, I ended up in hospital; but more on that later. Let’s stick with Pulp for now, for the sake of chronology and the necessary linking of strands.

Photo: Sarah Szczesny

In the liner notes to ‘More’, which consist of comments by Pulp singer Jarvis Cocker as well as a classic info text, you learn a lot about the album’s emotional and artistic back story. Cocker always reflects on the songs in the context of his own biography, with a tone that oscillates between self-analysis and stylised pop melancholy. It is particularly interesting how personal experiences and creative processes are not separated from each other, precisely because art and life are never two separate strands, but as closely intertwined as the double helix of our DNA, indissolubly connected as long as our pulse keeps beating.

„Help the aged / One time they were just like you / Drinking, smoking cigs and sniffing glue / Help the aged / Don’t just put them in a home / Can’t have much fun when they’re all on their own / Give a hand, if you can / Try and help them to unwind / Give them hope and give them comfort / ‘Cause they’re running out of time …“
(Pulp, „Help the Aged“, 1998)

Cocker explains how he has noticed changes in his songwriting as he has grown older. Whereas he used to write primarily about ‘thoughts, ideas and concepts’, a relationship crisis, the death of his mother and the loss of Pulp bassist Steve Mackey led him to develop a lyricism and compositional process fuelled by his own emotions.

His long-term relationship was on hold at the time and he found himself, as he says, ‘in the middle of a year of wondering what I was actually doing here’. The result is that ‘More’ actually adds new narratives to Pulp’s discography, some 24 years after the last album ‘We Love Life’.

Bday-Party JC

Kurzer Einschub:

A quick aside: older Kaput readers will remember: ‘We Love Life’ was the reason for Linus Volkmann and me to stalk Jarvis Cocker in London back then (with the help of Pulp guitarist Mark Webber) until we were granted entry to his birthday party.

The next day we were even allowed to meet him in his private Kensington club for an interview for the November 2001 cover story of Intro magazine.

Good times, at least for us.

Jarvis Cocker & beim Auflegen auf der Geburtstagsparty von Jarvis, London, 2001 (Photo: Thomas Venker)

But back to ‘More’. On the album, Cocker tells stories of emphatic concern for children, parents and friends instead of egocentric views of the world and excessive debauchery. They are honest depictions of relationship problems – no more hedonistically flaunted, egotistical moments. In other words, Cocker puts familiar narratives in a new light on ‘More’, and also revisits earlier attitudes and stagings. Consider the somewhat over-exaggerated take on old age in songs back in earlier songs like ‘Help the Aged’; well now, that’s a topic that Cocker can now tackle from personal experience. As the liner notes so aptly relay: ‘In many ways, ’More’‘ has become an album about the passing of time, about maturing and understanding one’s place in it all.’ A sentence that – when I later listened to ‘More’ on an endless loop in hospital – resonated particularly deeply with me.

‘More’ was created together with long-time Pulp members Mark Webber, Nick Banks and Candida Doyle, as well as newer collaborators Andrew McKinney, Emma Smith, Adam Betts and Jason Buckle. The line-up was completed by string arranger Richard Jones and, of course, producer James Ford. 
Ford knows like no other how to pick up on the sound and patina of the 90s and noughties while introducing complementary, contemporary influences. For a band like Pulp, who have had a sensitive relationship with studio work since the gruelling recording process of ‘This is Hardcore’, Ford is a stroke of luck: he is known for his speedy, focused way of working, and still brings warmth and depth to the sound.

Photo: Sarah Szczesny

Perhaps now is the right time to immerse yourself in some of the songs from ‘More’, where this ‘new’ Jarvis Cocker becomes most tangible. The tenth (of a total of eleven) songs is particularly suitable for this: ‘The Hymn of the North’. It is about Cocker’s son, written when he was 16 and Jarvis suddenly realised that his son would soon be leaving home to start his own life. The song glides along gently, carried by just the right amount of pathos, but not without a slightly affected, dramatically exaggerated middle section, a brief twitch in an otherwise calm and flowing number. Cocker himself was, as he says, ‘frightened to death’ by this realisation and you can feel it in every line of the text.

„Life still needs to be filled none the less / So go and find something to love / But just promise me this one thing, yes: / Please stay in sight of the Mainland / Please stay in sight of the Mainland / I know you’ve got to go / I don’t want you to go …“

Another example, and for me one of the album’s hits, is ‘Grown Ups’. Even the wonderfully upbeat, 45-second-long intro could have stood on its own: a little hypnotic, endless loop that charmingly doesn’t want to go anywhere. But then, of course, Jarvis’ voice comes into play, and immediately lifts the song to another plateau. You hang on his lips, listen, and croon along to the chorus.

‘Grown Ups’ is an older song, written during the ‘This is Hardcore’ era. But it was only now, around three decades later, that Cocker found the right words. The title is a warning of course: perhaps he really had to grow up before he could finish this song. Jarvis says: “Maybe I had to become a grown up before I could finish it. I’ve always had a bit of an obsession with age. I don’t know why, but I wrote a song called “Help the Aged” when I was 33. And I’ve always not really wanted to grow up. So to say that I am grown up now is a big achievement actually. The thing I do remember when I was younger is wanting to be older because I thought I would be less awkward then.“

It is this mixture of introspection, irony and quiet melancholy that makes Cocker one of the most exciting storytellers in British pop to this day – precisely because he never completely discards his awkwardness, but accepts it as part of his truth.

„The moon went behind a petro-chemical p lant / I had a feeling I didn’t understand / I was shivering on crutches / More dead than alive / It was Xmas 1985 / It was the night they let me out of the home / It was the night I caught the bus on my own (….) Trying so so hard / To act just like a grown up / & it’s so so hard / & we’re hoping that we don’t get shown up / & everybody wants to grow up / Finally part of the new generation / Finally part of the pub conversation / & somehow this leads to mature life decisions (…) Playing all night / To get in somebody’s Knickers / & I am not ageing / No, I am just ripening / & life’s too short to drink bad wine (…) Cos nobody wants to grow up / One last sunset
One final blaze of glory / & I know it’s all about the journey / Not the final destination / But what if you get travel sick / Before you’ve even left the station? …)
(Pulp, „Grown Up´s“, 2025)

However, it is not only the major reflections that Cocker shares with us on ‘More’, but also the small fragments of his life puzzle. In ‘Tina’, for example, he talks about a girl he idolised from afar, a long, long time ago in Sheffield, but never dared to speak to.

„ (…) Does she still wear the t-shirt / With the horizontal stripes? / The one she wore / The night I almost spoke to her / Tina’s always attentive to my needs / We’re really good together / cos we never meet (…) Welcome back to Dreamland / We all know your name / T.i.n.a. still reads her book on the train / Tina / Tina / Tina / Well tonight I have been thinking about Tina.“
(Pulp, „Tina“, 2025)

Unfree Hospital

And that brings us to the hospital. The subheading? A reference to Tocotronic. ‘Free Hospital’ – one of their most beautiful songs. And, at least half of it, an astonishingly fitting reflection of my own hospital emotional state.

„ … Das Ticken der Wanduhr ist wie ein Lied / Die Dinge um mich bilden ein Muster / Das mich unbeweglich umgibt (…) Hier aus dem Dunkeln schauen zwei Augen / Und ihr Blick ist finster (…) Ich merke es genau doch kann es kaum glauben / Wir werden verwundet durch das was wir sehen / Free / Free / Hospital / Free / Free
/ Hospital / Hospital)“.

After various cliffhangers, it’s time to name the events that brought me to this medical setting. At the end of April, after much hesitation, I had a so-called ‘routine operation’ on my left ankle as an outpatient. Three doctors I consulted unanimously described the procedure as unproblematic.
And at first it actually looked like it would heal without complications. But then an inflammation developed, slowly but steadily boiling up. My physician did not want to recognise this. The result: after several worried visits to the surgery, I collapsed at home and was taken to hospital by ambulance.

I was to stay there for three weeks. I was operated on four more times. I probably don’t need to mention how traumatic and anxiety-fuelled these days and nights were. How alienated everything felt. Even now, a week after being discharged, I am still far from calm. This is the first time I’ve been able to write again. Before that: feverish flushes. Pain medication. A brief, hazy episode of oxycodone and one day, maybe two that I barely remember. The wounds are still open. And with them the fear: that I’m not out of the woods. . That ‘it’ will come back.

Photo: Sarah Szczesny

I spoke earlier about ‘Grown Ups’ and growing up, a state that we, the ‘young professionals’ working in the cultural sector, like to push away forever. To defer until it’s no longer possible, when reality catches up with us – through a child, a crisis, the end of a relationship. Or, as in my case, through illness.

I have already outlined Jarvis Cocker’s path to a new songwriting paradigm above. And while the hours and days in hospital dragged on – especially the nights when, despite sleeping pills, I just dozed, restless, motionless, in a loop of my thoughts – I often thought about this song. And of the album as a whole. Perhaps that was also the moment when the idea of interweaving these two seemingly incompatible things, this album review and processing my medical adventure – solidified. Because I couldn’t separate them anyway.

„I was waiting for a knock on the wall / Waited all night did not hear anything at all / Thinking of my lips on your lips / Working on a partial eclipse / Welcome to the home of the hits / Sorry to insist / On this partial eclipse / Of the sun. / A brand new shape to the universe / This is what it looks like with polarities reversed / Expansion becomes contraction / Repulsion becomes attraction…“
(Pulp, „Partial Eclipse“, 2025)

The first time I listened to ‘Partial Eclipse’ at home, it didn’t really stick with me. But that was to change in hospital. Perhaps because in this song, with the flat dramaturgy he so elegantly cultivates, Jarvis Cocker dreams of ‘leaving the Earth’, referring to the 2015 solar eclipse. An escape from all the negative things this world has to offer. His version of Sun-Ra’s space escapism, perhaps.
And suddenly this song fitted in alarmingly well with my decidedly Earthbound everyday life in hospital: I didn’t see any sky in the first week. After that, only when I dragged myself to the window on crutches. Or when someone pushed me into the garden in a wheelchair.

For the record: the experiences of the past few weeks have not shaped the ‘Grown Ups’ narrative for me – rather, as the plural suggests, it is the most recent of several experiences that make the topic resonate. A serious bike accident thirteen years ago, another five years ago and – similar to Jarvis Cocker and probably many of you Kaput readers – various personal losses and stories of illness in my immediate environment have anchored the narrative more and more centrally in my perception over the years.

What particularly preoccupied me during these three weeks in hospital was not just my own physical experiences. When you live so close to strangers, often separated by only 30 to 50 centimetres and a wall of pillows and blankets that you build to have at least a residual degree of intimacy, you automatically imagine your way into their lives and reflect them back into your own. I don’t think there’s anyone in hospital who doesn’t think about their own transience. As shitty as everything felt for me, I always held on to the hope that things would get better. Some of my fellow patients – and some even said this openly – had long since given up this hope, whether because of their age, their illness or both.

Of course, I know that my experiences are nothing compared to those who are confronted with years of unimaginable suffering in war zones or other crises. Nevertheless, I have decided to share these impressions. Writing has always been an outlet for me, a form of self-therapy. Just as the sympathy of friends and acquaintances has given me strength in recent weeks and continues to do so, helping me to fight the depressive waves that are knocking on my door.

However, it wasn’t just the direct impressions of the suffering of others that got to me, but also many small observations and realisations. For example, that you are only treated as well as you demand. Not because doctors or nurses don’t want it; on the contrary, the entire team at St. Vincent Hospital, which I would like to explicitly mention here, deserve my greatest thanks, I felt I was in the best of hands. But because of the brutal pace and workload in the hospital world , there is hardly any time left for anything else. Everyone is constantly working to the limit, from the emergency department to the ward service.

„Light all your candles / Light all your candles for me now / Cos all your birthdays came at once / & don’t you try to hide to hide / It cannot be denied / I’ve waited far too long / To believe / To believe in the words / I once wrote to this song: / You’ve got to have love / Oh. / Without love you’re just making a fool of yourself …“
(Pulp, „Got to have Love“, 2025)

I was released as an early present, so to speak, on the day before my birthday. Coming home was and is a moment of euphoria, a return to at least some normality. Even if it quickly turns into a rollercoaster of highs and lows; you’re only ever optimistic until the dark clouds gather in your head and suddenly Jochen Distelmeyer sings ‘I’m afraid of tomorrow / I’m afraid of today / I’m afraid of yesterday’ and whispers that Prozac could be the solution (Blumfeld, ‘Testament der Angst’).
But don’t worry: the first thing I did after the hospital was to stop taking the painkillers.

Maybe that’s why it took me a few days to remember that I had kept a recorded diary during the first two weeks in hospital. Typing was out of the question, but I had the feeling that my frustration and all the other feelings pulsating inside me could be channelled in this way and not float around freely like the bacteria in my wound.

The (admittedly very pathetic) title of the document: ‘I would like to live in the time of the happy’. Once you’ve been in hospital for three weeks, shame is a meaningless word anyway. So here are a few passages from my fever notes, unadorned, merely corrected for spelling. Some of them are tough going for me when I read them again. But I can assure you: it was recorded as it is here, chronologically from admission to discharge.

Mercy, help the Aged!

•  “Worst night so far. No sleep from 2:00 am. Apparently already used up all the painkillers. My head is exploding. Absolute hell. For the first time in my life, I don’t want to live.”
•  “No toilet for five days. Nose is also starting to run. Immune system is down. I’m about to throw up. And right now, the nurse isn’t coming at 6 a.m. like usual, but at 7 a.m.”
• “The night was horrible again. I only give it a 9 on the pain scale to set an upward trend. But pain all the time.“
•  “I spent Saturday in delirium. Thanks to the doping. If the nurse hadn’t accidentally pushed the wheelchair against my leg, I would have slept through the cup final. At least I got to see it on TV, even if I always had to think about my main stand ticket.”
•  “What’s really annoying in the operating theatre is having to listen to people talking before the anaesthetic finally kicks in. But even worse: when they want to make small talk with you.”
•  “After the operation, I suddenly have a bag hanging from me into which blood plasma is pumped the whole time. To clean the wound. And suddenly I see bacterial blood leaving my body in one go.”
• “There’s nothing more to tell. Thursday (we are on day 8 of my stay; author’s note) was just boring. The pain doesn’t allow me to do anything except sleep and listen to a bit of music.”
• “I have to think about my father. The last time I saw him was in the rehabilitation clinic near Dresden. He also had an open wound back then, on his knee. I always thought it was just because he was overweight, but now I have the same thing.“
• “Alex, who got under a car in Morocco before the graduation party had even finished. Kiese hung from a tree after work. Next line eat next line.” (I was obviously thinking of two friends who died far too soon; author’s note)
• “That’s my blood container beeping all the time. Apparently no one has come for three quarters of an hour. It beeps and beeps and beeps. So that’s how it feels to be in the lower class of the healthcare system.”
• “The third operation – the anaesthetic didn’t work as well as before. They told me that they had to top it up. No matter. Happy that I was gone. (…) But if I hadn’t insisted on the MRI, they would never have found the second focus. Then the night would have been so horrible again.” (Obviously the timeline is a bit mixed up…; author’s note)
•   „Not enough painkillers. But it’s my own fault, says the night nurse. I should just ask for more. You manage according to the patient’s wishes. Really? But what should I ask for? Injection, pill, infusion? From what? Absurd. Just so that in the end it can only be the patient’s fault if something goes wrong.”
• “How can a person complain and snore as much as the guy next to me? At least I’ve finally got the sleeping pill. I’ll be off in a minute.”
• “A doctor has just described the wound to me: 12 centimetres long. 3 wide. 2 deep. They’re going to transplant skin from my thigh downwards during the operation now or in operation 5 so that it heals faster. Can they please finally anaesthetise me and only wake me up again when everything is fine?”“
  Enough pain report.

Zurück zu Pulp.

My favourite song on ‘More’ is ‘Slow Jam’, a song that took Jarvis a whole eight years to find the right form for, which you absolutely can’t hear. It was originally intended for his solo album ‘JARV IS…’, but somehow it didn’t fit: the music was too slow, the words too depressive – and the right beat wasn’t in sight. It was Chilly Gonzales who tipped Cocker off to the Jersey Beat, a hip-hop beat that only uses a bass drum.

The depressive text goes something like this: „(…) Slow Death / That’s what our love has turned into / So how about we talk about something new? / You claim the Bible is a lie / You claim it is a work of fiction / Pray then how do you explain / This morning’s crucifixion? / Jesus died upon the cross / Then Jesus came back from the dead / So, I had a word with Jesus / & this is what he said: / Jesus said “I feel your pain / God knows I share it too. / Slow Death? / Now you know just what I went through /So how about we talk about something new? …“
(Pulp, „Slow Jam“, 2025)

The lyrics were inspired by Jarvis Cocker’s slowly crumbling first marriage, which felt like a staggering descent towards the end: “I wrote the second verse, about the Bible, when I was with my first wife. We had a massive row on Good Friday and I went and sat in the park in Paris in a really bad mood. So that’s where those words come from. I suppose it’s the kind of song I wouldn’t have been able to write when I was younger because it’s about the way that when you’re in a relationship for a long time it can become a slow death. But that’s only if you let it become that. So how about trying to turn it into a slow jam?“

Épilogue

I dedicate this text to Sarah, even if she hates it. Without her love and tireless support, I would never have survived the past few weeks and would not be able to cope with what is still to come.
I would also like to thank Pulp and all the musicians whose songs have carried me through the days and nights. Music is and remains the healing force of the universe.

PS: I had just finished this piece when I learned that Jarvis Cocker, too, had once ended up. In his book „Good Pop, Bad Pop“, he opens up his attic and lets us rifle through the relics of his life — half-forgotten flyers, scrawled lyrics, dead batteries. And nestled there, like some broken toy with too much significance to throw away, is the story of the fall.
1985: a girl, a window, a misjudged move. He falls. Ends up in hospital for weeks.
And here I am, caught off guard by the eerie echo of it all. How strange that these things find you when your body is soft and your defenses are down.