Happy Birthday Diffy! It also therefore marks the 20th anniversary of my first ever album on CD. (Late adopter of frightening new technology).

Was thinking of this yesterday too and played it in full also I was 9 years old (one of the child fans they tried to shake off with Hardcore!) and my 11 year old brother bought it that day on cassette on a very rare day out in the city centre. It was fate! Usually we would never have been there at that time of teh year. I remember HMV had two huge sections at both entrances stacked full of copies of DC and he made the rare plunge of buying an album. We had seen them for the very first time just a few weeks earlier on TOTP performing Mis-Shapes. I was, from that performance, very intrigued by Russell as I couldn't believe a man was wearing make-up. I had never seen that before. We recorded TOTP that week by chance and so could watch it over and over and it was a few weeks before we noticed Mark Webber standing behind Jarvis He's so small! Then they were on TV again on Christmas Day on TOTP. Ah, I miss those old days. Then Disco 2000, the Brits, and seeing them in July 1996. It was so exciting for such a brief period of time between 1995 to 1996. Those days definitely had a particular mood and zeitgeist. Oh to step in a time machine and go back even one last time. I can't hear or see any comparable bands these days or since the late 1990s.

Night. Free Autobahn. 15ß km/h.

We're making a move
We're making it now
We're coming out of the sidelines
Just put your hands up, it's a raid, yeah

Loud, loud, loud!!!!!!!!!!

Still my favourite album ever, even if I wouldn't defend it with quite the same vigour as when I first fell in love with it. But because it was the first record that meant the world to me, and that it's still pretty fantastic all these years later.

NME online have a retrospective thing up on their site for DC. The only new quotes I think, seem to be from their PR person at the time:

www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/pulps-different-class-at-20-an-oral-history-of-the-era-defining-album-that-propelled-jarvis-and-co-t

I think prior to NME going free recently, there's a fair chance a Different Class 20 Years On thing might have got a front cover, or ''a bit'' of the front cover. I don't know if anyone's seen the new-look NME but basically it's turned into a carbon copy of those free ''cultural'' mags that get handed-out outside train stations (Shortlist, Game, Time Out), except not as good, lots of big photos and ads, not much text and music is only part of their remit now, ''indie'' music even less-so. As someone who would have defended the title more than most before this relaunch (it's been trendy to slate it for years but you could tell they still had writers that were passionate writing about old and new music), it's hard not to shake your head at the awful covers of Chris Moyles, Taylor Swift etc. in the last few weeks.

Anyway, back to Pulp...Steve Coogan mentions in his new auto-biography that he burst into tears when he heard Disco 2000 for the first time and the line 'Won't it be strange when we're all fully grown?" as it seemed to him the perfect evocation of being young in the 70's when the year 2000 meant living in space etc.

Also, non DC-related but Elijah Wood's favourite song to do on karaoke is This Is Hardcore.
And Nick Banks was on BBC 5 Live last Wed morning after his team Sheffield Wednesday knocked Arsenal out of the League Cup. He was asked whether Pulp would write a song if Wednesday got to the final. ''Too hard'' apparently. Any new song is too hard, Nick!