Skellig by David Almond (Yearling Books 1998)

 

I found him in the garage on a Sunday afternoon. It was the day after we moved into Falconer Road. The winter was ending. Mum had said we’d be moving just in time for the spring. Nobody else was there. Just me. The others were inside the house with Dr. Death, worrying about the baby.

He was lying there in the darkness behind the tea chests, in the dust and dirt. It was as if he’d been there forever. He was filthy and pale and dried out and I thought he was dead. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I’d soon begin to see the truth about him, that there’d never been another creature like him in the world.

Pulp’s This is Hardcore by Jane Savidge (Bloomsbury Academic 2024)

 

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.