Watch Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker talk through writing ‘Mile End’ for ‘Trainspotting’ and his favourite films

nme.com:

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.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.