I was lying when I asked you to stay
By: David Fickling
Tags: Writing, Music, Lyrics

It takes a lot of single-minded self-belief to make your way in the music industry, so it’s no shock that brittle egotism is a quality that’s over-represented among singers.

What is surprising is that this tendency hasn’t produced a stronger collection of songs about bitter break-ups.

The more common emotion is melancholy, or at most a passivity that only switches to aggression in isolated, sublime moments — think the final, defiant chorus of “The Winner Takes It All”, or that exasperated aside “Why don’t you be a MAN about it?” at the end of “You Keep Me Hanging On”.

Performers love to be loved, I suppose, so the desire to leave a good impression normally trumps the expression of raw emotion.

But the moments when the mask slips are, for me, some of the greatest songs in pop: “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right”, “Fuck You”, “You’re No Good” (especially in Dee Dee Warwick’s brassy, clattering original take), “You Oughta Know”, or that smoky pair of Jamie Lidell tracks, “What Is It This Time?”/”Game For Fools”.

I remember the moment I “got into” Pulp. Downstairs at HMV in Oxford in 1993, I bought a copy of “Intro”, a collection of singles and B-sides in which they developed their sleazy kitchen-sink disco sound. At the time, there was one track that stood above all the others to my ears: “Sheffield: Sex City”.

It’s an eight-minute epic that starts with Jarvis Cocker mouthing the names of suburbs like he’s reciting the Kama Sutra (“Intake. Manor Park. The Wicker. Norton. Freshville. Hackenthorpe.”). Pulp’s keyboardist Candida (Candida!) Doyle breaks in to read out a scene from Nancy Friday, about apartment residents waking each other up with their lovemaking until “within minutes the whole building was fucking”. Only once that’s been going on for nearly two minutes does the song really start.

I still love “Sheffield: Sex City”. It’s a wordy, panoramic, hot mess of a song about a narrator and his lover failing to get it together for most of a long, torrid, rainy day in a surreal urban landscape:

Jesus! Even the sun’s on heat today, the whole city getting stiff in the building heat…

Old women clacked their tongues in the shade of crumbling concrete bus shelters

Dogs doing it on central reservations and causing multiple pile-ups in the centre of town

I didn’t want to come here in the first place but I’ve been sentenced to three years in the Housing Benefit waiting room…

At the centre of all this spiralling imagery, the thematic axis on which the song turns is almost motionless — a woman, waiting at home for her lover to come around:

Now I’m trying hard to meet her but the fares went up at seven

She is somewhere in the city, somewhere watching television

Watching people being stupid, doing things she can’t believe in

Love won’t last ’til next installment

Ten o’clock on Tuesday evening

The world is going on outside, the night is gaping open wide

The wardrobe and the chest of drawers are telling her to go outdoors

He should have been here by this time, he said that he’d be here by nine

That guy is such a prick sometimes, I don’t know why you bother, really.

Jarvis breaks in on this train of thought with a bloodcurdling yelp of apology, and reels off a string of excuses:

Oh babe oh I’m sorry

But I had to make love to every crack in the pavement and the shop doorways

And the puddles of rain that reflected your face in my eyes.

The whole thing is a tour de force which probably seemed romantic to my teenaged, inexperienced self. But Jarvis would have been pushing 30 by the time he wrote this, and surely knew better. Did his lover really credit this guff? “That’s your excuse? You weren’t seeing someone else, you were making love to the city?”

So latterly I’ve transferred my affections to “Razzmatazz”, a sort of lyrical remix of the same themes that drops the pretense and revels in the nasty emotion lurking beneath.

This Jarvis isn’t a head-in-the-clouds poet thwarted by the frictions of modern urban life. He’s a rancorous ex in an astonishingly vicious game of break-up one-upmanship:

You started getting fatter three weeks after I left you

Now you’re going with some kid looks like some — bad comedian

Are you gonna go out, are you sitting at home eating boxes of Milk Tray?

Watch TV on your own, aren’t you the one with your razzmatazz

and your nights on the town?

Oh-oh-oh

And your father wants to help you doesn’t he babe?

But your mother wants to put you away

Now no-one’s gonna care if you don’t call them when you said

And he’s not coming round tonight to try and talk you into bed

And all those stupid little things they ain’t working

Oh they aren’t working at all.

That string of “you”s, shot out like a volley of poison darts. That taunting “babe”. Is that really the troubadour protagonist of “Sheffield: Sex City”, “coming round tonight to try and talk you into bed”? Well, well. We always half-suspected it.

“Razzmatazz” is a deliriously hateful song, and made all the more so by its delivery. Jarvis’s arch stage mannerisms always had a touch of the Larry Grayson about them, but here he’s coming off as some — bad comedian. Like a drunken stand-up act or its protagonist’s life, the whole song is curdling into a weak joke at its own expense. Lame one-liners fall flat, before taking an abrupt turn into degradation and naked hostility:

The trouble with your brother, he’s always sleeping — with your mother

And I know that your sister missed her time again this month

Oh am I talking too fast or are you just playing dumb?

If you want I can write it down.

It’s all so nasty that I find myself hoping Jarvis is simply putting on a very good act. But I wonder. That mixture of desire and venom is a theme he continued to mine successfully throughout this era, from “Lipgloss” (which seems to be a third go at gnawing over the same squalid scenario), “She’s a Lady” and “I Spy”, right up to “Common People”. And thinking about all the subtle class signalling in “Razzmatazz” is another clue to the malign honesty at its heart.

Jarvis, with his slightly bohemian upbringing and grammar-school-to-art-college education, never quite fit the solidly working-class English stereotype as much as he played it. And you realise listening to “Razzmatazz” that he’s actually using class imagery to denigrate his protagonist.

In the video, she’s rattling around her flat, pouring cornflakes in the sink and leafing through a book with the pathetically aspirational title “How to Live in Style”. Jarvis hangs out with his band on stage, and on a balcony in Paris, actually living in style. Knowing he’s going somewhere, he mocks her as underclass, as lumpenproletariat, employing all the contemptuous finesse of an Edith Wharton character:

Oh well I saw you at the doctor’s waiting for a test

You tried to look like some kind of heiress but your face is such a mess

And now you’re going to a party and you’re leaving on your own

Oh I’m sorry but didn’t you say that things go better with a little bit of razz-a-ma-tazz?

The mocking way he breezes past his old lover’s medical test — has she missed her time again this month, too? — before settling on that last word, stretched out to four jeering syllables. Who even says that stuff? “Putting on the razzle-dazzle.” Certainly not Jarvis. No one with a clue, no one who’d buy this record.

Years from now, Jarvis will be living in Paris like he promised in the video, “half-way up a sumptuous gilt rococo staircase in the ninth arrondissement”, married with a child to the fashion-stylist daughter of a French banker. He’ll be curating music festivals in London, getting Iggy Pop to perform at the Royal Festival Hall. People who read the Independent will line up to pay 100 quid a ticket.

Her? She’ll still be on her couch in Sheffield, glued to the telly. Shouting at her delinquent teenage son, who’s starting to remind her of his father. Still getting fat eating boxes of Milk Tray. “All because the lady loves…” The funny thing is, she still thinks that shit is classy.