The year is 2025. An oscillating wash of sound pours into London’s O2 Arena, only for Kelly Macdonald’s voice to come flickering through with we-hope-you-enjoy-your-flight crispness: ‘This performance is an encore.’
But what exactly do you do for an encore? Pulp aficionados will recognise that line from 1998’s characteristically searching single ‘This is Hardcore’. Nearly three decades on, it’s inspired the name of a film which will see director Garth Jennings stitching footage from two triumphant gigs into a defining document of Pulp’s recent comeback.
While we may have to wait the best part of a month for Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore? to come to streaming, if you’re after an answer to that question then its soundtrack (simply titled Live!) is already out in the world. ‘An encore occurs because the audience wants more,’ Macdonald continues. ‘So… make some noise.’
They scarcely need the encouragement. Once Jarvis Cocker has let loose on opener ‘Spike Island’, a jubilant roar sounds between the plinks and bleeps of Candida Doyle’s spaceship synths. Even as the tempo drops down into the sultrier mood of ‘Slow Jam’, he can’t pause without applause. His voice strains with controlled romantic anguish until the audience lift the burden and sing for him.
If this is the way the crowd react to Pulp’s newest songs, how are they going to respond when their old favourites get an airing? Well, when the woozy warbles of ‘Sorted for E’s & Wizz’ give way to its huge chorus, the fans return every word and every sigh. What a delicious paradox it is – this knowing, clear-eyed interrogation of rave culture turned into a celebratory singalong.
Indeed, for a proud bande à part like Pulp, paradox is a gift. The year 2000 was half a decade away when ‘Disco 2000’, a tale of unfulfilled love set to infectious dance-rock hooks, came along. Now, it’s a quarter of a century ago. But to hear its lyrics – almost epistolary in their heartbreaking directness – echoing around a stadium in 2025 is to feel the song’s sentiment with wrenching clarity.
‘Disco 2000’ isn’t the only number that’s all the sharper for Pulp having more time behind them. The charity-song façade of 1997’s sweetly swaying ‘Help the Aged’ soon collapses into self-centred mortal terror, resolving itself in a wicked plea for sexual connection.
By contrast, the far newer ‘Farmers Market’ takes a poet’s care in charting the beginning of a relationship, and its live arrangement magnifies its small details into a boundless vista of emotion. More astonishing still is sonic hangover cure ‘Sunrise’ (‘if you’ve been up at a club all night, it can make you a little bit allergic to sunlight,’ Cocker explains) which surges up from reflective folk to a glorious spectacle of massed choral voices.
After the interval, the bright strum of an acoustic guitar heralds one of the concert’s most moving moments – a gigantic singalong of ‘Something Changed’. Its simple beauty remains undimmed, its dragonfly-delicate guitar solo going straight to the heart.
Latter-day highlight ‘Grown Ups’ proves that Cocker’s slow metamorphosis from cool big brother to cool uncle is at last complete. Guiding the audience into clapping along to its steady mod-soul bounce, he rattles his way through a litany of anxieties around adulthood, all described with the nervous intimacy of a private diary.
But Pulp’s songs endure because they are not so much confessions as confidences. Cocker demands no forgiveness or admiration, only solidarity. He trusts that if you haven’t shared his feelings at some point in your life, you may well have them to ‘look forward’ to, and there are few things which distil such hyperventilating, hyper-concentrated feeling as the criminally underrated ‘O.U.’.
It ignites with lightning-storm urgency, Emma Smith’s violin racing in circles like a dog chasing its own tail. Has anyone ever expressed the run-for-the-doors moment at the end of a million romcoms more perfectly in a song?
And Pulp can nail the agony of a romance beyond resurrection with equal grace. Cocker’s resigned whisper on the opening lines of ‘Do You Remember the First Time?’, matched by a bassline which sighs with shiver-inducing finality, is as gnawingly affecting as the day of the song’s release. When it erupts into that immortally catchy chorus, one voice multiplied by thousands, its alchemical transformation of jealousy into joy feels more like magic than ever.
Though undoubtedly an icon of 90s Britain, perhaps Cocker is better described as the decade’s designated driver; a Katherine Mansfield figure in the Bloomsbury Group of Britpop, in love with its overstimulating creative glamour while hating its nihilistic rejection of the intellect, the ephemerality of its fashions, and above all its profound and painful post-Thatcher ignorance of class. Take ‘Mis-Shapes’. Declaring revolution and rejecting violence with equally emphatic force, its demolition of end-of-history complacency and condescension hasn’t aged one bit.
But this is a reunion gig after all, so is it any surprise that the sparkling opening chords of ‘Babies’ are met with one of the most rapturous cheers of the night? Sometimes a touch of nostalgia is exactly what you need, and after Cocker’s timeless tale of adolescent lust has built to its conclusion, a chant of ‘yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah’ reverberates around the crowd seemingly spontaneously.
‘Okay, we’re not playing that one,’ Cocker teases as the concert nears its close, but what sort of Pulp gig would it be without ‘Common People’? As soon as those synths strike up you know every word of what is about to follow, and yet the indignant, bone-deep, unsparing fury of its storytelling makes it new every time he performs it.
No quantity of compilation appearances can reduce its importance; no middle-class bohemian with a degree of self-awareness can listen to it without seeing themselves in its crosshairs. There has never been another ‘Common People’, there never can be again, and we are alive at the same time as the man who wrote it. For all that’s wrong with the world, there’s also that.
The glowing harmonies of ‘A Sunset’, Cocker’s commentary on a world which monetises and privatises all that it can get away with, draw the evening to a gentle close. It manages to be far more feel-good than any pretence that nothing is wrong, but there’s a lesson in there too.
‘It’s both a statement of fact (it’s a recording of a live band),’ Cocker says of the title Live!, ‘and a challenge (come on! Everyone come alive!)’. Gig tickets and streaming services and yes, live albums all cost money, but music, song, and memory are free. Now go forth and live.
Live! is out now via Rough Trade Records – order here
Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore? is in UK cinemas on 18th September only and due to premiere worldwide on MUBI from 25th September
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Review by Poppy Bristow
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