Pulp
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★☆
Ten songs into Pulp’s set, the feather boas flutter on screen, Jarvis Cocker adopts his most louche pose yet atop a brown leather armchair, and the cinematic creepiness of This Is Hardcore starts to build.
This six-minute epic, laced with pornographic despair, seemed gratuitous when it was released, in 1998, but here it becomes the Pulp classic that most benefits from this being an indoor gig.
There’s no open sky to dissipate the effect as the lighting, a friendly 1970s orange for the preceding songs, turns a sordid crimson. We’re no longer in the disco. This is Pulp in their red era, Pulp at their most menacing, and their frontman delivers its final act with the kind of theatrical conviction for which he is still, perhaps, underrated.
This night at 3Arena is only the second date on the You Deserve More tour, which coincides with the release of More, their first album for 24 years.
The set, elevated by the presence of a string section, begins with the album’s opening track, Spike Island, an effortless shimmy back to peak Pulp in which Cocker slips in his personal manifesto that he was “born to perform”, then tempers that grandiosity by defining performance as “shouting and pointing”.
Tonight he is a storyteller in corduroy, here to anchor a generous show separated by a civilised 15-minute interval so that the audience’s ageing bladders can obtain some relief and Cocker can do the most Jarvisesque of costume changes.
The length means that the inclusion of seven songs from More doesn’t come at too much cost, with Underwear and I Spy, two imperial-era songs from Different Class, Pulp’s 1995 album, the only regrettable casualties compared with the band’s greatest-hits foray into St Anne’s Park in 2023.
It is 32 years since Pulp first played Dublin – which Cocker details before sliding into Do You Remember the First Time? – and 29 years since they headlined a bill featuring Cast and Super Furry Animals at an earlier iteration of 3Arena. None of us has got any younger since then.
Cocker plays into this, incorporating a couple of lie-downs while speak-singing and asking the audience for help with a high bit in the chorus of Help the Aged. “Everybody’s got to grow up,” he sings on the band’s new song Grown Ups, though in Pulp fashion this is swiftly followed by whispered doubt. “Everybody? Are you sure?”
In the intervening decades, none of the poignancy of songs such as Something Changed and Disco 2000 have lessened – if anything, as the crowd sings “let’s all meet up in the year 2000″, it has become more acute.
Mis-Shapes, “dedicated to pretty much everybody in this room”, retains its reliable highlight status, but the truly celebratory portion of the show arrives courtesy of the poppy 1993 song Babies, the most likable story of teenage voyeurism ever written, and then we’re on track for an outsize eruption.
Common People, both danceable triumph and pointed dissection of the British class system, hits different. The song, the last before a “soft” encore, remains Pulp’s crowning glory. As at St Anne’s Park, its furious climax on Tuesday night is delayed by band introductions and is all the more satisfying for that.
It’s an achievement worth reliving. Let’s all meet up in, say, the year 2029? Why not? We deserve more.
