PULP: This Is Hardcore

 

(#585: 11 April 1998, 1 week)

 

Track listing: The Fear/Dishes/Party Hard/Help The Aged/This Is Hardcore/TV Movie/A Little Soul/I’m A Man/Seductive Barry/Sylvia/Glory Days/The Day After The Revolution

 

Regular readers will be aware of certain facts. The Pope was, and most likely will still be, a Catholic. Bears do their excretory business in the woods. And I have a long-standing problem with Pulp.

 

I am not the best person to write or even ask about Pulp, or perhaps I am the best-placed person to do so. You decide. All I know is that, once upon a time, in the second half of the 1990s, Pulp was our favourite band. By “our” I mean mine and Laura’s. I remember how on the Monday morning This Is Hardcore came out, I stood outside Chalky’s record shop, across the way from the Gloucester Green bus station, waiting for it to open so I could buy a copy (because for some long-forgotten reason I had that Monday off – it was 30 March, two weeks before Easter). That’s how much we liked them.

 

And, my goodness, had we adored “This Is Hardcore,” the album’s second trailer single. It was absolutely unlike anything else going on at the time – it certainly had nothing to do with “Britpop.” It was nearly six-and-a-half minutes long but still felt a little too short. Too incendiary for British forced-to-be-happy radio, and therefore it missed the top ten, but we knew it was genius.

 

How little we knew. About anything.

 

I am perhaps the best-placed person to ask or even write about This Is Hardcore, the album, because I recognised what Jarvis Cocker was, to a great extent, putting himself through. We were born four months apart. We both grew up as awkward, harried, arty prodigies in dead-end lower middle-class ghettos. We were outsiders rather than true sons of the parish. We both had to get the fuck out of where we were because I can’t speak for JC but I doubt I would have survived if I hadn’t. We came down to London in the eighties to re-create our selves, at a time when you could live an enriching and culturally nourishing life on little or no money. As twentysomethings we were already perennial underachievers.

 

As thirtysomethings we rose somewhat. I of course didn’t rise to anywhere near the same extent as JC did but I was carefully climbing up the career ladder, earning more money and, whisper it, “getting somewhere” or so I imagined. For both of us it was the classic late-starter effect – good things came somewhat later in our lives than perhaps they should have done, and we didn’t really know how to handle them.

 

So we both went mad, in our differing ways. JC finally became a “proper” pop star and, instead of being given the present he had been expecting, he was just handed a lengthening and glittering ticksheet of things he was expected to do. I found, as my nineties eccentrically wore on, that the career ceiling was now quite close to my head. My limitations became starkly apparent, and I dealt with the dilemma in unwise ways. Not in the way that JC did; I did not indulge in cocaine or/and heroin, did not lock myself away in a New York hotel to watch pay-to-view pornography television channels and come to weary conclusions about that business’ similarity to the music industry.

 

Nonetheless, my badness was unprettily bad. I can only summarise what I remember of 1998 – ask me what I did that summer and to this day I honestly couldn’t tell you – in the manner of somebody resolutely speeding towards a brick wall at one hundred miles per hour, but in slow motion. I finally and predictably hit said brick wall at 12:30 p.m. on Saturday 24 October 1998 in Trevor Place, London SW7. Now that was the sound – and spectacle – of someone literally losing the plot.

 

In addition, I was failing, with equal misguided resolution, to admit to the high probability that, in the second half of the nineties, Laura and I just weren’t working out, as a couple. We were too different as people and wanted different things. It was our fault and nobody’s fault. I was given a very clear escape route by somebody else – a work colleague – in that period. I didn’t take it, despite dozens of opportunities, and in retrospect it was completely right for me not to do so. But too many mistakes were made. I had to face up to the very basic fact that I was not, and never would be, “an Oxford person.” London, yes, that’s where the life (at that time) still was; Oxford, you’re fooling yourself. I wasn’t put on this earth to be an Oxonian yuppie, hence I failed at it. I shouldn’t have taken that route in life in the first place, I know, but circumstances at the time were what they were, and I was what I, at the time, was.

 

I don’t intend to probe too deeply into the rather horrible mechanics of my situation – I’ve already told you far more than you need to know. What I am saying here is that I could listen to Jarvis Cocker and Pulp – because that, to all meaningful intents and purposes, was what they had, by the mid-nineties, become – and think YES; I recognise all of it. Promised the space age when we were kids, expected to clean toilets as grown-ups, the meek shall inherit fuck all (and that was maybe the original intention; keep the serfs in their place); the whole kit.

 

But there is recognising the situation and expressing that recognition – two separate things - and Lou Reed’s old homily about what lies between thought and expression comes instantly to mind. You can comprehend the world’s mess, and how it intertwines with your life, with frighteningly clear and encyclopaedic precision, but how do you communicate that comprehension and, more importantly, what answers do you propose? It can be as frustrating as articulating your inarticulable love of music in ways that can only read as partial, slipshod and compromised because, guess what, so many of the important elements go beyond what words are capable of expressing.

 

As Laura and I learned when we listened to This Is Hardcore on the evening of Monday 30 March 1998 and realised – oh…er…um…this isn’t exactly great. Is it?

 

A lot of ambitious claims have been made about this record over the ensuing almost three decades. None really stands up. “Did Pulp put out one of the greatest albums ever made?” In fairness, they didn’t. Was This Is Hardcore “the album that killed Britpop?” No – Britpop did a more than adequate job of killing itself off; no single record could have wielded the metaphorical sword. It isn’t a neglected masterpiece, the ultimate anti-pop statement (a blessing usually given by jaded male rock critics who don’t like pop, a.k.a. music mainly liked by women) or a searing prophecy of our now-diminished world of artificial intelligence and incels. Nor is it – sorry, Jon Savage - “the oddest and most disquieting album ever to make it to the top of the album charts,” although the great man is right when he remarks “it was a record that was not necessarily supposed to be enjoyed.”

 

What, then, is This Is Hardcore if none of these things?

 

Well, I’ll tell you. This Is Hardcore is, clearly and unquestionably, one of the most contemptuous and sarcastic albums ever to top the chart. It’s the sound of Jarvis Cocker losing every plot there is to lose, and he knows it. Indeed, in the introductory “The Fear” – behaving in the classic manner of too many British modern jazz records, i.e. STARTING WITH THE DIFFICULT BIT, WHAT A WAY TO WELCOME THE UNDECIDED – he misquotes Paul Daniels’ catchphrase: “You’re gonna like it, but not a lot.”

 

Paul Daniels; there’s someone who could be really frightening at times, and not always intentionally. Have you seen his 1987 Hallowe’en television special, the one where he tries to escape from an actual medieval iron maiden? Now, that was scary. It was also original and invigorating television. It was a spectacle that Daniels had designed – to a point; the BBC insisted that he draw some way back from what he had originally planned - to thrill his audience.

 

But Cocker just seems intent on pissing off his audience, or getting rid of his existing one to make way for a smaller and wholly different one. Does that gesture sound familiar in the recent history of social media? He smirks about “pretty soon you’ll all be singing along (to “the words of my song” – note that “my”)” in a valiant bid to stop being a pop star, to dissuade anybody from buying any more of his records and to stop anybody offering him any more work.

 

It doesn’t help that musically “The Fear,” as with far too many songs on This Is Hardcore, settles in that ponderous early-seventies midtempo (un)glam(orous)-rock sludge pool cherished by so many people who delude themselves that The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust represents the apex of Western culture, complete with a horrible early seventies chorus of backing singers. But this is unmistakeably Cocker sticking his tongue out and sneering at the hundreds of thousands of people who’d loved Different Class on the basis that he’s having a breakdown. All of which catharsis is prefaced by a reference to an obscure compilation of fifties lounge music which in 1998 would have only been known to a few well-connected hipsters (so Cocker, like me, spent way too much money in Intoxica! Records on Portobello Road. So what?). He’s having a hissy fit and laughing at the masses who formerly loved him at the same time. Quite a double achievement, really.

 

One of the main reasons why This Is Hardcore generally sounds so migraine-muddy is that Pulp’s chief arranger, guitarist and violinist Russell Senior, had recently quit the band on less than good terms. He’d seen how at first hand Pulp had stopped being a collective and become Jarvis plus backing band. His record company had made it clear that he was the main event, and he started to believe that – hence, “my” rather than “our” song, play what he wants. You can see him on Later With Jools Holland performing “This Is Hardcore” and basically faffing cod-melodramatically about the studio – he thinks he’s Serge Gainsbourg but really he’s P. J. Proby - and conducting and directing the rest of the band like he’s Paul Anka and the guys get shirts, don’t make the fucking maniac out of him, where’s Russell/Joe?

 

Anyway, Senior couldn’t really be replaced, so relief guitarist Mark Webber took on everything – and his playing is generally overdone, overheated, overpowering, overbearing and harsh (and induced on my part an urgent need for paracetamol after I’d listened to the album again for this blog) like he was the new Mick Ronson.

 

The other main problem with the album is that so many of its songs really aren’t that good – “B-sides,” Laura and I glumly nodded to each other on our first listen to underwhelming trifles like “Dishes,” “TV Movie,” “A Little Soul” and “Sylvia.” Now some of those songs are not without their merits. If you extract “Dishes” from the surrounding 1998ness of things, it’s actually quite a touching little song about not wanting the world when you can find joy – and real love – in everyday life. Touching, that is, if you can tear yourself away from the latent resentment in Cocker’s petulant and hoarse, drug-wrecked, Strepsils-requiring vocal. Richard Hawley – not involved with This Is Hardcore, although he should have been – would have handled and interpreted this song beautifully.

 

And “TV Movie” and “A Little Soul” work quite well as a twofer – the former sees Cocker morosely musing about his girlfriend having just left him and expecting her to come back. His is a forlorn hope, as any listener familiar with “Miss My Love Today” by Gilbert O’Sullivan and “Laid” by James will immediately recognise, and the song in truth is a bit of a whinge, although I like odd touches such as the whistling-while-the-rhythm-section-staggers-around-it interlude, as though he thinks that The Very Best Of Roger Whittaker will get her back. But “A Little Soul,” which is ostensibly about his father, maybe spells out exactly why she left “yesterday” – he’s inherited his dad’s tendency to knock his other half around. It doesn’t make the song any less boring, musically, but it’s worth a thought.

 

If anything, Cocker seems a bossy old sod at times. “Party Hard” is an unattractive (perhaps deliberately so) Bowie-circa-Lodger synth-art-disco pastiche with the singer grumpily telling his subject to stop enjoying herself and come back to him (is Jarvis really Terry Hall’s secret cousin? This is all very “Too Much, Too Young” and “Tunnel Of Love” but in reverse; she’s busy having fun rather than knuckle down under his joyless reign). “Her” voice is portrayed by a smug vocoder. But the supposedly anti-manly “I’m A Man” is instantaneously hobbled by a ghastly and very dated “ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-MAN” chorus refrain that Chicory Tip would have rejected for a 1976 B-side.

 

Likewise, when the time comes for, and demands, some answers to this particular midlife crisis – and we have to remember that this is a 34-year-old man (only three years older than Charli xcx was when she made brat) singing about getting old (“A man of twenty-seven talking about early retirement,” as Irvine Welsh has his character Heather Thomson think) – Cocker doesn’t really have any (so he’s also pop’s Perry Anderson). In “Glory Days,” which musically resembles an ill-fitting rejigging of the elements of “Common People,” after a fairly long list of actually quite acute observations of how grown-up reality wrecks childhood dreams – because they are opposing ends of the same capitalist telescope (not that Cocker says anything about that) – the final, “climactic” verse descends into non-committal centrist gibberish.

 

Similarly, “The Day After The Revolution” – Cocker is no Bill Fay – arrives at the profoundly depressing and unsatisfactory Road Less Travelled conclusion that…

 

What could it be? What is Jarvis Cocker’s final message to a benighted and systematically-repressed public? Kick over the statues? Bring tanks and guns onto the street? Hang robber barons from lampposts?

 

Oh, no. None of that dangerous socialist talk.

 

“Why did it seem so difficult to recognise a simple truth?”

 

Look, he’s going to tell us, the guy whose initials are the same as Jesus Christ! Hush, everybody, he’s about to speak…

 

Oh look, he’s in the rocket capsule and there’s this guy in a robe sitting down with a mask and crystal ball and he turns around and there’s a mask…

 

Go on, Jarvis, we’re listening! What is your Great Truth like what is that will be inscribed on one of them tablets of stones like them Ten Commandants (We all harbour our inner Bluebottle)?

 

He peels off the mask, and there’s another mask beneath, so he peels that one off too, and it’s…

 

“THE REVOLUTION BEGINS AND ENDS…WITH YOU.”

 

Oh.

 

Um.

 

Right.

 

…IT WAS HIS ALTER EGO ALL ALONG! THE DEMON WAS WITHIN HIMSELF!

 

Well, that was a fair point – and to be fair, if you’d watched The Prisoner closely, the outcome was signposted pretty heavily throughout many of its episodes.

 

But it isn’t 1968 any more, and this…isn’t really…going to wash, Jarvis.

 

“The revolution begins and ends with you.” Well, yes, in an elemental get-up-off-your-arses-and-FIGHT sense, you can see what Cocker is getting at. But I’m not sure he can, or does. To my ears, however, it just sounds like the blandest of blandishments. Hallmark Cards, Yoko Ono on X, foreword by Duncan Goodhew level. The sort of sub-Blairite guff you’d spot in the back pages of the Mail On Sunday magazine. Or Oprah magazine.

 

That’s your payoff. “The revolution begins and ends with you.” It’s all your fault. There’s a third way. I haven’t got any answers or my record label’s forbidden me from giving you the real ones. Tom and Sarah Centrist wouldn’t sing along to those at the barbecue.

 

Which brings me to introducing that most unlikely of Then Play Long figures, Nick Hornby, into the discourse.

 

As long-time observers will know, I’m generally at polar odds with the way Hornby views and uses music. But a stopped clock is right twice a day, and when he reviewed This Is Hardcore for SPIN magazine’s May 1998 issue, I think he got it more or less right. If I may be permitted to quote, this section is especially relevant:

 

“…This Is Hardcore occasionally reminds one why nobody listens to new wave albums anymore. In the U.K., new wave was the Boomtown Rats, Joe Jackson, Tom Robinson — mild punk rock with intelligence, sincerity, an organ, and a wearying tendency to write lame songs satirizing the power of the popular press. So it doesn't help that Cocker sounds most like Bob Geldof when he is trying to sound like David Bowie. New wave is a period of British pop that hasn't aged well, perhaps because it aimed for musical neutrality and ended up sounding merely anonymous.”

 

To be fair, “Glad To Be Gay” is a rightfully angry protest song and a proper “anthem” that will endure for as long as there are people to hear and sing along to it, and Joe Jackson – who memorably sang some of “Common People” on William Shatner’s immortal interpretation, and made it sound even angrier than the original – has subsequently proved that he has far more strings to his bow. But only Paul Morley otherwise seems to have spotted the fairly ineluctable truth that Jarvis Cocker’s singing voice generally sounds like that of Bob Geldof – whiny, throaty, entitled. Moreover, Cocker shares with Geldof a tendency to construct overweening, declamatory, self-satisfied, self-righteous epics; he could easily deliver “I Don’t Like Mondays” in the first person. Take the Springsteen out of “Rat Trap,” add in a bit of early Roxy Music and Sailor and you have “Common People.”

 

That sense of anonymous neutrality is certainly palpable in “The Day After The Revolution.” After delivering his profoundly underwhelming “solution” – it isn’t exactly “kick out the jams, motherfuckers,” is it? – Cocker, perhaps aware that he’s harrumphed himself into a corner, then utters a string of pointless non-sequiturs (as non-sequiturs could only, by definition, be). “The Rave is over…Sheffield is over (well of course it is, Jarvis; you pissed on out of there the first chance you got)…Bergerac is over (??!! Oh, it’s a JOKE)…Men are over, women are over (over what? Over whom?)…Cholesterol is over(doing it?)…The breakdown is over (no, it isn’t really, eh Jarv; otherwise wouldn’t you have put out a proper follow-up album?)…irony is over…” The dream is over, don't believe in Beatles, Yoko and me...

 

What can it all mean? Hey, it’s a bunch of random doodahs slung together that can mean WHATEVER YOU WANT THEM TO MEAN MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN. Nice to see Cocker hadn’t forgotten the fortysomething fellow reading Watchmen comics in his mother’s attic. Then…the song just goes nowhere. The closing synth chord goes into loop until JC’s voice mysteriously/randomly reappears at 9:53 (the whole thing goes on for nearly fifteen minutes) to intone an echoey “BYE BYE.” You too, Jarvis – bye bye, we certainly won’t be buying any more of your records, then.

 

What Geldof hasn’t done, however, to the best of my awareness, is to inhabit the deeply creepy personas that Cocker seems unduly keen to inhabit in some of his songs. I have so far deliberately left three songs from This Is Hardcore out of my discourse in order to illuminate this point. The first of these is “Help The Aged,” which was also the album’s lead single. Laura and I didn’t think much of it, and neither did many other people because it only got to number eight. It’s another attempt at a wave-your-hands-in-someone’s-air mass singalong which fails primarily because it isn’t about what you think it’s about, i.e. a plaintive plea to look after the old folks because, well, they were once like us and now they’re losing everything, including cognisance, balance, bodily functions, memory and hope, and who sings about that type of thing these late nineties days?

 

Except it’s actually another excuse for “Jarvis Cocker” to try to get his leg over with somebody younger. It’s the classic construct behind so many pop songs – the older man telling the younger, ahem, girl that she should go with him (“When You Ask About Love,” “Run To Me”), or else she’s a girl who’s grown into a woman, and ooer is it now legal for me to say I fancy you (“Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen,” “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon”)? “Give us all a feel,” “Teach you stuff, although he’s looking rough.” Was this backstage chatter from Jim’ll Fix It rehearsals?

 

And I’m afraid it’s not too different in “This is Hardcore,” the song, either. One of two songs on the album where the stops have really been pulled out musically – strings and piano by Anne Dudley, etc. – it is superficially quite impressive, still (though, like so many of the album’s other songs, suffers from Webber’s headachy guitar fuzz attempting to fill the space that Russell Senior left – at times it’s akin to bad Suede).

 

But what exactly is Cocker inviting us to share here? He says that, as a connoisseur of pay-per-view televisual pornography, he was struck by the similarities between the porn business and the music industry (as I have already intimated above but hope you don’t mind rhetorically bringing back here). So one could interpret the subject matter of “This Is Hardcore” as a young woman (“teenage wet dream” – oh dear) being exploited and used up by The Business. I hope that’s what Jarvis means anyway because his bellowing “THERE IS NO WAY BACK FOR YOU” and “THIS IS ME ON TOP OF YOU” over hammering drums, staccato piano and that annoying fucking guitar (again) sounds like the end of an average night out with Gary Glitter. It certainly doesn’t tempt me to revisit the song, with its basic Peter Thomas sample and Cocker’s finally rather overstated “sensuality" (and that's to say nothing about the doubts Jane Savidge, the band's publicist who wrote the 33+1⁄3 book about This Is Hardcore had about the project, including its cover - and yes, Lolita was heavily mentioned as a relevant comparison point - nor indeed "A Little Soul"'s musical nod to..."The Tracks Of My Tears").

 

Worse than that, these songs even make me view Different Class in a different light. That Jarvis – he’s a bit of a smarmy little cunt, isn’t he? That “Pencil Skirt” (“I really love it when you tell me to stop”). That “I-Spy.” He goes to bed with married women. He spies on other women. He patronises yet other women. Somebody really needs to introduce his body to a can of Mace and a pair of secateurs. Not only that, he sneers at the working class (“Mis-Shapes”) as only the middle-class son of a Conservative councillor (so much for “working class grit”) can. It taints its predecessor. What a spiteful thing for an album to do.

 

Yes, I hear you all cry in hoarse protest – but Jarvis Cocker is only playing characters. This isn’t him expressing his personal views (though I doubt from published evidence that his opinion on the working class in general is radically different); this is him using these situations as analogies for a different but comparable pain. Much as people these days say about Geordie Greep. The difference is that Greep makes it abundantly clear that the men of whom he sings, and whose roles he acts out, are caricatures up to a point, but beyond that point reveal themselves to be not quite irredeemable, even as shits. You end up feeling sorry for the pathetic sub-Andrew Tate incel of “Holy, Holy” who ends up begging his paid escort to put her hand on his knee, even if he has to pay extra for that.

 

And, like Cocker’s characters at their most finely drawn, Greep’s men can only subscribe to an idealisation of love and are thoroughly incapable of dealing with love as a reality. In the CD booklet of This Is Hardcore we find individual members of Pulp occupying the same space in the London Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, but not connecting with, various models who, though very real, have been stylised and photographed in such a way as to make them look like paintings or sculptures. Not real human beings. The back cover is a blurred through-the-curtains shot of nocturnal central London, rendered to make it resemble Hell. And this disconnection between concept and reality is certainly the case with the co-protagonist of “Seductive Barry,” the song you all thought I’d forgotten.

 

You see, this was the second of the two songs which swept Laura and myself away when first we heard it. We couldn’t believe how monumentally great it was.

 

And I still can’t. In the middle of this otherwise desolate sharkshow of an album comes the single best thing Pulp ever recorded. Suddenly the squalor and sarcasm vanish, instead of which we have a patient bass, hovering keyboards, sedately-shuffling percussion, guitar that is decorative rather than obstructive.

 

And the voice of Neneh Cherry.

 

You can say what you like. This guy’s in love with an image. Someone he sees on that pay-to-view channel. Or someone he glimpsed on a billboard. Somebody even who he saw board a bus in 1976 and she turned and gave him the most radiant and ineradicable of smiles and he never saw her ever again but not a day passes when he doesn’t think about her and that smile. And maybe this is all playing out in his imagination – he sometimes sounds aggrieved as if to protest “what, you don’t believe me?” On occasion he’s a little too assertive, as if not even convincing himself (“so what’cha gonna DOOOOO about it?”). In this way, the title of “Seductive Barry,” which I presume was the song’s original working title (more White than Gibb or Manilow, I’d guess), is effective because it roots transcendence in the humdrum and average.

 

But she, as in the voice and spirit of Neneh Cherry, is with him all the way, from the opening staccato unisons for voice and vocoder – I’ve only seen Dan Perry spot it, but that methodology (“I. Don’t. Know. No. IIIIIIIIIIII DOOOOOOOOOOOOOONT know”) was a central part of the working vocabulary of Shriekback (R.I.P. Dave Allen – so the song’s really about Barry Andrews!).

 

And the song narrows down to its essence of heartbeat – the moment, at 5:37, when Anne Dudley’s strings and harp swim into the picture like reclaimed guardian angels, is one of the most sublime moments in the entirety of Then Play Long (who saw that coming?). It is as though Martin Fry’s lexicon of dreams had suddenly, if briefly, become tangible. Remember how Greep’s The New Sound concludes with his reading of “If You Are But A Dream.” “I’m not going home tonight,” says Cocker. He turns around. There is no home. He doesn’t turn around. “If this is a dream – then I’m going to sleep for the rest of my life”…and Cocker has never sounded happier. We can’t see him move, but he is moved. Irony is fucking over.

 

He has no time for a “reality” where Pulp release one more album, which Laura will not live to hear and which was produced by a photograph of Scott Walker, and Jarvis Cocker will become a sort of ex-pop star-at-large before pulling some of Pulp back together for what might not yet be called a comeback. Nor the “reality” in which the cover star of This Is Hardcore – what has happened to her? Is she even still alive? What did she become?

 

How little we all knew. About anything. Except that which was worth knowing.

 

“Pretty green eyes so full of sparkle and such light. Though life's been unkind, she chose not to cry. But it's all right. Now your lover has come home.”

(“Pretty Green Eyes” by Force & Styles featuring Junior, track one, CD one, of the mixed compilation This Is…Hardcore, released by Beechwood Music in 1997)