Released on March 30, 1998, Pulp’s sixth album, This Is Hardcore, may be as close to commercial suicide as you can get when recording an album in a burning studio with a noose around your neck. But its release also conveyed many other things, including an acknowledgement that drugs and fame are not all they’re cracked up to be, and that pornography is a clear and pleasant danger for men with too much time on their hands. One thing it most definitely signified was the end of Britpop. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I hear you cry, but it’s a truth barely acknowledged that only a band like Pulp, who’d formed almost twenty years previously – Jarvis Cocker formed the band at the City School in Sheffield in 1978 with schoolmate Peter ‘Dolly’ Dalton, who several years later became one of my closest friends whilst we were both attending Nottingham University – and spent the vast majority of those twenty years squandering in obscurity, could have successfully completed the task with so much style and vigour.
No comments:
Post a Comment