Pulp
Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, San Francisco
September 16, 2024
Photos by Raymond Ahner
Sometimes a specific song/album/artist can bring you back to a specific time in your life. Case in point: the first tour that I ever went on as a musician was in the Spring of 2019, and one of the albums that was on constant rotation in the tour van was His ‘n’ Hers by Pulp, as the singer/guitarist of the band I was opening for had just gotten into them. Days after the tour was over and I was back in the Bay Area, I had that album on repeat and then ventured deeper into the band’s catalogue. After discovering that they were no longer together and touring, I resigned myself to the fact that these albums would be the closest I would ever get to witnessing the band in a live setting. Fast forward five years, and Pulp announced their first North American tour in a dozen years, with their lone Bay Area stop being at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium.
To say that there was excitement in the venue is an understatement. There was clearly a good amount of audience members in attendance who had never seen the band before, and once the lights went down that excitement was broken into a fever pitch of applause. A low drone began emanating from the PA as text appeared on a screen behind the stage, telling the audience, “This is a night you will remember for the rest of your life. You are about to see the 557th concert by Pulp. This performance is an encore. An encore happens because the crowd wants more.” And after more cheers, the screen read: “This is what we do for an encore.” The band made their way onstage, the ambient note soon turning into the opening of the song “I Spy,” before frontman Jarvis Cocker sang the opening lines, “I spy a boy and I spy a girl. And I spy the worst place in the world.” He suddenly appeared in front of the screen as the band kicked into high gear as the song’s tempo quickened. It was six minutes of horny, frenzied bliss, finally coming to a close to another round of rapturous applause from the audience.
To say that it was the perfect opening to the show would be an understatement. So much of Jarvis Cocker’s most famous lyrics have to do with unrequited love and lust, something that he would sing about in the next song that the band played, “Disco 2000,” one of Pulp’s most popular songs. Before the song he told the crowd, “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to play and you’re going to give us energy based on how we play, and we’ll play off that energy, and you’ll play off the energy that we’re giving back to you, and so on.”
The music of Pulp has always sounded full, especially the material that the band put out during their heyday, and the band onstage was more then up top the task of replicating it live. Of course there was Jarvis Cocker, ever the consummate frontman, but I would be foolish to not give the rest of the band their due, as they pulled off each and every song perfectly. There was Mark Webber on guitar and keyboards, Candida Doyle on keyboards, and Nick Banks on drums, as well as live members Andrew McKinney on bass, Emma Smith on violin and guitar, and Adam Betts on percussion, guitar, and keyboards. Every song was pulled off without a hitch, even the more abstract ones like “Weeds II (The Origin Of The Species).”
Which brings up a good point in and of itself: Pulp could have easily phoned it in and only played their hits, but some of their most popular songs like “Lipgloss” and “Razzmatazz” were absent from the setlist, with longer songs like “F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.” and “Sunrise” being performed instead. There wasn’t anything played pre-1992, with the oldest song in the set being the non-album single “O.U. (Gone, Gone),” and while it would have been great to see anything from the band’s first three albums, an era that has been all but ignored by the band since they were originally released, it makes sense that Pulp would at least focus on material from the most popular era of the band.
Probably the highlight of the entire show for me was the song “This Is Hardcore,” which saw Jarvis sitting on an armchair and drinking during the intro as Mark Webber played out discordant notes on his guitar. The song is an analogy about fame funneled through the analogy of hardcore pornography, and it was one of only two songs from the album This Is Hardcore that was played during the entire show. The entire performance of the song stretched near the eight-minute mark and went through multiple sections, the crowd screaming back at Jarvis as he sang, “This is hardcore, there is no way back from you! This is hardcore, this is me on top of you!” before the song reached a fever pitch, Jarvis gesturing as he exclaimed, “That goes in there and that goes in there and that goes in there and that goes in there and then it’s over!” Despite the fact that the song was performed just over halfway through their set, the show could have ended there and I would have felt satisfied.
As I mentioned earlier, the Pulp album I’ve heard the most amount of times (and the one that’s my favorite) is His ‘n’ Hers, so the one-two punch “Do You Remember The First Time?” and “Babies” immediately afterwards was another highlight of the set for me. Before playing the former song, Jarvis asked the crowd who saw them at their first San Francisco show on September 25th 1994 at The Fillmore before thanking the audience for making this show the largest that Pulp had ever played in San Francisco. Later on in the performance, during one of the encores, Jarvis remarked about how the band had seen one of the Waymo self-driving cars on their way to their hotel from SFO, and it inspired them to play a song about cars that they don’t normally play. After asking the crowd what they thought the song was, the band launched into “Joyriders,” the first song on the album, and a song that I didn’t expect to see the band perform.
Of course the song that got the biggest crowd reaction was the one that closed out the first encore: “Common People,” the band’s biggest hit and signature song. It’s a song that starts out simply and slowly enough, but it picked up tempo and became more full as Jarvis spurned the crowd on, singing “You’ll never live like common people, you’ll never do what common people do! You’ll never fail like common people do! You’ll never watch your life slide out of view!” The song is an exclamation of contempt against those with money who will never understand the plight of the working class, yet still try espouse that they know what struggles really are. To get meta for a moment here, the song made me think about Pulp and their standing in the so-called “Britpop” scene, which was spearheaded by the bands Blur and Oasis. With Damon Albarn refusing to tour with Blur in the United States and the Oasis reunion sure to only see the Gallagher brothers playing stadiums, here was Pulp playing relatively small venues throughout North America and selling them out night after night despite never having a huge hit Stateside. It made me think that Jarvis Cocker and Pulp are the true heroes and spokespeople of the common people.
Opening the show was ESCAPE-ISM. The solo project of Washington, DC punk musician Ian Svenonius, the project sounds more like a combination of Suicide, Lou Reed, Link Wray, and The Ramones. Playing the guitar like he just picked it up yesterday, he sang songs like “Rebel Outlaw,” while bassist/keyboardist Sandi Denton deadpanned, “He’s a rebel.” At first I wasn’t fully on board with his performance, but as the set went on I began to enjoy the set more and more, as I viewed it less like a traditional performance and more like performance art.
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