Mark Webber’s musical and life journey has taken some unusual turns. Growing up in the north of England, he became an ardent fan of Pulp, the groundbreaking Britpop band fronted by Jarvis Cocker. Over the winding course of four decades, Webber would go from fan to fan club president, tour manager to support musician to full band member.
While Pulp got started in the late-1970s, the band bubbled under as little more than a cult sensation. They began releasing albums in the ‘80s, but their first three releases didn’t even chart. The British listening public belatedly caught up with them: 1994’s His ‘n’ Hers went Gold in the UK. Pulp’s fifth album, 1995’s Different Class broke though massively, going 4x Platinum in the UK and charting in eight other countries. With that momentum, Pulp entered a lengthy and sustained period of popularity, becoming leading lights of the Britpop era alongside Blur, Oasis, and Suede, all bands that came along years after the arty rockers from Sheffield.
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From his earliest days, Webber – a self-described hoarder – collected all manner of Pulp-related memorabilia. Now he has compiled the best of those bits along with written narrative in a dazzling book, I’m With Pulp, Are You? It’s essential reading for anyone interested in the saga of the massively popular (everywhere but the U.S., that is) band, and it’s a fine visual accompaniment for those belatedly discovering the joys of Pulp and its music.
Mark Webber spoke with me about his unique perspective on the band’s history.
Wide-eyed Fan to Fanzine Editor
“There was a very small independent record store in the small town that I grew up in; it was the place where all the alternative kids would go and hang out. In 1985 I was 15 years old, and the people there knew my musical inclinations. The Little Girl (With Blue Eyes) EP had just come out; they played it for me and said, ‘We think you’ll like this.’ I bought it and played it so much that within a year I’d had to buy a second copy as I had worn it out.
“In January 1986 Pulp were coming to play a concert in Chesterfield. I went along to the soundcheck to interview them for the local music fanzine I had started. I was just a clueless, naive kid. They were not much older than me, but at that age, a few years is a big difference.
“This concert was shortly after Jarvis had the accident where he fell out of a first-floor window trying to impress a girl. So he performed a few concerts from a wheelchair: wheeled onto the stage, did the show from the wheelchair, and then at the end of the concert he stood up and walked off! You were not sure if this was some kind of prank, something to try and seem more interesting, or what the hell was going on.
“Pulp had these strange, twisted ballads and some abrasive, abstract songs. The keyboard player looked like a doll, and the drummer looked like a cartoon character. Russell [Senior, guitar] looked like David Byrne or Ron Mael, with crazy staring eyes. Jarvis was this strange troubadour character with a goatee. I was taken by the idea that something so original and artistic and creative could be happening 12 miles away from the town where I was going to school.
“There were no signs of success in terms of being on the charts. The last single that lineup released was [1987’s] ‘They Suffocate at Night.’ They shot a video for that in Sheffield; me and a friend were there. They shot through the night, and the band actually split up at the end of the video! When you are a fan and you hear that, you think, ‘That’s the end.’”
Pulp, group portrait, London , United Kingdom, 1998. L-R: Mark Webber, Nick Banks, Jarvis Cocker, Steve Mackey, Candida Doyle. (Photo by Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images)
Fan Club President to Tour Manager to Auxiliary Player
“People were starting to get interested, but there were no records coming out and the concerts were very sporadic, so it was difficult to develop an audience. We started to collect people’s addresses; we’d send them flyers and things. It developed into a fan club as people became more interested. In the beginning, they didn’t have a press officer, so I became a sort of mouthpiece for the band.
“It seems a bit grand to say now, but from the fans’ point of view I became the ‘conscience’ of the group. I was president of the fan club. When I handed it over, there must have been a few thousand members.
“I did a thing where I cut up a pair of Jarvis’s trousers to send out to fan club members. I cut it into 500 as an edition of a certain number of objects. I don’t know where I got the idea to do this!
“We did a few publications that were nice; we did a fanzine called Disco-very. And then I started to do a series called The Pulp Scrapbook, collections of press from the early period to show people that were coming to the band later that there was all this history for them to discover. It just got to the point where there was so much press, we just couldn’t keep track of it all. And it kind of speaks to what I’ve ended up doing with this book.
“I was slowly getting more and more involved in what they were doing, but I wasn’t part of any contracts or anything like that. I wasn’t part of the business discussions other than what I was needed to do as the tour manager.
“Once I started playing with them at concerts – which began with them giving me parts to play because they didn’t have enough hands – then the rules of engagement got a bit blurred, and there was some frustration. But I didn’t really voice it that much because I was just happy to be along; it was like living the dream.”
Mark Webber (Credit: Gerard Malanga)
A Different Class of Musician
“We wrote the [1995] Different Class songs together. ‘Common People’ came out, and it was a huge success. I was informed that there was a meeting upstairs with the band and the managers and I wasn’t invited. It went on for a long time, and then they said, ‘Can you come upstairs?’ I was thinking, ‘Well, this has been great. They’re about to be massively successful, and they’re going to say, “Thanks for your help, but… see you around.”’
“But I misjudged them quite severely, because Jarvis said, ‘We’ve been talking about it, and we’d like you to join the band.’ It was such a shock. I didn’t reply; I didn’t say yes or anything, really. I don’t think I ever did.
“Me coming in as a creative contributor skewed things in a certain direction, because I’ve got my musical influences and they all had theirs. One of the unusual things about Pulp is that everyone has quite different tastes and brought different things to the band, and different levels of musical inability. We know none of us were very competent musicians, really.
“The This is Hardcore [1998] period was my sort of Lamonte Young, Terry Riley minimalist period. That kind of influence does pervade a lot of those songs, although our songs are kind of dressed up like some kind of intelligent version of pop music. There was this moment when we were doing these more arty kinds of things, and I guess that was because I was pushing the group a little bit in that direction.
Revellers wear Jarvis Cocker masks ahead of Pulp playing at the New Year Hogmanay Street Party and Concert celebrations in Edinburgh, December 31, 2023. (Credit: Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images)
“When the band went inactive in 2003, we did think it was the end. It didn’t end badly; no one really fell out. We just had enough. For me at the time, it was the end of music. I had enough of engaging with the music business; I didn’t listen to records for years. I just listened to talk radio. I didn’t have any instruments in the house for about eight years; I just had to get away. I became a curator of avant-garde film programs.
“It always seemed like Jarvis wasn’t interested [in reuniting], and I was definitely not interested. I was loving all the other stuff that I was doing. But in 2011 Jarvis rang me up out of the blue one day, and said, ‘I’ve been persuaded that this might be a good idea. What do you think?’ If it would have been five years earlier, I don’t know what my response would have been. But enough time had passed for me to think, ‘Well, let’s see how it is.’ And once we got together and reminded each other of the chords, it was obvious that there was something there that was kind of great, so we decided to go for it.
“Playing ‘This is Hardcore’ and ‘F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.’ and ‘Common People’ night after night is okay, but it’s nice to play some different things. [Since reuniting again in 2020] we haven’t done any recording, but we do have quite a lot of songs. A couple are Pulp songs that never got finished back when we were active, and a couple are new things that have come about recently. We’re not completely sure if we want to get involved in making a record. We are going to play some more concerts next year, so we’re not finished yet.”
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