Saving the best til last? All good things come to an end & at least we were able to go out with a great song as the last Pulp single release.

The song started life as “Candy’s Spector”, developing from ideas that Candida brought to one of the “We Love Life” writing sessions. We had a few goes at it before the final version took shape under the guidance of producer Scott Walker. (Thankfully, he turned a blind eye to the namecheck in the lyrics.)

A video featuring a galaxy of celebrity lookalikes singing along was directed by Jarvis and Martin Wallace at Sarm West, the same studio where the Band Aid single was recorded. This video version of the song was released as the lead track on CD2. How many people can you recognise just by listening?

The record cover reproduces a photo of Mark (probably aged 12 but looking much younger) taken by his dad on Heddon Street in London, the same location as the cover of the @davidbowie Ziggy Stardust album.

B-sides “Forever in My Dreams” and “Yesterday” date from the abandoned LP sessions with Chris Thomas in 2000. We wrote so many songs in this period & there are plenty of demos that survive. (One of them, “After You” was re-recorded as a gift to fans in 2012.) @nickcaveofficial and @roisinmurphyofficial were very game in agreeing to do their own cover versions of two of our older songs.

But unfortunately the single came out far too long after the LP release & that might account for the lack of attention it received at the time. Not sure now why there was such a big delay but maybe it was a consequence of the slow fade out of the band leading up to our last show at Rotherham Magna Centre in December 2002. We all felt like it was time to do something else for a while. No-one wants to become a bad cover version of themselves.