‘Like James Bond playing strip poker in a sex dungeon’: Pulp’s This is Hardcore at 25

In 1998, Jarvis Cocker had begun to feel like meat that was past its sell-by date. Observing the public’s ‘voracious appetite’ for pornography, he saw a mirror held up against the showbiz conveyer belt. Mark Beaumont charts the colourful origins of Pulp’s ‘unforgiving’ sixth album