Interesting reading the last two posts from people around my age (''a man told me to beware of thirty three''), as we were early-teens when TIH came out and are now roughly the age Jarvis was when he wrote it/the album was released. Clearly, these brave/embarassing, adult-confessional songs, were not really for us from an artistic sense yet clearly were/had to be/should be! from a label/commercial angle ("Do they regularly listen to/buy pop singles? Check. Are they a captive audience of the band already from their last record? Check. Job done!") and yet as wide-eyed fans, we felt compelled to find a way in with them, regardless.

My near lifetime affliction to this group didn't begin until the following year when Pulp's popularity was at a decline for the first time since the 1980's and my introduction to a lot of the TIH material didn't arrive until I watched a tv recording of ''The Park Is Mine'' concert in early 2000. I remember being convinced I'd heard "The Fear" before as it sounded so familiar/immediate. And I almost wore-out the VHS by rewinding back to watch the performance of ''Laughing Boy'' again and again. I also loved ''TV Movie'' almost straight away too - so the more traditionally arranged (turgid to some) songs on the album such as this and A Little Soul have always been as big a part of me for Pulp as the Doyle-Senior propelled, idiosyncratic sonic axis of Gift singles and the Sisters EP that so many fans hold-up as being premium Pulp. It took another year, spring 2001, when I finally purchased This Is Hardcore, to hear the album in full and though I struggled with some tracks such as Seductive Barry and Party Hard (I hated the abrupt, distorted intro of the latter and after revelling in the pretty majesty of 'Dishes' would quickly pause/skip the CD to shield me from the start of the next song) but learned to love it after a while (the cheerleaders in the video may have helped).

The internal meetings at Island during 1997 and '98 as to how on earth they marketed This Is Hardcore to a key demograph mentioned above must have been fascinating. "Why can't we get a group of popstars just to behave and not think for themselves?! Just follow the bleedin' formula and we'll all make a few bob out of it..."

The band were going through their own difficulties within and outside the studio and it's hard to believe that nothing other than strong co-ercion made them do TV promotional duties such as when the comeback began in Nov'97, appearing on Live & Kicking in a room full of pre-teens to chat and play Help The Aged. That side of things - again, a few months later on Top of the Pops, the band miming along to This Is Hardcore; was surely the pinnacle/nadir of all the things to mess with your head that had supposedly peaked post-Brit Awards'96. Rather than chronicling a nervous breakdown and turning it into catharsis by wilfully releasing a much-awaited album discussing such themes, the element of having to ''sell'' the record publicly on such media platforms can only have prolonged the mental heebie-jeebies rolling around inside the heads of the band members. Little wonder, I guess, that Jarvis promptly buggered-off almost as soon as the album came out to make a TV documentary series about Outsider Art.

I guess that's partially what makes him proud of the record (''the best rendition of the sound of failure put to tape" or whatever his quote is in the deluxe edition liner notes), along with the more finessed, musical chops of the group.
I too would have loved to see where a 'FEELING CALLED LOVE'-led Pulp with Russell still at the helm would have taken the group but he didn't appear to have the stomach or creative direction to help bring-about such a change so of the 25-odd songs we eventually got in full from the sessions, I think it more than holds-up even if ideal album tracklist/single choices are frustratingly difficult to resolve personally never mind through debating it with other fans like we've done on here many times before.

''It's A Dirty World'' is still a banger, though - twelve years on from its release, but eight years too late. I'll never understand that omission.