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2 hours ago
5
In 1978, in the classroom of a comprehensive school in Sheffield, a skinny, shortsighted 15-year-old wrote a mission statement in the back of an exercise book – a masterplan for reaching the top with the band he had recently formed with some classmates who, like him, weren’t picked first for sports.
In 2023, after a hiatus of a decade, his band Pulp started touring again, and last year played to 20,000 people at each of two nights at the O2 in London. This film features concert footage from those gigs in which a still lithe, still-got-it-at-60-odd Jarvis Cocker sings his hit art-pop anthems backed by most of the classic lineup and a 10-piece string section. And interspersed with the concert footage are autobiographical musings, nostalgic archive footage, interviews with Jarvis’s mum and gran, and Cocker narrating the story of how he got from there, almost half a century ago, to here.
The total package, in typical Pulp style, is a mixture of the exuberant and celebratory with the bittersweet and reflective. In voiceover, Cocker says that songs “contain pockets of energy from your past life that’s released again when you perform them”. And hearing them performed in the present, you notice how many of the lyrics were about young people wondering what life would be like when they were older. (“Let’s all meet up in the year 2000/Won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown?”) Which was another way of them wondering whether they were making the right decisions in the present.
Obviously it’s ironic that Cocker achieved national treasure status by being the patron saint of outsiders – all those “misshapes, mistakes, misfits / Raised on a diet of broken biscuits”. He sounds a little bemused by it himself, although, of course, he understood the transformative power of pop from a young age, and how even the gawkiest kid might strike a pose and become a sex symbol.
But the band were outliers even at their Britpop-era peak. There’s a clip of Cocker playing in a charity football tournament in 1996 along with the more classically laddish Liam Gallagher, Damon Albarn and Robbie Williams, and while he briefly enjoyed being in the starting XI, as one of life’s shrewd observers, he did look more suited to the sidelines. In fact the implication of much of the 90s footage is that getting everything he had ever dreamed of in his youth was an anticlimactic trauma from which he has only lately recovered.
Back in the film’s present day, Pulp’s first album in 24 years has just gone to No 1 and the concert opens with a song from it, Spike Island, and its defiant refrain “I was born to perform … I exist to do this”. The gigs are apparently Pulp’s 566th and 567th live shows, and there is no reason why there shouldn’t be many more.
It is a shame, though, that the O2 gigs were the only ones filmed. Even by the standards of soulless, corporate enormo-arenas it is an absolute enjoyment-vortex of a venue, and while the attenders are singing along and look as if they’re having fun, little of the energy that was presumably there is transmitted through the screen. Pulp thrived and thrilled because they seemed to speak to (and for) us so directly. But in this film the cameras seem too far away, the stage too big and the musicians too far apart. The bio-documentary and archival parts of What Do You Do for an Encore? are wonderful: droll, heartfelt and inimitably Cocker. To enjoy the concert section, you probably had to be there.
