“All voices are important,” the Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker told an adoring crowd in Adelaide on Friday. “All voices should be heard.”
Message received. At one point Pulp had pulled out of the opening gig at the Adelaide festival over the Adelaide writers’ week (AWW) furore.
But they turned up, they wowed the 10,000-strong crowd, and while Cocker didn’t explicitly say his comment was a reference to the brouhaha around AWW, it was pretty clear.
“Things are better when everyone is involved in them,” he said. And he proved his point by launching into Common People, bringing that crowd to its feet.
The concert was theatrical but intimate, spectacular and uplifting, cheeky and moving and fun.
Getting Pulp, one of the biggest bands of the 90s, for opening night was a major coup for the Adelaide festival. The traditionally free gig kicks off Adelaide’s Mad March.
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Pulp are an indie band who generally get lumped in with the Britpop movement. At their peak they garnered fierce devotion with songs about class consciousness, and raw and real storytelling about love and sex and the suburbs.
A beautiful and joyous Welcome to Country from Kaurna and Narrunga elder Mickey O’Brien set the scene, and then the show started.
Cocker strode out and it was straight into the anthemic Sorted for E’s & Wizz, to a crowd that roiled and popped to his distinctive voice, which gives Pulp songs a peculiar mix of joy and melancholy.
And Cocker steered clear, mostly, of local politics, despite the band’s former refusal to play in protest at the cancellation of an appearance by the Palestinian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah. Her reinstatement paved the way for Pulp to U-turn and the writer will also appear at an alternative writers’ week event with Louise Adler – who resigned as director of AWW – on Sunday.
At the time, the band had said it wanted “to make it absolutely clear that Pulp refuse to condone the silencing of voices. We celebrate difference, and oppose censorship, violence and oppression in all its forms.”
When it decided to play it said it hoped the concert “will be an opportunity for different communities to come together in peace and harmony”.
There were plenty of nostalgic gen Xers in 90s band T-shirts in the crowd on Friday night, but it was also the opening whistle for the multiple festivals that take over the city, so it was an eclectic mix that gathered for a breezy, balmy evening by the River Torrens.
Fruit bats and migrating birds soared overhead, and threatened thunderstorms and a feared bacterial stink from the river didn’t eventuate.
A constant stream of fans packed out Elder Park until it was a steamy pit and were treated to a mix tape of Pulp’s decades.
The band split in 2002, reformed a couple of times after that, then released their 2025 album More. It’s their first album in 24 years.
This tour is a perfect blend of how they were then, and how they’ve grown up.
Classic hits including Common People had the dense crowd on its feet. But most of them stayed that way throughout.
• Tory Shepherd was one of those who pulled out of AWW
