triciathetree wrote:

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Sad to see the preorders sold out but thenmaybe best for my wallet

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 Still available from Rough Trade and other 3rd party sellers

HoltbyCity wrote:

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triciathetree wrote:

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Sad to see the preorders sold out but thenmaybe best for my wallet

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 Still available from Rough Trade and other 3rd party sellers

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 terrible news for my savings account!

I don't buy vinyl - no record player, and if I start collecting it's a very slippery, expensive slope! - so I will pick up the CD edition. I find it hard to believe it's been 30 years... funny how it all falls away...

Would have been nice if they'd included a Blu-ray of the Glastonbury show, seeing as they've gone to the effort of providing the audio, but I suspect that may have pushed prices up even further.

The world its playing with me because i got the "Different Class" cd last year as a birthday present.

Oh noooooooo Im obviously buying this but where am I getting the money??????

Based on this, Glastonbury 1998...(again)

If you're "lucky" enough to "win" the chance to buy one.

"This Is Glastonbury" only contained seven of the fourteen songs performed in 1998 (ten if you had the expanded Japanese edition), so I would absolutely welcome a full release of that show.

It's not mentioned in the announcement, but presumeably it's the remixed version of the concert, only heard once on radio - which I'm very keen to get in CD quality. Mark mentioned in his Giles interview that it was going to be part of the abandoned 25th anniversary, if he could arrange it, so hopefully that's what they've managed to get. A cassette recording of the FM radio broadcast is tucked away on YouTube but I'm really looking forward to an upgrade.

Plus Different Class is the one Pulp cash cashcow that Universal can rely upon. It made back its investment, neither of Hardcore or WLL did. Its popularity means that it's always going to be ripe for reissue plucking. And the label presumably know they still have content they can tack-on to another version in the future to get folk to spend on it again...

Hard to find accurate sales on the albums - the last BPI milestones were quadruple platinum >1.2m for DC and gold >100k for TIH - which has been the case for the latter since April 1998. So it hasn't reached the next milestone of Gold (300k) since the month of release. Worldwide, another...75k?
Say 200k in total as an estimate. Average retail price £12.99 (cheaper now than in 1998!) = £2.6m

Costs...a year on-and-off in two of the best studios at the time in Britain (Townhouse and Olympia) with one of the best producers in the game (Chris Thomas) and his staff.
Manufacturing of physical albums. The distributors and record stores' cut.

Marketing. Cost of promo videos - between £300k - £500k? The one for This Is Hardcore has often been cited as costing £250k but in one of Mark's book-talks this year he gave a much lower figure.

Would all that add-up more than two and a half mill? Probably comes down to how high the day-rates in those studios were but...potentially. 

We Love Life was granted a silver award (60k units sold) upon release but has never gone higher. These awards are for trade sales as opposed to retail, and when we were analysing More's numbers, the opening week of WLL was reported as being c 25k so it's likely that it didn't actually even physically sell 60k units to the public in 2001/02 or the intervening years.

More must not be far off that 60k number, it's still in the top 100 physical charts after 3 months. Mercury nominations for 2025 are announced on Wednesday, that should help prolong its stay in the charts if listed. The fact that it wasn't granted a silver award on release is clearly a reflection in the decline of physical product since the millenium.

Given We Love Life had an even longer gestation than Hardcore with other expensive studios being used (Metropolis and Air plus Cosford Mills for the failed try-out with Chris Thomas - at least Steve's own studio was used for demos/early try-outs which would have saved on costs) and although only two music videos were made (compared to five for both DC and TIH) and the marketing campaign not as glossy as Hardcore, it was still a commercial failure.

Island's attempts to reduce Pulp's terms on a new contract in 2002 were hardly surprising, in the light of all that. I do wonder if Pulp's consistent reputation as one of the best live bands in the business from 1994 onwards gave them any leverage in talks with Island/Universal in 2002 (i.e we headlined Leeds/Reading in 2000 and are second from top in 2002 - you need to market us better and pick the singles to sell. To which Universal wouldn't have been blamed from replying "Well, give us a ****ing single that we can sell, then!"

The press release at the time suggested that it was simply a case of the band not being happy with the new offer and all parties amicably deciding to part ways.

As an aside, I've seen articles/heard reports over the years that have said "Pulp, who have sold over 10m records around the world throughout their career..." and I'm doubtful about that. The only "proof" for that figure on Wikipedia last time I checked a few years ago was one news article which could have plucked it from anywhere. About half that figure sounds closer to the mark, I think. Hard to have accurate figures across the globe but it doesn't seem that Pulp sold in huge quantities beyond the UK even at their mid-90s peak.

-- Edited by Eamonn on Sunday 7th of September 2025 05:07:38 PM