In the United States, the album was reconfigured by Columbia Records and retitled Pure Pop for Now People, a slogan that had appeared on the original UK album cover, with Columbia opting for a different track listing: "Shake and Pop" was replaced with "They Called It Rock," a slightly different version of the song by Lowe's other band Rockpile, which had been included as a single-sided bonus 45 in the original UK album; the live version of "Heart of the City" was replaced with a studio version that had been released as the b-side of Lowe's "So It Goes" single on Stiff Records; and "Rollers Show," a song originally released by Lowe in 1977 as a United Artists novelty single under the name Tartan Horde (a follow-up to their single "Bay City Rollers We Love You"),[3] was added.

Although musically sophisticated in conventional genres, the album shares the energy, cynicism and rebelliousness of the contemporary new wave movement.

The US version replaced this with a picture of Lowe dressed up in a green Riddler suit made by Antoinette Laumer Sales.

Reviewing the American release in 1978, Village Voice critic Robert Christgau called it "an amazing pop tour-de-force demonstrating that if the music is cute enough the words can be any old non-cliché".

"[17] Nick Kent, writing in NME, noted that fans of Lowe would be "more than a little pissed off" by the inclusion of five songs that had previously been released in different formats, but also said, "if you're not already familiar with these titles then you at least have nothing to complain about, seeing that they're almost uniformly superb.