Pulp: Former publicist for Sheffield band on This Is Hardcore, the album that 'ended' Britpop

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 “ground 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, co-founder and head of PR company Savage & Best, over a video call from her home in North London.

“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 five months 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, they called 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 the resulting disillusionment with fame endured in the band's material.

Pulp had to follow up to their era-defining record, Different Class, and Cocker 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”.

It 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).

Her writing about This Is Hardcore, she says, marks a “trilogy of Britpop books”. But the album, she says, is “probably my favourite record of the 90s. There's so much depth to it”.

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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’m A Man, which Jane says was about the “toxic masculinity of the 90s”, decades before the term’s current common use.

It is obvious that Jane has not approached this purely from a PR perspective – she speaks with a passion that marks her out as a life-long music lover.

She grew up in Derbyshire and her initial connection with Pulp came when, in the 1980s, she was at university in Nottingham with Peter Dalton, an original founding member of the group with Cocker in 1978.

Jane herself 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 with Mel Bell Publicity, later going to Virgin Records, where she briefly 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 go with him to dinner with a team of journalists 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 pounds and it came to £195 pounds. 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.”

She then moved to Best In Press, before it morphed into Savage & Best, and 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, says Jane, she 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 office, became a major part of the country’s biggest scene of that decade, Britpop. Some credit the company with instigating the scene, but they did not come up with the word itself (“everyone tries to lay claim to inventing the term,” says Jane). Still, it made for plenty of front covers in the British music press for her clients.

She adds: "I was very lucky, and people say: ‘Did you know it was extraordinary?’ I didn't know that, but I knew I was having an amazing time.”

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 by artists ranging from MF Doom to Madonna and from Black Sabbath to Britney Spears.