thanks !

I love the WLL era, so much hidden gems to discover.

That's really interesting, and suggests that there's significantly more in the vaults even than the three demo sessions (Wessex x 2 and Depot) that we knew about.

The 'Quiet Bits' one looks more like a songwriting work-in-progress collection than a studio session. Jarvis did say something in an interview in 1999 about how they were demoing "very badly recorded songs on cassette", so maybe this is that.

For what it's worth got the 23/24 October dates from Wessex Studios - rang them up when I was doing the book and they looked in the diary for me (very nice of them!). Of course there's no way of knowing that this was definitely the session that produced the stuff on that CD, but it seems likely.

The 'Live Depot demo' seems like it might be later on in the process as there are songs there (Roadkill, The Trees) that don't seem to have been around in 1999. Mid/late 2000 maybe?

What I didn't know when I did the book was that the Depot was Steve's studio. So it'd make sense for them to go in there if they wanted to do some quick pre-production demos.

Such a shame that they were evidently flying during this 99/2000 period - there's essentially 3 albums' worth of stuff here, and we know that a lot of it is great. But somehow it just seemed to lose its way once they went into the studio proper.

1999 must have been their most productive year for songwriting- an incredible number of tracks recorded late '99/early 2000.

How ironic, that was the year I got into Pulp and remember desperately scouring the internet for news on new material in autumn '99/early 2000, unable to find anything and worried that This Is Hardcore was to be the depressing, final album!

Doesn't Jarvis say in "Mother Brother Lover" that he intended to release a Pulp album called "The Quiet Revolution" around that time, only to change his mind when Chris de Burgh got there first? I guess a lot of this material would have been on it. Interesting to wonder what form the album would have taken and the publicity around it - semi-acoustic songs, no singles, a tour of small venues perhaps? Many of us would have lapped it up, would Island have lost patience though? Or would it have galvanised everyone for another record, "bigger" with songs from the leftover/new material? Or maybe a lot of those songs wouldn't have been written as this parallel dimension would have meant things working out differently...

Can anyone shed more light on the background of the soundtrack to the Wildside film? Did it come to nothing in the end and was it a Pulp or certain members of Pulp endeavour?

Yes, same film! The original release of the film was recut by the production company and there was a new version put out in 2000, with a new soundtrack.

From Pulp People 30, Summer 2000:

"As mentioned in the last issue, Pulp contributed some music to Wild Side, the crazy film by Donald Cammell. You know the plot now so I wont repeat myself, hopefully some of you have even been to see it, if so let me know what you made of it!! Mark saw a preview at the NFT a while ago, at which point the soundtrack was incomplete, and only one short piece of Pulp music was included. Still dont know how much of what Pulp did will be in the final but, but Mark, Jarvis and Steve did get a big credit for additional music at the end of the film."

(I don't think the previous issue has been put online yet... I don't know where my copy is, but I don't remember it saying much more about the music.)

From Mr Webber's book:

"We were asked to write some incidental music for Wild Side, the final film by Donald Cammel, which was being reassembled according to his original intentions by his widow China Kong and editor Frank Mazzola. We were sent a VHS of the rough cut which was completely crazy in many fantastic ways, especially because of a marvellously unhinged performance by Christopher Walken.

"Steve, Jarvis and I got together for a couple of days at Steve's flat to work on instrumentals for various scenes. I thought we were just improvising and that we'd go back and develop these ideas later. It was quick and lo-fi and some of the music was quite preposterous, but this recording was sent out to Mr. Mazzola. They ended up commissioning a score from Ryuichi Sakamoto but one of our pieces - My Chopper - was featured in the final cut, towards the end of the film when the main protagonist skulks away in this helicopter. "That's my chopper. The dogs are at the door. Let's go!"

A version of My Chopper was played live in 1999/2000. That's one of the only mentions of the film in Sturdy's book:

"The only Pulp-related live appearance in the closing months of 1999 was a semi-secret gig at the 333 Club in London where Jarvis, Steve, and glass harmonica player Alasdair Molloy played a 25-minute, five-song instrumental set, including 'Roald Dahl', an instrumental based on 'Cockroach Conversation', and a version of one of the pieces that Jarvis, Steve and Mark had recently worked on for the soundtrack of cult director Donald Cammel's posthumous film Wild Side. "The music was heading towards the new age ambient thing," Molloy explained to the NME after the performance, "but with interesting beats going on. There was one track where Jarvis played a Fifties-style guitar. The glass harmonica was used by people like Mozart and Beethoven. I think this is the first time it's been used in this way. We've taken its sound into another space altogether."

The same trio plus Mark and a percussionist, now called A Touch of Glass, played again at Scott Walker's Meltdown in July 2000, where Sturdy describes My Chopper as "slightly Pink Floyd-ish". That performance can be heard here.

-- Edited by hawalius1 on Friday 4th of October 2024 01:48:43 PM

Yeah, good spot that. Were they considering a rework? Or just bolting it onto a CDR as a reference point for the new material? If that CD is a live demo, maybe they just chucked it into the mix while rehearsing i.e. it wasn't re-recorded/demo'd in a studio, merely performed live amongst new material.

Also, considering he began to "check-out" shortly after this period, Webbo wasn't half-creative at this point between music and film and those little stabs of happiness!

I guess the machinery of the music industry and the pace of your creativity being sucked by the commercial considerations must be a pain in the arse. Although, in this case, Pulp not settling on a producer seemed to be the most limiting factor of all.

-- Edited by Eamonn on Friday 4th of October 2024 03:59:45 PM

It's Mark Sturdy's book that says Candy's Spectre was an early name for Bad Cover Version. It's intriguing to think that My Body May Die might be in there somewhere, with an unrecognisable name. Perhaps Duck Diving and Fire Island are, too.

Swingles are definitely credited for Weeds 2 and Wickerman, and I suspect their vocals were meant to be on Weeds and Sunrise. I've always thought it's their vox on the All Seeing I Middle of the Road mix.

hawalius1 wrote:

---

Yes, same film! The original release of the film was recut by the production company and there was a new version put out in 2000, with a new soundtrack.

From Pulp People 30, Summer 2000:

"As mentioned in the last issue, Pulp contributed some music to Wild Side, the crazy film by Donald Cammell. You know the plot now so I wont repeat myself, hopefully some of you have even been to see it, if so let me know what you made of it!! Mark saw a preview at the NFT a while ago, at which point the soundtrack was incomplete, and only one short piece of Pulp music was included. Still dont know how much of what Pulp did will be in the final but, but Mark, Jarvis and Steve did get a big credit for additional music at the end of the film."

(I don't think the previous issue has been put online yet... I don't know where my copy is, but I don't remember it saying much more about the music.)

From Mr Webber's book:

"We were asked to write some incidental music for Wild Side, the final film by Donald Cammel, which was being reassembled according to his original intentions by his widow China Kong and editor Frank Mazzola. We were sent a VHS of the rough cut which was completely crazy in many fantastic ways, especially because of a marvellously unhinged performance by Christopher Walken.

"Steve, Jarvis and I got together for a couple of days at Steve's flat to work on instrumentals for various scenes. I thought we were just improvising and that we'd go back and develop these ideas later. It was quick and lo-fi and some of the music was quite preposterous, but this recording was sent out to Mr. Mazzola. They ended up commissioning a score from Ryuichi Sakamoto but one of our pieces - My Chopper - was featured in the final cut, towards the end of the film when the main protagonist skulks away in this helicopter. "That's my chopper. The dogs are at the door. Let's go!"

A version of My Chopper was played live in 1999/2000. That's one of the only mentions of the film in Sturdy's book:

"The only Pulp-related live appearance in the closing months of 1999 was a semi-secret gig at the 333 Club in London where Jarvis, Steve, and glass harmonica player Alasdair Molloy played a 25-minute, five-song instrumental set, including 'Roald Dahl', an instrumental based on 'Cockroach Conversation', and a version of one of the pieces that Jarvis, Steve and Mark had recently worked on for the soundtrack of cult director Donald Cammel's posthumous film Wild Side. "The music was heading towards the new age ambient thing," Molloy explained to the NME after the performance, "but with interesting beats going on. There was one track where Jarvis played a Fifties-style guitar. The glass harmonica was used by people like Mozart and Beethoven. I think this is the first time it's been used in this way. We've taken its sound into another space altogether."

The same trio plus Mark and a percussionist, now called A Touch of Glass, played again at Scott Walker's Meltdown in July 2000, where Sturdy describes My Chopper as "slightly Pink Floyd-ish". That performance can be heard here.

-- Edited by hawalius1 on Friday 4th of October 2024 01:48:43 PM

---

ok I see, thanks!

Get to the Chopper then
here's the link to the director's cut :

-- Edited by Bookmark on Friday 4th of October 2024 06:31:15 PM

Pulp were definitely burned out as hell by 2001 (there's that depressing The Face interview for one) but the creative force never burned out. Oh how things could have been different had Island got their act together. We know what the singles should have been - Sunrise in 2000 when radio wanted it, then for the album, Minnie, Weeds, Bad Cover Version in 2001.

It's ironic, though: all this material, but they still didn't have a B-side to put on the Trees/Sunrise single. Nobody's brightest decision, that one.

I don't think I could stomach a song about The Sun.