The Jarvis Cocker-led band extends the boundless joy of reunion on a double live album that celebrates an extraordinary discography.
Jarvis Cocker has spoken, and the narrative surrounding the recent concerts confirms it: Pulp’s joyful revival is an encore—a reminder. But one must not forget that some performances shine brightest during the encores, when the service seems complete, the stakes behind and the mission accomplished. It is sometimes there, in these more relaxed moments (whether planned or not), that the connection between the band, its audience, and its music is at its most intense. Anyone who attended one of the Sheffield group’s recent shows will confirm: Jarvis, Candida Doyle, Mark Webber, and Nick Banks (well supported on stage) have delivered over the past months concerts that surpass what was expected of the long-awaited More, the prodigious 2025 comeback album.
Songs like Grown Ups, the sweaty Got to Have Love, or the impeccable single Spike Island find in this Live! (recorded at the O2 Arena in London over two nights) their rightful place within a songbook generously traversed by two discs filled with perfect pop. Regrets are, of course, part of the game: one might long for an I Spy, or a Pink Glove which was indeed one of the peaks of the summer Zenith. More and the unyielding Different Class dominate the tracklist chosen for this edition, which features fewer forays into the early career, with here the exception of O.U. (Gone, Gone) which in 1992 was Pulp’s first single for Gift Records and still contains much of what makes the band unique. In the forthcoming film (coming to Mubi) Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore?, where Garth Jennings blends footage from these same concerts with archival imagery commented by Cocker in a tone close to his autobiographical book Good Pop Bad Pop (an inventory still untranslated of various relics, with this emphasis on what our culture regards as disposable, an alternate narration to be found among the scraps), the showman reveals his magic formula: “Barry White + Eurodisco + blunt English realism = the future”.
A Return Definitively Successful
As early as 2014, the documentary A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets (by Florian Habicht) used the pretext of a Sheffield concert to reach one of pulp’s foundational pillars: how pop and everyday life feed and illuminate each other (and perhaps how one would have no meaning without the other), and vice versa. With the tour documented by this Live!, we are at the heart of this dynamic: life becomes a burst of a show, and the grand staging machinery manages to transform an audience of several thousand into a warm, friendly celebration among friends. A party where moments of grace slip in, such as the moment when, facing a band tightening around its historic core, the crowd sings along to Something Changed—yet the kind of song one might sometimes believe belongs to oneself alone. Arriving at the end of the journey at the absolute pop perfection of Babies, Pulp only has to play its long-awaited finale with the soaring Common People, which Jarvis ends (before a lovely farewell on A Sunset) with “it’s the best day of my life… until tomorrow”. Pulp’s return was not in vain: this is the kind of encores we would wish, though rarely, to linger a little longer.
Live! (Rough Trade Records/Wagram). Released on August 28.
