His 'n' Hers

I can’t quite believe it’s taken me this long to get around to writing about this song. “His ‘n’ Hers” is the last track on The Sisters EP, which I tend to consider Pulp’s crowning achievement, actually.

Has anyone combined salaciousness with raw human need as well as Jarvis does here? The song is a bump-and-grind epic that also expresses all sorts of unvarnished terrors, most prominently the fear of a boring, staid existence that feels like a death sentence. Like many Pulp songs of this era, this kind of existence is expressed as life in the suburbs. But is this line equally a swipe at Morrissey? I’m frightened of James Dean posters.

The band is on top-form here: Russell’s spaghetti western guitar; Candida’s organs and synths, alternately bubbling and sea-sick; the unerring drama of the Mackey/Banks rhythm section. At the conclusion, the song rises to an almost unbearable crescendo that then ends abruptly. Awesome.

This TV performance is an absolute classic, with an amazing Jarvis monologue. On Pulp’s reunion tour of 2011-2012, the song has so far only been performed once, at the very first show of the tour, in Toulouse, France. Here’s a clip.