I Want You

The guitars intertwine agreeably and the backing vocals campily intone “ba-ba-ba-ba.” Here’s another Freaks track that feints towards pop. Nevertheless, Jarvis promises a scenario of mutual dissatisfaction, to put it mildly. Romantic obsession curdles into boredom by the second verse already. And, once the relationship has reached its inevitable conclusion (“You’ve got to stamp upon its head,” Jarvis instructs), endless regret will inevitably follow, which soon morphs back into romantic obsession. And we can where this is headed.

Not that the band was faring well in the music scene at this point anyway, but it probably didn’t help that Freaks came out the same year as Elvis Costello’s “I Want You,” an even more fascinating, slow-motion crawl through desire unhinged. Pulp’s song sounds positively breezy in comparison. Although it’s worth nothing that the demo of Pulp’s “I Want You” first came out on a compilation cassette in 1984, but I think it’s safe it reached a limited audience this way. “I Want You” is also one of the few Freaks-era songs that the band performed occasionally in the '90s and beyond.