I have the original aperture cd from 95 and I very quickly settled on Candida on the bench. Just love that photo.

Likewise: Candida on the bench is my favourite, and along with the orange cafe picture makes up my A-list. They are followed by the Steve underwear shot, the snogging couple, and the boy & girl awkwardly chatting.

Pictures seeming to tell a story about maturing and relationships just chimed with where I was at the time, being a 15 year old lad (what an age to be falling in love with this band), as well as illustrating what so much of what Pulp seemed to be about at the time.

The cafe shot: makes you think of the song Bar Italia, obviously, whilst having nothing to do with the establishment being sung about. I mean, we see chips instead of cannoli - for most of us this scene was set somewhere on a concrete-and-drizzl-grey British high street - not Soho, let alone Milan. The song engaged in a bit of world-building - a chapter or episode from an ongoing and mysterious story of someones night out, about a world of opportunity that I was chomping at the bit to enter, but which society would hold aloof a few years yet.

And the colours: the oranges and browns, the hints of Bauhaus underfoot (again, a striving for glamour and culture in unlikely places - that or kitsch overreach, if not both); it was all very Pulp, and very influential on my growing aesthetic sensibilities, for good or ill. (And more generally in the artwork, all those purples, lilacs and blues: yum)

Candida and the dog was the cover I slotted inside in the end. Candida just looks fab in these images, so she needed to be in whichever I chose. And the dog with the trumpet collar thing is just so arresting, and never ceases to be. I wonder why that is. Think of the pictures of Bowie as Halloween Jack, sitting whilst his massive dog strains at the leash. They work in stereo somehow. You cant but stare at them.

Also: I realised today that the dog and its collar are weirdly reminiscent of the HMV logo, if we imagine that the dog has moved beyond being puzzled by its owners gramophone and attempted to eat the thing, or has otherwise been eaten by it. It will bite you and never warn you, look out!

Something might link those ideas, or it mightn't, I dont have the brains to know for sure. But theyre strong images and this is how they make me feel ;)

-- Edited by superchob on Wednesday 29th of October 2025 05:34:55 PM

The three chaps playing musical statues in a room with different purples on the wall and floor closely followed by Steve entering the girl's bedroom were the two most striking images to me when I first saw the Different Class cassette inlay sleeve. It all seemed so weird, exciting and maybe a bit wrong. And as I'd never heard of the surname "Senior" before, part of me wondered whether he had changed his name to impose his authority on the group! Of course I later found out that he once liked to be referred to as Russell Wickerman..

Despite my avatar (which I meant to be temporary, and never got round to replacing), I plumped for Candida and the dog, which is the cover I've had on most over the years. Nice to see it's a shared favourite.

I got the aperture CD from Woolies probably in late November 95, definitely not in release week. It was such a gorgeous and special object, but I was precious about damaging the black fold out, so I picked my favourite cover at the time - the purple room - and stuck with it for a long time. I've ended up with 3 copies - I can't leave them sad and lonely in a charity shop - so my play copy gets changed regularly these days.

Favourites are a/f/m Candida & Purple Room, plus park railing teens, and snogging couple. I reckon my least favourite is wedding photo. As only wedding photo & snogging couple have the full band, I guess it had to be one of those for the official main cover, but I wonder if there were arguments about it.

Intriguing to discover the unseen variants in DC30. There may be more we've never seen, and perhaps one day there will be an exhibition of them all - the art of Pulp. The music comes first, of course, but the aesthetics of Pulp - the sleeves, the videos, the changing logos, Candida & Jarvis's (and now Nick's) fashion, all the ephemera and memorabilia collected in Mark's book - really mark them out as an extraordinary visual band. Who else comes close to their output?