By his own estimation, Mark Webber is a “hoarder”. To put that more politely, the guitarist is by nature an archivist who, crucially when it came to compiling his new book I’m With Pulp, Are You?, a “visual history” of a band he first loved as a fan when few other people were interested and then joined on a full-time basis in the 1990s, had “boxes” of ephemera to draw on.
Stuck at home during the pandemic, Webber began going through his spare room. “Once I started to open [the Pulp boxes] up, there were things that I couldn’t remember having, photos I couldn’t remember where they were taken,” he says. “But I discovered loads of what seemed to be interesting stuff because it was like I was discovering it fresh, like someone who buys the book might, and so I got a bit enthused.”
Around the same time, JC Gabel, editorial director of the Los Angeles-based publisher Hat & Beard Press, got in touch. He was thinking about putting together a book on Different Class, the 1995 album that, powered by ’Common People’, took Pulp to arena-level success. To Webber, Gabel’s idea didn’t sound “that interesting” but, he added, “I’ve just found all this stuff, what do you think of doing an archive book?”
Thus was born I’m With Pulp, which, to quote Jarvis Cocker’s foreword, is important not just because Webber was integral to the band’s most successful era but because, from the 1980s onwards, Mark Webber “was there to hold on to, collect and collate the debris left behind by Pulp’s first stumbling attempts to make music”.
After the band’s first demise in 2002, for a time Webber was so sick of music he only listened to talk radio, and built a new career as a curator of artists’ film and video. He’s written on experimental music, he’s worked in academia and has been compiling an oral history of avant-garde cinema. Seen in this light, I’m With Pulp represents the closing of a circle, the curator applying the tools of his trade to his younger self, the Pulp fan who collected stuff and whose enthusiasms, represented by the 13 records here, in turn shaped Pulp. To quote Cocker again, “He has impeccable taste.”
Mark Webber’s I’m With Pulp, Are You?, which features essays by Luke Turner and Simon Reynolds and a foreword by Jarvis Cocker, is published by Hat & Beard Press. Webber will be in conversion with Miranda Sawyer at the ICA on 27 November.
To begin reading Mark Webber’s Baker’s Dozen, click ‘first record’ below.
