Electric Picnic: Pulp Review

There wasn’t much of a fuss when Pulp petered out in 2002. In a post-Britpop world, their continued existence was beginning to feel like an exercise in collective denial (on their part) and it’s fair to state their passing wasn’t widely mourned. Having achieved everything they set out to, it seemed sensible to call it a day rather than suffer the ignominy of a long decline into mediocrity. For that reason, this summer’s short run of reunion shows can be seen as not so much a conventional comeback, where a band makes good on lost opportunities, as a belated victory lap. With nothing to prove, they have full license to celebrate, maybe even wallow in, their glorious streak of ‘90s hits.
Already on the far side of thirty when Britpop stormed the zeitgeist, Pulp’s best songs were underpinned by a nostalgia for an innocence long lost even then (beneath the suburbanite sexpot persona, it was obvious Jarvis Cocker yearned for the days when a quick fumble in the closet was a life-changing event). Which, of course, renders the nostalgia people nowadays feel for them doubly ironic. It’s like looking in your reflection through a double set of mirrors.

Ridiculously skinny for a man pushing 48, Cocker struts the Picnic Main Stage with zany scarecrow energy, one-third louche rock god (he mounts a speaker at one point), two-thirds Monty Python’s Ministry of Funny Walks. Musically the band veers from the sublime... to, well the even more sublime. The perve-pop shenanigans of ‘Babies’ are at once Benny Hill hilarious and extremely affecting; ‘Do You Remember The First Time?’ could be a diary entry ripped from the pages of the audience’s collective youth.
The high-point, naturally is ‘Common People’, rendered all the more affecting by Cocker’s pronouncement to the effect that, with their comeback tour at an end, this might be the last time they play it. A clever, deeply scabrous critique of Britain’s class system, it feels even more affecting today, in an age when old Etonians run the UK government and every second band seems to have gone to private school. Oh for a contemporary outfit possessing one-tenth of their charm, guile and teasing wit.