mp3: Pulp - Mile End

Pulp’s B-sides were often more interesting than the albums as they gave Jarvis just that little bit more slack lyrically to really have a go at someone, whether it’s himself, dirty old perv teachers or just southerners in general. Take the fantastic The Professional, for example, after Jarvis appeared to hit some sort of post-mega-success meltdown; whereas This Is Hardcore showed the more palatable effects of his angst, The Professional was just embittered, unhappy, self-loathing at its best: “I’m only trying to give you what you’ve come to expect/Just another song about single mothers and sex/You’ve heard it before, it’s nothing special - you can do it the hard way, or you can be…a professional.”

Or PTA, on the Mis-shapes single: “I’ve never had a woman before/I was too scared to touch the girls in the Poly/And I don’t know what it’s like to be young/Cos all my life I’ve been knocking on forty”.

So it is with Mile End, one of my favourite Pulp songs. It’s so bloody jaunty for a song about the absolute dregs of humanity. When I visit our office in London, the Underground stop is on the Central Line, and as we whizz rapidly westwards, I see Mile End just sitting there towards the easterly side of the route and I wonder if it really is anything like how he sings: “The lonely kids come out at night, they kick a ball, and have a fight, and maybe shoot somebody if they lose at pool… The pearly king from the Isle of Dogs feels up children in the bogs, down by the playing fields, someone sets a car on fire…” The best part is all the northern jibes at the end at the expense of bloody southerners - “Leave it ahhht!” “Lend us a foiaahhhver!” It’s a mess alright, it’s…Mile……….End. And the noise after he sings the title at the end of the chorus sounds like something from The Thing. Aptly.