I know it's an album that tends to divide opinion on here but the few unreleased demoed songs we've heard seem to get a positive reaction.
It's the one period of Pulp where quite an amount of unreleased material remains locked away. Over the months, probably years (since the 90's albums were reissued), there's been intermittent talk on here about how to go about getting Universal to release a We Love Life deluxe edition or at least the unreleased songs from that era.
A while back, one poster on here came up with the idea of setting up a petition on the pulpwiki website. Myself and Will put have worked on this http://www.pulpwiki.net/Main/HomePage
over the last few days, so feel free to sign it, and add ideas as to what else we can do. We were discussing the posibility of uploading a video to youtube containing short clips of the unreleased material that has been posted on here previously and live recordings from 1999 and then adding it to the petition. Copyright issues means we'd have to be careful about linking clips of songs like After You and My Mistake to a petition that we ultimately want Universal to see.
In terms of spreading awareness of the petition, posting a link to various facebook and twitter accounts (from Pulp's own one, to various alternative music sites) will help. I don't know what sort of ballpark figure we can hope to impress Universal with (5,000?) but the more the better.
According to Mr Sturdy the band themselves expressed interest at a We Love Life reissue this year but were knocked back by Universal. If we made some impression on them it may give them something to think about. We missed the boat with tying this in with the initial reunion but they could still piggyback on the shows Pulp are likely to do in the spring.
So, any other suggestions, perhaps even to the text of the petition itself, gratefully received.
I would sheepishly suggest that you use a petition site (or maybe there is code available?) so the signatures can be verified. I think most official petitions require either an email address (not publicly displayed, but can be sent to whomever the petition is intended) or some other means of verifying that it's not just 1 person signing hundreds of times with made up names. Also, perhaps address it to Julian Fernandez, if he's still at the company?
I would sheepishly suggest that you use a petition site (or maybe there is code available?) so the signatures can be verified. I think most official petitions require either an email address (not publicly displayed, but can be sent to whomever the petition is intended) or some other means of verifying that it's not just 1 person signing hundreds of times with made up names. Also, perhaps address it to Julian Fernandez, if he's still at the company?
Yep, we discussed using a site such as petitionbuzz but Will can see the IP addresses being used to sign the petition meaning multiple entries from one individual can be filtered out. But he's better qualified to talk about that. Maybe an independent site would give the petition more credibility, I don't know. .
Fernandez was the guy who helped co-ordinate the original deluxe editions wasn't he? There's a guy that fits his description on LinkedIn (Product Manager at Universal) so that's good to know. I'm not professional enough to have a profile up there but it's surely him.
Thanks for the suggestion twiggy. I will give it some thought.
At the moment, the IP address of each person who votes is recorded in the database, so it would be very difficult for one person to vote lots of times (or at least if they did it could easily be filtered out).
Email validation would be slightly more secure, but also make it more complicated. A percentage of verification emails will inevitablely disappear into people's spam filters etc.
I looked at sites like - http://www.petitionbuzz.com/ - when setting it up and they don't seem to require email validation.
EDIT: Eamonn has already made some of these points while I was typing this.
-- Edited by Will on Friday 28th of October 2011 09:16:16 PM
Eels released an album of b sides, remixes, rarities and side projects from the first ten years across all albums. Would that be viable for Pulp?
It would probably be more marketable alright as the problem we have with We Love Life is that it didn't sell fantastically well nor was it seen as distinctive/important/influential in the way that you could argue the previous three (even Intro) were.
I suppose it's the fact that between the previous reissues and the Peels Session, a lot of the unreleased, rare stuff was put out there in 2006. Fire will hopefully do the same with the 80's stuff in the coming months.
We Love Life is a bit of an anomaly in that it's long gestation period saw a large amount of songs recorded to a high standard before being dropped. And as the album kind of fell flat on its arse (though it still got great reviews across the board in the press and at least entered in the top ten) this era has largely been forgotten about.
The prospect of the entire album being remastered and repackaged is probably slight for the reasons given, but making the demoed songs that didn't come out available for 99p each on itunes or whatever is surely something they would consider should we drum enough interest.
shit, it's dark and I accidentally pressed enter instead of delete to correct a typing error! That's meant to be Jasmine Lightfoot not Jasmine Lifh. Anyway, great idea and hope it gets lots of votes - it deserves to! I think although WLL didn't sell amazingly a lot of the reason was that people just weren't following Pulp as much after the change from DC to TIH. Now I imagine people will be/ are a lot more interested in investigating their less well known stuff with the reunion and would fork out an extra few quid for 2 CDs.
-- Edited by Jazza on Saturday 29th of October 2011 01:29:27 PM
As Fred said the way the Eels approached it might be a good idea but then again like Jazza pointed out the poor sales are really probably just because a lot of people had drifted off because of the lengthy gap between the albums & the change in sound. But WLL was a good album. It's just different but then TIH is substantially different to HNH or Intro.
The material on the deluxe eds. is top quality. Many songs are the kind of stuff that would be A-side material for others. & we know that quality is not the worry with these demos. They were worked on a lot and were originally intended to be put out there. I'd be very happy to pay for it as I've heard all the names of these songs but haven't heard many of them.
The options I suppose are whther to rework it into a new album which is highly unlikely, put it out as a compilation like the Eels one Fred mentioned, or just as a WLL deluxe ed.
This is a great idea & well done both Eamonn & Will for taking the initiative to put it together. Are you settling on gathering the signatures at Wiki or are your going to use a site like petitionbuzz?
Jean wrote:This is a great idea & well done both Eamonn & Will for taking the initiative to put it together. Are you settling on gathering the signatures at Wiki or are your going to use a site like petitionbuzz?
We will continue to gather signatures on the wiki. Now we're started it's not really practical to move somewhere else. I'm happy there are enough controls in place to prevent one person signing several times.
I don't know if anyone has done this (or if anything will become of it) but I sent an email to jarviscocker.net to see if they could post it on their website and facebook group. Actually, is anyone on this forum behind that website?
Signed! Everybody needs to post the link and a brief idea of what this is about all over the internet. Obviously, Facebooks and Twitters are a must but if anyone can think of anywhere else to link to it then do it! I have sent an email to the NME - they seem to like this kind of thing. Hopefully they will run with it on their website.
Well lets see what this project could look like eh? I've noticed that from the previous deluxe editions Pulp aren't keen on putting demos of songs that get an official release, eg. Jarvis reference to Lipgloss demo which doesn't appear the Happy Endings demo that is circulating, only songs that are unreleased. So it's unlikely to feature the Wickerman demo or any other demos of songs that feature on the album, in my opinion. So what does that leave us with? Yesterday Forever In My Dreams Cuckoo Quiet Revolution After You Grandfather's Nursery My Mistake/Chordy My Body May Die(?) These are the songs that are already in circulation, I included My Body May Die as stylistically it fits and it's just too darn good to be obscure. Thats 8 tracks and the deluxe editions range from 11 to 14 bonus tracks. What could take up the remainder? One of the Trees/Sunrise remixes? Duck Diving (Peel Session?) Disco 2000 (Nick Cave) The songs above could easily fill out a bonus disc in a deluxe edition without anything unreleased or unknown coming to us. Then we move onto unreleased material Darren M'Lady Peformance Of A Lifetime St Just Got To Have Love (vocal) The Depot sessions are reported as not having vocals so I think it unlikely they will be released, however much I want to hear Medieveal Owl! So in reality we are talking anywhere from none to 5 unreleased songs as a best result? Anyone else have anything to add to this?
My Mistake is only documented in the Depot sessions and yet that does have vocals so there was either another recording session that we have no information of or the information on the Depot sessions is not completely accurate. Either way there is a strong possibility that more unreleased songs exist in a fully recorded form.
Great point Eamonn, thats what I was hoping for. Also, what about the 'The juice of thy cunny is like a fine wine' track? Do we know which song that is from? I'm secretly hoping that's from Medieval Owl and I will get a chance to hear it!
Great point Eamonn, thats what I was hoping for. Also, what about the 'The juice of thy cunny is like a fine wine' track? Do we know which song that is from? I'm secretly hoping that's from Medieval Owl and I will get a chance to hear it!
Thought that was 'Got to have love?' or did I misread Sturdy's book?