Why Pulp’s US Reunion Tour Is Pure Brit-Pop Magic

“A concert is “Nothing goes without a little magic,” Jarvis Cocker told the crowd shortly after Pulp took the stage in Brooklyn. “You react to us, we react to you – that invokes magic.” The Britpop gods arrived in New York last weekend for two glorious nights of their long-awaited North American reunion tour. Almost everyone in the room had spent years praying for these shows, so both nights were full of that magic. “You’re about to see the 555^th “Pulp Concert,” a message flashed across the video screen Friday. “This is a night you’ll remember for the rest of your life.” Thirty seconds into the show, as Jarvis belted out “I Spy,” no one in the audience would object.

Jarvis brought all his hippest disco dancer moves, shaking his livelihood in a sleek bell-bottom suit, Chelsea boots with brutal high heels, and geeky glasses. At sixty, he’s the ultimate rock & roll charisma machine. His fashion sense is timeless—when you start dressing as a teenager like you’re already a dodgy middle-aged librarian, it’s a look you’ll never need to get rid of. Like everything else about Pulp, it’s proof that wasting your youth as a pretentious poseur can be the start of a creative adventure that lasts a lifetime.

Pulp kicked off their This Is What We Do For An Encore tour last year in the UK, their first in over a decade. Their sensational 2012 reunion show was the last time they were here, but they made up for lost time with a string of classics: Common People, Disco 2000, Razzmatazz, This Is Hardcore, and more. The mood throughout Brooklyn’s Kings Theater was one of pure jubilation.

“I have to do a little wardrobe inspection,” Jarvis announced Saturday night, looking out at the crowd. “You guys didn’t come dressed properly. You should wear something pink and tight.” Naturally, that led to the perverse disco hit “Pink Glove.” He touted “Babies” as an example of “raw South Yorkshire realism.” 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 lumberjack hero Andy Warhol: “I’m afraid if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all its meaning.” (The last time Pulp played New York, it was Dahl’s birthday.) The Great Gatsbyso Jarvis pulled out his paperback copy and read his favorite passage to the audience.)

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Pulp exploded into the Britpop explosion of the 1990s, emerging from the northern steel town of Sheffield. But they’ve always stood out from the crowd, with classics like Him and her, IntroductionAnd Different class. They had their own sound, 70s glamour mixed with 80s synth-disco glitz, in the alley between the library and the goth club. Jarvis was the greatest British songwriter of his generation, deploying his bitchy spirit like a cross between David Bowie and Lady Bracknell.

At their 2012 shows, they played all the hits, but this time, they’re playing with the catalog. To name just the most obvious example, they dropped “Mis-Shapes,” as well as hits that are still going strong like “Lipgloss,” “Bar Italia,” and (hmmm) “Help the Aged.” They’ve played all over the music scene—on Saturday, Jarvis even sang a snippet of “Master of the Universe,” a taste of early Pulp in 1987, at their most hilarious. One of the endearing things about this band is how long they were bad before they suddenly turned into geniuses.

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

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Cocker has remained prolific as a solo artist – his band Jarv Is had an excellent 2020 Beyond the limitswith the accidentally well-timed quarantine anthem “House Music All Night Long.” He’s one of his home country’s most revered DJs—he’s been reading bedtime stories during lockdown, in addition to his “Domestic Disco” shows—and wrote the memoir-manifesto Good Pop/Bad Pop: An Inventory. But he doesn’t do Pulp tracks solo, so it’s a rare treat to hear Cocker’s “Disco 2000” himself.

These songs are originally written by a young man who likes to pretend to be a sly old scamp, and Jarvis, in his sixties, brings new emotional angles to them. (His birthday is Thursday.) Pulp intentionally skipped “Help the Aged,” their 1997 hit about turning the unthinkable age of thirty-three. But the show had a vague time-travel theme. He performed all the Pulp songs about staying out too late, checking his watch, telling the time (a typical Jarvis lyrical trope), being stuck in a dingy club or a stranger’s bedroom, and wishing he could be anywhere else. The show’s emotional drivers were two very different hits, “Sorted for E’s & Wizz” and “Do You Remember the First Time?” ” — one is about sex, the other is 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, in which he moaned: ‘Mother, I can never go home again, because I feel like I’ve left a huge chunk of my brain somewhere in a field in Hampshire!’ All right!“But at these shows, Jarvis was making his all-night, hour-by-hour drug use a map of adulthood from one decade to the next, as he wondered endlessly what it was all supposed to mean. In “Do You Remember,” every time he licked his lips and gasped, “You wanna go?” homeit made the house seem very, very, very far away.

“Underwear” was a highlight – a sung ballad about regretting every life decision that brought you into this room and out of your clothes. “Common People” had the room rocking, with the author’s commentary. “There are no ordinary people,” he added during the breakdown. “We’re all different, and that’s what we have in common. As the French say, long live the differenceOn Friday they released the fabulous 1992 indie single ‘OU (Gone, Gone)’. For some of us, the show could have benefited even more from that era. But tragically, they didn’t play the electro-sleaze favourite ‘Sheffield: Sex City’.

As always, Cocker’s jokes were funnier than most artists’ entire sets. He regaled fans with stories of New York, showing them slideshows of his tourist photos, raving about the trees in Prospect Park and the insects in Central Park. He admitted to having a phobia of Times Square, after a horrible night at the Paramount Hotel on Christmas 1996, triggered by a Vermeer painting above his bed.The Milkmaid — it is not that scary.)

Pulp remain a band of long-time friends, with Nick Banks on drums, Webber on guitar, Candida Doyle on keyboards. (They are joined by Emma Smith and Andrew McKinney of Jarv Is, Richard Jones and Jason Buckle from Cocker’s early 2000s techno project Relaxed Muscle.) They still have ties to their hometown of Sheffield, as seen in the 2014 documentary Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and SupermarketsThere’s a great scene where Banks brags about sponsoring her daughter’s soccer team; she calls Pulp “my dad’s shitty band.”

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For Webber’s birthday, the band performed one of his favorite songs, the farewell single “Bad Cover Version.” At the time, it might have seemed like a weak self-imitation, but this weekend, it took on a bit of gravitas. They dove deep into We love life2001’s swan song that was clumsily botched in the studio, but the songs take off live, with the pantheistic hippie-pagan edge Wicker Man atmosphere of “Weeds” and “Sunrise”. They finished in style with “Glory Days”, This is hardcore.

They’re also debuting new material on this tour. “We’ve brought these songs, some of which are very old, back to life,” Jarvis said Saturday. “So why not a new song?” It was a tribute to the affectionate warmth of concerts that saw people cheering instead of sitting down or running to the bar. (Instead, fans scheduled their mass-exodus bathroom breaks for Saturday’s show.) We love life (interludes, more nonsense for everyone.) “Got To Have Love” was an Al Green-inspired sermon on love, even though Reverend Al probably would never have sung “Without love, you’re just jerking off to somebody else.” “Spike Island” was even more catchy, 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 play together.