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MUSIC
Pulp ★★★★★
Sidney Myer Music Bowl, March 3
A Pulp show in Melbourne is a rare event, unseen since 2011, and before that, 1998. Some are out for the blood moon tonight. I’m out for Pulp.
Veteran members Jarvis Cocker, Candida Doyle, Mark Webber and Nick Banks, and several touring members, are flanked by half a dozen of those blowy inflatable dancing men you get outside car dealerships – I guess they look a bit like how Cocker dances.
They open with Sorted for E’s and Wizz and then go straight into Disco 2000 – possibly the best one-two opening punch I’ve ever seen at a live show. Skinny and limber at 62, Cocker throws himself around the stage with barely a pause. His voice has lost none of that breathy lustre.
Pulp’s power comes from the fact that unlike their Britpop peers they were never intrinsically tied to youth. They were already in their 30s when they hit their 90s stride, and Cocker has simply always seemed out of time. He’s a storyteller, and a documenter of the ordinary. He’s a glam rock Alan Bennett, a disco ball Mike Leigh. Gangly, self-possessed, horny.
In Disco 2000 and Do You Remember the First Time?, youth already sounds like a distant memory, full of yearning and excitement. Babies, a perfect little short story about voyeurism, captures the raw sexuality of adolescence in all its awkwardness and sordidness.
The seedy, red-light lament of This is Hardcore brings that sordidness into an adult world, Cocker reclining in an armchair, then writhing around the stage: “This is the eye of the storm / It’s what men in stained raincoats pay for / But in here it is pure”.
The nineties hits form the core of the set, but the pretty great new album More (2025) gets a look in too, with the tracks Spike Island, Got to Have Love and the sweet Farmers Market holding their own. Even newer is Begging For Change, recorded for the War Child charity, due out on Friday.
But it’s the outcast anthems that win the night. Mis-Shapes, in which weirdos “Raised on a diet of broken biscuits” inherit the earth, and the set closer Common People, about class tourism, both carry so much rage and indignation.
While Mis-Shapes is brimming with joy, the anger of Common People tussles with disco synths and resolves into something complex and thoughtful. “You will never understand / How it feels to live your life / With no meaning or control.” Still powerful after over 30 years.
On the way out the gate I see the last dregs of the blood moon, a grey-orange smudge high in the sky. A natural phenomena only seen every few years. Well, Pulp haven’t played here for 15. I know which I’ll remember.
Reviewed by Will Cox
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