PULP: WHAT DO YOU DO FOR AN ENCORE? Directed by Garth Jennings (UK, 2026)
Pulp are to Britpop what David Bowie is to Heavy Metal. The morale being that you should never place artists in the wrong genre. Jarvis Cocker’s song writing gifts place him in a category of his own. The only similarility with Bowie is that both are English men who were obsessed with creating a template for musical stardom from an early age. Bowie went through a Laughing Gnome phase and experimented with Folk music but subsequently achieved his dream fairly rapidly. Pulp took around 14 years to turn the masterplan into an overnight success.
This film should, by rights, be an opportunity to document the band’s unique career path up to the release of their eighth studio album – More (2025). It pays lip service to this idea with carefully selected snippets from the archive. But otherwise it’s a straightforward concert movie filmed before a rapturous crowd at the O2 stadium in London. There some entertaining clips from the early days but nothing new or revelatory. We learn next to nothing about the other band members and Cocker plays his cards close to his chest. For instance, he is cagey about his 2-year sojourn in Paris.
What it confirms is that the song that sums up the band’s ethos and the appeal for fans is ‘Mis-Shapes’, the opening track from their breakthrough album Different Class (1995). The song is like a clarion call for misfits everywhere to rise up and discard their imaginary chains: “We want your homes, we want your lives / We want the things you won’t allow us /We won’t use guns, we won’t use bombs /We’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of/That’s our minds” It’s a classic tune for bedroom rebels everywhere and a celebration of brains over brawn.
The nerdy gaucheness of Jarvis Cocker is the chief reason a song like this hits the mark. His image is that of one of the ‘common people’ and the antithesis of all that is normally associated with rock heroics. When he sings of awkwardness, embarassment and of losing his virginity there is never any sense that he’s making things up. These are songs based on his own experience. Like the playwright Alan Bennett he has the knack of being able to make funny/sad observations about everyday aspirations, the majority of which are destined to end in disappointment.
All this makes him an unlikely frontman but, as he sings in Spike Island from the latest album: “I was born to perform./It’s a calling. /I exist to do this./Shouting and pointing.”
