But the rapt audience response to the current single Sunrise kept them at it

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But the rapt audience response to the current single "Sunrise" kept them at it.The turning point was engaging the legendary pop maverick and longtime inspiration Scott Walker as producer. "He would say to our drummer 'Hey Nick, put some lead in your ass.'" Jarvis smiles with pleasure at the memory, "That was to make him slow down.. And it worked," he marvels. "There really was a lot of lead in that ass."We Love Life has turned out to be Pulp's finest and most complete recording to date: the band's music is more supple and more engaging than ever before, and Cocker's lyrics are as good as any he's written: at once effortlessly contemporary and occupying a world all of their own."Weeds", the anthemic opening number, begins with a rousing vision of the bravery of asylum-seekers and proceeds through a compelling meditation on drugs, prostitution and the exploitation of the underclass for entertainment, to culminate in a defiant statement of self-affirmation: "Do your dance, do your funny little dance."One of the great pleasures of watching Jarvis perform with the pre-fame Pulp was the way he would ramble on between songs. But as the band became more successful people started hanging on his every word. Presumably that must have been rather disconcerting for someone who'd always insisted on his right to talk "complete rubbish"?"I'm not a big fan of talking," claims Jarvis "I think it's over-rated... What is it they say about empty barrels making most noise?"Anyone who doubts the enduring logic beneath Cocker's deadpan anecdotal style should pay heed to his explanation why, at last year's South Bank tribute concert to the great folk archivist Harry Smith, he controversially recast the cotton-picking blues standard "The Boll Weevil Blues" as an imaginary conversation with a cockroach about to fall into a pan of spaghetti bolognese."Because I'm from the South Yorkshire triangle rather than the Mississippi Delta, I had to try and come up with some appropriate subject matter.

As far as I could make out, the song is about a farmer telling this boll weevil not to destroy any of his crops. Now, when I was living in a squat in Camberwell, we had quite a problem with cockroaches, and I turned this Baby Belling cooker on one night and then got distracted. When I went back to the cooker, there was a cockroach doing a tightrope walk along the edge of the pan... I didn't have any money at the time and I knew if it fell in – desperate as I was – I wouldn't be able to eat the food because of the cockroach juice, so I was trying to persuade it to fall off the other way..." He looks up for confirmation of how exquisitely this inspired conceit harmonised with the concerns of the author of the original song. "And people in the papers slagged me off for missing the point!"After so many years with his face pressed up against fame's restaurant window (Pulp recently entered their third decade, with Jarvis the only remaining founder member), it was no wonder his glasses got a bit steamed up once he got inside. Now he's seeing things more clearly again, does he think he's learned anything?"It's certainly a privilege to have experienced what goes on in that world at first hand," he says thoughtfully, "rather than going through life labouring under a misapprehension of what it might be. The only downside is that when you see how something actually works, it often doesn't measure up to your expectations." Jarvis smiles.

"But then I think even that's good because it gets rid of an illusion in your life, and you can get on with thinking about something useful." Pulp's new single 'Trees/Sunrise' is out now The album 'We Love Life' follows next Monday. A genetic analysis of a skeleton entombed in a church in the Italian town of Padua has shown that it could be the body of St Luke the Evangelist, who died about AD150. A genetic analysis of a skeleton entombed in a church in the Italian town of Padua has shown that it could be the body of St Luke the Evangelist, who died about AD150. Scientists who did DNA tests on the teeth of the skeleton believe the man was probably born in Syria, the birthplace of Luke, who wrote the Third Gospel of the New Testament. The Catholic Church asked the scientists, led by Guido Barbujani of the University of Ferrara, to analyse the body buried in the church of Santa Giustina because of doubts over its provenance.Historical texts suggest that St Luke was born in Antioch in Syria about AD70 and died in the Greek city of Thebes 84 years later. His body was supposed to have been moved to Constantinople, now Istanbul, in Turkey, before being taken to Padua some time before 1177.However, scholars have wondered whether the body in Padua was of a Greek man who died at about the time as Luke. This would not have been an unusual fraud in a time when there was a thriving trade in saintly relics.Dr Barbujani's team concluded that the body was three times more likely to be of Syrian origin than Greek, and was probably not switched with a Turkish corpse in Constantinople.The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, extracted mitochondrial DNA – which is maternally inherited – from a pair of teeth independently dated as belonging to a person who died between AD72 and AD416. The scientists compared the DNA signature with present-day people living in Greece, Syria and Turkey to find the closest match and therefore the most likely birthplace of the Padua skeleton..