Jane Savidge Interview

This Is Hardcore is the first Pulp album to feature in the 33⅓ series of music books about influential albums. Jane Savidge is ideally placed to tell the story of This Is Hardcore. Alongside John Best she co-founded Savage & Best, with Pulp being one of a large roster of bands they helped to get press coverage for. To describe Savage & Best as successful is an understatement. They were a phenomenon. Based in the heart of Camden Town, they were propelled by a group of young people who – most importantly – were passionate about good music, and – less importantly – brilliant at generating publicity for the bands they represented. 

Like last year’s Nick Banks interview, this is another long read. The interview is split into four parts that cover a different aspect of Jane’s work and her relationship with Pulp.

Part 1: Jane and Savage & Best 

Acrylic Afternoons (AA): For those who aren’t familiar with your first book, ‘Lunch With The Wild Frontiers’, can you explain the role of a music PR in the 1990s?

Jane: The job has completely changed now, but I used to describe it as being a ‘music taste evangelist’. Basically I would find bands that I loved and tell everybody about them. In those days my friends were music journalists writing for the NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror. Many of those journalists went on to write for the broadsheet newspapers. In that intense period in the early 90s, some people felt that a publicist shouldn’t get too too close to their artist, whereas other people felt that you should protect the artist rather than being a friend of the journalist. So you had a delicate balancing act. 

You always have to represent the artists that you look after to the best of your ability and stop them doing things that you don’t think are a good idea. I hated the tabloid newspapers and I used to say that my bands would never speak to the Daily Mail, and no-one ever questioned that. Obviously I was being a bit ridiculous but people would say to me, “Oh okay… fair enough” and that would be fine. But then it got to a point where the bands I looked after – Suede, Pulp, Elastica, The Verve, Spiritualized, Jesus And The Mary Chain, The Charlatans – became so big that all the tabloids wanted to write about them. That’s when I felt uncomfortable because I didn’t think those bands belonged in the tabloids. But they were selling so many records those papers had to write about them.

When Pulp became famous The Mirror rang me every day to try to get a story. I refused to call them back. The guy who ran the gossip pages said, “Savage & Best must be the worst press company in Britain because they’re not returning my calls”. I didn’t want to speak to them and felt that my bands were perfectly okay without them. He did this every day until a couple of people in the office said that it might be damaging the reputation of Savage & Best. So I rang him just to say hello and the next day he said, “Oh look Savage & Best rang back”. It was all part of their bullying nature. 

AA: Presumably they were going to write stuff about your bands anyway, with or without your cooperation?

Jane: That’s the fine line between saying ‘No Comment’ or getting involved in the story, because you can pour fuel on it. There was lots of gossip going around about drugs and I didn’t want to comment on that because it’s got nothing to do with the music.

Savidge, Best and a load of promo CDs.
Photographed by Peter Robathan for Arena magazine (1995)

AA: Your first book makes the world of a music PR seem impossibly glamourous from the perspective of an outsider. How much time was spent having fun and how much was hard work?

Jane: It was impossibly glamourous! Everybody in the office was the same age. We were all in our 20s and nobody really had a boyfriend or a girlfriend, so we worked late. On Wednesdays we went to the recording of Top Of The Pops, which was broadcast on Thursdays. On Fridays one of us went to the recording of TFI Friday because we always had one of our bands on. I once had five bands on Top Of The Pops on the same night. We often went to pubs around Camden for the gigs and then went back to the office afterwards. We’d stay there until midnight listening to music and doing things we shouldn’t have been doing. 

We were also the same age as the bands we looked after. Jarvis and Steve came into the office a fair amount because they liked Camden. It helped that we didn’t have a financial stake in the band. We were genuinely in love with the music and did it for monthly retainers just to keep the office going. People could tell that we genuinely loved the bands, so the bands liked hanging around with us.

AA: Was that the office where Polly [Birkbeck, Senior Press Officer at Savage & Best] would take the Polaroid photos of the artists and display them on the wall?

Jane: That’s the one. In the downstairs office was an architect’s practice. All the people who came to see us first had to sign their name in the architect’s reception book. You know… ’Jason from Spiritualized’. If we still had that book it would be worth thousands. More pop-stars than architects.  

AA: Within the Savage & Best team, did everyone share the same opinion about what made Pulp great?

Jane: I’d say that me and Polly were quite similar. I was obsessed with image and style. Lyrics and androgyny were important too, so I completely understood the Manic Street Preachers. I once worked with a US band called Suicidal Tendencies. When I met the singer he drank Diet Coke and afterwards I gave him a lift in my car and he put his seatbelt on. I thought, ‘Hang on, you’re called Suicidal Tendencies and you’re drinking Diet Coke and wearing seat belts?’ I asked him why he wanted to be in a band and he said, “So I can have a house as big as my gran”. If that was true and you were British, no-one would buy your records ever again! What a completely different mentality. In the UK you’d probably say, “I wanna become famous so I can kill my gran”.

But in terms of how I differed to the others, I was a bit more chaotic. I wasn’t remotely interested in my career. I would come in to work on a Monday, go out to lunch and then return to the office on a Thursday. People would ask, “Where have you been?” I’d say, randomly, “Oh I went out with Damien Hirst… and he gave me 15 grand”. That would keep them quiet for a bit. Then I’d get tired so I would put my feet up on the sofa and call a few people. 

AA: I guess there’s no rule-book for a job like that. You’re sort of making it up as you go along, right?

Jane: I was chaotic and I didn’t know what I was doing. But other people who did know what they were doing expected something different from me. For instance, Suede went to America and didn’t make it. They got flipped with The Cranberries because of the Irish connection which the Americans loved. All the press rang me to say it was over for Suede because it didn’t work out for them in America. I just went, “So the Americans didn’t get it. What great news, because we all know they’ve got shit taste!” I wasn’t saying I dislike Americans and their music, but you’ve got to put on a brave face and own the situation. By some point I became a proper publicist and had a proper career. And still people called me and expected to get a proper reply. But I never wanted to do that.

AA: Over time you’d have seen your bands get more attention, more success and more demands placed upon them. Did you have to recalibrate how you worked with the bands and your relationship with them?

Jane: We were learning on the hoof and everything was going mad at that point. Everyday the phone was ringing off the hook. I couldn’t take all the phone calls, none of us could. When I did interviews for my first book some of the interviewers asked me if I thought I worked my bands too hard, especially given the current focus on artists’ mental health. But I was not like some whip-cracking manager who coerced the bands to do something because they needed their 20%. 

AA: Did they just want to interview the bands, or did they also want stories about the bands?

Jane: They wanted interviews generally. They did ask for stories about some of our newer bands. They would write about any Savage & Best band. It was ludicrous. That’s why I made up the names of new bands just to get them into the gossip columns as a joke.

Part 2: Jane & Pulp

AA: Tell us about your first encounter with Pulp.

Jane: I don’t claim to be a Pulp purist. My only connection to the band from the early days was that I went to university in Nottingham with Dolly [Peter Dalton]. He used to have ridiculously corkscrew-curly hair and kept telling me about a band he was in called Pulp. I’d heard of Pulp because I used to listen to every John Peel session, so I was semi-impressed that he used to be in the band. I don’t think he thought they were going anywhere at that point because he’d left the band. He ended up joining the Nine O’Clock Service [Sheffield-based Christianity rave cult] which Antony Genn was also a member of. 

But the song that really turned me on to Pulp was My Legendary Girlfriend. There are two or three pop songs now that have that quiet-loud thing, and I was really impressed by that track. The press switched-on to it and the NME gave it Single Of The Week. At that point we were doing Lush, and Miki [Berenyi] and John [Best] were going out with each other. Miki came into the office all the time and said, “You should go to see Pulp, they’ve suddenly become fantastic”. Of course, Pulp would say that they’ve always been fantastic.    

AA: So Miki had become a music taste evangelist for Pulp?

Jane: She was! Savage & Best took on Pulp when O.U. came out in 1992. So after a couple of conversations I went to see them in Brighton and at London ULU. By then Jarvis had become a raconteur. He was like one of those 1970s comedians that it was okay to like because they’re not racist. In between songs he did his little monologues. It was so funny that you almost wanted him to go on forever even though he was punctuated by these amazing songs. I don’t know whether Jarvis had that confidence in the early days. He got to that level of confidence and it probably made him think, ‘You know what, I’ll just have a chat’. That connection with an audience I don’t think I had ever seen before. He was so likeable. 

I remember Polly, Melissa [Thompson], Rachel [Hendry], me and John being really excited by what was going on. But Jarvis was still shy when he came into the office. I’m not going to say he had charisma back then, but anyone who didn’t know him would be impressed by him. On stage he was so likeable and lovable that Pulp felt like a labour of love to us. It was exciting when Jarvis answered all those questions in the last round of Pop Quiz. I remember that he was so pleased that he put his hands up in the air. We all watched it in the office and we were like, ‘Fucking hell! He’s great!’ When we took Pulp on, I rang the NME and someone at their office asked me, “What have you done that for?” 

AA: Let me guess: ’Damaged goods… been around for a while… not going anywhere…’ etc? 

Jane: All of that, so I said to them, “Yeah, but they’ve suddenly become amazing”. An incremental thing then happened where the NME would write about them, and then the Melody Maker would do a slightly larger piece and then the NME did an even bigger piece. They were both part of the same publishing company but the titles competed against each other. They were regularly writing short pieces about Pulp, reminding people that this band from Sheffield existed. If I can be slightly cynical about it, I think Savage & Best’s success with Suede – and Suede’s success with being Suede – helped Pulp. I know that Pulp hated being lumped-in with Britpop. I collect quotes about bands that detest Britpop, I promise you they all dismiss it. I’ve been accused of lumping bands into movements to help their press profile. I admit that I did that, but I think it helped. 

AA: I suppose that came from your understanding of how journalists and the music press operated?

Jane: I knew that journalists liked to think that they were the first to comment on a scene. They want to make a name for themselves and to identify that something is going on. If you tell them, ‘I’ve got a great band’, you’ll get a ‘So…?’ But if you say, ‘I’ve got four bands who sound like they come from the same place, wear the same clothes and sing about the same things’, the journalists will go, ‘Oh, that’s really interesting’. 

Select magazine, April 1993.

AA: You’ve said that Andrew Harrison [Select editor] didn’t just want to put Brett and Suede on the cover and that it was your suggestion to throw in Pulp, Saint Etienne and The Auteurs?

Jane: Suede had just been put on the cover of Q, after only two singles. We’d had Suede covers with Select, NME and Melody Maker, so Select had no reason to put Suede on their cover again. They certainly didn’t want to appear to be following Q which they thought was an old man’s title! So there needed to be a reason to put them on the cover. Harrison wanted to get Pulp into a monthly magazine, but why would they write about a band that had been going for fourteen years? So positioning Pulp as part of a scene gave them a reason. We set up a photo session in a supermarket in Camden.

They took him to a supermarket. Photograph by Neil Cooper.

AA: The photo of Jarvis standing in front of the boxes of washing powder?

Jane: Yes. We put another one of our bands, The Auteurs, in that issue and Select added Denim and Saint Etienne. It was a motley collection but they all had something in common and that was Britishness. Unfortunately it became skewed with the title ‘Yanks Go Home’.

AA: And didn’t they add the Union Flag in the background without Brett knowing? To think this was not long after Morrissey at Finsbury Park.

Jane: Exactly. It was all a bit weird. I’m not ashamed to be British but I thought the ‘Yanks Go Home’ thing was a bit too much. I thought the flag was a toxic thing at the time. But the whole cover came about because we needed to get Pulp into a monthly magazine and there needed to be something to tie Pulp into. So those were the circumstances and I identify that as the first Britpop cover. As much as all those bands disassociate themselves from Britpop, the Big Five as it really is – Pulp, Suede, Blur, Elastica and Oasis – it helped them sell millions of records. 

AA: What are you most proud of when you look back at your time working with Pulp?

Jane: When I saw them at Glastonbury in 1995 I felt partially involved in the possibility that they didn’t get bottled off the stage. I thought it was going to be full of pissed-up Mancs. I heard that Pulp had been rehearsing for 16-hour days or something ridiculous like that. I’m not proud as such because I had nothing to do with that.

AA: But you must’ve felt vindicated? Here was a band that you had devoted countless hours of your early career to and suddenly they were everywhere. 

Jane: I did feel vindicated. But I thought Pulp were an office secret. It sounds ludicrous, but we loved them and a few people around us loved them too. But how could 100,000 people love them? What if we were wrong? What if no-one knew who they were? But it ended up being incredible. Pulp had become our biggest band at that point. Common People had charted at Number 2 as did Mis-Shapes, kept off the top spots by R*bson & Jerome and Simply Red. 

AA: Oh God I’m going to have to asterisk R*bson & Jerome.

Jane: Sorry!

AA: As well as feeling vindicated, did you feel that you’d lost something? Pulp clearly weren’t an office secret anymore. They belonged to everyone. 

Jane: A lot of people thought that. I thought it with R.E.M. because I saw them perform live so many times over a two year period. I even slept in my car for a couple of weeks following them around. When Losing My Religion came out, I bought the cassette. Me and my best friend played it and we just looked at each other and said, “They’re not our band anymore, are they? We’ve lost them”. That was really sad. I can’t remember if I thought the same way about Pulp. Maybe not in the same way.

AA: Were there any regrets or notable fuck-ups working with Pulp?

Jane: One of the things I most regret was taking Jarvis to the Action Man party. 

AA: I sense you felt more horrified about it than he probably did. You felt responsible, right?

Jane: I did, totally responsible. Jarvis came into the office, he was going to meet Steve later and had an hour to kill. Mark Borkowski [PR guru] told me he was having this Action Man party. I said to Jarvis, “You’re going to meet Steve later, just come along to this thing with me”. I didn’t realise there were going to be so many photographers there. Borkowski said to me, “I can’t believe you bought Jarvis along!” I was thinking, ‘Well now you’ve said that, neither can I’. After that Jarvis didn’t go to any parties for three months. It probably helped him to be honest.  

Jarvis meets Action Man (Mark Griffin).
Photograph by Michael Crabtree.

AA: Did you ever have to modify the requests from magazines about how they wanted Jarvis to appear in the photo shoots?  

Jane: Everyone was so desperate to write a different story because you can’t do the same thing every week. The Melody Maker often took bands to Legoland. 

AA: Took bands to Legoland?

Jane: Yes! Ultrasound went to Legoland. Spiritualized refused to go to Legoland, but they did a shoot in a flotation tank instead. So fair enough. But I can’t think of any things that Jarvis turned down. It got to a period, particularly for This Is Hardcore, where he did a lot of interviews. I don’t know whether it was because they’d got to a certain level of fame or whether it was to front-load all the interviews because it was a more difficult record to sell. 

Some of the covers Savage & Best secured during 1997-98.

Part 3: Jane & Britpop

AA: There was a growing and tight-knit group of younger music types gaining influence in the early 1990s, whether as journalists, pluggers, presenters, PRs or programmers. Did that help the bands that were emerging at that time?

Jane: There was the likes of Steve Lamacq (NME, Radio 1, Deceptive Records), Stuart Maconie (Radio 1, Select, NME) and Ric Blaxill (Radio 1, Top Of The Pops). But I think something changed when Oasis joined the party. When Britpop first started – before we called it Britpop when it was just the Camden scene – people would go to Syndrome [indie club] off Oxford Street and we all socialised together. You’d get Jarvis dancing with a journalist like Siân Pattenden and you’d have Caitlin Moran sitting in the corner. Then Oasis came down, but because they became so big so quickly they arrived with their bouncers and bodyguards. It changed the mood. Oasis bought a lad mentality that became quite cartoon-like. Then, suddenly, you had roped-off areas. I never saw a roped-off area until Oasis arrived.

AA: I liked Simon Price’s observation about Britpop being a diverse and pluralistic scene long before it became a “monobrowed monoculture”.

Jane: I totally agree with that. That’s why I disagree with people who say Britpop was a sexist movement that talked women down. That’s what it became. But it wasn’t like that before. The bands that kick-started it like Suede, Pulp and Blur were never like that.

AA: That brings us to the issue of band rivalry and competition. It fuelled so much of the press attention during that time. There was something different about Pulp because they didn’t overtly slag-off their contemporaries in the way some of your other bands did to gain attention. Do you have a view on why that might be?  

Jane: I think it was because Pulp were older, not by much, but it made them question what the point of that behaviour was. I think they’d seen it all already and probably felt the Britpop thing was a bit of a fad. You know… been around for 14 years and will still be around 14 years later. They’d lived through so many movements and not been associated with any of them – well done to them – so why would they fall out with another band? They had bigger fish to fry. 

AA: I wonder if the other reason they avoided criticising other bands was because Pulp, well probably Steve and Jarvis chiefly, were in the middle of a social circle of artists and musicians whose lives were intertwined; collaborating together, living together and socialising together?

Jane: Pulp intermingled with them all, sharing flats with Elastica and Menswear. It sounds like a slur to say that Pulp weren’t offensive enough to be a rival to anybody, but there was a different vibe around them. I could tell that Pulp were an intellectual band because we got them on the cover of Les Inrockuptibles. As a student of Sartre, Camus and Baudelaire, I knew that Les Inrocks only wrote about British bands with a certain sensibility. They loved Pulp, Suede and The Auteurs because of the connection to their lyrics. There’s something very specific about Pulp’s world. Can you ever imagine Oasis having a song called Acrylic Afternoons? It was all supersonic this, and rock-n-roll that. There’s this specific world that Pulp have got, and Suede have got a similar world, that is so much more than what Blur or Oasis had.

Jarvis adorns the cover of Les Inrockuptibles, November 1995. Photograph by Philippe Garcia.

Part 4: Jane & This Is Hardcore

AA: From all the albums you love and are qualified to write about, what made you choose This Is Hardcore for your 33⅓ debut? 

Jane: I would love to have done Murmur by R.E.M., but that had already been published, and I had already written about Suede’s Coming Up. I could’ve done Different Class but I’ve always been obsessed with This Is Hardcore because it’s a dense record with so much going on. It’s the musical equivalent of Reggie Perrin’s Grot shops. I say that because it was music that was meant to destroy something. 

Consciously Jarvis wanted to kill his career because he could see it was out of control. He wanted fame for so long, and when he got it, it was the wrong kind of fame. That’s why the book starts and ends with the two fictitious stories about Jarvis calling the Total Fame Solutions helpline. I wanted to show it’s all very well wanting fame, but you’ve got to be careful what you wish for. You can get what you want, but it won’t necessarily make you feel happy. Perhaps if the MJ incident hadn’t happened Jarvis could have attained a type of fame that he was happy with. But that didn’t happen, and I think This Is Hardcore is the result of that. That’s why I chose to write about it.

AA: Fame is one of the overarching themes that straddles his lyrical output from that era. 

Jane: I like that he equates fame with hardcore pornography. Not just pornography, but hardcore pornography. Your life is examined in close, minute detail. They know your address. They ring up your PR company. They track you down to your hotel room in New York. Constant attention. Because they own you in the same way that they own a naked body in pornography.  

I’ve always felt that fame is like a disease. There’s that theory that if someone gets a terrible disease, their friends stop speaking to them because the friends don’t know how to deal with it. Fame is exactly the same. So you think that as much as you’ve grown up together and they’ve now become this superstar, the relationship has changed because they think I’m being their friend because they’re famous. And I could never get over that. I would go around to Brett’s house a lot and stay up late. It was always fun. But the relationship changes once you’ve helped make a band famous. If you spoke to the childhood friends of some of the people we’ve been talking about they’d probably say that they’re not the same anymore. And even if the famous person hasn’t changed, that’s not the point, because it’s their friends’ identification of the difference that makes the difference. 

This Is Hardcore promotional CD.

AA: For This Is Hardcore, there was a wider range of publications that began writing about Pulp. There was interest from international and non-music titles too. What lay behind that?

Jane: I think it was becoming more acceptable to write about bands like Pulp in those magazines. We’d already had a Sunday Times Magazine cover for Suede, and Jarvis was even more of an interesting person for those magazines. I don’t want to say I’ve got a new-found respect for Jarvis’ lyrics by writing this book, but I’ve had a reinforced respect for him as a lyricist. I’m obsessed by print magazines and newspapers, I always have been, which is why being a PR was a perfect job for me. Journalists are obsessed with lyrics. They can’t write about a D chord for very long at all, but they can examine a lyric for many pages.

AA: We’re going to have to talk about Michael Jackson now. Tell us about why you identify the 1996 Brit Awards as the ‘year zero’ moment for the events that led to This Is Hardcore.  

Jane: There always has to be an ‘inciting incident’ as it were. Not just in life but also when you’re writing. There needs to be a reason behind it. When Jarvis waggled his fully-clothed bum at the King of Pop™, he didn’t know what he was unleashing. It was just a spur of the moment thing and yet it changed his life utterly into a realm of fame that he had no concept of. 

It meant that if he walked down the street and a policeman came towards him, the policeman would shake his hand and ask for his autograph. It was a very strange existence. The problem with fame is that it makes people think they know you and that they own bits of you. Everything was aspirational for Jarvis before Jacko. People accused him of having writers’ block and he said, ‘No it’s just mild constipation’, which I thought was quite funny. 

But what do you write about when your subject matter has changed so utterly? I think This Is Hardcore is Jarvis maturing. The type of things he was writing about: ageing, mortality, despair, drugs. It ended up being a record that couldn’t be associated with Britpop. I think he wanted it to be a record you couldn’t even associate with Pulp. It was saying goodbye to pop music but it ended up accidentally killing off Britpop. 

AA: This Is Hardcore wasn’t the only difficult/awkward/dark/introspective record released at that time. You must have seen the storm clouds gathering on the horizon in 1996?

Jane: I saw it earlier with the release of Dog Man Star. It was probably the first record to try to kill off Britpop before Britpop had properly got going. I think people wanted to make less easy music. 

AA: Why do you think that was? 

Jane: Because it goes back to the old quote: ‘What are you rebelling against?’ ‘What have you got?’. Britpop was a reaction to grunge. What was the reaction to Britpop? Well, if Britpop was associated with easy, fun music then let’s make it as dark as possible. Everyone wanted to react against everything else going on around them. 

AA: Do you remember listening to Hardcore for the first time?

Jane: You’ll know from the book the fictitious story where I to go to HMV to return the record because it doesn’t sound like Pulp. What happened in reality is that I went with John [Best] to see Geoff [Travis] and Jeannette [Lee] at Rough Trade. We sat in the Rough Trade office and Geoff said he would play us a song they had just recorded. It was This Is Hardcore and it may have been even longer than the released version. Just after it had finished, I remember saying, “Is that the single then?”

AA: Did you follow that up with, ”And will there be a radio edit?”

Jane: [Laughs] I would never, ever say that! I didn’t even mean it to be a bad thing, I just wanted to know what I was going to be working with. 

AA: So What did Geoff say?

Jane: He said “Yes”. So I said, “Okay, let’s do it”, and we did the first cover with Select.

AA: Now we’re talking! “Death, Porn, Heroin… What’s eating Jarvis Cocker?”

Jane: That was the cover where everyone went, ‘Oh my God’. The band blamed me for that, I think.

Select magazine, April 1998.

AA: It was the photo shoot styling that had glamourised the heroin chic vibe, so presumably nothing to do with you?

Jane: Right. It was the most expensive photo session that Select ever commissioned. They certainly wanted it to have that kind of vibe. They wanted it to be a new kind of world that Pulp had created. And there were obviously rumours about the band doing certain drugs. So they wrote about that because I didn’t deny it, or something like that. It was a very weird time, and it set a precedent for the fucking entire campaign! And Select were completely right to do that. They had got the record right.  

AA: Would the music journalists ever share the angle they intended to take on a big feature story? 

Jane: Not really, although they’re more likely to do that now. But we were doing 20 interviews a day with all our bands and the journalists would never run a headline by me. They had total control. But when I saw that headline I thought, ‘God… okay, fair enough’. It was quite pointed. I re-read the article several times when I was writing the book and I can’t dispute that they got the record right.

AA: Let’s talk about The Day After The Revolution and the album’s ending. “Yeah we made it, by the skin of our teeth”. “Now all our breakdowns and nightmares look small”. Is Hardcore a redemptive album? If so, is it anything more than a pyrrhic victory and a brave face? 

Jane: I think that all ties in with the millennium and being on the cusp of something new. Jarvis was getting tired of being accused of being an ironist. It was the wrong period of his life – and of the century – to be accused of irony. To answer your question I think it’s both actually. I think it was a redemptive thing. Pulp had been going for over 20 years at that point. If you’re 65 years old and have been going at something for 20 years then it feels like less than 20 years. But if you’re 34 and you’ve been going for 20 years it feels like the end of something.

AA: So you think Jarvis wanted to feel optimistic about the future?

Jane: Yes, but I think he probably felt quite old and tired by the time he’d got to that point, more so than a 65 year old would.

AA: Perhaps it was a necessity for him to feel optimistic as a way of putting behind him the trauma and the convoluted artistic process of writing about that trauma?

Jane: I occasionally punctuate the book with asides like, “This was Pulp’s 21st single”. I do that without any comment to make the reader appreciate how much water had gone under the bridge. When it comes to that song, it is the end of something. The end of irony. The end of pop music. The end of being accused of irony. Jarvis told me he liked the book. That surprised me, because I wasn’t even sure that he’d want to read about that part of his life again. So I’m quite pleased that he likes it.

AA: What are your memories of the Hardcore launch party?

Jane: It was incredibly weird and wonderful because some months previously they’d done a photo session there [the Park Lane Hilton hotel] in what must be the tackiest room in Britain. So they obviously thought it was a very appropriate place. There were five songs and I remember being exhaustively excited. It was a culmination of the madness of the record. There was also a trauma surrounding it. I probably had a drug problem at that point in my life so I think it was usual to think, ‘When are the drugs coming? Are we going to get them in time?’. I wasn’t unique in that, there was a lot of people there who felt the same way. I think many people were damaged and there was a lot of paranoia by that point. But I remember the performance being incredibly moving.

AA: Steve Lamacq once asked Jarvis to describe Different Class in 15 words (“Pop music made by people from the north of England in the mid nineteen nineties”). It’s my last question, so I’m setting you the same challenge, but instead of Different Class you have to describe This Is Hardcore in 15 words.

Jane: “Giant, sprawling, fraught masterpiece populated by songs about drugs, despair, pornography, death and ageing… hyphen… nice!”

‘This Is Hardcore’ by Jane Savidge is published by Bloomsbury on 7 March 2024.

Further reading and watching…

Read Lunch With The Wild Frontiers by Jane Savidge (2019)

View the full list of titles in the 33⅓ series

Read Fingers Crossed by Miki Berenyi (2023)

Breach Of Faith, BBC documentary on the Nine O’Clock Service (1995): YouTube

The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Series 2 (1977): YouTube

This Is Hardcore in pictures: The Guardian

Geoff Travis and Jeannette Lee interview (2015): The Independent

Follow Jane Savidge on Instagram

Acrylic Afternoons: Website, Twitter / X, Instagram

In conversation with Nick Banks

So It Started There: From Punk To Pulp

Nick Banks is currently on the road following the release of his memoir, So It Started There: From Punk To Pulp. It’s packed with vivid recollections spanning from his Rotherham childhood to his present day global gallivanting as Pulp’s drummer.

I catch up with Nick mid-way through his book tour. We’re in an empty upstairs bar in Bath. We have a packet of crisps, a Diet Coke (Nick) and a lime and soda (me). We have over an hour to natter about Pulp. To get him talking I’ve brought along a bag of artefacts related to different parts of his memoir. I needn’t have done. As those who’ve attended one of his books talks will know, Nick will happily “gabber-on” with barely any prompting. The dream interviewee.

With this book, Nick’s found his voice and discovered an appreciative audience. He seems in high spirits. Pulp’s summer concerts – their most successful tour ever – are fresh in his mind, with more concerts to look forward to in November and December.

This is unashamedly a long-read written more for the Pulp fan than the casual. So pull up a chair and let’s open the bag of artefacts to see what we find.

1. ‘Rock Bottom’ by Lynsey De Paul & Mike Moran (1977)

Acrylic Afternoons (AA): Our first item is a seven-inch single. It caught your attention as the UK’s Eurovision entry in 1977, finishing second to France. You say in your book that you liked it, but not enough to buy a copy.

Nick: Ah ‘Rock Bottom’. Yes! It’s a great song. It’s a catchy tune. 

AA: It got me thinking about how different a person’s musical influences might be if they had been born a couple of years earlier or later. Is that something you’ve thought about too?

Nick: Definitely. I got the tail-end of punk rock. It literally was the tail-end, but you only think of that in hindsight 20 years later. At the time it felt like it was the only musical thing to be interested in. But if I had been born a couple of years later it would probably have been New Romantic – wearing a sash, wedge haircut and some stupid buckle shoes. I got into punk in 1978 to 1979. I know everyone will think that their age of music is the best. And that’s absolutely fine. But I feel lucky at being able to get into music in that year. A lot of people say 1979 is the best year in music, full stop. I feel lucky because the explosion that followed was incredible.

AA: The first time you saw Pulp was the ‘Stars on Sundae’ event at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. You describe the event in a way that makes it seem quite polished, with the cut-out fishes as stage props and the inclusion of backing singers. Yet many who talk about Pulp performances in the early days refer to their ramshackle charm, with things not always working out as the band had hoped. 

Nick: It varied with the members changing in the band. Obviously when you’re a band at school you haven’t got a clue and so it is pretty ramshackle. But for the ‘It’ record there were people in the band who could actually play. Like Simon Hinkler for instance. They were a little bit older so they could bring more experience. From what I could remember it just seemed really different and very competent. Once that ‘It’ line-up dissolved and then others came in, like Manners [Pete Mansell] and Magnus [Doyle], it went back to more ramshackle. Obviously when I joined it became a lot less ramshackle I’d like to say! 

AA: How much do you remember of that performance at the Crucible?

Nick: Obviously they were playing the songs from ‘It’. I don’t think they played any songs from earlier. But it was just so different to the local bands I was listening to or experiencing. No way should I have liked it because it was acoustic and gentle with twinkly piano and a tooting trombone. There was no crunching goth guitars. It was completely different. But having said that, like we’ve all seen, you couldn’t take your eyes off this singer. He would talk to the audience. He had an actual charisma and a talent for engaging them and getting everyone on side. No other bands really did that.

AA: The Limit club was one of your regular haunts during those times.

Nick: Certainly throughout the 80s it was pretty much three nights a week. You’d go on Monday where you’d try to get in before 11pm because it was free. You’d run down the street from the Hallamshire. Wednesdays were similar. That was maybe cheap drinks night. And often a Thursday, that might’ve been student night. You’d try to avoid it at the weekend because it got somewhat uglier.

AA: A different clientele? 

Nick: Very much a different clientele! I’ve been in there on a Saturday, buried under fighting skinheads. You’d comically crawl out between someone’s legs thinking, ‘what the bloody hell’s going off here?’. Every city had a dive-y disco where all the goths and punks and new romantics hung out. The drinks were cheap and the toilets were horrible. That’s the faustian pact you have to buy into to go to these places. Kids these days, they’ve got it all nicey-nice.

AA: Soap in the toilets even.

Nick: All that kind of stuff! They don’t have to wade knee-deep in shit at 1 o’ clock. I’m going too far… maybe just over the soles of your boots. But like I say, it was those kinds of places where everyone that was a bit different and into alternative music would go to. They’d go to The Limit and they’d go to the Leadmill. They wouldn’t really go to other places because they didn’t really exist. There were ‘townie bars’, as we would call them, where people couldn’t get in if they were wearing jeans. And yet these kids going in wearing their trousers would batter your head-in in a heartbeat.

AA: You certainly weren’t telling people at the top of the stairs in the Hallamshire that you weren’t letting them in to watch the band because they were wearing the wrong clothes.

Nick: No. 50p – in you go!

AA: I loved the image of Tim Allcard and Jarvis sitting with you at the top of the stairs to avoid paying you their 50p entrance fee. 

Nick: We just did it to have our day every week. You’d sit there on Sunday and nurse half a larger for hours. Sit at the top of the stairs, collect the money and listen to the bands. You’d get to know all the band people; they’d often be the same folks you’d see down The Limit later on.

AA: It sounds like a scene, though you probably wouldn’t call it a scene. 

Nick: No, you wouldn’t call it a scene but it kind of was because everyone would get to know each other. Bands would form and split-up, often even in the same night, but that’s just what you needed to do.

2. Pulp flyers from 14 January and 4 December (1986)

AA: Come 1986 and you’ve joined Pulp. It doesn’t get much better than joining your favourite band, right?

Nick: Not in your musical career, no.

AA: But I also think that this is the last time that Nick’s seen Pulp as a punter. So you lose something as well as gain something?

Nick: Yeah, that’s true. 

AA: We’ve got a flyer from January ’86 of Pulp at The Limit, possibly one of the last times you saw them as a punter? And another flyer from December ’86 at the 100 Club which was one of your first gigs as a band member.

Nick: Very possibly I was at The Limit one and that might have been one where Jarvis was in the wheelchair. And the 100 Club was one of the few gigs that ‘Captain Sleep’ was a band member. Candida had been in and out of the band. She was very much torn between following brother Magnus and boyfriend Manners in the schism. I don’t know what happened but maybe Jarvis sweet-talked her to come back. Perhaps like me she thought that Pulp was the best band to be in, so it was better to stick with it and see where it takes you.

AA: When you joined Pulp, ’Dogs Are Everywhere’ had been out for a few months. The Melody Maker review said:

Pulp are probably the most subversively important band in the world today, and they don’t even know it.

AA: That was the band you joined. And yet, for years, nothing happened. 

Nick: It was Single Of The Week in the NME. You’d think with that kind of interest that someone with clout and money would say, ‘let’s have a look at this lot properly and let’s enable them to make better records and get some publicity’. No-one ever did. Perhaps it was a London-centric thing where those bods couldn’t see what was there. I joined my favourite band, I loved ‘Little Girl’, I loved ‘Dogs Are Everywhere’, I loved the ‘Freaks’ record which came out after I joined. ‘Freaks’ had been recorded for a while but Fire Records were rubbish and they couldn’t get their shit together. 

AA: And even before ‘Freaks’ was released the band were moving on from those songs to the new Portasound-inspired ones. 

Nick: Because Fire took so long to get stuff out, the band had basically dissolved and a new sound was being devised. ‘Freaks’ was the songs of two years before and the sound had moved on.

AA: Did you ever get people who came along to Pulp concerts in 1987 telling you they were expecting to hear more material from ‘Freaks’?

Nick: Well no, because no-one bought it. [laughs]

AA: So they weren’t to know any different?

Nick: ‘Dogs’ had sold pitiful amounts. ‘Little Girl’ had sold a few more, but probably not even a thousand. ‘Where’s the hits?’ There were no hits! Doing these book talks, I’ve been doing straw polls, like in Bristol: “Anybody at the Fleece And Firkin gig in 1992?” One person put their hand up. But when you ask, “Who came to the summer shows?”, everyone raises their hand.

AA: Let’s talk about the FON demo in 1987. For me, Pulp had a bit of a habit of leaving some of their best songs in the recording studio. You must’ve listened to ‘Death Comes To Town’, ‘Don’t You Want Me Anymore?’ and ‘Rattlesnake’ and thought, ‘This is it. This is absolutely bloody brilliant’.

Nick: Yes. All of us thought that it was head and shoulders the best thing that Pulp had done. We were just really desperate for FON to say, ‘These are great, you’re gonna go far kids. Sign this contract and we’ll start releasing records.’ Anything to get off having to deal with Fire Records because the relationship was so sour even before we had signed again. ‘Rattlesnake’ was a firm favourite. A slight leftwards movement to the serbo-disco side of things. Very much a Russell influence. 

AA: Fire have never released these three songs on any of the various compilations and reissues they’ve done over the years. Presumably they don’t own the recordings?

Nick: They won’t own them because they were funded by FON. They just gave us some studio time and we used that to do those three songs. Although not owning songs does not necessarily mean that Fire won’t release them. They’ve tried that before.

3. ‘The Day That Never Happened’, a concert by Pulp
at the Sheffield Leadmill (1988)

AA: The Day That Never Happened. This was ‘shit or bust’ time for Pulp.

Nick: Yes! It was one of those moments of trying to do something grandiose but with no money whatsoever. What was on that telly should have been projections onto the white cloth draped behind me. But the projector broke and there was no spare. So we covered the telly in tin foil and showed the images on there instead. This period summed up the approach of reaching out to the stars but not getting out of the gutter. All these grand ideas to make something a multimedia extravaganza.

AA: But more stuff to go wrong?

Nick: Definitely. And as we’ve seen this year, you can do it now, but it costs an absolute arm and a leg.

AA: Tell me about Antony Genn [pictured above, playing bass guitar]. I’ve not met him when he’s been sober, but he’s such an engaging and charismatic figure that he’s someone you’d follow anywhere. I imagine he brought vibes, fun and mischief to the Pulp camp?

Nick: Yes, very much so. Antony has got an incredibly rare talent. He can get where water can’t. He’s done the soundtrack for Peaky Blinders, manages Inhaler and has done lots of amazing stuff. He’s never had a proper job in his life and he’s done it all by having the gift of the gab and lots of charm. He can be a bit of a nightmare. There are times when you wanna say to him, ‘Ants, just shut up.’

AA: Or maybe, ‘Ants, tune your guitar’?

Nick: ‘Tune your bloody guitar’ and don’t leave the drummer to do it. Exactly. He’s got a brother who is very similar, Steve Genn, who was another Pulp person and who is also very charismatic. Steve is very much ‘The Genn Project 1.0’. He mooches around in Sheffield. Whereas Antony is ‘The Genn Project 2.0’. He could see what his brother could do but he could take it to another level. Antony has also been working on a book. I’m not sure if it’s his life story or snippets of different things. We shall see. 

AA: 1988 is the year of the Camden Falcon gig that Steve Mackey attended. You were the one who suggested to Jarvis that Steve could be the next bass player after Antony Genn departed. 

Nick: The Day That Never Happened would’ve been Jarvis’ last gig as a Sheffield resident. Nothing was going right for the band at all. It seemed like a well-worn secret in Sheffield that this band needed wider attention. So with Jarvis moving down to London – and I don’t suppose we thought about it in an overt way – but you think, ‘We’ve got to try to keep the group together’, because it could very easily dissolve away.

AA: Without anyone taking a deliberate decision that it should dissolve?

Nick: Very much so. That’s what happens to bands that struggle for success. They get on with other stuff and lose contact. So Jarvis moved down to London and I remember seeing Steve at the Camden Falcon. I said to Jarvis, “Let’s ask Steve because he’s down there and you’re down there so at least you two can keep it going”. Not long after he joined Steve told me there was a room coming up in his squat and I said, “Well, I’ll have it”. So I moved down to London for a bit. 

AA: How did Russ and Candida feel with the centre of gravity moving southwards to London?

Nick: Well Candida went to live in Manchester. Hence the album title ‘Separations’ as everyone was separating out. Russell stayed in Sheffield. There was three of us in London and Candida in Manchester. That’s why in those years, 1989  and 1990, there was very little Pulp activity because we were scattered to the four winds. Only every now and again did a little concert come up and you could get together. We could have very easily disappeared. Thankfully we could just about keep something together.

AA: I like what Jarvis said about it being like a hibernating animal’s heartbeat. Pulp were dormant but still alive.

Nick: A flicker of life. And with three of us being there we started to play more London gigs and people started to look at us from a different angle. And in the book I talk about Jarvis deciding to reinvent himself and get rid of the glasses for contact lenses.

AA: Sex symbol!

Nick: That was f**king hilarious. Jarvis is sexy? You what? Literally it floored us. You are kidding. We’ve seen him scrabbling around all the time and he wasn’t sexy in the slightest. But the taking off of those glasses was casting aside a barrier between being taken seriously and not being taken seriously. Reviews alluded to us being a bit odd:

“Looks like an undertaker’s apprentice, sounds like a heavenly choir.”

It wasn’t exactly, ‘C-mon kids this is music that’s gonna change your life’. And I think the glasses were some kind of barrier. A lot of people said Pulp were “wacky”. And that drove us f**king nuts. “Wacky” suggests not serious. We were deadly serious. All the time. 

AA: “Kitsch” was the other word. 

Nick: All that kind of stuff. There is a kitsch element, and that’s fine, but wacky was horrible. So getting rid of the glasses helped get rid of that stigma. Then it became Sexy Jarvis. When you’re in a band having a sexy lead singer is better than having a wacky undertaker’s-apprentice singer. 

AA: And especially one that both the girls and the boys found attractive. 

Nick: Exactly! 

4. Pond Street, Sheffield. Photographed by Uwe Bedenbecker (1992)

AA: The next item is a photographic booklet published earlier this year. The photographer’s from Germany but lived in Sheffield for a brief period at the beginning of the 1990s. I looked through his pictures and thought, ‘This is the city that Nick left for London’, and sadly Sheffield really did look on its arse. In your book you write about having to avoid the skinheads on Pond Street [pictured above] on your way home from seeing The Damned. 

Nick: We’d have to come down from here [points to the corner of the Top Rank building in front of the second parked bus]. On the other side of the road where the flagpoles are is the bus station. That’s where we’d get the 287 Maltby bus back home. The road was a dual carriageway and linking the two sides was a dark, piss-smelling underpass. If you heard the sound of running boots behind you while you were in the underpass, you’d run as well. You’d try to get to the lights of the bus station where you were probably safe. If you got there, the last bus that would take us to the end of our street departed at about 10:45pm. So you missed the last bits of the gig. You could get another bus at 11:15pm but you had to walk about a mile and a half to get home from where the bus terminated. Often I’d get on that bus and when the driver kicked you off you were faced with that long walk. But if you said to the bus driver, “You’re going past the end of our road, so do you mind if I stay on it?”. Nearly always they went, “Well if anyone sees me, I’ll lose my job, so you’ve got to hide”. I’d say, “Can I get off at Whiston crossroads?” “Yeah, lie on the seat and don’t put your head up because if the Inspector sees me, I’m done.” You’d get to the crossroads, the bus door would open and you’d jump out and say, “Thank you very much”.

Nick: This bit here is a really important area [pointing to the pavement on the left hand side of the building in the middle]. That’s where I met Anne Murray. Anne was my gateway person to getting into the Sheffield scene. It was there that me and my brother, who was wearing his Stranglers jacket, were stood loafing around. Anne and her friend came up to us and said, “Oh my God we love your jacket, it’s amazing.” We had a little conversation and they walked one way and we walked the other way, probably to get the bus. And afterwards we thought, ‘Ooh, who are these girls taking an interest in us, we need to find them’. After a couple of weeks we tracked them down. Anne knew all the places like The Limit and the Hallamshire. I think we would have found those places eventually, but it brought it forward a couple of years.

5. My Legendary Girlfriend: for further details
contact Nickos at Pulp Central on 071 701 3390 (1991)

AA. So you went off to London at the turn of the decade. This is the promo blurb for Pulp’s breakthrough single ‘My Legendary Girlfriend’. You’re listed as the person to contact – “Nickos at Pulp Central” – which brings to mind an image of you as a PR sitting at a desk with a telephone and a typewriter. 

Nick: That was me at the squat in Camberwell!

AA: You were sending video tapes of the ‘My Legendary Girlfriend’ promo around? 

Nick: Everyone had a go at trying to advance the Pulp project. Jarvis never really seemed to do that. He’s not organised at all really. On the rare occasion he had organised something he’d forget to tell anyone. So Russell for many years was doing a lot of the pushing. When I went down to London I had a go at sending videos out just to drum up some interest. And once Steve joined he did a load of stuff by talking to lots of different people. We were trying to keep things together and to advance the project.

AA: And you secured a gig at The Venue in New Cross.

Nick: I remember ringing them up and they said, “Oh you sent us the video. No one sends us videos, we get cassettes.”

AA: With ‘My Legendary Girlfriend’ you waited four years to get a record out that you featured on, but it doesn’t even have your name on it.

Nick: But we’d got a record out so I wasn’t precious about the fact that my name wasn’t on it. And again, it was a Single Of The Week and it was saying, ‘This band are amazing’. So we were hoping we could build on it because that had happened before but nothing came of it.

6. A fan writes to complain about Fire’s treatment of Pulp (1992)

AA: Our next item is a letter from ‘Harry’ at Fire Records to a Pulp fan who seemingly wrote to Fire to complain about how long it was taking them to release ‘Separations’. Fire’s response explains that they retreated from their original plan to release ‘Separations’ on the same day that Gift were releasing Pulp’s new single, ‘O.U’. So, was the timing malice or coincidence?  

Nick: I think there’s a bit of arseholey behaviour. We were ready to go with ‘O.U’ and Fire chose the same day for ‘Separations’ [which was recorded in 1989]. There’s too much of a coincidence after all that delay. In hindsight I think Fire would have preferred it to come out earlier but there were massive upheavals within indie distribution and Rough Trade were struggling. But we weren’t interested in that, we just wanted our records out.

AA: In the acknowledgments section of your book, you’re quite philosophical about the Fire Records relationship. If you could go back in time and correct some of the injustices on condition that it might alter the band’s trajectory in the nineties, I sense that you probably wouldn’t go back and fiddle about. Because you got there in the end. 

Nick: We got there in the end and it was fantastic. I think you’re right, but at the time if you knew you were going to be struggling for another five years you’d think, ‘I’ve not joined a band to struggle like this’. You want to join a band, write some songs, go on tour with your mates, have a great time and enjoy the limos and girls for the rest of eternity! Life sometimes doesn’t work like that. Hence why I can write a 470-page book because of the amazing and difficult story of how it all came about. 

AA: After all this messing about you could have quite easily thought, ‘Well I’ve got to get another job, I’m off’.

Nick. I trained as a teacher. I was in the cafe at Endcliffe Park in Sheffield about a year or two ago and someone came up to me and said, “Are you Mr. Banks?” I said “Yes”, and she said, “You taught me at Burntwood School.” How do you even remember a teacher who was only there for one year back in 1990?

AA: They probably remember you because you didn’t set them any homework Nick.

Nick: Yeah – I didn’t give a shit! [laughs] So it’s a great story but if you had the choice you’d have wanted it to be different. If I would have left Pulp, and two years later was working in a shitty school while the band became successful, I would have ended up bitter. So you had to give it a go as much as you possibly could. 

7. Pulp People fan club mailing (1992)

AA: I can’t let us go past 1992 without mentioning the song ‘Live On’. Once again, Pulp struggled to capture the live energy of a song within the studio. In Russell’s book, Freak Out The Squares: Life In A Band Called Pulp, he said that Jarvis felt the song was too Baggy or Indie Disco and so it lost its moment in time. Could it have been Pulp’s first hit single?

Nick: ‘Live On’, and ‘Death Comes To Town’ was another, fell between the cracks and got left behind. It’s sad. But if they don’t get something to drag them along they get lost. We did try ‘Live On’ two or three times in the studio. It was really exciting to play live. You could see the audience liked it. It had some excitement. It had some verve. But put it under the microphone in a recording studio and it just didn’t work.

AA: Was the amount of optimism and confidence within the band – that there would be plenty more great songs soon to be written – part of the reason that ‘Live On’ got left behind?

Nick: We created new stuff all the time. We put the new stuff into the set but we were only playing short sets, 40 minutes or so. So we’d add the new songs but then some other newish ones would have to get taken out. They’d end up sitting on the shelf of the archive. 

8. Lipgloss & Cigarettes – The New Era (1993-94)

AA: So let’s move on to the New Era. You write about the day you signed to Island Records: sunny day, big cheque, champagne. What else did you remember about the event? Was it quite formal or celebratory?

Nick: We went to the Island offices down in Chiswick. There was a garden out the back and we signed there. There was a clink of glasses. After all the shit we’d gone through with Fire and the failure with FON, it seemed like such a relief to realise we were with a company that was serious. Island really did court us for a long time. It wasn’t a case of ‘see you once, see you twice, boom, sign these guys’. They kept coming to see us all the time. Dave Gilmour and Nigel Coxon came to a load of gigs and they talked to us, talk, talk, talk. And it very nearly fell through at the last minute because of the horrible contractual situation that was tying us all up. We managed to get through in the end. But it wasn’t easy. 

AA: There was a gap between the signing and you heading off to buy new drums. Russell said he spent the money buying a load of make-up. Was there nothing that you were desperate to run out and buy?

Nick: No, not really. Because you were still thinking that it could all evaporate at any moment. You could go into the studio for Island, but it doesn’t mean they’re going to release the record if they don’t think it’s good enough. You just wanted to keep your head down and keep trying to create stuff. So going out to buy a fancy sports car? No, not now. 

AA: I understand that Ed Buller [‘His ‘N’ Hers’ producer] had, not harsh words as such, but he basically said about some of Russell’s violin playing-

Nick: That it was shit! [laughs]

AA: And you mention in the book that sometimes your drums didn’t sound right and you had to record them again. Did Buller have tough love for you as well? Did he ever say, ’Nick, you’re speeding up, slowing down, and these parts aren’t quite right…’

Nick: Sometimes, yes. He wasn’t as tough with me as he was with Russ. There’s enough technology within a studio to smooth the drums out. I wouldn’t say tough love, it was more him being helpful and encouraging to try to bring me on. But drums and violin are different. The violin has to be right and Russell wasn’t particularly one for practising. He was very much of the DIY punk ethic of trying to make something interesting rather than trying to be technically proficient. 

AA: You lived in the studio’s town house around the corner on St Paul Street. Was it just you and Russ as the Sheffield contingent who lived there, or were the whole band packed in together? 

Nick: Pretty much the whole band, yeah. It was convenient because the studio was nearby. I don’t know where Jarvis was living at the time, but it just seemed easy. It was a nice house and we had a cleaner come in. You’d go to the studio and we even had our tea cooked for us.

AA: There’s a funny clip on the Pulp Hits DVD from your time living in the studio’s house. Jarvis is saying to you, “Lock the door Nick” and you’ve seemingly lost the house key that you were only given the day before.

Nick: [Laughs] Like old ladies arguing, yeah. 

AA: Settle this for us: were you given a key, Nick? 

Nick: I’ve no idea! I’m sure we would all have been given a key… you would think?

AA: Philip Castle said he first met Pulp when he unveiled his airbrush painting for the ‘His ’N’ Hers’ sleeve. Do you remember that?

Nick: No. I was never much of a fan of bands that have paintings of themselves as the cover art. 

AA: Why? Because it’s pretentious? 

Nick: No, because I think it looks a bit crap to be honest. So I was very underwhelmed. But you’re not gonna say, “That’s shit… bin it.” Jarvis was very much into airbrush art at that time. And it was the theme of all the single sleeves so it seemed right to have an airbrush picture of us for the actual album. But I’m not convinced it’s brilliant. 

AA: I once asked Philip if it was for sale. He said, “Well, it might be, but it’s been on our wall for years and my wife has come to like it”.

Nick: I’m sure it wouldn’t be cheap if he was gonna sell it. 

9. Cassette tape featuring early mixes of songs recorded during the Different Class sessions (1995)

AA: I’m going to be quick on ‘Different Class’ and Glastonbury because you understandably get asked about that period a lot. During the Tim Burgess Listening Party you shared this picture of a cassette that had early versions of some of the ‘Different Class’ songs. On side B is a song called ‘Microstop’. Is that a song that has a little gap in it, like ‘PTA’ or ‘Mile End’?

Nick: I’ll have to dig the tape out and listen to what it was. It was definitely a song that had a really tiny stop. What that will have gone on to be I don’t know. The mystery remains unanswered.¹

AA: Even before ‘Common People’ was released and before Glastonbury, you must’ve known you were going to have a big audience. Did it change the way you thought about the process of making the record? 

Nick: Not really. We never reacted to it. I don’t think it affected anything, we just wanted it to sound great. 

10. Candida, Nick & Jarvis arrive in style
at the V96 festival site in Chelmsford (1996)

AA: Here’s our next item. Do you remember where this photo was taken?

Nick: That would be Chelmsford V96. We went there via helicopter.

AA: For me, this is the pinnacle of Pulp’s popularity. It’s a few weeks short of a decade since you joined Pulp. You had Jackson [Nick’s first child] on the way and Pulp were about to win the prestigious Mercury Music Prize. You had four years of not much happening but those latter six years were incredible. What do you remember about V96?

Nick: It kind of was the pinnacle. It was a hot day but I’m struggling to remember anything about it. I enjoyed going on the helicopter and looking down on the festival site. This is what joining a band should be about. You arrive at a festival that you’re headlining in a helicopter. Yes… brilliant! Sod the cost and hope you don’t crash.

11. French publicity leaflet (1998)

AA: On to the Difficult Album, ‘This Is Hardcore’. You said before now that Jarvis and Steve seemed to immerse themselves in studio life by mixing, re-mixing, tweaking this and tweaking that. And because you laid the drums down first, I imagine you’ve a lot of memories of just hanging around in the studio with not much happening. Why was ‘Hardcore’ so hard?

Nick: I think there was a crisis of confidence looking back on it. ‘His ’N’ Hers’ and ‘Different Class’ seemed effortless. We wrote the songs, went into the studio and did them, and everyone knew, ‘that’s finished, it’s done’. Confidence? Yes. It’s great, brilliant, get on with the next song. Then you come to the Hardcore stuff and it’s like, ‘Errr, we’re not sure.’ The confidence had gone. You’d put a track up on the desk and tit around with the sound for a couple of weeks, after which it sounded just like it did at the start. They’d go, ‘Hmmm, let’s put that song away for a bit and let’s get another one on’. So you’d do another song and the same thing happened. It just seemed interminable and, really, it’s the producer’s dark job to say, ‘This is now finished’. I think he tried but I just got really, really bored of it. 

AA: Did you have to keep your mouth zipped?

Nick: You could stand up and say your piece. But you’re wasting your time because no-one’s gonna take your words and think, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s got a point’. So you just don’t say anything because nothing’s going to happen. On previous records everybody would be in the control room listening to the songs. Everyone would listen and say, ‘It’s sounding great’. But when this crisis of confidence comes on, people would think, ‘Oh maybe I’ll go and do something else’ and disappear. So it’s just Steve, Jarvis and Tommo [producer Chris Thomas] in the studio fannying around. Frustrating.

AA. But you got something out of that period that you can be proud of. 

Nick: Yeah, absolutely. Got there in the end and a great record. As the reviewers were saying, you’re going to like it, but not a lot. Because it was quite a shift into a darker idea.

12. Access All Areas pass, We Love Life tour (2001)

AA: I thought Pulp’s headline appearance at the Reading Festival in 2000 was a triumph. It marked the return of Pulp who I thought were still outstanding and still relevant. Then you buggered off for another ten months. By the time we got to the autumn tour in 2001 I sensed that the band wasn’t a gang anymore. You seemed to be tolerating each other rather than being as one. Did it feel tough at the time?

Nick: Because we had got used to the idea of being a ‘big artist’, there was less of a sense that we were actively working together towards a common goal. We didn’t have to be fighting the good fight anymore so we didn’t need a gang mentality as a band. So you do rest on your laurels a little bit. The band had also been living in each others’ pockets for a long time. It does get tough and people get their little foibles that start getting on people’s nerves.

13. Ticket and setlist from Pulp’s farewell concert (2002)

AA: That period concluded with the coldest Pulp concert I’ve ever been to – Pulp’s finale at the Magna steelworks in Rotherham. I was struck by the revelation in your book that it was Geoff Travis [Pulp’s manager] who communicated the news to you that Pulp would be taking an indefinite break. Did things just fizzle out?

Nick: There was always that caveat from the stage, ‘We’re going away for a bit… see you later’. It was never, ‘that’s the end and there will be no more’. Jarvis was never the greatest communicator. Perhaps that’s because we’re blokes, and blokes are rubbish at that kind of thing. But he never sat us down and said to us, ‘everyone, I’m feeling a bit burnt out so I’m going off to do something else’. 

AA: Did you see it coming?

Nick: Kind of, yeah. Given the trouble with producing ‘Hardcore’ and then ‘We Love Life’ taking equally as long but in a different way, if we were going to do another record, you knew it would be similar. It would not have been as easy and effortless as ‘His ’N’ Hers’ and ‘Different Class’. You knew it was going to be another three-year slog. 

14. Publicity for the Pulp reunion (2011)

AA: When I look back at the 2011-12 reunion I’m still amazed at just how popular Pulp had become in Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Where did that come from, because suddenly it felt like France had been eclipsed at the country outside of the UK where your support was the strongest?

Nick: All the other bands we’d speak to would tell us that the Mexico audiences were bonkers. They just seem to really, really like British music, and there’s a lot of it. We went there and played to huge crowds. It was a revelation. It’s always fabulous to play to new ears and new eyes because they’ve never seen the real thing in the flesh. So to be able to go there and give it with both barrels is great. We’ve got Uruguay coming up next month and we’ve never played there before. 

15. Candida Doyle in 2023 and 1986

AA: Let’s wrap up by talking about the wonderful summer of 2023. During the band’s performance of ‘Glory Days’ a photo of Candida playing her Farfisa organ is fleetingly projected onto the screen at the back of the stage. The photo was taken the best part of 40 years ago. I then looked at Candida on the stage in front of me: same stance and the same Farfisa. It was hard not to be overcome by the emotion of the moment. The Farfisa embodies the Pulp sound for me. 

Nick: Yeah, totally. Because it’s a late 60s instrument you think that it’s got to fall apart at some point, but it never has. It’s a sturdy bit of kit. I’ve watched it have water poured out of it in Poland. I thought, ‘that’s gonna be dead’, but the crew got a hair dryer on it and it turned out fine. Many years ago we tried to sample the Farfisa so it didn’t have to be taken it out anymore. Because it could be dropped, broken, all that kind of stuff, and where do you go from there? The sampling didn’t work as we never quite got the right feel of it. We even tried to buy another one. We found one in Canada but then you think that’s gonna cost a fortune to ship over and you don’t know whether it’s going to work. We did have a second one for this load of gigs. It was Bryan Ferry’s! Exact same model. Because our keyboard tech does a lot of work for Bryan Ferry. He said, “Oh yeah, Brian’s got one of them”, so we borrowed it as a back-up.

AA: Did Pulp have to give a deposit to loan it from Bryan?

Nick: I think our keyboard tech said, “I’ll not tell Bryan, but we’ll borrow it as a back-up!” 

16. Pulp setlist and confetti (2023)

AA: The Elysian Collective’s strings brought a whole new dimension to the live Pulp sound. How did that partnership come about?

Nick: We had done shows before, one-offs, with orchestras and it was always really special. Jarvis had this idea that for these concerts to be special we needed a string section to help re-create the songs. There was a core of musicians in the Collective that did all the shows. They got other musicians to join them, a northern section for the northern gigs and and a southern section for the southern ones. We got ‘two for the price of one’ because usually these sections just play the strings but the Collective’s musicians could sing, so we got a choir as well! They were great.

AA: Did that influence the songs that Pulp chose to perform?

Nick: A little bit. It influenced where songs were placed within the set.

AA: How does a band like Pulp reach an agreement on which songs to play?

Nick: Like in 2011, there’s eight songs that have to be played at every gig. It’s just going to piss people off if those songs aren’t played because they’re everyone’s favourites. We rehearsed up to 30 songs. It was a case of seeing what worked and sounded right. We also looked at how we could approach them in a slightly different technological way. Certainly me and Mark would have liked to have taken some songs out and slotted other songs in. But obviously with all the visuals it’s pretty difficult to take one song out and play a different one because the visual effects people would say, ‘We haven’t got any visuals for that’. They worked on the visuals for months and months. 

AA: I hope you and Mark can persuade the others. Last question: if it was down to you, which extra song would you slot into the setlist?

Nick: I really liked playing ‘Bad Cover Version’ so I would put that one in. The song really soars into those choruses. It has a lyrical concept that you don’t hear anybody else talking about: carbon copies are not as good as the originals.

– – – – –

Our time is up. We clear the table of debris. I give Nick the ‘Rock Bottom’ record and the Uwe Bedenbecker booklet to thank him for his time. He flicks through the booklet, then pauses and stares intently at a photograph taken at the corner of West Street and Westfield Terrace in Sheffield. He’s spotted a site where he used to paste fly-posters. Momentarily his mind is transported back to a part of his teenage years where his sole objectives were to avoid the skinheads and the South Yorkshire Police.

As we leave the pub Nick tells me he’s seeing “the chaps” this weekend. It’ll be the first time his band-mates share their verdict on the book. Except for Candida that is. Because, says Nick, she has already been texting him with encouraging feedback. Of course she has, I think to myself, for that’s what a kind and wonderful person she is.

On my way home I think of countless other questions I wanted to ask. But it doesn’t matter. I gaze out of the train window and begin to imagine the fun of seeing Pulp perform for us in 2024. We all get to be there when the next chapters are written in both Nick’s and Pulp’s stories. Bring it on.

Further reading and listening…

‘Rock Bottom’ performed live in London at the Eurovision Song Contest: YouTube

Download Pulp’s FON session from 1987: feelingcalledlive.co.uk

The Day That Never Happened: Acrylic Afternoons

Uwe Bedenbecker, Sheffield 1991-1992: Cafe Royal Books

“Suck A Dog!” Jarvis accuses Nick of losing the house keys: YouTube

Burntwood School wins the 2015 Sterling Prize: The Guardian

‘Live On’ (Live BBC session): Spotify, Pulp Wiki

‘This Is Hardcore’ in pictures: The Guardian

The Elysian Collective: Instagram

Purchase ‘So It Started There: From Punk To Pulp’: Omnibus Press

Nick Banks: Twitter / X

Acrylic Afternoons: Website, Twitter / X, Instagram

Footnotes

1. Mystery solved: I’m reliably informed that ‘Microstop’ was the working title for ‘P.T.A.’ ↩︎

Pulp vinyl reissues: This Is Hardcore

On the day This Is Hardcore was released I headed off to get my copy from Rockaboom Records in Leicester. At the time I had a bee in my bonnet about the seemingly declining quality of vinyl records. Taking no chances I deliberately bought two copies so that I could make one good set if there were any jumps, scratches or other flaws. Sure enough both copies had a jump towards the end of Side C. Back to Leicester again.

The guy behind the counter at Rockaboom was very patient, if a little quizzical, and he let me look through the rest of his stock until I was happy I’d got a pristine copy. Against the odds Rockaboom still exists – albeit in different premises – and even today I can’t visit the shop without remembering when I had five copies of This Is Hardcore spread across the counter.

The things this band makes us do.

Anyway, 18 years later and there are three separate pressings of This Is Hardcore available: the 1998 original and two reissues from 2009 and 2016.

Original pressing, Island, 1998

The original 140g double LP was pressed by MPO and packaged in a spectacular high-gloss gatefold sleeve. The album tracks cover sides A, B and C. Side D contains four bonus tracks: both the b-sides from the Help The Aged single and two of the b-sides from the This Is Hardcore singles. It also came with a Pulp mailing list postcard which was identical to that included in CD copies of the album.

There are two notable and quirky features of this pressing, and I adore them both. The first is that the last five seconds of Bar Italia play before The Fear begins. This is similar to the CD release except on the CD you have to rewind track 1 to -0:05. The second feature is the locked groove at the end of The Day After The Revolution which plays the audio of Candida’s synths for as long as you leave the tone arm down. They’re both nice touches. The sound quality is perfectly good too.

Finding a copy today is difficult but not impossible with prices for those in excellent condition starting around the £80 mark. If you’re after a pristine copy then keep an eye out for any scuffs to the outer sleeve since the gloss finish shows up imperfections more easily.

First reissue, Plain Recordings, 2009

By surprise the first reissue emerged from an obscure US label called Plain Recordings. There was clearly a demand for This Is Hardcore on vinyl and for a period of time they sold really well before falling off the radar.

It comes with a glossy gatefold sleeve that’s so sturdy and tight that it clamps the burly 180g records tightly in their paper-thin printed inner sleeves. If you manage to track one down, then don’t be squeamish about a bit of modest ringwear.

The artwork reproduction is acceptable but clearly inferior to the original both in terms of definition and colouration (vibrant blood-reds appear as passive light-browns). Oddly the labels have been completely redesigned – out with the pink and in with the dark grey – which makes me wonder if the folks at Plain had ever set eyes on the original pressing.

Like the original you can hear the end of Bar Italia before The Fear starts. However, there’s no audio in the locked groove at the end of The Day After The Revolution; instead the song fades out after 58 seconds of Candida’s synth drone. It’s surely not a coincidence that both these features are identical to the US CD release meaning that the audio is highly likely to have been sourced directly from CD.

The sound is acceptable but inferior to the original, my main complaint is that the dynamic range is compressed so that there’s less variation between the quiet bits and the loud bits. However, it’s not a noticeably louder cut.

They originally sold for around £25 in the UK but more recently the asking prices have rocketed. However, I expect they’ll begin to fall again following the Universal reissue.

Second reissue, Universal Music, 2016

And so to 2016. This issue was mastered by Greg Moore at Finyl Tweek and pressed by MPO in France. Sadly, you don’t get to hear Bar Italia at the beginning of side A and there’s no audio in the locked groove at the end of side C.

The gatefold sleeve has a matt rather than gloss finish which comes as a bit of a disappointment. The labels are near identical to the Plain Recordings reissue which (again) makes me think that no-one responsible for manufacturing the reissue has seen the original. They’ve clearly copied the labels that were designed for the Plain reissue.  A comparison of the Side A label is shown below with the 1998 original on the left.

Yet again, the artwork reproduction underwhelms and is worse than both the original and the Plain reissue. The images were purposely designed to have a painterly effect with Horst Diekgerdes’ photographs manipulated by Photoshop’s Smart Blur function. Speaking about the effect, Peter Saville [responsible for Hardcore’s art direction] said: “We don’t quite know digitally what it does but fascinating things happen between A and B that are not aesthetics-based.”

Because of the poor artwork reproduction, the impact the images had, along with their luminescent qualities are lost. The images are now just plain blurred as Webbo brilliantly demonstrates below (original on the left, reissue on the right):

But all’s not lost. The audio quality was a nice surprise and I think my copy of Hardcore is easily the best sounding of all the 2016 reissues. The cut is slightly louder than the original and background noise is kept to a minimum. At £19 for a double vinyl with bonus tracks, you can’t really go wrong.

Verdict

This one’s easy to sum up. If you care about the sound quality then I’d opt for either the original or the 2016 reissue. The Plain reissue doesn’t sound bad, just less good than the others. If you care about artwork then you have to find the original and should avoid the 2016 reissue at all costs. If you’re on a budget then your only option is to go for the 2016 reissue.

Pulp vinyl reissues: Different Class

There’s quite a lot to cover in this post as there are five vinyl pressings of Different Class across seven distinct releases. If you just want to know whether the 2016 reissue is worth buying then skip to the verdict below (spoiler: it isn’t!)

If you prefer to take the scenic route, then read on…

Original pressing, Island, 1995.

The original 140g LP was pressed by SNA in France. It’s a notoriously poor pressing with even good copies suffering from a steam of crackles and pops. Cramming over 25 minutes of audio per side doesn’t help either and while that wasn’t abnormal at the time, it makes for an imperfect listen. Even when John Peel’s personal copy was played on high-end hifi equipment last year the limitations of the pressing were painfully clear.

This initial pressing was packaged in three different ways:

• The limited edition interchangeable covers – “choose your own front cover”.
  The very first copies came with an impressive die-cut sleeve that contained six double-sided inserts. When placed into the sleeve the inserts would appear through the die-cut and complete the cover artwork. It was a brilliant idea that allowed you to choose any one of the 12 different covers to display. For added pizazz the sleeve was embossed with silver foil which perfectly encapsulated Pulp’s everyday-glamour ethos.

• The regular wedding picture
  Once the copies with the interchangeable covers sold out (fairly quickly and before Christmas ’95 if memory serves me right) the records were packaged in the now-standard sleeve featuring the picture of Sharron & Dominic’s wedding. The foil embossing was replaced and the six inserts condensed into a single insert.

• The presskit (below)
  This one is ridiculously rare, so much so that I’ve seen only two copies for sale in the past 20 years. The outer sleeve is identical to the one used for the interchangeable covers. Inside are six inserts that each feature a press clipping of a Different Class album review. It also includes the same photo and lyric insert from the regular edition with the wedding picture.

Unsurprisingly the edition with the interchangeable covers remains massively sought after thanks to the innovative packaging overseen by Cally Colomon who headed up Island’s art department. One of Cally’s former colleagues told me they had to go to great lengths to find the right sort of card that on the same side could both be black and accept the foil embossing. Eventually they located a printing firm in Birmingham that could do the job.

These days it’s hard to find a copy in pristine condition, a frequent problem being tears and creases around the front of the sleeve. Those copies that were preserved in their original cellophane wrapper (which have now become more brittle with age) can suffer from slightly warped sleeves caused by the cellophane contracting gradually over the years.

Throughout the late 90s and early 2000’s it was reasonably easy to pick up a good second-hand copy of the interchangeable covers for between £15 to £25. In 2016 you’re lucky to find one for less than £100. A copy that was still sealed in its original cellophane sold on eBay in 2015 for £300. That’s over 30 times the original retail price of £9.50! If you’re lucky enough to have one then cherish it because they’re easy to damage.

First reissue, Simply Vinyl, 2000

The first reissue came in 2000 and was released by Simply Vinyl. The 180g record was pressed by Record Industry in Haarlem, Netherlands. SV’s releases all came in an outer PVC sleeve and they did a good job of replicating the standard packaging featuring the wedding picture. Apart from the superior pressing the main difference to the 1995 original is that the labels are blue rather than white. The reissue was widely available for a number of years, particularly so in 2003 when they were made available for a lower price  of  £12.99.

Second reissue, Universal, 2004

By surprise, and without any fanfare, Universal released a new pressing in 2004. It’s notable because they attempted to replicate the interchangeable covers sleeve on the cheap. It doesn’t look half as good as the original as there’s no foil embossing. The die-cut sleeve has a slightly different shaped cut-out and the six inserts have square (right angle) edges rather than curved ones.

Strangely this release was aimed at the European rather than the UK market. I saw new copies sold in France and Spain but never in the UK where the Simply Vinyl edition was still available. I never bought a copy so can’t comment on the quality of the pressing. The Universal sticker on the cellophane wrapper proudly describes the record as being “mastered from the original tapes”.

Sadly this edition often gets passed off as the 1995 original, particularly on eBay. Sometimes this is by accident as they have identical catalogue numbers, but I often suspect it’s anything but an accident as it means they sell for higher amounts. Provided you look out for the differences described above then they’re easy to tell apart.

Third reissue, Music On Vinyl, 2011

With the late-2000s ‘vinyl revival’ it was only a matter of time before the third reissue was released with this one by Music On Vinyl in 2011. As with the Simply Vinyl pressing, this was pressed by Record Industry in Haarlem, Netherlands. Visually it’s very similar to the Simply Vinyl pressing too. Packaging wise they made a good effort but it’s not as close to the original as Simply Vinyl achieved. It’s still available though not as widely as it once was and typically sells for around £25.

I don’t have this copy (yet!) but when I get one I’ll edit this post with my thoughts on the audio quality.

Fourth reissue, Plain Recordings, 2015

Sooner or later there had to be a misfire. In 2015 Plain Recordings released a 180g edition aimed at the North American market but which was widely available elsewhere. You can tell this pressing a mile off as the artwork is completely mangled: the wedding image has a wider crop, the title is positioned adjacent to the Pulp logo rather than beneath it and – unforgivably – the typeface is vertically stretched. It practically screams ‘cheap’ at you.

The artwork alone was enough to put me off: if they can mess this up then the audio quality isn’t going to be up to scratch either. Online reviews about this label’s mastering practices bear this out. Granted I haven’t listened to it, but my advice would be to avoid this one.

Fifth reissue, Universal Music, 2016

I honestly don’t know where to start with this reissue. To be blunt, it’s a trough of dross.

Take the artwork reproduction, shown below. The Simply Vinyl cover is on the left and Universal’s 2016 cover on the right. Look at them. Now, tell me if you think this is an acceptable effort. It’s not, is it?

Maybe they rushed the cover so they could take longer to get the inner sleeve just right. But what’s this? Two brand new song titles…

Live Bed Show Doyle. Just take a moment to let that one sink in.

Do you think they were in a hurry?

Up next is Somethings Changed.

At least Wizz doesn’t possess an ‘h’. As someone whose had his name spelt incorrectly more than a few times on Pulp’s releases, Streeve Makey Sleeve Mackie Steve Mackey was lucky to come out unscathed.

They’ve not even bothered to include the album credits on the inner sleeve. Producer Chris Thomas? Not important. He only helped to define the sound of the album of 1995. Engineer Pete Lewis? Forget him. He only put together the order of the songs, creating one of the most beautiful transitions between tracks 2 and 3 on an album anywhere (listen to it – it’s perfect). Anne Dudley? Irrelevant. She only arranged the strings that transformed I Spy into the epic revenge-drama we love today. We might not see these people in Pulp’s videos or see them perform on stage, but their skill, creativity and vision was responsible for bringing Different Class into the world. For that, they deserve to be credited in the same way they are on other copies of the album.

As for the technical stuff, this is a 180g MPO pressing. Like the other reissues it suffers from relatively high levels of background noise. The label on my copy has circular suction marks which suggests a lack of quality control on the manufacturing side.

Verdict

Steer well clear of the 2016 reissue. It’s a poor effort on all fronts and undermines the very reason why people like ourselves go out to buy our favourite music on vinyl. If you want the best quality audio and artwork reproduction then I’d go for the Simply Vinyl reissue or failing that the one by Music On Vinyl. For its conceptual brilliance then there’s no substitute for finding the original pressing with the interchangeable covers. Holding the album with the cover of your choice still gives me a little kick 21 years later. Sadly, the cost of owning one will give your wallet a big kick.

Sixth reissue?

Now more than ever Different Class deserves to be released as part of a proper deluxe edition box set. We have to accept that it will only sound good on vinyl if it’s split across four rather than two sides. Carefully recreating the original interchangeable covers would be massively popular and make up for the shortcuts in the 2004 reissue. There’s plenty of extra audio and video that could be included across multiple CDs and DVDs. Finally, there’s a wealth of material to fill a book about the making of the album and the success that it and the band enjoyed. With the 25th anniversary due in 2020 I really hope that Universal have a big plan for something along these lines. It needs to be well prepared and well executed. If ever there was a dream job for me, this would be it.

Next week: This Is Hardcore

Pulp vinyl reissues: We Love Life

I planned to review Different Class after His ‘n’ Hers but with eight different issues it proved to be too big a task for one week. Taking the easy way out I turned my attention to We Love Life. It’s been years since I listened to it all the way through. So long in fact that I couldn’t quite remember the track list. Shame on me.

First pressing, Island, 2001

Another confession: I never bothered to pick up a vinyl copy of We Love Life back in 2001. After the lavish packaging of Different Class and This Is Hardcore I expected far more than the plain packaging that it came in. The Island art department would never have settled for something quite as mediocre back in the mid-90s heyday.

On its release the vinyl issue proved to be difficult to track down in my home town of Birmingham. I ended my search at HMV’s massive Oxford Circus branch. But then I saw the £16 price tag, the measly single rather than double vinyl pressing and the uninspiring packaging. I shrugged with indifference, then placed it back on the shelf. Like a growing number of things about Pulp in 2001 it felt a bit disorganised, half-arsed and apologetic. I’d waited three years for a new Pulp record and for that singular moment when you walk into the record shop giddy with pride and anticipation. And when you’re in your early 20s, three years feels like an eternity.

The original 140g pressing is dependable but otherwise unremarkable. It was cut by Sean Magee at Abbey Road Studios and is another quiet cut with Side A exceeding 25 minutes and Side B exceeding 28 minutes. Not ideal. The vinyl artwork is ever so slightly different to the CD artwork when you look closely at the title which is rendered in the Dymo-style embossing tape (an odd typeface choice if ever there was one, even if the title was a last-minute decision).

Perhaps because of the production numbers as well as the unpopularity of vinyl back in 2001, this original pressing is hard to come by. When it does come up for sale the prices get ridiculous – £60 to £80 depending on the condition – so it’s good that it has been included in the latest series of reissues, especially given that it was overlooked as part of the 2006 CD Deluxe Editions.

Second pressing, Universal Music, 2016

Like the other albums, the We Love Life reissue is made by MPO in France and is pressed on 180g vinyl.

The first thing you notice is how well they’ve reproduced the artwork. It’s clearly the most competent effort of all the reissues thanks to how basic the artwork is. In other words there’s very little to mess up, as you can see from labels below: the original on the left and the reissue on the right.

Both pressings sound similar too. For the most part it’s difficult to tell them apart. Compared to the original there’s slightly more background noise on the reissue which detracts from the quieter moments, particularly when the record’s played at a higher volume. But otherwise the reissue is more than good enough.

My copy came out of the sleeve with minor scuff-marks on the record’s surface. I’m not the only one to notice this as it affects some of the other MPO pressings too. It’s nothing too serious but you’d certainly expect better quality control standards. If you buy a copy that’s also scuffed then don’t feel awkward about asking for an exchange.

Verdict

This is a really welcome reissue and it’s a relief to see they’ve done a competent job.  In my opinion it’s not worth anyone paying over the odds just to track down the original when the reissue is as good and as faithful to the original as this.

A final moan…

By far the greatest limitation of both the original and the reissue is that almost 54 minutes of audio is being crammed onto one record. It would’ve been far better to have issued a double vinyl package with each side having a 45rpm cut lasting around 13 minutes. There’s an ideal and even way to split the songs:

• Weeds, Weeds II and Minnie on Side A;
• Trees and Wickerman on Side B;
• I Love Life, Birds and Bob Lind on Side C, and
• Bad Cover Version, Roadkill and Sunrise on Side D.

How difficult can that be? Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 15 years before Universal sees sense.

Next week: Different Class (wish me luck!)

Pulp vinyl reissues: His ‘n’ Hers

As part of HMV’s vinyl week in June, Universal Music reissued Pulp’s four studio albums that were originally released by Island Records between 1994 and 2001: His ‘n’ Hers, Different Class, This Is Hardcore and We Love Life. HMV marketed these reissues as ‘advance releases’ meaning that they’ll be available through other retailers from September.

With the exception of We Love Life, each album has already been reissued on vinyl. I thought it’d be a good idea to compare each of the reissues against the original releases to help fans and collectors decide whether to search out an original or to settle for one of the reissues.

Let’s start with His ‘n’ Hers…

First pressing, Island, 1994

The original 140g LP was pressed in France by SNA. Curiously Babies wasn’t included on the LP but was included on the CD and cassette formats of the album. The reasons for this aren’t clear, though it may have have been because Babies had already been released as a single back in October 1992. Excluding it from the LP could also have helped to increase the chart position of the Sisters EP which featured Babies as its lead track and which was released soon after His ‘n’ Hers.

Overall, this is a great item: the artwork is sharp, both the inner and the outer sleeves are glossy and the audio packs a good punch. It’s still relatively easy to track down a second hand copy but expect to pay upwards of £45 for one that’s still in really good condition.

Second pressing, Music On Vinyl, 2012

The first of the reissues was released by Music On Vinyl in December 2012. It’s easily distinguishable as it’s a 2LP edition and comes with a gatefold sleeve. The first record contains the remastered album and includes Babies. The second record contains bonus tracks that were previously released as a 2CD Deluxe Edition in 2006. At around 30 minutes per side, this second record pushes the boundary way too far in terms of the quantity of music you can reasonably fit onto an LP without detriment to the sound quality.

Both the records are pressed on 200g heavyweight vinyl. There’s also an oversized photo booklet that reproduces the 2CD Deluxe Edition booklet which feature Jarvis’ excellent sleeve notes. This pressing is still widely available, selling for £25-£30.

So far, so good. But there are two areas for improvement.

Firstly, the cut is noticeably quieter compared to the original pressing. If you’re not fussed by that you simply turn the volume up a bit and accept that the crackles and imperfections are louder too.

Secondly, the reproduction artwork leaves a lot to be desired. It appears as if Philip Castle’s painting was scanned from the CD booklet. To disguise the limitations MOV appear to have arbitarily increased the saturation and contrast. “Job done!” you can hear their artwork coordinator exclaim. Well, not quite. You can see see the difference this makes in the picture below. The original sleeve is on the left; the reissue on the right. On the original, you can not only read the time on Candida’s watch but you can practically feel the itch from the bobbles on her knitwear. The rest of the artwork has been re-typeset and broadly follows the same layout as the original.

Third pressing, Universal Music, 2016

The 2016 reissue was released by Universal Music. The lacquer was cut by Greg Moore at Finyl Tweek and the record was pressed by MPO in France. At 180g, this is heavier than the original pressing but lighter than the 2012 reissue. By omitting Babies and keeping the release to a single record it’s more faithful to the original and so gets a thumbs-up from me. At £19 this is also the cheapest of the three releases.

To my ears, the audio is indistinguishable from the 2012 reissue which suggests that the 2006 remasters were used. It sounds perfectly acceptable too, but like the earlier reissue is a quieter cut compared to the original release.

With even more contrast applied to the image, the artwork is even worse than the 2012 reissue. I appreciate it’s a very pedantic point, but some of the people that Pulp referenced in the acknowledgments have had their names spelt incorrectly. And yet those individuals who put together this reissue have seen fit to give themselves a name credit in the same acknowledgement section. Yes, yes, I know that no-one cares about this stuff apart from those fans who know which song Nick Banks plays a fire extinguisher on. Nevertheless, it gives the impression of a reissue project that was put together a bit too hastily for its own good.

The verdict

If you’re after superior audio and artwork quality, then there’s no contest: you should track down the original 1994 pressing and accept that you’re going to have to pay more for it.

If that’s out of the question for you, then there’s not much to choose from between the two reissues as both are decent enough pressings. However, I think the Music On Vinyl release has the edge since for a few extra quid you get the second record of bonus tracks and the chance to delve into Jarvis’ detailed sleeve notes.

Next week: We Love Life

Freak Out The Squares: Book Review

At last! A book about Pulp, by a member of Pulp. Not any member of Pulp either, but Russell Senior. He is, by some margin, the band’s most astute, opinionated, authentic and cerebral voice.

It’s all here too: the early days, the bust-ups, the set-backs, the reunion, the Britpop anecdotes, the put-downs and the downright odd occurrences that only someone in a Very Successful Band would encounter.

He’s chosen to weave the story of Pulp’s 2011 reunion throughout the book’s main story which, as you’d expect, focusses on the period from 1984 to 1997. The approach works well and brings to the fore the contrasting fortunes between the young man navigating his way through early adulthood and the middle-aged rock star coming to terms with success.

That Russell was the band’s no-nonsense taskmaster is hard-wired into the Pulp story. Freak Out The Squares reinforces that notion further.

As the band’s oldest and most level-headed member, Russell assumed the role of the ‘responsible adult’. When he wasn’t calling out other band members for titting about, he occupied himself by organising, managing, promoting, scheduling, negotiating, fixing, sorting and motivating.

In the early days he ploughs massive effort into getting bookings outside of Sheffield. He was savvy enough to realise that any band can put on a triumphant show in their home town when half the audience are mates of the band. Getting concerts in Hull, Bath, Chesterfield and Uxbridge – where strangers would turn up to see Pulp – was a different matter entirely and a passport to better things.

When he suspects a well-known Sheffield venue of short-changing the band, Russell’s the one who gets on their case and ultimately takes matters into his own hands. When he’s not kicking against mediocrity, the band’s label, Thatcher or Jarvis’ dubious fashion choices he’s busy cajoling the rest of the band to take their endeavours seriously.

So it’s fitting that when the reunion concerts begin, it’s Russell who sees them as an opportunity to have a summer adventure criss-crossing Europe. His condition for agreeing to play the concerts was that the tour would be taken at a leisurely pace, with festival appearances scheduled a week apart from each other. This was to allow each performance to feel special and to provide plenty of time for sightseeing in between (for which read meandering through Europe’s rural backwaters avoiding anything as bland and as functional as a motorway). When the rest of Pulp agree additional festival appearances, Russell refuses to compromise. That accounts for why Pulp performed some festivals without him. As Russell explains: his fear of flying wasn’t always the sole reason for his absence.

Travelling separately from the rest of the band and crew, he has a ball travelling in a small campervan – affectionately termed the ‘Russ Bus’ – with assorted helpers, family, friends of family and partners in crime. Of all the band members, he’s clearly the one having most of the fun and shows the younger generation he’s travelling with how to misbehave with style.

For the Britpop obsessive there’s plenty of tales that feature the usual suspects: Chris Gentry from Menswear, Luke Haines from the ‘Otters’, all of Blur (usually about their mildly-twattish behaviour), Longpigs, and Suede. There’s a delightful tale about a dispute involving Simon Gilbert’s drum kit. It illustrates brilliantly the petty behaviours and one-upmanship that punctuate the tedium of life on the road.

Surprisingly there are some chunks of the band’s history that Russell has little or no memory of. It’s a trait he shares with Jarvis, although the impression I get from the book is that Russell retains a better grasp than Jarvis does of the key events and their sequencing. Russell admits he has no recollection of either the His ‘n’ Hers UK tour or the 1996 Arena tour despite these each being the biggest tours the band had ever embarked upon at the time. Disappointingly he has nothing to say about the writing and recording of the Separations album – the sound of which he had a significant influence upon. Perhaps there’s a scrapped chapter titled ‘Eastern European Disco Sound’ that didn’t make the final draft.

Reassuringly, those events that are already familiar to a Pulp fan get a more detailed explanation. His chapter about the expedition sailing in a dinghy through Sheffield’s subterranean waterways makes for a superb companion to the lyrics of Wickerman and Jarvis’ short essay on the Rivers Porter and Don. Read it and marvel at the sense of adventure and fear they would’ve felt.

In the book Russell again makes clear that he left the band in circumstances that were far from ideal. That feeling of there being unfinished business – and of wanting to put that right – was felt strongly enough to overcome his other concern that a badly-executed reunion would tarnish Pulp’s legacy. It will come as a relief to his bandmates that he’s resisted the temptation to reopen those old disagreements. Although he doesn’t shy away from expressing his opinions and frustrations, he does so in a way that preserves his own and Pulp’s dignity. He admits that the book is a reflection of events seen through his own eyes, accepting that others won’t always have seen things in the same way:

“There are characters that don’t really exist. Those that do often didn’t do what I say they did. Many of the cleverest things they said are attributed to me. This story is best regarded as historical fiction based upon real events.”

In fact, it’s often more revealing what he doesn’t say. Even once you allow for the fact that Mark Webber didn’t become a full member of Pulp until 1995, Mark barely features in the book compared to the other band members. Infer from that whatever you will.

I thought it was telling that by the time he properly turns his attention to Mark, it’s because of a disagreement they have at the 2011 Dour Festival about the position of Webber’s keyboards on the stage. Tempers flare. It’s a situation that’s uncannily similar to the 1993 episode featuring Simon Gilbert’s drum kit. There’s humour in this book where you least expect it. There are laugh out loud moments too: look out for the tale featuring Mr. Ball and a separate one featuring the Palme D’Or.

In summary then: this book is a triumph.

It’ll be cherished by those of us who’ll take our love and memories of Pulp to the grave. More importantly, it’s a crucial read for those who – pity them – only have a casual interest in Pulp. Fundamentally he writes about themes that are far bigger than Pulp: determination, passion, loyalty, rejection, adventure, success, fame, bloody-mindedness and spending your formative years entwined in a city losing the fight against deindustrialisation.

Which brings us to Sheffield.

Freak Out The Squares confirms what we already know to be true: Pulp were only a going concern in the 1990s because, one by one, the other band members moved down to London. But it was the influence exerted by Sheffield – and Russell specifically – that ensured Pulp made it to the 1990s at all and went on to become the band we recognise today.

For that alone, we owe him great deal.

Welcome

This is a new blog about the band Pulp. It’s linked to the acrylicafternoons.com website and is for all the stuff that’s better suited to a blog.

Now… let’s try to get the first proper post published.