"A guitar based band" wasnt the issue for me.
The very first track on the first album is "A guitar based band", and I can happily hum along to that on any given day.

It's not a guitar's fault.
Dont blame the guitar.

TIH was the first thing I ever purchased off the internet. (Cdnow.com which would later become part of Amazon) The record stores in my podunk town didn't carry albums by obscure british indie bands.

The CD arrived a week before its official release date. My first reaction was that it was "different, maybe great but I need some time with it".

More than any of Pulp's other albums TIH has grown with me. I discover new things in it all the time. Songs i didn't like now make more sense to me. Its still not my favourite.

saw119 wrote:

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andy wrote:

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Didn't think that record got so much hate from Pulp fans. We Love Life is flawed and could have been way better with the rejected tracks, but TIH is a masterpiece of Pop music, with elements of 70s rock n roll.

I guess the move to a guitar based band didn't really convince "older" fans. The sound is radically different from their previous efforts, maybe that's the reason ?

I suppose most of you who dont like TIH are not convinced by both Jarvis solo records either ?

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 Hmm, it's a little bit more complicated than that I'd say, certainly for me it was. I have no objection to guitars or loud guitar music, however, my love for Pulp was born in that earlier less guitar driven sound and let's not forget the violin. You suggest that the defining characteristic of the pre TIH sound is keyboard but I would argue it was Russel's violin that set them apart. Once that was taken away, and Russel's mentality as well, they definitely lost something. I was a devout fan of Russel having spoken to him on a few occasions, Jarvis was fantastic but Russel was where it was at for me. If your favourite member of a band left and it led to a fairly radical retooling of the sound I'm sure you'd reevaluate too. I actually liked TIH from the first time I heard it, I just wasn't in the 'right' place to hear it first time out. The song This is Hardcore is a true modern masterpiece.

Interestingly, I find I listen to WLL much more than I ever listen to TIH.

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Interesting. Well WLL is kinda Pulp going back to its previous sound but with acoustic elements added, so it makes sense that you prefer it over TIH. To me though, the song selection was bad. Leaving out the demos we have heard was a big mistake, although the record as a whole is good. But not great.

As for debate about the fav member leaving, i understand. I was always more of a Jarvis fan than Russell, which i thought was a bit too rigorous on how Pulp should sound. Seems like it was the reason for his departure too. I'm glad they kept on doing records without him. It allowed Steve and Mark to reinvent the sound of the band. TIH has some great melodies, a huge production and some amazing bsides. 

What I like about Pulp is that they managed to reinvent themselves with every record. It was like a new band each time. Sometimes you dig it sometimes you dont. Same goes for all Jarvis post Pulp releases. Going from My Lighthouse to Legendary Girlfriend to Common People to Caucasian Blues and Carla, it's quite a journey. 

When TIH came out I was at the lowest point of my life. My few friends had gone off to uni, and I'd screwed my life up. In my first dismal job, renting a squalid room, living off a miserable £40 a week - no minimum wage in those days. Eating 10p loaves of bread and tins of beans from Safeway.

I bought TIH the day it came out, and listened to it at lunch on my discman. Went back very late to work because of it (contributed to getting fired a few weeks later, which was actually good news). The darker mood of TIH should have suited me. I was mostly listening to Joy Division, my life summed up by the lyric "when routine bites hard, and ambitions are low / resentment rides high, and emotions won't grow". But I've never loved the album like I have the rest of Pulp's albums.

The title track remains one of my favourite Pulp songs - it is a brooding evil masterpiece. When I first heard it, it was sinister and unsettling, but familiarity lessened the starkness and I grew to love the way it grows into a lush and expansive epic. So I was excited for the album, and it was thrilling to have new Pulp, but in retrospect it was underwhelming. I like the first half, but the 2nd half is drab and bloated (as Sleeve said). Pulp still had great songs: as others said, there were some amazing b-sides on the singles. I hated Glory Days and adored Cocaine Socialism. The Professional has a great lyric, instantly memorable thanks to the simple rhyme.  Little Soul is a nice song, but not a single.

Perhaps part of my negative response to TIH is that it was obvious Pulp were going through a difficult time. The whole Pulp story, of mis-shapes struggling for years on the margins - and then exploding into the glorious pop of their imperial phase - was inspiring and joyful. The album, and interviews at the time, hinted that things were going wrong somehow.

To clarify: This Is Hardcore, when compared to NOT-Pulp albums, is a great album. It's just not my favourite Pulp. And after that miserable intro, I should add a happy ending... by the time We Love Life came out, I loved life too, and with a few glitches have done ever since.

Good to hear. Also, is the NME still going? They had to give it away last time I heard.

I've been meaning to write this for ages so here goes - and some of its quite embarrassing now that I write it down and remember it now as a 34 year old 'proper' human.

No other band/album truly defined my teenage years as much as Pulp/This is Hardcore. So I live in Australia and growing up, I lived in a place called Port Macquarie - which is about 4.5 hours north of Sydney. Its coastal, its beachy and its very much a laid back 'straya type of place. People get married, go to work and probably do not daydream about bands from the other side of the Earth.

It was 1998 and I was getting into 'alternative music' which consisted of whatever bands were on Recovery or played on Triple J/RAGE. Theres also the 'first time' and the 'correct time' for me and Pulp. I say this because I have memories of sitting on the corner of my parents coffee table watching the video for Disco 2000 right to the end. I wasn't into music at all when I was 11 or 12 but I always thought this video was great. When I saw the video clip for Party Hard I fell in love for the first time OR at least knew what it felt like to be a lady ;)

I didn't purchase the album until January 1999 when we visited Sydney. We had a Sanity CD shop in Port but I must not have had $30 spare to buy an album - but I did have a store credit to spend at Grace Bros after a Christmas present didn't quite work properly - so exchanged it for TIH... My Mum was like 'Are you sure you want this?'. A half-naked lady on the front probably wasn't the best look.

I would study the liner notes (whilst not listening to the recordings - as instructed) and draw Jarvis in my art sketch book. I would buy copies of Rolling Stone and Q to just get the tiniest of Pulp pics or news. I would wag PE to go to the library and get on the internet (this is 1998) and look at the Pulp site. They did tour here in Sept/Oct 98 but my love came a little too late -  maybe 1-2 months after they left the country. I found The Park is Mine video in Target and I thrashed that VHS. I'm surprised its even still playable. I used to play it before I went to school (my parents would leave early for work), I would play it on the weekends if parents went out and I would pretend to play the drums on the arm of our sofa. My parents would be like - 'the arm of the sofa is really starting to wear...'

And you have to remember that news and pics and interviews - they just didn't really exist in 1998/99. Like they did, but not like it is today. I would imagine what a Pulp gig might be like - hell I even used to day-dream that I was in Pulp. Mark never really existed and it was actually me who ran the fanclub and then became a fully-fledged member. I had this whole world made up in my head. I was a bored 15 year old...

Even though I have just waffled on - its quite hard to get down what TIH means to me. I hadn't listened to a lot of music so didn't know if it was crap or cringey - I just knew I loved this band and I had this thing that I could tap into and off I'd go and daydream that I lived in Sheffield and Jarvis and Candida were my cool older friends etc etc. Like do kids/teenagers even daydream these days? 

I still take it with me when we go on roadtrips - I still get lost in The Fear or that guitar part in Dishes. I cant tell you how many times I went to sleep between the ages of 14-17 with TIH playing through the shittiest of discmans (the things didnt even have skip-protection).

Would I put it in my top 10 of albums - or is it my fav Pulp album? Sometimes it is. To me its like an anomaly in the Pulp discography - cause its like a weird-ass band playing at being a stadium band. Their oddness was relegated to B-sides. I so often think of alternative tracklistings for TIH and think The Professional and Ladies Man could have easily made it on instead of those turgid Side B songs. I didn't think they were crap at the time but in hindsight I think they're a bit ewwwww.

And this is all just nostalgic waffle - but I'm not nostalgic for being a teenager. I'm probably more nostalgic for that intenseness that comes with being that age and being so 'into' something. I still listen to TIH but I probably am a bit of skipper these days. ie. Play first 5 tracks then skip to Seductive Barry (I love the 98 Glasto version - its ummm 'thicker' sounding) and Sylvia , then end with The Day After The Revolution because... well just because. I'm sure its a song that has been relegated to shit Pulp songs but I like the chorus so whatevs.

PS. Oh and the logo - f**k me - was there ever a better logo created for a band?

PSS. Why do I have 6 versions of this album? Lols!

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.