I think TIH is a fine record, and I love it, but if we're going to talk about how Pulp developed their sound - and whether they were right in contriving to lose their audience - it's worth asking if they ever actually found a new one.

Did they just want the acclaim of Jarvis and Steve's arty Camden crowd? Did they conflate being financially unsuccessful with artistic success? It's one thing to deliberately repudiate fame because you don't want fame - it's another to make a whole album that's basically a grand artistic statement and then weaken said artistic statement by making decisions that actively reduced its exposure.

We do talk - and I've spoken about this upthread, in my usual longwinded manner - about how Hardcore is flawed, but without those flaws, it wouldn't be Hardcore; you can't make a perfect tracklist with your favourite tracks (although it's tempting) because, like the White Album or something, the soul of the album lives in its existence as a messy, flawed but brightly burnished record, it's the sound of the band falling apart and to that end it's a manifestation of the band falling apart, it's cause-and-effect.

So Hardcore's weaknesses are sort of inevitable, they're the consequences of a deeply damaged yet hugely creative band trying to make a grandiose statement but not-quite-selling-it because of their (frontman's) tortured relationship with fame... and that's what makes Hardcore what it is.

So, was the issue - and I'm not saying there necessarily was one - not with what the album This Is Hardcore was, but that it was This Is Hardcore in the first place? Was it really the right album to make? Was a desperate dive into the scrubbiest corners of Jarvis Cocker's psyche, dredging up the traumas fame bestowed of Pulp, strung-out and yelping about porn, coke, death, middle age and maleness, actually the right call to make? Instead of pumping it all into an album, should Jarvis have just seen a therapist? Should they have adjourned earlier - could they possibly have preserved their inter-band relationships? probably not, but still - could they have produced something more musically refined, something where the influences they've picked up (like Portishead) are used a bit more subtly? 

A band isn't a commercial prospect, and Pulp shouldn't make art for money; the art they make shouldn't be made with the aim of commercial success. But nor should it be made with the intent of commercial failure. There isn't much value in the martyrdom of career suicide other than as some sort of grand indie gesture. The trouble is that people want to hear your records. Maybe this isn't cynical enough, but perhaps if Pulp put out some sharper singles post-96, more people could've heard their album and loved it. And then those people might have more than two Pulp albums to listen to... OK, that sounds entitled.

These are open-ended questions, by the way. I don't have a view of the answer. I do think it's a really good album, and the title track we'd be weaker without. But there are a lot of 'what-ifs?'. Stephen's glorious Russell interview I'm typing up mentions, among other things, that Russell actually approved of the artistic direction Hardcore went in (having feared it'd be more ballads). It's an interesting conundrum.

lipglossed wrote:

I think TIH is a fine record, and I love it, but if we're going to talk about how Pulp developed their sound - and whether they were right in contriving to lose their audience - it's worth asking if they ever actually found a new one.

 

Obviously they never found a new audience.  And alienated a large chunk of the audience gained with Different Class.  However, my thinking is that they reinforced some of their existing audience (self included). The ones that matter

Its hard to think of many bands that cultivated a new audience with a change in direction.  The worst example I have (and I am going back a long way) is UB40 who were pretty outspoken and politicised at the outset only to turn into a covers band releasing everything and anything to be popular.  

Going back to the Bowie comparison post Rebel Rebel, he only had three top ten UK singles off the next 5 LPs.  Heroes peaked at #24. Fame at #18 (though #1 in US).   Young Americans, Station To Station, Low, Heroes and Lodger appealed to fewer and fewer though he was fortunate to have had a very large audience in the first place.  But retrospectively, Low and Station To Station are now considered to be among his finest albums and the other three are all part of his great work in the 1970s.

PS Heroes went silver in 2016, gold in 2018 and platinum in 2020.  Sold very few physical copies in 1977.

A Little Soul (from The Tracks Of My Tears).

Ian wrote:

---

andy wrote:

---

Probably the only album i listened from start to finish on headphones at my virgin megastore few days before the release. I remember standing in front of those listening boxes for like an hour (well the whole duration of the record) whilst people where shopping, passing by. Weird and hypnotic experience to have that music in my ears for the first time and the whole going by in front of me.


then on release day, lunch time in high school, time to take the bus and go buy the CD and vinyl version with all those extra tracks. What a time it was the 90s for music...


To this day, still probably one of the top 5 disc i would take on the desert island. the most anticipated record by Pulp, months before it was rumored to be called Hard Chord (or so i read in my local music newspaper, probably some journalist getting the info wrong :D), Like a Friend as a teaser on that soundtrack, their cover or All time High (which sound very TIH), the help the aged single... the wait. the LONG WAIT. (although compared to nowadays it wasnt THAT Long hehe)


My tracklisting too follow :D


(Cocaine Socialism sounds like Common People ? Really ?)

---

 

The article I read is on the wiki:
https://pulpwiki.net/Pulp/Press1997
I have just found it whilst browsing through random pages. It says "Hard Cord". Whether it's correct or the writer mis-heard "Hardcore" is anyone's guess.

---

 I remember talking about this at the time with one of my mates at school, it was in a magazine (possibly NME or Melody Maker) that the name of the album would either be called This is Hardcore or This is Hard Chord.. Hard Cord would have been another good option though 

Hello all! Long time lurker, first time poster.

I finally decided to register to unburden myself of two thoughts on my favourite album by what has slowly but surely taken its place as my favourite band.

1 - IMHO the perfect version of this album was released in 1998: the North American version. It's exactly the same as the UK release up to and including Glory Days. Then there's the short-outro version of The Day After the Revolution. And then it ends with Like a Friend.

This is the album as I've always known it and to me it's perfect. It's long but doesn't feel bloated, I'm not a fan of the long outro (sounds too close to tinnitus for my taste), and there is no better song to conclude the whole beautiful mess than the majestic Like a Friend (a b-side? A throwaway for a film soundtrack? Insanity!). There are some fine songs that didn't make the cut, and I understand some people's reservations about tracks such as Seductive Barry, but I still wouldn't change a thing. BTW, something similar was done with His N Hers, which on this side of the pond closes with Razzmatazz, and it is perfection.

2 - I was one of the few new fans recruited by this album, and the way that happened might prove the point that it was never going to happen on a large scale. Long story short, I had spent the mid-90s quite well insulated from new music, particularly new British music, and so Pulp and every aspect of their story were 100% new to me when I stumbled upon this album in the summer of 1998.

As someone who heard this record with no expectations and no context, it was a revelation. It didn't blow me away instantly, but I was still inexorably drawn in. I mean, who puts "you're going to like it, but not a lot" within the first minute of their album's opening track, an anthemic dirge about panic attacks and general jadedness? "Pretty soon you'll all be singing along"? Oh, haha, you cheeky bastard! Little did I know this gent was being perfectly serious. Just imagine, if you can, hearing that song and those lines with your head as empty as mine was.

Since I had no knowledge of the backstory and wasn't immediately keen to seek it out, for a good long while I took the album as a well-wrought meditation on manhood, early middle age and their attendant anxieties. It was in some sense a perfect chaser to OK Computer, the one a grand universal statement about modern anxieties, depression and paranoia, and the other an intensely intimate, claustrophobic dissection of same.

And yet it also reaches for the universal in some key places. That might be why Help the Aged wound up becoming my favourite song by my favourite band, even if I know in my head that it isn't their *best* song. Pretty soon, I was indeed singing along. I'm struck by how I initially received and loved this song as an ironic tune about the 35-year-old narrator propositioning a 20-year-old, but 25 years on find it a poignant and sincere song about aging and death. Or maybe it's both, and that's what makes it great? (I have travelled three times to see Pulp and they have not played it. Here's hoping they do should I get to see them this year.)

All of which is to say, I think this album won me over in large part because I had absolutely no knowledge or expectations going in. I was able to approach it as a musical island. Had I known it was all about the band's and especially its frontman's fame-inspired crisis, it would have hit very differently. It might even have been off-putting. And, well, how many people were in a position to approach it with no expectations in 1998?