Jarvis Cocker makes a grand entrance. The rest of Pulp have taken their place at the front of the stage, the string players are ready to the band’s right, and then their frontman emerges at the top of a Hollywood staircase, silhouetted by a massive full moon. He has a spindly, instantly recognisable silhouette, of course. There’s no mistaking; Jarv is here.
Mid-set he mentions Pulp’s first foray to Manchester; an appearance at the Boardwalk in October 1992. Subsequently, things changed for Pulp; hit albums and fame. And for Cocker, an elevated position in our country’s cultural life, including presenting radio shows, an appearance on BBC One’s Question Time and in the film Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, a recently published memoir-of-sorts (Good Pop, Bad Pop), and a fully-fledged solo career under the name Jarv Is. His idiosyncrasy remains intact; at the very least, he pronounces “party” like no one else I’ve heard (in a Yorkshire French accent).
It was 2001 when Pulp released their last album, We Love Life. This Castlefield Bowl show is a stop on the second reunion tour; an eight-thousand capacity, mostly open-air arena, bounded on one side by a redbrick railway bridge.
Cocker makes his way down the staircase to the sound of I Spy, a vivid account of class revenge via the medium of sexual conquest. It’s a great song, strikingly unsettling, but prime Jarvis territory.
The indie dancefloor classic Disco 2000 gets a mundane background image of woodchip on a wall and some showbiz pizzazz too; a cannon firing colourful streamers into the crowd. The devoted audience sing out the choruses and the verses too. When Cocker askes for noise, we give him noise.
Mis-Shapes is early in the set, a quite wonderful solidarity call to the misfits and alienated weirdos full of hunger and ideas but struggling to navigate the world. Cocker used to deliver Mis-Shapes with real anger and desperation in the early 1990s, less so now.
Something Changed – dedicated to the memory Pulp’s former bassist Steve Mackey, who died aged 56 in March – is followed by one of the more obscure songs of the evening, Weeds. The brave decision to swerve some obvious tunes in favour of the whirring psychedelia of this authentic selection from the back catalogue seems well appreciated by most of the crowd, excluding those that take the opportunity for a trip to the bar.
The song takes up the same theme of growing up in unpropitious surroundings that features in Mis-Shapes. In the year or so before the first incarnation of Pulp, schoolboy Jarvis was working part-time in a fish market in Sheffield. I assume, off-duty, he’d probably have smelled of cod, which may well have proved a hindrance in his teenage love life; the unsuccessful nature of which became another staple ingredient in his lyrics.
“Look, a train,” Cocker says, pointing at the only one that passes the whole evening with no passengers on board. “Oh, it’s empty,” he exclaims.
Introducing Sorted for E’s & Wizz he pays homage to Manchester’s role “defining the vibe of the rave era”. There’s always the comedown, though, as the song tells us. That’s common to other Pulp songs too; the confusion and self-doubt of the morning after. As evidenced too, by the trajectory of the band.
In the mid-1990s, buoyed by Britpop and high on hits, the former fish salesman discovered the world was his oyster, but that the leap out of the margins and into the mainstream had come at a cost. The album This is Hardcore (1998) is the sound of someone losing the plot. That album’s title track is this evening’s highlight: an epic, pornographic, melancholic song that finds the string orchestra in their element, and the visuals awash with sleazy red, as if the film Moulin Rouge had been remixed by David Lynch.
Peak period Pulp songs about the sexual act – including Do You Remember the First Time? (Cocker losing his virginity), and Babies (a disconcerting confession of voyeurism) – provoke the most sustained bouts of audience dancing. Cocker himself serves up his best selection of moves during Sunrise. Throughout a spectacular wig-out mid-song, with guitarist Mark Webber in full effect, he manages a number of side lunges and twisted body shapes, and like some amphetamine-fuelled Marcel Marceau shooing away a flock of birds, several sequences of fluttery hand gestures.
Like a Friend opens the encore, Cocker fixating on the trauma of being friend-zoned by a perennial crush, tortured by an inability to make a complete break: “Come on in now, wipe your feet on my dreams,” he sings while lying on his back.
We’ve experienced full-tilt frolics, entertainment and songs of ennui and playfulness, before Common People closes the show, followed by a short burst of fireworks. The sun has set somewhere behind the stage. Did we just witness Manchester’s final goodbye to Pulp? If so, the trans-Pennine love affair ended with a triumph.
