It was a fool’s errand to try to upstage Jarvis Cocker during Pulp’s remarkable 1990s peak, but bassist Steve Mackey, who has died aged 56 after a long period of ill health, came close. A model of self-contained cool and dance-influenced grooves, he was key to the Pulp sound and look. On stage, Cocker was the insinuating, finger-pointing extrovert, but Mackey, reserved and elegant, was an attraction in his own right. His basslines gave Pulp a disco undertow that set them apart from their indie peers.
After he joined in 1989, the Sheffield group evolved: no longer struggling art-rockers but danceable art-poppers, they found their own space as Britpop’s idiosyncratic outliers. Mackey’s description of their sound was, without much exaggeration, “Eastern European Balkans disco with acid house and Sheffield bleep music”.
