Critic Reviews

As Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore? makes abundantly clear, Cocker’s voice, moves, and lust for performance put Pulp in a class by themselves. This film is quite an encore.

Favouring multimedia and collage visuals, director Garth Jennings’ impressive music video resumé (including Pulp’s ​‘Help the Aged’ and Blur’s ​‘Coffee & TV’) ensures this never becomes a standard trip down memory lane.

What Do You Do For An Encore? is a celebration of Pulp, tracing their supermarket sweep from Sheffield wannabes to national treasures, stitching together live footage with decades-old interviews and a voiceover from Cocker himself.

Four musicians, little ornament and no bells and whistles do more than the arena fireworks to explain why Pulp still matter.

The concert footage explains why people still want to see Pulp perform, but the history scattered around it keeps suggesting a stronger film about why Pulp needed to return in the first place.

The bio-documentary and archival parts of What Do You Do for an Encore? are wonderful: droll, heartfelt and inimitably Cocker. To enjoy the concert section, you probably had to be there.

As Cocker’s narration reveals his disdain for the upper classes and his dedication to promoting the underdog, the songs in the back half of the concert begin to hit a little differently, particularly “This is Hardcore,” which takes on the dark side of fame, aging, and voyeurism, as well as the band’s breakthrough smash, 1995’s “Common People,” a sharp critique of the wealthy who appropriate the struggle of the working class as their own. Just as the meaning the songs have for the band becomes clearer, so they do for us as well.