This Is Hardcore is Pulp’s cry for help. A giant, sprawling, flawed masterpiece of a record, the 1998 album manages to tackle some of the most inappropriate grown-up issues of the day fame, ageing, mortality, drugs, and pornography and still come out crying and laughing on the other side. The subject of pornography dominates the record from its controversial artwork to the images conjured up by songs like “Seductive Barry” and the title track after Pulp’s main man, Jarvis Cocker who’d spent most of his teenage and adult life chasing celebrity, only to be cruelly disappointed when it finally arrived in spades hit upon the grand notion of using pornography as a metaphor for fame. The album’s commercial failure as a follow-up to the band’s Britpop-defining, Different Class, also symbolizes a death knell for Britpop itself.

Dark, right? Except just like Pulp themselves, Jane Sav