Uncommon people
As a publicist, Jane Savidge represented some of biggest bands of the Britpop era, including Sheffield’s own Pulp. She talks to John Blow about her new book on their record This Is Hardcore.
IMAGINE being responsible for a rock star’s public relations and seeing that client run on to the stage at Britain’s biggest music awards showcase to confront the “King of Pop”. Then he parades his backside in mock flatulence as a protest and later gets arrested – no action taken, ultimately, though comedian and ex-solicitor Bob Mortimer had offered his counsel – with his face inevitably spread across the next day’s newspapers.
Quite the day of work ahead. But for Jane Savidge, former PR for Sheffield band Pulp and other household names, that moment between Jarvis Cocker and Michael Jackson at the BRIT Awards in 1996 represented the “Year Zero” of what is one of her favourite albums from the decade, This Is Hardcore.
“He became the fifth most famous man in Britain overnight, along with Frank Bruno, John Major, Michael Barrymore and – this takes it back – Will Carling,” says Jane, cofounder and head of PR company Savage & Best, over a video call.
“That sent him spiralling into this fame that he'd been waiting for his whole life. He wanted to basically become as famous as an astronaut so he could get girls, that was kind of the childhood dream. But the fame that he got was the wrong kind of fame.
“It sent him over the edge, really, I think. Policemen stopped him in the streets and he’d expect to be arrested and they asked for an autograph.”
On the BRITs incident, Jane adds: “Jarvis went into hiding for 24 hours, but (during) those 24 hours, I think a lot of the newspapers rethought it. Because it was (some time) after the Jordan Chandler case – where Michael Jackson had settled out of court – and because Michael Jackson was trying to behave like a Christ-like figure on stage with all these children, I think some kind of reflection from those tabloids brought them down on Jarvis’s side. So I think it was a very brief moment of rejection that Jarvis had got and then after that, there were calls for him to be knighted, for instance. We only had 24 hours to deal with the fallout and after that, it was fine.”
It may have been a stunt which overshadowed the band's creative output at the time, but Cocker’s resulting disillusionment with fame seemed to endure in the band's material.
Pulp had to follow up to their era-defining record of 1995, Different Class, and wrote the 1998 album This Is Hardcore, which, says Savidge,
“is basically Jarvis’s way of equating fame with hardcore pornography – the way that you are examined completely, microscopically”.
The latter is a record she explores in her new book, titled after the album itself and brought out as part of publisher Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series of short books about popular music. It comes after Savidge’s past works Lunch With The Wild Frontiers (2019) and Here They Come With Their Make Up On: Suede, Coming Up and More Adventures Beyond The Wild Frontiers (2022). The latest, she says, marks the third in a “trilogy of Britpop books” but the album it is written about – the one “which ended it all” for the genre – is “probably my favourite record of the 90s. There's so much depth to it”.
She notes the album’s fourth track, Help the Aged. “Only Pulp could have got away with releasing a song like that – which became a top 10 hit, although it disappeared very quickly – because it's not sexy to write songs about old people.” Then there is I’mAMan , which Jane says was about the “toxic masculinity that was surrounding Britpop in the 90s”, years before the term’s current common use.
It is clear she has not approached this purely from a PR perspective but as a music lover.
‘It sent him over the edge, really, I think. Policemen stopped him in the streets and he’d expect to be arrested and they asked for an autograph.’
Jane grew up in Derbyshire and her initial connection with Pulp came when, in the 1980s, she was at university in Nottingham alongside Peter Dalton, an original founding member of the group with Cocker in 1978.
She was in a band called Kill Devil Hills – managed by Ian Dickson who went on to be the “Australian version of Simon Cowell” – when she started her PR career, later briefly going to Virgin Records, where she worked with Roy Orbison. “That was an incredible experience because I got to know him for the last six to eight weeks of his life,” she says.
“I had to take him to dinner with a journalist from the Mail on Sunday. I was too young to have a credit card, so I'd taken all the money I have in the world out so that I could pay for this meal in Kensington. I had £200 and it came to £195. I remember handing the money over, thinking, please let this be enough. But he was one of the sweetest people I've ever worked with, I think.”
Later, at Savage & Best, the firm had huge success representing the likes of Suede, The Verve and Elastica. Then Pulp also brought out three impressive singles – O. U. (Gone, Gone), Babies and Razzmatazz.
“Just after My Legendary Girlfriend and just before O.U. was when we took them on at Savage & Best.
“NME rang us and said: ‘Why have you taken Pulp on, they’ve been going for 12 years?’ I said: ‘Because they just suddenly got really great’.”
In those days Jane, now 59 and living in north London, would "identify scenes that I thought were important. So for instance, if I was doing (PR for) Gaye Bykers on Acid, I realised that if I put them in a scene called the ‘grebo’ scene, they’d get twice as much press,” she says. “So I kept doing this.”
Pulp and Suede, the sort of bands who she hung around with in the firm's Camden offices, became a major part of the country’s biggest scene of that decade, Britpop. Some credit the company with instigating the scene, but she says they did not come up with the word itself (“everyone tries to lay claim to inventing the term”). Still, it made for plenty of front covers in the British music press for her clients.
“I was very lucky, and people ask: ‘Did you know it was extraordinary?’ I didn't know that, but I knew I was having an amazing time. But looking back, I think probably I was 23, 24, 25. Everybody has an amazing time when they’re that age.”
Jane Savidge’s book on Pulp’s This is Hardcore is published in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series on March 7. The 33 1/3s are short books about popular music, focusing on individual albums.