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.

Freak Out the Squares: Life in a band called Pulp by Russell Senior (Aurum Press 2015)

 

I was living in a flat above a sex shop with a girl who had a bit of a Béatrice Dalle thing going on and was the object of much pining amongst local musicians, including Jarvis. In a bid to impress her, he climbed Artery-style out of the window and made his way along the ledge, only to fall twenty feet onto the pavement in front of the sex shop – his broken glasses and splayed limbs serving as a dire warning on the dangers of pornography to several adolescent boys who had been plucking up the courage to go in.

It seemed touch and go for a bit, he’d broken his hip and was in hospital for a while, then moved out into residential care. But he slowly improved and was able to come out in a wheelchair. We had to cancel a couple of shows but he gamely did the rest in his wheelchair.

I shamelessly milked the mishap for all it was worth and took Jarvis down to London to do press, which included a surreal photo shoot pushing him round a skateboard park in the chair.

For the next show at The Clarendon, London, we brought a coach party down from Sheffield. The trip down to London was always filled with expectation. On the way into the metropolis, the excitement mounted: there were famous people just walking down the street, bold as brass. Rover always seemed to spot Oliver Reed just disappearing into a pub and demand that the van stop, but no one else ever saw him. It was probably just wishful thinking on Rover’s part, like the time when he went past Felicity Kendall in the street and she ‘gave him the eye’. Can’t remember the concert, it got some reviews.

Never one to avoid advancing the greater glory of Pulp by resorting to bad taste, I cut out a picture from a Romania Today, 1968 magazine of a forlorn man wired up with electrodes – onto which I drew broken glasses to make it look like Jarvis.

Friday's Playlist #3

An ongoing series:

Simple Minds, 'Hunter and the Hunted' (New Gold Dream 81-82-83-84)

Pulp, 'She's Dead' (Separations)

Moby featuring Debbie Harry, 'New York, New York' (Go)

Stephen Duffy, 'Eucharist' (I Love My Friends)

Felt, 'Primitive Painters' (Ignite The Seven Cannons)

The Auteurs, 'Bailed Out' (New Wave)

Luke Haines, 'How To Hate The Working Classes' (Christie Malry's Own Double Entry)

The Supremes, 'Stormy' (The Supremes Box Set)

Kristen Vigard, 'God Give Me Strength' (Grace Of My Heart Soundtrack)

Teenage Fanclub, 'Mellow Doubt' (Grand Prix)

Update 11/11/ 22
The Luke Haines and the Kristen Vigard tracks are both missing from the Spotify playlist. Click on the links above to find both tracks on YouTube. Both brilliant . . . but I would say that.

Spotify Playlist Link.  

Politics Goes Pop

I still maintain that Pulp's 'Common People' and 'Cocaine Socialism' are two of the best political pop songs of the last ten years or so. Employing a lacerating wit where others would just be shouty fuckers, Jarvis Cocker has that knack in his lyrics for spot on acidic observations about everyday life that have always been so much more politically relevant than those other musicians who, in trying to angle an invite to be on the bottom of the bill at the Love Music, Hate Racism festival at the Weasel and Duck pub in Dunstable, try to wrap a borrowed Ruts riff around a lyric that is the equivalent of a mimeographed manifesto written by an anarcho-trot expelled from the Alliance of Workers' Spartacist Federation for being too politically incoherent.

That is why I was buzzed to read in the comments section of Lenny's Blog that Jarvis Cocker has debuted a new old song, 'Running The World', on his recently launched MySpace page. According to the blurb on his profile page he's uploaded the song now 'cos it's a year to the day that he wrote the song on the night of Live8 last year, and in his own words:

"I wanted you to hear it now cos It's exactly 1 year since that Live-8 thing & it was the night of that event that I wrote this song. I apologise for all the swearing but sometimes that's the only thing that seems appropriate. It's in no way a criticism of Geldof & co. but I remember thinking at the time: "Where does engaging with these politicians/businessmen really get you?" - ( 12 months on & the cunts still haven't paid up as far as I can make out) - maybe the problem is something more ..... fundamental. Anyway, what do I know? I'm just a pampered rock star - but at least I think it's good to discuss this stuff. Don't you?"

With the opening lines of 'Well did you hear that there is a natural order, those most deserving will end up with the most, that the cream can't help but always rise to the top, well I say: shit floats', and a chorus that the whole family can sing along to, I think we've found the soundtrack to the summer; especially now that Trevorland have been dumped out of the World Cup, and Baddiel and Skinner have put the acetate of 'Three Lions' in Ian Broudie's vault for another two years.

The boy done good.