Simply find the best possible online shopping Pulp deals
Shop Pulp products and compare prices and listings on popular online marketplaces.
This is Hardcore posed the question of this Pulp film back in 1998. It seems only now that the Jarvis Cocker-fronted band has an answer. A run of reunion shows in 2023 led somewhere unexpected: a new album, More, and a new generation of appreciation for timeless songs. Garth Jennings’ work on What Do You Do for an Encore?, a blur of documentarian stylings and concert film thrills, is consistent enough to get the Pulp story across. He leaves much of the why and what of it all in the shadows. It’s a bold move to make a documentary that’s somewhat light on detail, but it works in the band’s favour as Cocker narrates us through a brief history of Pulp. There’s a lot to cram in after nearly fifty years of the band existing, much of that spent in the small-scale venues of Sheffield. But the slow crawl to stardom and rapid fallout with its glistening highs is charted well here. There’s enough for those well-versed in Pulp’s history, and enough too for those who only know a song or two.
What Do You Do for an…
“What prevented me from joining the legion of lost souls?” Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker asks during their new documentary What Do You Do For An Encore?, “The band.” Shot during their victory lap tour in support of last year’s ‘More’ – their first album for 24 years – this delicate and personal film focuses on the seed of Pulp’s success: Cocker’s childhood dreams.
The film opens with a performance of comeback single ‘Spike Island’. The song itself is a reinstatement of their core values (“I exist to do this/Shouting and pointing”) and the frontman is in full flight: all telescopic fingers and twitchy model wiggles in his Serge Gainsbourg suit – a cypher for all his “Mis-shapes, Mistake, Misfit” fans. What Do You Do For An Encore? is a celebration of Pulp, tracing their supermarket sweep from Sheffield wannabes to national treasures, stitching together live footage with decades-old interviews and a voiceover from Cocker himself.
Early on, director Garth Jennings’ flashes up a bricolage of Pulp memoranda (flyers, stickers, album covers, backstage footage). It’s a cinematic Proustian moment because the classic Pulp line-up of Jarvis Cocker, Candida Doyle, Steve Mackey, Russell Senior, Mark Webber…
Something about “Pulp: What Do You Do For An Encore?” is inherently fascinating, but director Garth Jennings (“Son of Rambow,” “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”) never quite manages to unlock it. Pulp have always seemed slightly out of step with whatever moment they happened to inhabit, even when the culture eventually caught up with them. Their return decades after their commercial peak should make for a rich story about aging, survival, nostalgia, mortality, and what happens when a group built around alienation suddenly finds itself treated like an hallowed institution. Instead, Jennings spends much of the film watching them play.
That is hardly disastrous. Jarvis Cocker remains one of rock music’s most distinctive frontmen, still gangly and theatrical, and still capable of making a massive room feel surprisingly intimate. Pulp’s catalog has also aged remarkably well. Songs rooted in anxieties about class, sex, aspiration, embarrassment, and British life haven’t lost their sting simply because the people performing them have grown older. But concert footage can only carry a film so far, particularly when the glimpses of the story surrounding it prove consistently more interesting.