Why Pulp’s U.S. Reunion Tour Is Pure Brit-Pop Magic

“A concert is no good unless there’s some magic,” Jarvis Cocker told the crowd, soon after Pulp hit the stage in Brooklyn. “You react to us, we react to you — that summons the magic.” The Britpop gods reached New York last weekend, for two glorious nights, on their long-awaited North American reunion tour. Nearly everyone in the room had spent years praying for these shows, so both nights were full of that magic. “You are about to see the 555^th concert by Pulp,” a message flashed on the video screen on Friday. “This is a night you will remember for the rest of your life.” Thirty seconds into the show, with Jarvis declaiming “I Spy,” not a soul in the room would disagree.

Jarvis brought all his wiggliest disco-showgirl moves, shaking his money maker in a dapper bell-bottom suit, Chelsea boots with brutally high heels, and geek spectacles. At sixty, he’s the consummate rock & roll charisma machine. His fashion sense is timeless — when you start as a teenager dressing like you’re already a louche middle-aged dowager librarian, it’s a look you never need to outgrow. Like everything else about Pulp, it’s proof that wasting your youth as a pretentious poseur can be the start of a lifelong creative adventure.

Pulp began their “This Is What We Do For An Encore” tour last year in the U.K., their first in over a decade. Their mind-glowingly great 2012 reunion shows were the last time they’d visited here, but they made up for lost time with one classic after another: “Common People,” “Disco 2000,” “Razzmatazz,” “This Is Hardcore,” so many more. The mood was sheer jubilation all over Brooklyn’s Kings Theater. 

“I’ve got to do a bit of clothing inspection,” Jarvis announced on Saturday night, peering into the crowd. “You didn’t come correctly dressed. You should be wearing something pink and tight.” Naturally, that led into the perv-disco banger “Pink Glove.” He introduced “Babies” as an example of “the gritty realism of South Yorkshire.” On Friday, he delivered a line from Roald Dahl, in honor of the author’s birthday. Saturday was guitarist Mark Webber’s birthday, so he recited a quote from the axeman’s hero Andy Warhol: “I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.” (The last time Pulp played NYC, it was the anniversary of The Great Gatsby, so Jarvis pulled out his pocket copy and read his favorite passage to the audience.)

Pulp blew up in the 1990s Britpop explosion, rising out of the tough Northern steel town of Sheffield. But they always stood head and shoulder pads above the pack, in classics like His ’n’ Hers, Intro, and Different Class. They had their own sound — Seventies glam meets Eighties synth-disco glitz, in the alley between the library and the goth club. Jarvis was the great U.K. songwriter of his generation, flashing his bitchy wit like a mix of David Bowie and Lady Bracknell. 

At the 2012 shows, they crammed in all the hits, but this time they’re playing around with the catalog. Just to pick the most obvious example, they skipped “Mis-Shapes,” along with surefire crowd-crushers like “Lipgloss,” “Bar Italia,” or (hmmm) “Help the Aged.” They ranged all across their history — on Saturday, Jarvis even sang a snippet of “Master of the Universe,” a 1987 taste of the early Pulp at their most hilariously horrendous. One of the endearing things about this band is how long they sucked before abruptly turning into geniuses.

Both nights, he dedicated the acoustic love ballad “Something Changed” to the band’s late bass player Steve Mackey. (At last week’s Midwest shows, he added Steve Albini.) He held a bucket of candy bars he kept tossing to the crowd, as a reward for anyone who could remember the first time Pulp played New York. The answer: September 29, 1994, at the Academy. (Jarvis didn’t mention this, but that’s also the day Halsey was born, just a few miles away — a neat cosmic coincidence.) “We were supporting a band called Blur,” Jarvis recalled. “Wonder what happened to them?”

Cocker has remained prolific as a solo artist — his band Jarv Is did the excellent 2020 Beyond the Pale, with the accidentally well-timed quarantine anthem “House Music All Night Long.” He’s one of his homeland’s most revered DJs — he read bedtime stories during the lockdown, along with his “Domestic Disco” broadcasts — and wrote the memoir-manifesto Good Pop/Bad Pop: An Inventory. But he doesn’t do Pulp tunes solo, so it’s a rare treat to hear “Disco 2000” from Cocker himself.

These songs originally came from a young man fond of posing as a wily old roué, so the sixty-something Jarvis brings out new emotional angles in them. (His birthday is on Thursday.) Pulp pointedly skipped “Help the Aged,” their 1997 hit about reaching the unthinkable age of thirty-three. But the show had a loose theme of time travel. He did all the Pulp songs about staying out too late, checking your watch, announcing the time (a trademark Jarvis lyric trope), stuck in some dismal club or a stranger’s bedroom, wishing you could be anywhere else. The show’s emotional powerhouses were two very different hits, “Sorted for E’s & Wizz” and “Do You Remember the First Time?” — one’s about sex, the other about drugs, but they’re both about desperately wanting to go home and knowing it’s too late. 

“Sorted” was his 1995 satire of rave culture, where he moans, “Mother, I can never go home again, because I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere in a field in Hampshire! All right!” But at these shows, Jarvis made the all-night hour-by-hour drug binge sound like a decade-by-decade map of adulthood, as he kept wondering what it was all supposed to mean. In “Do You Remember,” every time he licked his lips and panted “you wanna go hooome,” he made home sound very, very, very far away indeed. 

“Underwear” was a highlight — a sing-along ballad about regretting every life decision that brought you into this room and out of your clothes. “Common People” brought down the house, with the author’s commentary. “There’s no such thing as common people,” he added during the breakdown. “We’re all different, and that’s what we have in common. As the French say, viva la difference.” On Friday they busted out the fab 1992 indie single “O.U. (Gone, Gone).” For some of us, the show could have used even more from this era. But tragically, they didn’t play the electro-sleaze cult fave “Sheffield: Sex City.”

As always, Cocker’s banter was more fun than most artists’ entire sets. He treated fans to his New York stories, giving slideshows of his tourist pics, raving about the trees in Prospect Park and the bugs in Central Park. He admitted that he has a phobia of Times Square, after a horrifying night at the Paramount Hotel on Christmas 1996, triggered by a Vermeer painting over his bed. (The Milkmaid — it’s not that scary.) 

Pulp remains a band of lifelong friends, with Nick Banks on drums, Webber on guitar, Candida Doyle reigning at the keyboards. (They’re joined by Emma Smith and Andrew McKinney from Jarv Is, Richard Jones, and Jason Buckle from Cocker’s early-2000s techno project Relaxed Muscle.) They still have ties to their hometown Sheffield, as seen in the 2014 documentary Pulp: A Film About Life, Death, and Supermarkets. There’s a great scene where Banks boasts about sponsoring his daughter’s football team; she calls Pulp “me dad’s crap band.”

For Webber’s birthday, the band did one of his favorites, the farewell single “Bad Cover Version.” Back in the day, it might have sounded like a weak self-imitation, but this weekend it took on a bit of time-passes-slowly gravitas. They dipped deep into We Love Life, the 2001 swan song that got badly botched in the studio, but the songs take off live, with the pantheistic hippie-pagan Wicker Man vibe of “Weeds” and “Sunrise.” They ended on a high note with “Glory Days,” from This Is Hardcore.

They’re also debuting new tunes on this tour. “We’ve brought these songs, some of which are very old, back to life,” Jarvis said on Saturday. “So how about a new song?” It was a tribute to the shows’ affectionate warmth that people cheered instead of sitting down or racing off to the bar. (Instead, fans timed their mass-exodus bathroom breaks for the We Love Life interludes, more fool everyone.) “Got To Have Love” was an Al Green-inspired preacher-man love sermon, though the Rev. Al probably never would have sung, “Without love, you’re just jerking off in someone else.” “Spike Island” was even kickier, with Jarvis declaring, “I was born to perform!” No doubt—but his message to the world has always been, Aren’t we all? These shows were a tribute to the kind of magic that can only happen when a band and an audience perform together.