No, not dodgy territory at all, it's just that after six or seven years I got rather tired of asking (and generally not even getting so much as a "no" by way of a reply), so there's no way on earth I'm going to waste my energies bothering to ask again!

Huh, I have no recollection of this thread ever happening.

What is it with Pulp and the French, I wonder? Being half-French myself I have often pondered this question. II don't think they ever sold any great numbers of records over there (would like to see the stats on that, actually), and yet they seem to have a huge profile; they played fairly extensively between '91 and '96, earned the approval of Les Inrocks, did the Polnareff LP for a French label before they were famous enough to warrant any real attention in the UK, got FNAC (sort of the French version of HMV) to do a special limited edition giveaway CD with copies of Different Class, and even back when I started up Bar Italia in 1998 there were a few French fansites, one of which planned to have pre-Babelfish manual translations of all the lyrics into French (although they'd only got as far as "It"). Jarvis lives in France, having married a French woman. When I worked in Japan, the record clerks had never heard of Pulp or Jarvis, but asking for Pulp records in a Paris store gets you an immediate glimmer of recognition and an enthusiastic "ah oui, Zhar-vees." Is there any reason for all of this?