Pulp’s Next Encore Is Still Taking Shape
Jarvis Cocker and Garth Jennings discuss a new film about Pulp’s history, its younger audience and the possibility of another record.
Pulp’s history is coming to the screen in Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore?, a concert-documentary directed by Garth Jennings and built around the band’s 2025 performance at London’s O2 Arena. Combining live footage with animation, archive clips, old television material and personal memorabilia, the film follows Pulp from its formation in Sheffield in 1978 through its darker periods and later reunions.
In an interview reported by The Guardian, Cocker reflects on the distance between fame’s promise and its reality. He describes the period around 1998’s This Is Hardcore as a descent into a “dark tunnel”, while questioning the idea that celebrity can function as a solution to life’s problems. Fame, he says, is exciting, but requires perspective and a clear sense of motivation.
The film also documents Pulp’s continued appeal to younger listeners, many of whom were not born when the band split in 2002. After reunions between 2011 and 2013 and again from 2023, the group’s 2025 album More became its first studio record in 24 years and reached No 1 on the British album chart, according to the article.
Jennings, who previously directed Pulp videos for Help the Aged and A Little Soul, developed the film with Cocker as something broader than a conventional concert recording. Inspired in part by Abba Voyage, the project places the songs within the band’s wider story, drawing on material gathered from private collections, attics and personal archives.
Steve Mackey, Pulp’s bassist from 1989, is given a tribute in the film. Mackey died in 2023 aged 56, and the tribute was shown to his family before the film was completed. Cocker describes the process of representing Mackey’s place in the band’s story as difficult but important.
A further Pulp album remains possible, though unconfirmed. Cocker says the band might “sprout another record” if the circumstances are right over the next few years. For now, the group’s future is less a master plan than a matter of what he calls the right “intellectual weather”.
