Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore? review – Jarvis Cocker’s wit and warmth upstage the hits

Wonderful archive footage charts the Sheffield outsiders’ unlikely rise, but the distant camerawork struggles to capture the thrill of their triumphant O2 gigs

In 1978, in the classroom of a comprehensive school in Sheffield, a skinny, shortsighted 15-year-old wrote a mission statement in the back of an exercise book – a masterplan for reaching the top with the band he had recently formed with some classmates who, like him, weren’t picked first for sports.

In 2023, after a hiatus of a decade, his band Pulp started touring again, and last year played to 20,000 people at each of two nights at the O2 in London. This film features concert footage from those gigs in which a still lithe, still-got-it-at-60-odd Jarvis Cocker sings his hit art-pop anthems backed by most of the classic lineup and a 10-piece string section. And interspersed with the concert footage are autobiographical musings, nostalgic archive footage, interviews with Jarvis’s mum and gran, and Cocker narrating the story of how he got from there, almost half a century ago, to here.