SPILL FEATURE: LOTS OF PEOPLE WANT TO BE A FIREMAN OR A SPACEMAN. I WANTED TO BE A POP STAR. – A CONVERSATION WITH JARVIS COCKER OF PULP

LOTS OF PEOPLE WANT TO BE A FIREMAN OR A SPACEMAN. I WANTED TO BE A POP STAR.

A CONVERSATION WITH JARVIS COCKER OF PULP

You could forgive Jarvis Cocker for looking a bit content when we meet him one day short of his 63^rd birthday. After all, the last two years have been a whirlwind – a successful Pulp reunion, a number one album, and thousands of concerts around the world. So, it’s no surprise we get a relaxed, loquacious frontman in front of us, and he’s more than willing to share his thoughts on anything and everything from the past few years. “I’m quite happy at the moment, even if I don’t always smile!” he cracks as the fun begins.

The thing that brought us all here? The concert film What Do You Do For An Encore?, currently out on Mubi, which blends one of their many triumphant shows in 2025 with archival footage of the band, as well as an absorbing tell-all story. So, what was the inspiration behind the sudden release from a relatively guarded band? Turns out the inspiration came from an intriguing source.

“I went to see Garth (director Garth Jennings) in his in his office in Paris, and yeah, I’d just seen the ABBA Voyage thing, and it turned out that he’d watched it three times, so he was very into it!” Jarvis laughs. “What I liked about the show was that it was a mixture of things. It wasn’t just like looking at a video screen. They were real. There were, you know, the band, real people playing, and sometimes certain bits of the show things would come out into the audience, and it seemed like a new way of presenting a pop show, and I suppose that’s what we spoke about.” he continued. That led to the movie, but with a clear focus on making sure the band were the centre of it. “The real focus of the concert is the people on the stage, and you need to believe in them and believe that they are speaking to you,” he explains.

PULP: WHAT DO YOU DO FOR AN ENCORE? FILM REVIEW

As for the archival footage and documentary, we get a strong answer on that too – it wasn’t the band’s idea! It was inspired by an archiver who worked on the movie Senna, plus director Garth Jennings’ fandom of the group, the band were convinced to put the history on screen, with Cocker praising Jennings’ sensitive handling of the archival footage, particularly as it contains his mother and grandmother, who have both since passed away. “I think it acts as an introduction for all the people who don’t know about us. A lot of young people came to see us on tour, and I was very happy about that. They probably weren’t born when we first started, so they can catch up now!” he smiles.

It’s touring that’s given the band new life, and seen them rediscover themselves as well. In between stories of Chile and Mexico, among others, Jarvis shares a line so articulate that it can only really have come from one of pop’s great muses: “There’s a technical term for this thing, and it’s called collective effervescence, and that was a term coined by a French psychiatrist, I think, in 1912, and that’s about the way that people react at big events. It could be a sporting event. It could be a concert. When you get people together, and the mood starts to happen, and I love that. You know, I’m always very curious about the audience. I wonder how they got there, why they’re there…and all these individual people become this mass that then makes a magic thing happen. I hope that the film captures a bit of that.”

As well as the present, there’s the past, with Cocker sharing some wonderful stories of a first ‘Pulp’ rehearsal obtained via the bribes of beer and lager, before turning into the band we know today. There’s a sense that he still can’t quite believe he’s made it where he has, perhaps best summed up by his line: “Lots of people want to be a fireman or a spaceman. I wanted to be a pop star, and I actually managed to do it, so I’m very happy about that.” But he also shares the slightly darker side of looking into nostalgia, sharing how his entry into music coincided with the rave movement of the early 80s, a time when he thought Britain was truly ready for change – until the Government sunk it with law changes. It’s a nice nostalgia story with a bitter ending, although there’s a hopeful coda of ‘maybe one day we’ll beat them!’ with a smile that suggests the old radical still beats in there too.

PULP – LIVE! ALBUM REVIEW

As I said earlier, you’ll notice a loquaciousness in his answers, but that seems to come from contentment – he talks openly of recognising his own happiness one day before proposing to his now-wife, and that happiness reverberates through him as he talks, even when put on the subject of what he once called ‘bad pop’, which he now ascribes to money-chasing social media algorithms, advising that even in his only social media use (that of Instagram) he finds himself snoozing suggested content. “Keep your eyes open and your ears open, I think, and try and guard against it that way,” he suggests.

But mostly, he’s a happy man. He talks about finding genuine contentment in his songs, life, and family, with his son now 23 years old, around the time Pulp first took a serious hiatus. “I think now success is playing songs and seeing that people like them and feeling like you make some connection with that. It’s an amazing thing to be able to do and I think I appreciate it for what it is now rather than what I think it ought to be…” he says, almost to himself.

Mission accomplished on that score, then. So, what of the future of Pulp? After originally playing around and saying he would be attending Oasis’s 2027 tour, Cocker’s answer was as straight and honest as any other. Who knows? “I don’t think Pulp is over, but I never think that really,” Cocker said. “But we haven’t got plans to do any touring. What would have to happen for us to tour again? If we manage to write another record or something like that, you know. So, at the moment, we’ve just finished touring, so everybody’s going to have a bit of a rest. And I will probably maybe towards the end of the year think about saying, shall we have a rehearsal? Shall we see if we can write anything? And that aspect of it, you know, you can’t really predict that.”

Very true, of course – but given the vitality of Cocker himself, and the warmth that surrounds this production and its release, you’d be surprised if Pulp’s quite done yet. So, what will they do for an encore? If it’s anything like this, you won’t regret waiting for it.

Artist Links

What Do You Do For An Encore? Film Link

Photo Credit: Joseph Lynn