"Socialism gave way to socialising," observes Jarvis Cocker on 'Last Day Of The Miner's Strike', a shrewd bit of cultural history and a provocative finale to this quite brilliant compilation. In fact, as Pulp proved during their remarkable trip through the '90s, socialism and socialising weren't entirely incompatible concepts. Rather, they co-existed in a relationship of peculiar tension and outstanding creativity.
This, in essence, is Pulp's motor: a desire to indulge yourself, yet retain some 'standards'. A freedom to defy conventional morality in your private life whilst trying to uphold certain other, sometimes confused, ethics. 'Hits' charts their '90s parabola, from the sparkling effrontery of 'Babies' and 'Razzmatazz', up to the peaks of 'Common People' and 'Sorted For Es And Wizz', then back down again through the gristlier epiphanies of 'This Is Hardcore' and 'Sunrise'. On the simplest level, it makes for one of the most consistently entertaining singles collections in recent memory.
More profoundly, it shows how complex and challenging a genuinely popular group can be. At first, the biggest element of subversion was Jarvis Cocker himself, a self-made pop star who managed to combine a spectacularly seedy vision of relationships (has any singer ever made such currency out of voyeurism?) with an indignant curiosity about the shallowness and deceit of modern British life, from the fake love of E casualties to the desperate postures of slumming rich kids, and the delusions of ageing fashion casualties.
This latter strain bulldozes to the front on the selections from 'This Is Hardcore', where Cocker's awareness of his own encroaching middle age and concomitant disgust with fame are matched with music that swerves away from the band's hard-earned populism. 'This Is Hardcore' itself is the best thing here, a frowzy epic which compares an uncontrollable lust for pornography with an equally troubling desire for success and remains one of the best and most disturbing singles of the '90s. 'Party Hard', a horribly conflicted troll through the delights and idiocies of excess which steals, cannily, from Bowie's 'Cat People', runs it close.
'Last Day Of The Miner's Strike' is superb too, a document that charts social shifts from Pulp's birth in early '80s Sheffield to the present. The mode here is the same kind of widescreen, folk-inflected pop that fuelled last year's 'We Love Life'. The air, though, is as rueful as it is valedictory. And if, as many suspect, Pulp's marvellous career is drawing to a close, its mixture of grand perspective, personal dislocation and lower-case anthemics make for a wonderful ending. A national treasure, forever.
