The All Seeing I - "Pickled Eggs & Sherbet" CD, Album, 1999 (London Records)

The All Seeing I is an obscure music project from the town Sheffield, and its existence is really due to the honor and being proud of one's town.   The feeling here is a group of musicians who asked for volunteers to help out on Sheffield Proud Day.  The good thing is that Sheffield is very rich in talent, and therefore you have the Human League's Phil Oakey, Tony Christie (the Jack Jones of Sheffield, and that's a compliment), the electro-DJ- team All Seeing I, with Sheffield's leading citizen of 1999, Jarvis Cocker of Pulp.  

The All Seeing I is the foundation for this album, and pretty much wrote most of the music with Jarvis writing the lyrics.  There is also a cover of Sonny Bono's great "The Beat Goes On," and the other vocalists Lisa Millett, Steve Edwards are also very much part of the Sheffield world.  In a sense, this album is an aural documentary on Sheffield the city and its culture.  It is also a great album.

Jarvis Cocker is the chief reason why I purchased this CD, and I was intrigued that he wrote a song for Phil Oakey to sing, "1st Man in Space" which sounds more like Human League than any thing else.  Which is fantastic.   Human League is very much a band that is clearly from Sheffield. It's outer space music, and sort of treat their home town as if it was a city on another planet.  A great technique to write about one's world, as something outer-worldly.   Cocker at times appears to be an alien as well, but one who was grounded by the city's character.  Which comes to Tony Christie, who is obscure, underrated, and fantastic.  His songs on the album "Happy Birthday Nicola," "Stars on Sunday," and the single from the album "Walk Like A Panther" are brilliant.  Christie has that lounge aesthetic but with something extra.   Perhaps hooking up with these misfits has given Christie a unique edge.  "Pickled Eggs & Sherbet" is a great one-off project, and for me, puts Sheffield into my consciousness, just like Hollywood or vintage Manhattan. 

Pulp - "Different Class" Vinyl, LP, Album, 2011/1995 (Music on Vinyl/Island)

The perfect storm.  I was standing at the Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, waiting for the walk sign where thousands are doing the same.  As I looked up, there was this video on the side of the building, and it was Pulp's "Common People."  I stood there and waited till the video was over.  At the time, and it may have been due to jet-lag, but I thought that this was the greatest video I have ever seen in my life time.  The year was 1995.  At that point (and still) whatever is happening in England, Tokyo will have all the recordings at Tower or at the local HMV music shop down the road from where I'm standing. I went to the Foreign music section, meaning English/American pop music, and found Pulp's "Different Class" at one of its many listening stations.  It was the only time in my life where I played the first to the last song, the whole album while standing up and with headphones on at a record store. 

I never heard such pop perfection!  It brought an emotional response from me, due that I pretty much gave up on contemporary pop music in the 1990s.  I was buying music, but it was the peak of the CD re-releases at that time, which means I was buying hard-to-find soundtracks or old Joe Meek recordings on CD.  And since I was in Japan, I was discovering new music to me - the charms of Jun Togawa.  But Pulp brought me back to the present with such force, that while I was in Tokyo, every day I would stop by and listen to the entire album in the listening section of the store.  Eventually, I did buy the British edition at HMV.   Looking through my collection, I have every CD single released from that album as well as a regular CD British release as well as a Japanese special release with an extra CD, full of remixes and b-sides. All excellent. 

What impressed me about Pulp was, of course, Jarvis Cocker, their lead singer, and lyricist. Jarvis at the time reminded me of a combination of Nöel Coward and Ray Davies.  Distantly, also Roxy Music.   One of the great frontmen of a band, Jarvis's take on the world was very focused on the fact that they came from Sheffield and with a strong literary bent he could sketch these incredible narratives about life around him.   In a fashion, he was very much in the tradition of John Osborne and other writers of the Kitchen Sink Realism school of literature.  Pulp although a band in 1995, very much reminded me of the aesthetics of 1966, with a foot in the world of Soho London and more likely specific locations in Sheffield.  

"Different Class" is 12 songs and not one is a loser.  Highly orchestrated in the sense that this is a real band behind Cocker.   Going back to Roxy Music, it seems to me that like Bryan Ferry, he's the architect, but he wouldn't have shit if not for the talented and visionary musicians in the band.  Mark Webber, Russell Senior, Candida Doyle, Nick Banks, and Steve Mackey play a vital role in the makeup that's Pulp.   Also having the great Chris Thomas as the producer is a super plus as well.  With that foundation in place, Jarvis Cocker can shine like the shining star.  All the songs are credited to the band, with lyrics by Cocker.  

"Common People" is the last great pop song.  One of the things why I love that song, and the album is that it doesn't represent the future, but more of the time, place (Tokyo?) and the emotional state that I was in when I first heard this album.   Re-listening to it (many times) as well as watching all the official video releases, and the b-sides, it strikes me as the perfect moment for this band.  I'm also a huge fan of the previous album as well as the two records that followed "Different Class."  So that lineage of albums kept on building till they broke up.  Perfection!