He can be a caustic observer of humanity but there is always a grounding in curiosity and empathy because he does not exempt himself from the mess. One of Cocker’s strengths as a lyricist is that he rarely completely celebrates or condemns the environments and characters he sings about. Nevertheless, if there’s anywhere to escape to, this is it. Perhaps it’s where our darkness comes from. There is no Eden that humanity cannot soil yet with anthropomorphic sentimentality stripped away, nature reveals itself as brutal in its impassivity. A childhood yearning prevails through the album and a very adult disappointment (George Orwell’s overlooked midlife crisis gem Coming Up for Air is a literary equivalent). There’s darkness at the edge of town a place where bodies as well as redemption are occasionally found. Jarvis Cocker hasn’t lost his edge as a lyricist. There is beauty and love to be found but even in the moments of bliss, there’s cynicism, even in the glades, a grudging exhaustion, “Oh the trees, those useless trees produce the air that I am breathing.” Trouble follows us into the wilds because trouble partly is us. This is nature, as in human nature with all that entails. There is nothing especially pastoral about We Love Life and nothing at all Arcadian. Which is to say Pulp never really changed. And if you can’t leave, you take refuge in the green spaces you can find, even if they only exist in parks or books clinging to nature for fear of falling off the face of the earth. People leave cities for numerous reasons but self-preservation looms large. One sanctuary, offering the possibility of beauty or love, is nature. What do you do with the onset of responsibility, the vagaries of age, and when hedonism no longer does what it used to? When you have reached the sex dungeon panic attack of This Is Hardcore, “When you're no longer searching / For beauty or love / Just some kind of life / With the edges taken off.” While this seems a departure from the shady council estate noir of their earlier work, it’s a logical progression. There are songs about woods, birdsong, dawn. The cover, by Peter Saville, employs the floral Victorian typography of Louis John Pouchée. It’s a nature album from a band renowned for urban squalor and glamour. On the surface, We Love Life is the least Pulp of Pulp’s incarnations. Where did We Love Life go? And what does it tell us now, listening back twenty years later? Except, given the troublesome nature of reality, this final section of the arc seems to have disappeared. Then the ‘Fall’ with the lush breakdown of This Is Hardcore. There is the meteoric ‘Rise’ with His ‘n’ Hers, followed by the ‘Climax’ of their masterpiece Different Class and their momentous Glastonbury-headlining set. There is the ‘Introduction’ in the long pre-fame incubation of the band in the derelict but fertile brownfield of Sheffield. Viewed in retrospect, Pulp’s career appears to confirm Freytag’s five acts. Whether it was true or not is incidental. With the advent of the online world, it became the dominant prism through which we perceive our own lives. With the advent of cinema, the five act structure became the dominant way of portraying life. It tamed and rationalised the chaos of life, and therefore became an appealing belief system. Though the structure existed in practise before then, it took off after Freytag formalised it, and it’s easy to see why audiences, theatre producers, and political and religious moralists were all flattered by the comfort and order it offered. Another problem was that life, with all its messy tangents and inconvenient loose ends, does not necessarily unfold in five acts. The problem was Freytag, for all his talent and success, was a racist Prussian supremacist and had, to put it mildly, something of a questionable world-view. In Die Technik des Dramas (1863), Gustav Freytag argued for an ideal five act structure in storytelling.