You can't be a spectator - Thirteen observations from a Pulp concert in the year 2026

1) Jarvis has still got it.

2) Seriously, Jarvis Cocker has been getting up on stage for nearly 50 years now, and he knows how to work a crowd. He knows what shapes he can make in front of a blazing screen, he knows when to strategically deploy his arse wriggle, and the things he does with his hands can not be replicated by any other human being.

3) He can also bend like a motherfucker. 

4) I've been hoping to see Pulp live for more than 30 years ago, and they didn't disappoint, with a powerful and moving experience. It was everything I could have asked for, and so much more.

5) It was a very sensible gig - there was a 15 minute interval, and Jarvis threw tea bags into the crowd, and managed to make someone sitting in a comfy armchair look truly epic.

6) Bands that return to the stage after decades away can obviously be just phoning it in, but even with a few more wrinkles and a lot more grey hair up there, this felt like a band at their absolute peak.

7) Their brand new song - Begging For Change - was loud and fast and angry and very impressive, this is still definitely a band with something to say.

8) That new tune is coming out on a new War Child compilation, and that's the first I've heard of that, and I will most definitely be buying that on CD when I see it. That one that came out in 1995 was a game changer for me.  

9) At least half of the people who work in my office were there at the show - it's music for nerds and we are all very definitely nerds in public radio.

10) You can be 10m away from some dipshit letting off a flare in a crowded space and not even notice, because who looks backwards at a concert? 

11) There may have been a taste of AI in the background projections, especially since the band has dabbled in it recently, but it only lasted a second.

12) I was tempted by the Pulp beach towel in the merchandise trailer, but $70 was taking the piss.

13) I was not at all tempted by the white underwear under the glass. They didn't even have a price tag on that.

* All pictures taken by my mates Nik Dirga and Chris Walker, who made a great night even better

Forty hours of blank tape was the best Christmas present I'd ever got

I had no idea what I was going to do with 40 hours of blank video tape, but I was pretty sure this was the best goddamn Christmas present I had ever received in my entire young life.

When it comes to presents from Santa, there had been a few crackers in my childhood - some wonderful slot car sets, the occasional beloved Star Wars figure, some Fighting Fantasy books that got heavy use and my wonderful Grifter bicycle - but the 10 four-hour blank video tapes I got for Christmas 1988 was something special.

Blank tapes were a very important part of my life for several years. They were expensive as hell, and I made the absolute most out of every minute.  Most of them were three hours long, which was slightly frustrating when I couldn't quite get two films on a tape. 

Sometimes you'd fit two on perfectly - I did get both Bill & Teds and two Texas Chainsaw Massacres into the 180 minutes, with minutes to spare - but even if I couldn't get two films, I used up all the space with treasured episodes of TV shows and music videos.

And then it's 1988 and I was 13 and my big Christmas present for the year was a small box filled with 10 E-240 tapes. And even though I was going through the usual teenage dramas, this was proof that my parents still knew me, because this felt like a gift from heaven.  

Just a few years earlier I was spending all my Christmas money on a $15 blank tape because Star Wars was playing for the first time on TV, and I could tape it and watch it as many times as I liked, something that had been unimaginable for much of my childhood. While they were steadily getting cheaper - you could get tapes for $5.99 at the DEKA store in town - I still only had half a dozen tapes of my own when I suddenly had 40 hours to fill.

It took me a few months, but I soon managed to get copies of the best films in the world onto those tapes. With ample room for two films on every tape, I could get my own copies of 20 films, an unimaginably large amount for my young cinematic tastes. 

Most of them I taped off the TV - Psycho was one of the first films to get recorded - and then we somehow ended up with two VCR machines, and I could make my own copies of anything at the video store, and might have gone a bit crazy.

There have been several generations of new entertainment technology come and go since then, but I still have a couple of those long tapes, and the capacity to play them. I have those films in far greater quality, but there is a comfort in the warm fuzz of video tape, back when everything wasn't so sharp, and when a pile of blank tape was everything.

Sgt Rock: There he is.

- Sgt. Rock #422

Art, colors and letters by Joe, Andy and Adam Kubert

Written by Robert Kanigher

It ain't white boy day, is it?

True Romance was cool and slick and exactly what we all needed when we were stuck waiting for Pulp Fiction - the leads have never been more smokin' hot, the face-off between Walken and Hopper is so beautifully played and shot that if it wasn't for the deeply problematic conversation, it would arguably the greatest scene in history; and this is the movie where Brad Pitt became a true star without getting off the fuckin' sofa. 

But Gary Oldman's Drexl Spivey blows them all away - literally in the case of Samuel L Jackson - with an absolutely magnetic performance, and you can't turn away from watching the worst person in the fucking world go about his awful business.

In a just civilisation, there would have been 20 films where Drexl shows up, does his shit, and gets shot in the face by the main character. I can only assume we have failed as a culture and a society.

He just gets under my skin

There's something about the part in Sweatshop #5- written and drawn by Peter Bagge - where one of the miscreants in that vastly under-loved comic sets Neil Gaiman's pants on fire, and it's a moment which hits very differently in the year 2026, than when it was first published in 2003.

Gaiman's trousers are still on fire at the end of the story, and nobody seems to care, so I can only assume he's still burning away now.  

That cultural hole is getting bigger

The cultural hole around the start of this century is only getting bigger. We were all promised that once everything went online, it would be available forever, and that was such a dirty lie.

Websites go down, or fade away, and so much has been lost, and plenty of essays and articles have just vanished. There are too many stories of writers who have lost years of work because the sites they were writing for instantly vanished as the cash ran out. 

It's just so much easier to find out about comics culture from 1985 than it is for 2005. There were tonnes of professional mags and endless amounts of fanzines put out 40 years ago that are still kicking around. Ephemera that was printed out and distributed far and wide, and chucked in a box and rediscovered and kept because they are echoes of youth lost, but also filled with incidents and weird feuds and sheer data.

All that enthusiasm that went into these gorgeous little things didn't fade away, it just got given more platforms online and exploded out into the world. Instead of late night stapling parties, they're making videos for a bewildering amount of social media and working for geek websites.

And then those sites lose funding, and things on social media get drowned and forgotten (or more likely, never even seen as the algorithm continues to make horrendously bad decisions about what actually interests people), and trying to find information about things that came out 20 years ago is so much harder than finding data from 40 years ago.

So while the enthusiasms that were printed out 40-50 years ago can still be picked up for a couple of bucks at random comic stores and flea markets, more recent delights have vanished forever, and won't ever be haunting any old bookstores. The hole has eaten them all up instead.

It was a gas.

Blondie's Heart of Glass is one of the earliest music videos I ever remember seeing, and I still find it disturbing in a way I can never properly articulate. There's the sparseness of the tune, Debbie Harry's soaringly high voice, the minimal movements of the band - it all just makes me feel like a tiny kid again and truly creeps me out. 

Nobody else might be disturbed by how shiny her lip gloss is, but it takes me back to a time when the world was scary and unknowable, and I'm afraid I have not learned as much as I would like since then.

Love and Rockets: Grandma Dynamite

Maggie is getting old. 

We're all getting old, but we don't see it in the mirror, we see it on the faces of our loved ones. When you hit a significant milestone, it's no big deal, but when your little sister gets there, it's an entropic stab in the heart.

And after following Maggie and her story in Jaime Hernadez's staggeringly brilliant Locas comics for so, so long, you can see the weight of the years on her back as she sits in the doctor's office on the cover of the latest issue of Love and Rockets, waiting for some results.

She's at that age where she's wondering what's it all about, and maybe superheroes and other dreams aren't real and she just has to face life without them, but Maggie also sees an impossible figure in the clouds during a flight to see a dying parent. 

It's so far away you can't tell if it's falling to earth or rising into the sky. But it's definitely there, even if nobody else can see it. 

There's also the first mention of Penny Century in an age in this story, and maybe she finally got her wish and ascended to the heights of superpowers, and is checking in on her magpie. Or maybe Maggie is just seeing things. 

And maybe Ray and the foghorn were always meant to be together, and that's why they can't sit together for more than 10 seconds before tearing into each other. But they're meant to be together in the same way Maggie and Hopey should be, and it's just not going to happen.

There's always a lot of beautiful maybes whenever a new issue of Love and Rockets come out, and it's always worth to linger over them, especially when they never turn out like you expect.

The collection dissolves

I found another one of those existentially troubling collections at a favourite second hand bookstore recently. While they grant the opportunity to bulk out my own collection with rare delights, they still always give me the shits. 

There was a pile of The Dark Side and Fortean Times back issues, and a large amount of Edgar Rice Burroughs material, particularly Tarzan and all those various off-shots. There were a lot of early Warhammer books, and the first dozen or so Wild Cards anthologies.

It all showed up quite suddenly at the same time, and felt like it all belonged to the same tastes, slightly to the side of mine, with enough overlap to be interesting. All these books and magazines most certainly came from a distinct perspective, and the bulk of it suggested an estate sale, sold off as quickly as possible with little care for the finer details.

I've consolidated my own collection in recent weeks, and it's a lot of stuff. Vast piles of The Comic Journal, every single issue of everything from the Justice League International and Legion 5YL days. I can't help but wonder what will happen to it.

I don't care who makes money off my own collection when I leave this world. I would like to just give it all away, but I do have a family who deserve to get something out of my lifelong obsession for more nerd stuff. Even if they get cents on the dollar, I'd be glad to pass it on to them to dispose of it.

Sometimes I think... Sometimes I think I could just burn it all. But that feeling never really lasts.

Still, I did my part at the bookshop recently, and took home a few of those Dark Side and Fortean magazines to add to the small pile of other issues I have had for years, and filled some nagging holes in my Wild Cards and Phillip Jose Farmer books. 

And that's all I can hope for the issues of the New Warriors I've had in a handy box for 35 years. If they end up in a huge pile of other geek nonsense, I hope they find another home, in another collection, where they will be loved as much as I loved them.