“You can’t be a spectator. You gotta take these dreams and make them whole.” 

After over a decade releasing music, Pulp’s Different Class album brought the band the success they’d long aspired to, but the level of fame and tabloid scrutiny eventually soured the atmosphere for them. The pressure was on for their follow-up album, This is Hardcore. Movies had been an ongoing lyrical theme in the band’s work, and near the top of the band’s contributions to the screen were the music video for Hardcore’s title track, released in 1998, and then 16 years later, a film documenting the conclusion of the band’s 2012 tour in their hometown of Sheffield. This piece looks at the history that led to the song and music video for “This is Hardcore,” which serves as a microcosm of Pulp’s work, and the evolution of its resonances by the time of the feature-length film made with the band, Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets. Then we hear about the highlights and challenges brought in making these works, from the filmmakers themselves: “Hardcore” director Doug Nichol and Supermarkets helmer Florian Habicht. They share their experiences working with the band to actualize the band’s long-held audiovisual ambitions.

Pulp’s visual imagery had involved its band members from the start, with a distinctive DIY chic and personality showing even in their brief music videos. The “Common People” clip shows Cocker trapped behind a shopping cart’s bars, illustrating the commodification of his character by the song’s calculating student (played by Sadie Frost, who had memorably epitomized sinister excess in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where she’s bedecked in the ornate costume design of Eiko Ishioka). 

The film-related credentials of the band were strong: Cocker and Steve Mackey had studied film in college, and had expressed interest in filmmaking. The group contributed songs to film soundtracks including Trainspotting and Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine. Mark Webber eventually became a curator of avant-garde cinema and has since put together film screenings at ICA London, Tate Modern, and Anthology Film Archives, among several other venues. 

Hardcore’s title track was six minutes long and represented a notable departure from the upbeat pace of previous catchy Pulp hits. There’s a slow, morose atmosphere and an eerie 1960s orchestral sample. Cocker’s protagonist in this song is a demanding narrator with telling lapses across the song. The lyrics use pornography as an analogy for how show business uses and disposes of artists — as the distanced narrator gradually develops a wearier tone, he exclaims: “I’ve seen the storyline played out so many times before” — and the video heightens the lyrics’ double meanings and citation of role-playing. The explicit opening line “you are hardcore, you make me hard” is countered by the images on-screen of Cocker’s film-within-a-film character restrained, hands tied and mouth gagged as a gun-wielding woman walks into the room. The lyrics are superficially about sex, but lines like “You can’t be a spectator[…] / you gotta take these dreams and make them whole” were a reflection of Cocker’s inner dialogue with himself, struggling with the newly acquired pressures and conflicts of stardom. The band’s usual lyrical material was resonating differently: they’d gone from underdog protagonists, left out of many social situations and practically reduced to voyeurism through being limited to experience things only as secondhand witness, to being the condescending subject of cultural voyeurism (“Common People”), to, by the time of writing Hardcore, being reduced to objects of tabloid fodder. A warped full-circle had formed around Pulp following their mega-watt success: the band were no longer common people and could no longer be the spectators, and had in fact become the target of spectatorship.

The song’s accompanying video is a movie-within-a-movie within a music video, depicting the volatile glare of showbiz. The fact that the clip has glaring missing information is explicitly acknowledged in the video: there’s a succession of screen tests, “scene missing” title cards, a scream with missing audio, and camera zooms leading to missing scenes. These are all devices deployed in service of the video’s plot: a group of contemporary film archivists had discovered reels from an unfinished film shot in the 1950s and assembled a rough cut of the never-released film as a tribute to its late filmmaker. Cocker plays the incomplete film’s star, whose chance at movie glory ultimately fizzled with the unfinished film after the movie’s director was fired mid-production. The plot about this incomplete film is symbolic of the risks of lost potential in art: through the filmmaker and the film’s B-movie lead actor, as well as the film archivists’ challenge in assembling something of the detritus.

One of the great spectacles of 1990s filmmaking was Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which happened to be filming next to the “Hardcore” video at Pinewood Studios in February 1998. “Hardcore” and Eyes Wide Shut share the themes of an outsider’s voyeurism and mysteries drawing on the past: the blurring in “Hardcore” of old Hollywood with the contemporary aligns with how the contemporaneous Eyes Wide Shut is based on the 1926 Arthur Schnitzler novella Traumnouvelle. “It’s a fake world and everyone is smiling, but there’s a very dark undercurrent,” director Doug Nichol says of the video’s plot in the book Hardcore: The Cinematic World of Pulp, co-edited by Paul Burgess, a personal band photographer for Pulp. Nichol also revealed in conversations for this piece that Kubrick’s film and the “Hardcore” video share a crew member: Charles Staffell, who worked on special effects for films from as early as the 1940s (including Powell & Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going, David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Ken Russell’s Valentino, and David Lynch’s Dune, among many others). Staffell worked with Kubrick back in the 1960s on 2001: A Space Odyssey, then again three decades later on Eyes Wide Shut. Such extensive credits in old Hollywood filmmaking made him a fitting part of the team for “Hardcore.”

The existential anti-climax depicted in the line “What exactly do you do for an encore?” was inverted when it was adapted with a slight alteration to “This is what we do for an encore” as the title of the band’s reunion tours starting in 2023. This offered a happier resonance for the song: their concerts have regularly sold out internationally and their first new album in decades, More, was released June 2025. (The one sad change was the loss of Mackey, who passed away in March 2023. The tours and the new album are dedicated to his memory.)

“This is Hardcore”: An Interview with Doug Nichol

The Hardcore album’s downbeat shift had led with the first single: the mortality-focused “Help the Aged,” complete with a video referencing the staircase to heaven from Powell & Pressburger’s A Mattter of Life & Death. When it was time to film a music video for the unusual title track, director Doug Nichol got involved. Nichol, a Grammy-winning director of several music videos and music-related films, had also served as a DP or cameraman on films like Madonna: Truth or Dare and U2: Rattle and Hum, and he’s since gone on to direct documentary films including California Typewriter featuring Tom Hanks. Nichol conceptualized Pulp’s most elaborate music video up to that point. A YouTube comment from a fan exclaims, “Pulp finally got a proper budget to make a video!” But as Nichol tells it, this was not exactly the case at the beginning.

Nel Dahl: You’ve been involved in a variety of prominent music-related films and music videos. How did you get involved working in this kind of filmmaking? Was it something you actively pursued or did it just happen?

David Nichol: I started making music videos right out of film school back when MTV was in it’s heyday.  It was a very creative period as MTV needed music videos for their 24-hour cable channel and bands and record companies had a lot of money to spend on them. I first started working as a cinematographer and then moved into directing.

ND: How did you get involved with Pulp?

DN: My production company in London sent me the track, and I couldn’t believe what an amazing song it was. I was listening to it and going through a collection of photography/art books I had, looking for some inspiration to spark off the music. I opened this one book called Still Life — edited by Diane Keaton — that was a collection of obscure promotional photos taken on Hollywood movie sets in the 1950s and ’60s — seeing those images together with the music started it off for me.

I wrote up something that was less a music video treatment and more like a film review of an upcoming movie. The idea was that a group of film archivists had found a bunch of film reels from an uncompleted movie titled This is Hardcore that was made for Embassy Pictures in 1957. The director, Lewis Fulton, had been fired mid-way through production and the studio pulled the plug on his movie. The archivists had restored the film as best they could without a script, piecing together the scenes, the screen tests, and whatever else they could find to try to understand what the film was about. The band liked the idea and we got the go ahead to start pre-production.

ND: Was there anything from the experiences in your previous work that you learned that helped in constructing and filming the “Hardcore” video?

DN: Not really anything specific, but the more experience you have, the more you figure out how to accomplish things with limited resources, how to shoot certain things, how to stretch the budget to get what you want done.

ND: The song is dark in contrast to their catchy pop hits and was seen by some as a creative risk. Were you conscious of this as a risk for the band, and did that affect anything in how you put together the video?

DN: I just thought it was an amazing song — totally different from anything I had heard before. I think they were interested in doing new things musically from what they had already done, and they wanted the video to reflect that as well.

ND: Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey studied film and expressed an interest in filmmaking. How involved were the band in the creative aspects of the video? Did you have a lot of discussion with them before the shoot?

DN: When I met with Jarvis and Steve, they had recently watched Douglas Sirk’s Written On The Wind, which was shot in the late 1950s and had the Technicolor feel of some of the photographs that were in the book Still Life. We all were coming from the same place on this, and it was a very creative collaboration working with them. The ideas got very big, and yet we had a limited budget to make it. Eventually, most of us kicked in our fees and worked for free to get it made. I remember going to a meeting at the record company with Jarvis and Steve and the head of the label asking them if they really wanted to give up some of their advance to get the extra money for the video. They really cared, and they gave up a lot to get it made.

ND: Powell’s Peeping Tom and Sirk’s Written on the Wind were cited as influences. Were there any other movies you were thinking of? Are there other movies you’d recommend to people who love this video?

DN: In the opening, we stole some lines from period films for the “screen tests” the actors were doing. The was a line from Written on the Wind where the lead actor says, “I went to college once, but all they found were rocks in my head.” The actor in the music video messed up and said, “all they found were rats in my head.” But it kind of works. Douglas Sirk’s melodramas that he made in the mid-1950s —  Written on the Wind, All That Heaven Allows — with their great use of color are always great to see.

ND: It’s fascinating how “Hardcore” was filmed on Pinewood Studios at the same time Kubrick was shooting Eyes Wide Shut. What was it like filming near a huge spectacle in film history? Did you or the crew have any run-ins with Kubrick’s shoot or anything else interesting being shot at Pinewood?

DN: We took over two soundstages at Pinewood Studios and shot the video over 4-5 days. During our lunch breaks, some of us snuck onto Kubrick’s stage where he was shooting Eyes Wide Shut at the time. He was taking a break at the time, but we wandered about the New York apartment set before getting physically thrown out by a security guard. We used this old guy named Charlie Staffell — well into his 80s at the time — to do all the rear-screen projection in the video — he was doing Eyes Wide Shut as well. Charlie had done everything from David Lean’s Brief Encounter to Kubrick’s 2001.

ND: The level of detail packed in this is impressive, from the “scene missing” cards to the authentically sourced costume design. What is your favorite aspect of the video? Is there a rarely acknowledged aspect or detail of the video that you love?

DN: Everyone who worked on the video took a lot of pride in their work and really went all out — from the costumes and make-up, the art direction, the lighting, etc. I think everyone loved the band and the song and wanted to do their best work. We decided not to do any lip-sync except for the last part of the song. Just as a back up, in case it didn’t work in the edit, I did shoot Jarvis performing the whole song in front of a rear-screen projection of a massive 1950s countdown film leader. It was such an incredible performance, but we decided not to use it in the end and just stick to the original concept.

ND: What was the most challenging part to shoot? Was there anything you wanted to do but couldn’t due to time or budget constraints?

DN: There were a lot of challenges making the video, and most of them had to do with the budget. One of the reasons why were were able to pull it off was that we agreed to also shoot another music video for a different track called “Like a Friend,” which was for the soundtrack to the movie Great Expectations starring Gwyneth Paltrow). So we added that budget to the “Hardcore” budget and had just enough money to finish the sets. After we shot the final Busby Berkeley scene of Jarvis on the huge turntable with the dancers at 1:00 am for “Hardcore,” we quickly put the band’s instruments on the turntable, changed the lighting, and Pulp performed “Like a Friend” — and we shot it really quickly, in an hour. It was fun for everyone as “Hardcore” has almost no lip-sync or performance in it and “Like a Friend” was them doing what they do live on stage. The whole crew loved it.

Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets: An Interview with Florian Habicht

“You suddenly get into the pop arena, and you realize you hate it, it’s full of people with values you don’t like, and that’s probably what led to us making This is Hardcore. So you try to make the weirder record to escape from all those people,” Steve Mackey stated in the 2014 film Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets, which depicted Pulp’s 2012 farewell tour conclusion in Sheffield. During that tour, an independent filmmaker from New Zealand, Florian Habicht, had just had his film Love Story (available to view here) accepted to the BFI London Film Festival and he was allowed to invite someone. Jarvis Cocker came to mind, and to Habicht’s surprise, Cocker accepted after seeing Love Story’s trailer. That led to a discussion between Habicht and Cocker where they started talking about making a film together. “The main character in the film is Sheffield, the city that I was born in and the city that Pulp formed as a group,” Cocker has said. “Most of the songs that people know of Pulp […]often are about people in that city. Real life things are fascinating to me and I would be pleased if that remained of Pulp, the fact that it was pop music but it took ordinary life as its subject matter and tried to elevate it into an epic thing.” As Habicht explains, he had to work past many challenges in pursuing and making the film, including winning over the skeptical band, who had turned down many film offers (Cocker was bored by the music “rockumentaries” he’d seen), and then getting the participation of the locals in Sheffield.

Nel Dahl: You attended a Pulp concert as far back as the 1990s in New Zealand. What do you remember about that show?

Florian Habicht: It was 1998 and part of the “This Is Hardcore” tour. The only thing I remember is buzzing after the show, and scribbling down a note on a serviette — spur of the moment — for the band. It was an invitation to take them to an Auckland West Coast beach. I thought I could drive them in a friend’s Morris Minor. I gave the note to one of their security guys.

ND: Did you know you wanted to make films at that point?

FH: Yes. In 1998 I made several short films, on 16mm, Super 8 and S-VHS. Absurdist love stories with Nino Rota soundtracks. Federico Fellini was an inspiration, but even more so were his soundtracks by Nino Rota. Music for the circus of life… this really inspired me. Now, with what’s happening in the world when I read the news, I’ve lost faith in humanity, and would no longer give life a Nino Rota soundtrack.

ND: You’ve discussed how you met with Jarvis and how he told you he’d wanted to do a film about the city that had inspired the music, and how you too had been thinking of doing an unconventional film about Sheffield and Pulp’s music. At what point did the idea occur to you before this discussion?

FH: About three nights before we met. I was crashing at a friend’s place near Brick Lane, and had insomnia on her couch. That’s when the idea came to me. After just making my NYC romance Love Story, where the entire narrative was crowd-sourced on camera from real New Yorkers, I wanted to make a film that captures the spirit of Sheffield, and treats the everyday people as stars, or gives them an equal spotlight with the band. 

All of my early films were collaborations with artists I admired, and I cast artists rather than actors. People I wanted to hang out with. So it’s something I love doing.

ND: And what was the initial idea Jarvis had?

FH: Jarvis told me that he wanted to make a film about people that lived at Sheffield’s Park Hill, the largest state housing development in Europe, and then follow those people to the Pulp concert. So we both wanted to make a film about everyday people. But filming at Park Hill proved to be difficult because of its sheer size. Jarvis gave me [his lyric book] Mother, Brother, Lover with Pulp lyrics underlined and scribbled down notes as we spoke over a flat white, as a roadmap to his Sheffield. For me to capture Sheffield’s unique Northern spirit. My other idea was to have recreations, and a kind of fabricated day in the life of Sheffield; like Jarvis going for a swim in an olympic pool before the concert. Channel 4 Television loved this idea when producer Alex Boden and I pitched it to them, but Jarvis wanted to keep things real. I think my concept may have inspired the Nick Cave film 20,000 Days on Earth, which was just being made with Channel 4 at the time.

ND: What was it about Pulp that made you want to do a film about their work?

FH: Their songs really resonate with me. My favorite track is called “Dishes”. I don’t know any other bands that have written the most moving song about doing the dishes. I love that one can actually hear the lyrics in Pulp songs, and that they are all little stories that are acted out in my mind. I also wanted to be a singer when I was young, even started a band and played at school, but I couldn’t sing! It was cool to make a film about a bunch of people whose musical dreams came true.

ND: It’s interesting Pulp agreed to make a film with you because, as it’s discussed in the film, the band had become wary of tabloid-style fame. What do you think it was about the trailer of your film Love Story that got Jarvis to meet you and discuss making a film together? And then, during your talk, what do you think was it about you that convinced him to work with you? Especially since you’ve said “Jarvis didn’t think there was enough time to pull it off, and that’s when I sort of talked him into it.”

FH: Love Story is a film literally written on the streets of NYC. The story is crowd-sourced —on camera — from real New Yorkers. And the characters are loveable NYers with attitude and humor! Jarvis has a passion for filmmaking, and loves the everyday, so I think this is maybe why the trailer and film struck a chord with him. We naturally got on, and he said that if I could secure the funding, then let’s make a film. I was experienced at making films with small budgets, and got a fantastic team together in a very short amount of time.

ND: The film’s concept is credited to you and Jarvis. What level of involvement did the band have? Were there stipulations the band made from the outset, like “We don’t want to do this kind of film or this kind of film scene,” requests on type of lighting, or cliches to avoid?

FH: When it came to the edit, Jarvis was very involved, and his thoughts were bang on. I remember walking in circles in a park in Melbourne, with Jarvis sharing his thoughts on the phone. Steve, Candida, Mark, and Jeannette, Pulp’s manager, also viewed edits and shared their thoughts. When I met the band for the first time in Paris at a Pulp gig, Nick showed me his daughter’s football team from his phone, wearing their Pulp shirts, as they were sponsored by the band. This is the first scene in the film! I was supposed to meet the band and management the next morning for a breakfast meeting, and completely slept through my alarm! When that happened, I thought that I’d blown it all, and that was the end of the film, but I think Pulp thought it was very rock ‘n roll! Jeannette, their fantastic manager, was very forgiving on the phone.

For the shoot, Jarvis gave me lots of ideas and inspiration, connected me with his friend and original Pulp band member Tim, and sister Saskia, and then gave us complete freedom in Sheffield. I felt like I was dropped out of a plane with a parachute, video camera, and a book. Jarvis had underlined certain lines in Mother, Brother, Lover. That was like a map of his Sheffield. For example: Castle Markets — “worth a visit.” He also scribbled down Deborah’s surname from “Disco 2000.” I met many Deborahs claiming to be Deborah from “Disco 2000,” they all wanted to be in the film! I never met the real Deborah. The band toured South America while my team — that included DOP Maria Ines Manchego, producer Alex Boden, sound recordist Mark Bull, and editor Peter O’Donoghue — were in Sheffield in the gloomy middle of winter. So Pulp left us to it; yeah, there was lots of creative trust.

The only rules we were ever given was around the concert. The band didn’t want any cameras on stage we found out on the day. This was a shock for me, as we only had one night to capture it all. We managed to sneak two on the stage that night, and nobody minded. DOP Maria Ines Manchego did an amazing job orchestrating the concert shoot, as we only had one shot, and no previous experience filming concerts! Lots of my friends from New Zealand flew over to film the gig at Sheffield Arena. I filmed from inside the crowd, and also spent time in the toilets, asking concertgoers if they believed in an afterlife. My favorite footage of the concert was from composer Cam Ballyntine, the partner of our DOP, who had never filmed before! His shots of the show are the last shots of the film, when it’s snowing confetti on fans during “Something Changed.”

ND: The level of access granted to you as an independent filmmaker from New Zealand is impressive: Candida Doyle talks of her struggle with arthritis, Jarvis’ sister and mother were involved. When being interviewed about the film, Jarvis said that he was surprised at how you got Sheffield locals to open up, something he struggled with when growing up there. Did your experiences in your previous work help in getting people to talk with you?

FH: I’ve always been good at disarming people. Maybe because I don’t look too flash and can be very direct. My father was the same when he photographed Londoners during the Swinging Sixties. I love capturing on camera the magic of meeting people for the first time, as opposed to getting to know them first for a long time, and then filming. Having said that, I did feel that we had to gain people’s trust in Sheffield. It was the most challenging place I’ve ever approached strangers for filming, and the understated and thoughtful responses were GOLD.

ND: You’ve said how the concert to be filmed “was six weeks away, we didn’t have a script, and we didn’t have funding.” With the short timeframe, and no funding secured, how did you manage what must’ve been major pressure being suddenly dropped into this?

FH: Alex Boden, the producer, and I were unsuccessful in securing funding from the public funding bodies in the UK and New Zealand, so Alex bankrolled the shoot on his credit card! He was very relaxed despite this huge commitment, and he secured public and private funding once there was a rough cut. Interestingly, most of my films have gotten off the ground like this. With Love Story, I self funded the shoot, and the NZ Film Commission came onboard once we had a rough cut and some festival invitations. For documentary or more experimental filmmakers, its a model that can bear more fruit with funding bodies, but usually means less income for the filmmaker. I’ve been given advice to never put my own money into my films, but I do it all the time, and it’s why I’ve made eight films to date, rather than waiting years for funding. To start making a documentary, all you really need is a camera and some hard drives.

ND: Did you shoot a lot that didn’t end up getting used?

FH: At one point, the film was going to be called “Sheffield Sex City,” after the Pulp song. We did some interviews and filmed at La Chambre, which is the largest swingers club in Europe. This didn’t make it into the final film, but will remain ingrained in our memories! There was even a real python involved. We could have easily made a film of just the interviews I got with the band, and called it “Talking Heads.” I also thought about making an extended interview/tribute to Steve Mackey, as there’s so much great footage of him.

ND: What did you learn about the band members?

FH: Jarvis doesn’t like pigeons. When meeting Candida at a hotel, she will suggest meeting behind the piano! She was the most brave in the film I think. Mark is very funny. He enjoys being an anti-rock star. He’s also curated and written books about experimental cinema. Steve also studied film, and I remember him and Jarvis lining up for an Alejandro Jodorowsky in-person screening at SXSW in Texas. Nick is lots of fun, and I had the impression that he missed not playing with Pulp the most when the band was having their extended winter sleep.

ND: How was the reception at the time for you? In recent times, over a decade later, with the band being highly discussed again with touring and a surprise new album, have you received more feedback and interest in your film?

FH: The timing was actually a coincidence, but our Sales Agent Altitude is going to distribute the film now too in the UK, and there’s talk of some special cinema screenings once all the paperwork is done. We still get requests for special cinema screenings regularly from all over the world. Back in 2014, the film played super well at festivals and we picked up some audience awards. The sound from the concert has to be experienced on the big screen! We mixed it in London and it was mastered by the band (just after Led Zeppelin left the studio from mastering their greatest hits!). The ACE Hotel in L.A. — where Charlie Chaplin had his film premieres — was my favorite experience. The cinema is like a cathedral. More name-dropping: Beck was in the audience at the Ace Hotel and asked me if I’d like to make a concert film about him and his band. In New York, a few days later, the film was projected on three different rooftops, all next to each other, simultaneously — with the statue of Liberty in the background. And Liberty, the young Sheffield star of the film with the amazing outlook on life, introduced our film when it opened Sheffield DocFest.

Most people who have seen Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets have seen it above the clouds! In 2014 and 2015, I think every airline had our film as part of the in-flight entertainment. Unfortunately, it didn’t play too long at the movies, as it was mainly Pulp fans who came to see it. We always wanted to make a film that would reach further than just Pulp fans, but I think the film’s audience has mostly been Pulp fans. Maybe that’s the nature of music documentaries? I watched the film a few months ago at the Hollywood Cinema in Auckland with an amazing audience. I was watching them, and some were physically moving their heads and bodies, reacting to some of the scenes. The volume was turned right up. The themes about aging and death felt more poignant now than 10 years ago. I’ve been loving the new album More, and Jarvis trying to make sense of ripening — not aging. His dream about landing on another planet and watching everyone back on Earth having a good time sums it up for me!