Released alongside ‘Marrying for Love,’ Pulp’s ‘Cold Call on the Hot Line’ outshines its release partner, featuring layered musical backing and enrapturing vocals, characterised by a unique phone-booth graininess, reminiscent of ‘This is Hardcore’.
A display of dry wit, the song is essentially Jarvis Cocker as he tries on amusingly unsexy dad jokes, phone puns, and plays with the dichotomy of a love going cold on a hotline. The premise of the song — the speaker romantically cold calling random numbers and spouting quips — is as funny as its execution. Rifling through wordplay after wordplay to himself, like a salesperson reciting their pitch in the mirror, certain lines such as “I’ve heard of phone sex, but phone impotence, that’s a new one” draw a smile.
Creatively ushering in the instrumental section, Cocker says “here’s some music,” as a deceptively jovial keyboard and a floating violin emerge, mimicking hold music with quality unfaithful to its purpose (hold music never sounds this good).
About halfway through the song (and who knows how many puns later), the caller finally gets a number in the call queue. A few more jokes and then the punchline: “sorry wrong number,” suggesting the process may repeat until successful.
“Jarvis Cocker (Pulp) 1” by dextermixwith is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.