I've got a beer mat with the "This is Hardcore" Pulp logo on it somewhere, I've also got one of those signs that the dancers hold up in the "Party Hard" video (see photo)

 

That's about as interesting as it gets for me. I do remember hearing about, though never owning, delights such as:

• Disco 2000 sunglasses
• Pulp duvet and pillowcase
• "I Am Hardcore" badges
• "OU" balloons

I remember girls in my sixth form circa 1995 having the vinyl shoulder bag!

Funny, I was thinking about this the other day. For about 3 months in 1999, I temped at 3 Alveston Place (that place where you'd send those little mailing list post cards that used to come in CDs). One of my regrets is wandering round the storeroom one day and finding a box of pristine mid '90s Pulp T-shirts (already no longer available in the shops by that point).... and leaving it exactly where it was. I did get a free copy of This Is Glastonbury though!

I had a 'patriotic trim' ringer with an embroidered logo. That was a classy t shirt, became a bit small tho. I always wanted a 'pulp all over' one- quite migrane inducing. Great posts people!

Sleeve wrote:

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@Ian. Nice. How did you get hold of that?

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I won a competition in the Pulp People newsletter, I think there were a few of these and I know someone else who has one.

Speaking of which, a pair of Jarvis' trousers was cut into pieces, all of which were sent to fanclub members and his crushed car was given away as a competition prize as were Russell's sunglasses along with a personal note from him.

This is the aforementioned beer mat:

inspirit wrote:

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The promo items I always wanted were the Different Class cut outs.  I may be another false memory, but I think there was a Jarvis one (the extended arm one they had on the TFI set) in the HMV or Virgin in Edinburgh.    I sometimes see listings for huge billboard posters - and I covet them, even though I have nowhere to display them.

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 My mum wrote to Chris Evans and asked would he send me the Jarvis cutout if we paid the postage. There was no reply and eventually Jarvis threw it out of the window when he was being interviewed on TFI

Sleeve wrote:

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@Strudy. The legendary Alveston Place! I always wondered how that office worked and what it looked like. The address seems to fuel a fair bit of 90's nostalgia online.

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 Yeah, it was the piece on Medium the other day that got me thinking about it. I wrote the following as a follow-up to the piece but haven't posted it anywhere yet:

 

The company was actually called Trinity Street - after their original address elsewhere in Leamington.

I worked there for three months, January to April 1999, during what was supposed to be my second year at university. I'd managed to mess up my first year exams to such a massive extent that I was granted a year in purgatory, living in the same student house I would have been living in anyway, trying to keep myself occupied till June came round and I was able to re-sit for a second time and hopefully be let back in. (Happily, they did let me back in. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.)

Due to a lack of imagination and/or cash, I basically spent that year doing a succession of short term temp jobs to pay my rent and keep me in Tesco Red Flag vodka. When I got the call from Adecco, I was about as excited you can get about a £4/hour data entry job - that is to say, not hugely, but sufficiently so that I actually turned down another job that was on slightly more money. The reasons for this were (1) the other job was across town and this was literally right behind my house, and (2) like most people of my generation, I wasn't going to pass up a chance to see what was inside the address that I'd seen hundreds of times on those little postcards.

The building itself (which you can still see on Bing Maps birdseye view) was a fairly unremarkable light industrial setup - I've a feeling it might have been a converted church. The entrance was a modern extension with a fairly nice geometric art deco sort of frontage. As you walked in, the foyer was decorated from floor to ceiling with thousands of glossy band postcards that must have originated from that building over the years. Pride of place, for some reason, was a huge metal Insprial Carpets cow.

Apart from the entrance, for some reason I can only remember the upstairs of the place - presumably the downstairs part was some other bit of the business that we didn't need to know about. Upstairs was pretty unremarkable - at the front there was light airy open-plan office where all the 'management' team were based, then the rear part of the building was largely taken up with a warehouse-type setup largely filled with (I think) racks of the various postcards and merch that were to be sent out. There was also a mail sorting room and the data entry room, where a team of four of us hammered our way through pile upon pile of postcards every day.

I've never known a set-up (especially considering the whole thing was relatively small) where there's such an obvious divide between 'proper' employees and us lowly temps. After the first day when you got shown the ropes, the proper employees would barely acknowledge you - you could walk past them in the street and they'd look straight through you, which I found a bit weird. This clearly wasn't going to be a foot in the door of the music industry - insofar as these guys were even part of the music industry (although I do recall them going to the Brits that year). As a result, I don't really know much about the people who ran the place - there was a woman called Louise who wore leather trousers, and a guy called Smurf. Other than that, I'm largely drawing a blank.

The work, as you can imagine, was largely bloody tedious, although not totally unpleasant. The days consisted of trying to decipher scrawly 10 year olds' handwriting for the B*witched and Honeyz mailing list while listening to Radio 1 (which was actually going through a brief period of being fairly listenable at the time). Things were occasionally enlivened by the odd creepy fan letter or misdirected demo tape, and obviously signing up your friends to the Ocean Colour Scene newsletter under various stupid/abusive names, but it was mainly about hunkering down and getting to 5pm. By 5.05 I was home and unscathed. A simple, almost carefree existence. I even timed my hour's shift in the post room to perfection so that I didn't have to listen to Chris Moyles (there was no radio in the post room you see).

One regret is stumbling across a box of pristeen Britpop-era Pulp T-shirts (no longer available in the shops by that point) and leaving it exactly where it was, probably to get chucked in a skip a few months later. We did get the odd free CD when they were clearing out though.

I got fired after three months after turning up late a few times. Possibly fair enough - it was a two-minute commute from my front door, after all. But my curiosity had been throughly satisfied by then, and they didn't have the guts to talk to me about it (they got the agency to do their dirty work), so fuck 'em. The end.

That was great, thanks for sharing. You've basically answered any questions I had about the place and that humble sticker may be the rarest piece of Pulp merchandise out there.

Good plan! The only interesting thing I held onto is a huge screen printed Babies tour/promo poster. It looks like a Creme Egg advert:

Hey,
I don't have original Pulp stuff, but a friend of mine knows about my...sympathy and last year she sent me this tea towel:

www.shop.katyblades.co.uk/searchquick-submit.sc

It is so cool!

-- Edited by maidmarian on Monday 23rd of January 2017 05:53:48 PM

Love the Sturdy story, thanks.

Here's my little buddy, sitting on some favourite sleeves.

Not a Pulp promo, but a Pulp related Select promo.  The specs aren't original.  There are a few of these about, they pop up on ebay now and again.  Apart from three top ups, he's been out and plump for 21 years.  I've gone a bit saggy in that time, and don't stand up straight so well, but he's ever youthful.

(I'm not tech-savvy so I hope this works okay)