Director: Garth Jennings
“Not old brandy, still fizzy pop,” says singer and frontman Jarvis Cocker in Pulp: What Do You Do For An Encore?, a film that might sound like a straightforward record of a comeback tour, but turns out to be something more wistful, funny, and unexpectedly moving.
The film begins with Pulp’s 566th show, at London’s O2 Arena on 13 June 2025, in front of 20,000 people. There is plenty of archive footage and concert film, but Cocker quickly warns us what kind of journey this will be: “like being at a jumble sale”, sifting through “piles of visual rubbish” in search of the gold needed to tell the Pulp story. It is an apt description of a career assembled from fragments, accidents, and improbable persistence.
Formed at school, Pulp were never conventional musicians. Cocker still can’t read a note of music, and the ability to play was never the priority. The ability to dream was. The film traces the race to fame through John Peel sessions, early line-ups and years of obscurity – Pulp was recording for Peel 14 years before their breakthrough hit with a new line-up. Archive commercials and television appearances add to the jumble, while songs from the live show provide its emotional core.
The most interesting material, however, comes from Cocker’s personal history. His family, including his mother and grandmother appear to fill in the gaps of his Sheffield childhood. One beautiful visual conceit contrasts the real world, blurred by Cocker’s short sight, with the pin-sharp focus of television. It captures something central to Pulp: the strange distance between ordinary life and the world of fame.
Cocker’s narration is characteristically dry and self-deprecating. At one point, an intermission pictures a patch of grass where he had sex in 1983. It is funny but also shows the film’s refusal to separate the glamorous rock-star story from the awkward reality underneath it. Pulp’s appeal was never simply fame. Their songs (Disco 2000, Help The Aged, Babies) were about people, sex, embarrassment, ambition and disappointment. These were the songs you could relate to and dance to.
There is a poignant turn when the film reaches the death of bassist Steve Mackey in 2023. “We grew up in public together,” Cocker says. During an acoustic performance of “Something Changed”, director Jennings cuts to footage of Mackey while the audience sings along from the opening notes. Suddenly, the nostalgia becomes grief.
Pulp’s story has already contained a hibernation, a wake-up and what seemed like an ending. Now there is another chapter, including their first album in 24 years. Yet Cocker wisely resists pretending to know what comes next: “I honestly don’t know where it goes next, and that’s fine by me.”
The film ends with “Common People”, because what else would fit? After everything – the dreams, failures, fame, loss and return – it feels less like a finale than a moment of celebration and community.
“It was a really beautiful journey,” Cocker says. He’s right. And, for once, the encore feels entirely deserved.
Pulp: What Do You Do For an Encore will stream exclusively on MUBI from 25 September.
