Steve Mackey obituary

It was a fool’s errand to try to upstage Jarvis Cocker during Pulp’s remarkable 1990s peak, but bassist Steve Mackey, who has died aged 56 after a long period of ill health, came close. A model of self-contained cool and dance-influenced grooves, he was key to the Pulp sound and look. On stage, Cocker was the insinuating, finger-pointing extrovert, but Mackey, reserved and elegant, was an attraction in his own right. His basslines gave Pulp a disco undertow that set them apart from their indie peers.

After he joined in 1989, the Sheffield group evolved: no longer struggling art-rockers but danceable art-poppers, they found their own space as Britpop’s idiosyncratic outliers. Mackey’s description of their sound was, without much exaggeration, “Eastern European Balkans disco with acid house and Sheffield bleep music”.

When Pulp made their mark in the mid-90s, some of the success could also be apportioned to Mackey’s skill at managing the band’s visuals with Cocker in the early years. A Royal College of Art film graduate, Mackey oversaw graphics and video ideas with Cocker, who had studied film and video at Central Saint Martins in London. The pair asked famous people to recount how they lost their virginity and made a short film of the answers, releasing it with the single Do You Remember the First Time? (1994).

For the sleeve of their 1994 breakthrough album, His ’n’ Hers, they chose Philip Castle to create the sleeve art because they admired his poster design for A Clockwork Orange. They got what they paid for. Castle’s hyper-real drawing made each member look confrontational, but Mackey, in an orange suit with a just-so sweep of hair and hollow eyes, is especially disquieting. Conversely, a handsome 6ft 2in, he could also carry off a smouldering teen-idol look, as captured in an early-90s Jean-Baptiste Mondino shot.

Mackey’s interest in music was equalled by a love of photography, which he parlayed into a second career in the 2010s. He shot campaigns for Armani Exchange, Miu Miu and Marc Jacobs’s 2018 Redux Grunge collection; he also worked for the fashion magazine Love, founded by his wife, the stylist and editor Katie Grand. He and Grand became a couple in 1997 and cohabited happily for a decade. In 2008 she told the Observer, “he doesn’t want to get married and I don’t want to have children”. He changed his mind and in 2009 they married in New York State.

Pulp had taken eight years off in the 2000s, and returned for a 2011-12 tour, but even if the reunion had lasted beyond the tour, Mackey was by then a busy freelance record producer and remixer. As producer and/or writer, he worked on Florence + the Machine’s debut album, Lungs, Arcade Fire’s 2017 album Everything Now and MIA’s Kala (2007) and Arular (2005) albums. His list of remixing credits is lengthy and includes Kelis’s Bossy (2006) and Cornershop’s Topknot (2009).

He and Cocker remained close. They formulated a DJ event called Dancefloor Meditations – “an attempt to combine a guided meditation class with a nightclub experience”, as Cocker had it – staging it at festivals and at the 2017 Frieze Art Fair. It was their last major collaboration. In October 2022 Pulp advertised tour dates for summer 2023, but Mackey announced that he was not involved. “I’ve decided to continue the work I’m engaged in – music, film-making and photography projects, and will not be joining them,” he wrote on Instagram.

When his death was made public, Cocker posted a picture taken in South America during the 2012 tour. Mackey was forging ahead on a mountain path, having suggested to the band that the best way to fill a day off was to hike in the Andes. “Steve made things happen. In his life & in the band,” Cocker wrote.

He was one of two children born in Sheffield to Kath (nee Harrison) and Paul Mackey. After attending Hinde House comprehensive school in the city and then Richmond College of Further Education, he looked for a way into music. In an interview with Pulp’s fan club magazine in the 90s, he answered the question “Embarrassing past life?” with “Had long hair and was a member of a group called Trolley Dog Shag.”

He went to early Pulp gigs and got to know Cocker; when both took up university places in London in the late 80s, Cocker invited him to join the band. Pulp were so out of step with an indie scene dominated on the one hand by Madchester groups and on the other by American grunge that their prospects seemed dismal. In 1996, by then celebrated as a member of the group that made the epochal No 1 album Different Class (1995), Mackey said: “I think if you’re in a band that are popular, you might as well enjoy it.”

He is survived by his wife, his son, Marley, from an earlier relationship with the artist Zoe Grace, by his parents and his sister, Michelle.