Pulp‘s Jarvis Cocker has opened up about the creation of their song ‘Mile End’ for Danny Boyle‘s film Trainspotting.

The iconic frontman was the latest guest of Criterion‘s Closet Picks series on YouTube. The series sees select artists visit the American home-video distribution company’s DVD closet and allows them to choose and explain their favourite films from the Criterion collection.

While picking his favourite films, Cocker mentioned Trainspotting, the 1996 classic which follows the lives of a group of heroin addicts and their friends living in Leith, Edinburgh. Pulp’s song ‘Mile End’ appeared on the soundtrack to the film.

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Speaking about the creation of the track, Cocker said: “We were making the ‘Different Class’ record, and we recorded pretty much all the songs and then we got this message saying, ‘There’s a guy making a film,’ and could you write a song for it. So there’s a scene in this film – it’s a spoiler if you’ve not seen it, but it doesn’t give away too much of the plot – But there’s a scene where Ewan McGregor’s character goes into a toilet and some drugs have been flushed down it, and he goes down into the toilet and ends up in a kind of underwater environment.”

He continued: “You know, I’m realizing, as I’m talking about these films now, a lot of the films that I like tend to play with this thing of film convention and then something that is a representation of real life. So as luck would have it, we had a song called ‘Mile End’ that we’d recorded but didn’t really fit on the album. And so we said, Could you use that? That was a bit of a kind of serendipity.”

Other films that the ‘Sorted For E’s & Wizz’ singer picked out include David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Meantime, Salò and Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Grand Budapest Hotel – a director who he has also worked with, singing a song on the Fantastic Mr. Fox and creating the LP ‘Chansons d’Ennui Tip-Top’ for Andersons 2021 film The French Dispatch.

Pulp have signed to Rough Trade Records.

The band say “Rough Trade have managed Pulp for over 30 years so it feels great to finally be on the label. We did it!”#pulp pic.twitter.com/TKVcQDLao1

— Rough Trade Records (@RoughTradeRecs) December 12, 2024

In other Pulp news, it was revealed today (December 12) that the band have signed a new record deal with Rough Trade amid rumours of an album coming in 2025.

Cocker and co. reunited last year for the first Pulp shows since 2012. The group have treated fans to various new songs while out on the road, such as ‘Farmer’s Market’, ‘Spike Island’, ‘My Sex’, and ‘You’ve Got To Have Love’.

Pulp’s seventh and latest studio album, ‘We Love Life’, came out back in 2001 via Island Records. They then shared ‘After You’ – their first single in over a decade which was produced by LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy – through Rough Trade in 2012, as part of their first reunion.

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Other yet-to-be-released songs to have been performed by Pulp on their comeback run included ‘Background Noise’ and ‘A Sunset’.

Speaking to NME last month about his new book I’m With Pulp – Are You? guitarist Mark Webber addressed the rumours of a new album and said: “I guess at some point we’ll have to decide if we’re going to do something with these [new] songs,” he responded. “For the moment, that’s still hanging in the balance.”

As for what’s next for the band, Webber said: “I don’t know. We’ve got some shows confirmed, and I think it’s quite likely we’ll continue to do things.”

He also reflected on the experience of airing new material in a live setting, explaining: “People seem to be excited at the fact that we have some new songs. If you play a new song, then it’ll take the audience a while to digest it – it’s not like they’ll be in ecstasy immediately.

“It’s been good, and it’s good for us to do something different. As great as the songs are, it can get boring playing the same thing again and again.”

Elsewhere, Irvine Welsh recently announced that a new sequel to his acclaimed novel Trainspotting is on the way.