JARVIS COCKER PERFORMING IN ARENA CONCERT IN PULP: WHAT DO YOU DO FOR AN ENCORE? (2026)
The history of a band, and a big performance
In Alan Bennett's iconically English 2004 hit play The History Boys, the lead character Posner (the most underdog but the most memorable) has a key speech where he says: "I'm a Jew. I'm small. I'm homosexual. And I live in Sheffield. I'm fucked." Well, once in a way there was a rock band from Sheffield and they were fucked too, until they became popular and famous decades later and gave a concert (their 566th) to over 20,000 people. They were called Pulp. This is the living story of another one of those indestructible British rock bands that keeps dying and coming back to life again.
In confidential tones the band's legendary tall, rangy, loose-limbed lead singer Jarvis Cocker narrates this new documentary about the history of his band, who came from Sheffield. The film fuses footage from that biggest-ever arena show with four decades of newly revealed and colorful archival material. For fans of British rock, this has to be rather choice material. The arena concert was part of the global tour for More, the band’s first album in 24 years. This is obviously promotional material, but that doesn't keep if from being rich in British understatement. Now, for presence and energetic performance, Mick Jagger is the greatest rock band lead singer of all time. But Cocker's presentation puts the whole emphasis on the songs. that for Mick, sometimes become almost irrelevant. For Jarvis, who's 61 now, the modest dress may conceal age better. His performance is lively and energetic too, but in a relatively understated way, with little, fast dance steps and lots of artistic twisty hand and arm-waving.
Pulp's British understatement begins with the band's presentation. While it is a flashy digital show, Cocker typically is garbed the way he looks, like a nerdy prop school teacher, with floppy hair, black-framed glasses, and suit jacket. Nothing could be further from the spandex-bottomed glam rock catsuits with glitter rocked by Mick Jagger in much of his never-ending performing career - and emulated by many others; the standard rock lead singer sexy look, with its edge of sleaze that works because of its confident presentation.
Stylistically Pulp most resemble the other bands Suede and Roxy Music, both of which go back to 1970. Jarvis cocker began in 1978, when he was 15. One of the memorable moments of this history is to see pencil sketches Cocker made presciently in school of plans for band and costumes, which are then animated and come to life, living line drawings. Suede and Roxy Music go back to before Cocker's time, then, and formed him to hear. Suede and Roxy Music helped start the 1990s Britpop movement with a dark, glamorous edge.Their sound mixed sweeping, dramatic guitars with catchy pop hooks.The lyrics focused on working-class British life, nightlife, and awkward romance. Pulp carry on this tradition.
This is a band to listen to lyrics for, and they can run on a bit like the ones for "Grown Ups" that end with "Grown Ups": ". . . I know it's all about the journey/Not the final destination/But what if you get travel sick/Before you've even left the station?" Then thre are the basic emotions in the "Feeling Called Love" song. Sometimes the arena performance's emphasis on the spectacular rather than the intimate loses the subtle shadings of a song.
But this film's clever trick, and an admirable quality, is to fit in band history between stirring moments of almost-revelation like that in the arena concert with Jarvis recounting the long gaps of non-accomplishment between band albums and sparse hits (the first one 14 years afteer a debut record). Member off and on about university education; Jarvis falls trying to impress a girl and winds up in hospital, where he falls in love with the music of Barry White. If we look into the lyrics, the title comes from "This is Hardcore," which is about porn, containing the lines, "what exactly do you do for an encore?/'Cos this is Hardcore," but for many, it may just be about for the first time having sex; certainly a bold song.
Besides Jarvis, the band in the front-lined concert consists at different times of Candida Doyle, Nick Banks, Mark Webber Andrew McKinney, Emma Smith, Adam Betts Richard Jones, Jason, Buckle, and Kelly Macdonald. Personnel naturally have varied over the band's four-decade career, but the sound of a small orchestra is favored. Jarvis Cocker makes an engaging guide, and toward the end he provides the observation: "Real life is not televised, and songs contain pockets of energy from your past life which are released when you sing them again."
Garth Jennings directed the sci-fi comedy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) and the coming-of-age comedy Son of Rambow (2007), alongside his work on the Sing animated movies. This is a tidily edited film, with good sound.
Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore?, 99 mins., screens in American theaters for one night only on September 24, 2026, before streaming globally exclusively on Mubi starting September 25, 2026. Reviewed here by permission of Mubi.