Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore?: Documentary charts the thrilling story of Pulp, with a few forgivable omissions

Pulp were both purest Britpop, and also at an angle to it – a kind of antidote even. For a start, they were older than the Gallaghers and Albarns: Jarvis Cocker was 31, violinist and guitarist Russell Senior 34 when they played Glastonbury in 1995. Jarvis had first bluffed his way on to John Peel’s radio show by pressing a Pulp demo on him in 1981. Oasis were an underdog story in the same way that Rocky (1976) was an underdog story. Pulp songs were about a different kind of underdog: the rejected, the unrequited, the socially inept, the voyeur – no one in a Pulp song gets crowned champion of the world. But Pulp also had perhaps a purer commitment to pop (as opposed to rock) than any of their Britpop contemporaries. For their Top of the Pops debut, Jarvis chose to mime, rather than sing live: “To me, pop had nothing to do with reality. It was an improvement on reality.”

It’s a solid opinion with a respectable art-school lineage traceable through Roxy Music, Bowie, Warhol and plenty more. It’s also a reality that Pulp were, and are, phenomenal live, as shown in Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore?, in which director Garth Jennings (Son of Rambow, 2007; Sing, 2016) documents them live at the O2 Arena in London in 2025, fresh from a No. 1 reunion album, More. With a string section and a widescreen backdrop, Jarvis is in full showman mode, even if his Vegas-via-Sheffield kung fu moves are a little creakier. It’s noticeable, too, that Jarvis cannot resist matching an interpretative hand gesture to his lyrics, almost word for word, much like Taylor Swift, the current pop star to end all pop stars.

What Do You Do for an Encore? splits the difference between Greatest Hits concert film and a Story Of documentary. “This film,” Jarvis says, “will be like going to a jumble sale. Sifting through piles of rubbish to find the gold we need to tell a story.” It’s a great encapsulation of Pulp’s charity shop aesthetic (musically and sartorially), if rather harsh on the film’s raw materials: family photos, press clippings, archive TV, and a school exercise book in which a teenage Jarvis theorised his future career (“Most groups have a certain mode of dress, which is invariably emulated by their followers. The Pulp wardrobe shall consist of…”). There’s an incredible photo of a wooden dalek, made for the TV-obsessed Jarvis by his grandfather, that was big enough for him to climb into.

Do Jennings and Cocker leave out much of importance in their sifting? You could argue, the rest of the band. The film opens with ‘Spike Island’ from More. Pulp appear in silhouette as John Barry-like strings well and swell; when the spotlight hits, only Jarvis walks down the steps, the shapes of his band members revealed as cut-outs. But then, Jarvis has remained the only constant of the group since its formation (Jennings plays around with some animated timelines to track the band’s personnel, which recall the BBC’s Rock Family Trees series, 1995-98). And his bandmates, with their self-effacing stage presence, are the knowing foils to his own gyrations, whether it’s Candida Doyle’s deadpan, two-fingered keyboard style or unobtrusive guitarist Mark Webber (shown in a 90s-era interview wearing an Oasis top and carefully painting his nails).

Other gaps include Pulp’s 1995 appearance at Glastonbury, as late substitutes for The Stone Roses, when they produced a performance of ‘Common People’ so -electrifying, so perfectly amplified by the multiple momentums of a band, a song and a scene coming together with the beginnings of television’s obsession with covering the festival that it’s hard not to think of it as Britpop’s peak. Jennings skips past it, denying Russell Senior, with his cascading violin, his moment in the spotlight as Britpop’s John Cale. “Rights issue?” I scrawl in my notes. No, ‘Common People’ turns out to be the answer to the question ‘What Do You Do for a Closing Song?’ So here we get an eight-minute spectacular, with Jarvis, in the breakdown, using a handheld camera to tessellate snapshots of audience members on to the big screen (“Common people like you”). Jarvis’s notorious Brit Awards protest at Michael Jackson’s performance does not get mentioned. Does it need to be? Probably not, and given its significance in what Jarvis describes as a subsequent decade of personal darkness, it’s a forgivable omission. Steve Mackey, the group’s bassist, who died in 2023, is acknowledged with an acoustic version of ‘Something Changed’. “Songs contain pockets of energy from your past life, which are released when you perform them,” Jarvis says at one point here. “They’re real time travel, better than Doctor Who.”

► Pulp What Do You Do for an Encore? is in UK cinemas 18 September.