This Is Hardcore

Jane Savidge

★★★★

Bloomsbury Academic, £9.99

ISBN 9798765106952, 168 pages Top-drawer study of Pulp’s top-shelf reaction to fame

It’s a measure of the divided response to This Is Hardcore

– both within and without Pulp’s immediate circle – when it was released, in 1998, that the album’s 25th anniversary has inspired two separate books attempting to explain its purpose. Where Paul Burgess and Louise Colbourne’s visual tribute, HARDCORE: The Cinematic World Of Pulp, examined the record from an aesthetic stance, Jane Savidge’s 33 1/3 entry offers a track-by-track study, placing Pulp’s boldly vulnerable meltdown within its pop-cultural context as Britpop’s lights-out moment. Taking Jarvis Cocker’s Jacko stage invasion at the 1996 BRIT Awards as “Year Zero for what would one day become This Is Hardcore”, Savidge reasonably suggests that the band, committed to their chosen art form – if not prepared for what would happen if the wider world committed to them just as passionately – weren’t built for the fame that swallowed them whole following the release of Different Class. As PR for the band at the time, Savidge has all the material needed to back her claim, and bolsters it with witty insights into the music and a chatty, conversational tone that creates a huddled intimacy around a record that drew some pretty stark dividing lines for both fans and band alike. Her conflicted response to the album’s cover underscores the challenge that awaits anyone attempting to grapple with Cocker’s pornography/fame metaphor; her passion for what lies within lets the reader feel they’re not alone in loving a work for which the term “flawed masterpiece” seems tailor made. Jason Draper