I meet Pulp guitarist Mark Webber to talk about his new book, teenage years in Chesterfield and that BRIT Awards ceremony!

Chesterfield born Mark is the guitarist in Pulp, a band he followed as a teenage fan. So has playing in one of the country’s best known groups for nearly 30 years earned him a fortune?

Mark said: "It's made me comfortable and not have to worry about eating or paying the rent. It's enabled me to do all these other things like being avant garde film curator for 10 years which I couldn't possibly have done as there wasn't the money in that to pay a wage."

In his new book ‘I’m With Pulp, Are You?’ – which is released on October 5 and published by Hat and Beard Press – Mark turns back time on his life in Chesterfield and beyond.

He said: "I was first a fan of the band so I would collect ephemera like fliers, setlists, badges, stickers and I kept that up while I was in the group. During lockdown I started to go through six or seven boxes that had been in the storeroom for donkey's years. They were packed with press cuttings - thousands of pieces of paper."

He found archives from when he created the fanzine Cosmic Pig at the age of 15, running off the first edition on a photocopier at Chesterfield School.

Just two months later Mark heard Pulp’s song Little Girl (With Blue Eyes) in Planet X record shop on St Helen's Street, run by David 'Dids' Hayes and Henry Normal – the latter recommending that Mark check out the band’s gig at Chesterfield Arts Centre.

Mark said: "I went in the afternoon to interview Pulp for Cosmic Pig...I didn't meet Jarvis that day, it was Russell, Candida, Pete and Magnus. I went to the concert in the evening and that night my life was changed.

"It was quite sparsely attended in a big hall at the arts centre. Jarvis was performing in a wheelchair because he'd had an accident where he'd fallen out of a window in Sheffield a few months previously. He was wheeled onto the stage, played the concert and I remember his hands beating on the arms of this chair in the more passionate moments of the songs but then at the end of the concert he stood up and walked off!"

Four months later Mark put on a gig at the Conservative Club on Marsden Street, Chesterfield where Pulp headlined with support from The Bland and Trash That Car. Mark's band Siegfried's Magick Box opened the show. He said: "It was reasonably well attended - about 70 or 80 people, that would be a good night in those days.

"What Pulp were doing was very kind of arts schooly. I was already by then a massive fan of The Velvet Underground and it was amazing that something that was a bit like that was happening so close to home.

"Pulp used to make a big effort with the stage shows. They would have lots of clingfilm and tin foil to dress the stage, bits of string with toilet roll or bags of water with colour dye hanging around the stage. Me and a couple of my friends from Chesterfield got involved with helping them dress the stage. That would be around the time of my O-levels."

At school Mark told his careers officer that he was going to be a pop star. He said: "I just said it because I couldn't think of anything else and I was obviously into music. I got my nine O-levels at Chesterfield School, wasn't interested in doing A-levels and so I had to sign on because I didn't have a job. The only job I was offered by the job centre was working in an abattoir; I wasn't really into that!

"I tried to get on a foundation course at Chesterfield Arts College. I took along to the interview some creative abstract photocopies and Super-8 film that I'd scratched and coloured - the guy didn’t know what to do with me! I must be the only person who has been refused the art foundation course at Chesterfield College!

"I applied for the Civil Service in London and was there for 11 months - it was monumentally boring. It was the Public Trust Office, a government office which was part of the Lord Chancellor's office, which administrated people's wills or trusts.”

Pulp asked Mark to be their tour manager when he was 21. As the band's popularity grew, Mark and Pulp’s violinist and guitarist Russell Senior decided to start a fan club. One of Mark's genius ideas was to cut up a pair of Jarvis's trousers and send the bits of material to fans. Mark said: "I put the pieces in little envelopes that were numbered and had a message 'A gift for you from the wardrobe of Jarvis’. I've got number one and I kept a few. I liked the idea that it was editioned, like an artwork."

As tour manager Mark was responsible for ensuring that the band arrived at soundchecks on time, got on stage punctually and back to their digs at the end of the night. He said: "They were pretty tardy and Jarvis was terrible getting out of bed in the morning. At the beginning of my tenure as a tour manager,we stayed in bed and breakfast and I would be the one going around knocking on doors waking everyone up for their fried breakfast. Then we progressed to Trusthouse Forte; I was really proud of myself for doing a deal with Trusthouse Forte that we got discounted rates for practically all the hotels for a tour."

Mark’s appointment as the band’s guitarist 29 years ago enabled Jarvis to concentrate on his singing. He said: “It was around the time of the release of Common People and following on from that we recorded what became Different Class.

"Different Class was really successful. We played a lot of concerts in 95 and 96, those were the only years that we really toured intensively, like lots of bands tour all the time.”

Mark was with Pulp band members at the infamous Brit Awards in 1996 – up against Oasis for a clutch of honours – when Jarvis stole Michael Jackson's thunder by jumping on stage and waggling his bottom in front of TV cameras. He said: “Jarvis does some unpredictable things but that tops it. It's strange that it was so easy for it to happen, that there was no security. I was a little bit sad because I'd only just started to like Michael Jackson's music and I did quite like Earth Song even though it was totally preposterous.”

Pulp’s next recording was This Is Hardcore, which didn’t prove as popular with the record-buying public as its predecessor. Mark said: “Russell had left by that point so I had a bigger role to play in the group. We made another record, We Love Life, which sold less copies than the previous one. It got to the point where everyone felt a bit weary and felt it was time to give it a rest. At the end of 2002, we played a festival at Magna, between Sheffield and Rotherham, and it was announced it would be our last concert. I just remember that after the show, we all left in separate taxis - there was no group hug or high fives.

"There were years where i didn't see any of them. I got away from being a musician, I didn’t have instruments in the house and I didn’t listen to music. I started organising avant-garde film programmes at different museums, art centres, film festivals around the world.”

Then in 2010 Mark was asked by Jarvis if he wanted to do some more concerts. Mark said: "I hadn't played guitar for 10 years so it was like learning all the songs again. We rented what used to be Axis studios in Sheffield for six months – we'd go there for weeks on end and re-learn our songs. What was great was there was no career pressure; we didn't do anything new, we didn't have anything to promote other than selling tickets for the concert, we didn't do any press, we concentrated on putting on a good show.” Their last appearance in that era of Pulp was on The Jonathan Ross Show in January 2013 where they played the new song After You.

A month later Mark became a dad which changed his perspective on life. He said: "It brought to a halt avant-garde film organising activity because I stopped going out at night." Mark and his wife, Maria Palacios Cruz, a film programmer and film festival organiser, set up a small business called The Visible Press and have since published five books.

In the summer of 2022 Jarvis visited all the members of Pulp at their respective homes to sound them out about touring again.

Mark said: "My daughter, who was then 10 years old, had never seen me play so this idea that I was a pop star or a musician was a little bit abstract for her. That was one incentive. Also, we had had a pretty good time ten years previous, so it seemed like it would be worth doing it again while we were all physically capable.

"We have played some great concerts. In the last reunion we played loads of big shows but we also played in St Martins College – the building had been sold so it was like a goodbye party to the college. We played for 200 people on a stage two feet off the ground and not with our equipment.”

Pulp have just returned from a run of high-profile shows in the United States including one on Mark’s 54th birthday. They played seven festivals in Europe this summer.

When asked if he gets recognised on visits back to Chesterfield to see his dad, Mark said: "I don't think I've ever been recognised in Chesterfield in the last 20 years; sometimes it will happen in London but it’s pretty rare. We were lucky to have a singer who absorbed a lot of attention which enabled the rest of us to get on with our lives."

The book is available to order online at https://www.hatandbeard.co.uk/products/im-with-pulp-are-you