Bleary and weary, This Is Hardcore is a weird centerpiece for a book like Paul Burgess and Louise Colbourne's colorful coffee table-ish Hardcore: The Cinematic World of Pulp. However, the album's artistic bona-fides make the choice less odd. The record spawned four lush music videos, inspired collages and paintings, and had one of the decade's most recognizable (and infamous) jackets, though Burgess and Colbourne mostly steer clear of exploiting that arguably exploitative image of model Ksenia Sobchak prone and in the buff. There is a completely hilarious image of the censored Malaysian version of that cover with an ugly gold sweater photoshopped onto Sobchak.
There are also lots of behind-the-scenes shots and stills from the "Party Hard", "Help the Aged", "A Little Soul", and "This Is Hardcore" music videos; a storyboard for "Party Hard"; examples of Pulpy artwork (most notably Sergei Sviatchenko's disturbing collages); and shots of the band on stage at the release party.
The authors and several guests supply essays on the times, and director Garth Jennings conducts a very, very brief and unilluminating interview with band leader Jarvis Cocker that is almost comically split into two installments. Without question the most substantial piece of text in Hardcore is a 14-page interview with keyboardist Candida Doyle, who is unabashedly unenthusiastic about both the album and the era this book celebrates. However, her weariness over that period captures the temper of This Is Hardcore more honestly than most of the rest of this rather candy-coated book does. An essay by Pulp-documentarian Florian Habicht is also a must-read for the most horrifying interview-mishap tale ever told... that he was brave enough to recollect it in this book for posterior posterity is way more hardcore than anything on This Is Hardcore.
