What indeed?
Well, one thing you can do for an encore is publicly release a film of the concert you just played. And who doesn’t love a great concert movie? You get the best view in the house of your favourite band from a comfy seat, and you don’t even have to fight through a sea of armpits and flecks of saliva every time you want to go get a drink. It’s all upside.
Now Pulp have thrown their fedora in the ring with a memento from their momentous, career-spanning two-night stand at the O2 Arena last summer. Director Garth Jennings (Son of Rambow, the peerless Sing animations) expertly interweaves the performance with unseen footage of the band mapping out their journey from there to here.
Pulp can surely lay the soundest claim on being the great survivors of “Britpop” (though they hate the term), and now they’ve made it all the way here they absolutely do not squander the chance. At about the same time the brothers Gallagher were busy engaged in a gigantic nostalgia-based Ponzi scheme in a stadium elsewhere, Pulp were giving it all they’ve got in a show with some proper Razzmatazz as they only know how.
And when we talk about a Pulp set, fairly or unfairly, we’re really only talking about the guy at the front, right? The one we’ve come all this way to see – here’s Jarvis now, descending the light-up stairway, a cross between a praying mantis and a Butlins redcoat, throwing mis-shapes and approximating groove like only he can.
It’s showtime. Once engendered to “make some noise” by Kelly MacDonald (as if we’re not screaming our heads off already) it’s straight into newbie “Spike Island”, from their sublime latest, More. (Sample lyric: “I was wrestling with a coat hanger, can you guess who won? / The universe shrugged, shrugged and moved on”.) The restless relentlessness starts here.
To give a blow-by-blow of the entire rest of the show risks “spoilers” for something you absolutely do not want spoiled and has to be seen to be savoured. Suffice it to say that to go see Pulp at this point in time is to witness four decades’ worth of “bangers”, hits firmly shut-up-and-played, good pop/bad pop, a fair few hymns to suburban perversion, even a pastoral elegy thrown in there somewhere (the sorely overlooked/underloved We Love Life here represented by set one closer, “Sunrise”).
It’s a non-stop neurotic kaleidoscope from here on in where babies are had, drugs are scored, fountains are waited at, the first time is had (and it really is the worst time), something changes and then – to cap it all, well surely you know how it (nearly) ends – with some common people screaming about living with “common people” back at the least common people playing music imaginable.
Then it’s the actual encore, and the sun sets with “Sunset”, the band departs, and it really is all over. Except we now have this film to remember it by and watch again and again.
Do not miss this.
Pulp: What do you do for an encore? is screening on Friday 18th September
Written by IC Jones
