‘People think fame is a magic wand’: Jarvis Cocker on old songs, young fans and his granny’s verdict on Pulp

When the director Garth Jennings first moved to Paris, Jarvis Cocker, who was living there, dropped in on his old friend. “And I nearly got you arrested,” the Pulp frontman recalls. It was bonfire night, and Cocker had taken some welcoming fireworks over to Jennings’ place. “It turned out Garth’s apartment was quite near to the – not an army base, but what’s it called?”

“The École Militaire,” says Jennings.

“So obviously they didn’t like explosives,” says Cocker. “We got told off for that. The best welcome to Paris.”

“It was lovely,” adds Jennings, fondly. “I remember it very well.”

The men had first met in the late 1990s, when Jennings directed two gorgeous music videos for Pulp, for the singles Help the Aged and A Little Soul. Now, almost 30 years later, they are working together again, on Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore? This joyful, funny, celebratory film is a hybrid beast: part concert movie and part documentary on the long history of the band. The live show was filmed at London’s O2 Arena in the summer of 2025, on the night that Pulp were told that More, their eighth studio album and first album in 24 years, had gone to No 1 in the British album charts. You can see Cocker waving around the trophy on stage.

Jennings, director of Son of Rambow and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, has lived in Paris for the past 13 years, where the animation for Sing, his wildly successful kids’ musical film franchise, is made. He is working on a short Christmas special, and the third and final film in the series. “It’s a slow process,” he says, from the studio, “but we’re getting there.” Cocker moved back to London a few years ago, and today he is at home, getting ready to headline the End of the Road festival. It will be Pulp’s last show for a while.

You can blame Instagram and Abba Voyage for the existence of What Do You Do for an Encore? Pulp, formed by Cocker in Sheffield in 1978, split up in 2002. They got back together for a reunion tour between 2011 and 2013, the final date of which was captured for another idiosyncratic documentary, Florian Habicht’s Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets. Cocker had considered those shows to be a fitting – and final – farewell.

“When Pulp got together that time, I had this idea that things had ended in a not-nice way, and I wanted it to have a happy ending,” Cocker says. “I thought the way to do that would be to play concerts, and we invited Russell Senior back” – the violinist and guitarist had quit in 1997 – “and I just thought it would be like: we’re all friends, everything’s good, and then we’d all retire,” says Cocker. “And to be honest, that tour did seem to do that.”

So when a promoter got in touch years later, to ask if Pulp would be interested in playing again, Cocker had to think about it. “Because the worst thing to do would have been to spoil the happy ending.” How did he decide to say yes? “I confessed my fear that people wouldn’t come, or that people weren’t that bothered, and why would they be?” The promoter assured him that people would most definitely be bothered. “He told me about a few times when he’d been to shows and a Pulp song had come on before a band went on, and everybody sang along. You know, I don’t go to shows any more. I’m an old bloke.” (Cocker is about to turn 63.) “I just said: ‘All right, I hope you’re right, let’s do it.’ But I wanted to make sure that it would be a good thing for us to do as well.”

Cocker teased the news of a second Pulp reunion on Instagram in 2022. Jennings messaged him to tell him how excited he was, and to offer his help. It is obvious, when chatting to Jennings, that as well as being Cocker’s friend, he is a huge Pulp fan. As they started to work on the creative direction of the live show together, Jennings remembers, “I’d be in some other room working on a graphics thing, and then I’d suddenly hear you lot playing, and I’d have to just drop it and come outside. Especially a song like Razzmatazz, which was my first Pulp song. I found you through that. You started playing that at one point, and it was just the best thing ever. I had this wonderful little secret window into this world.”

When it became obvious that the live show was going to be a spectacle, they started to wonder about turning it into a film. “Some of my favourite films are concert films, and they don’t need to be anything more. But this felt like an opportunity to go a bit further,” says Jennings.

Which is where Abba Voyage comes in. Both Jennings and Cocker had seen – and loved – the theatrical experience, which blends live music with giant holograms of Abba in their prime. “That was something that was very inspiring. Just the sheer joy of it,” says Jennings, who has seen it three times. As well as performing the hits, Abba Voyage tells the story of Abba, just as What Do You Do for an Encore? tells the story of Pulp, giving each song context.

“I was so glad when Garth got in touch, because it felt as if he could help make it something that people hadn’t seen before,” Cocker says. “I am very familiar with Pulp’s backstory because I’ve lived through it. But I’m always flabbergasted at how long the band has gone on.” It is clear from the footage of the crowd, showing people losing their minds and singing every word, that some of the audience were not even born when Pulp split up for the first time. “That’s something amazing, really. And something I can’t explain – why young people have latched on to it.” They played in Manchester recently. “A lot of young people,” Cocker laughs. “But I’m happy about it.”

The film uses animation, old TV clips and grainy VHS footage, as well as documents and objects that fans may recognise from Cocker’s 2023 book Good Pop Bad Pop. It was a “huge job” to pull it together, says Jennings, who credits the archivist Tess McNally-Watson with some serious hard work. “Because it’s not all in one place. It’s in people’s bedrooms and attics, and someone’s friend’s brother’s still got a cassette, so it’s a lot of Raiders of the Lost Ark-style gathering and then transferring.” At one point, there is a funny, fond interview with Cocker’s mother and grandmother, who crack jokes about his newfound fame. “That’s a bit embarrassing for me,” says Cocker. “My grandma’s been dead ages, and my mum died only three or four years ago, so it was quite a thing.”

During the live show, Pulp pay a moving tribute to Steve Mackey, who joined the band as bassist in 1989, and who died in 2023 aged 56. Mackey was not going to play on this tour, though he had wished his old bandmates luck. It was important that he was included in the film, and Cocker says that they were able to show it to Mackey’s family before it was signed off. “Just to make sure that they were happy with it. But I think you did a very good job there, Garth. It’s a hard thing to express in the right way.”

What Do You Do for an Encore? does not shy away from the more complicated times in Pulp’s story. Around the release of their then-divisive album This Is Hardcore in 1998, Cocker describes “going down a dark tunnel”. Jennings was making videos for the band back then. Had he noticed that things seemed off?

“I didn’t notice Jarvis going down a dark tunnel, and maybe you were, Jarvis, and I apologise if I wasn’t there to help you,” he says, sincerely. “But no, because the actual act of making these things was always lovely. I never noticed you being tricky, or anything.”

“It was probably because I’d decided to be in a band when I was seven,” Cocker reflects. “Like a lot of people, you think that if you achieve fame, that will be the magic wand that makes everything in your life work, and obviously that’s not the case. You still have to make an effort in your life. You can’t just lie in a bed and say: ‘Right, OK, that’s it, job done.’ But I didn’t realise that, so that’s why I had issues with it.” Over time, he says, “I went back into real life and appreciated it. That was probably another reason why it took me a while to decide to do Pulp again. I was thinking: ‘Well, what’s the motivation? What will you get from it?’”

In the film, Cocker describes Pulp as “scaling Mount Pop”, but it sounds as if he didn’t much like what he found at the summit. “It’s like seeing videos of your wedding. Your wedding is a magical thing, but then somebody shows you a video, and you think: ‘Oh God, what’s that?’” He prefers fantasy to reality, he says, “but sometimes you have to look at reality. And that’s what happened.” Fame, he says, “is an exciting thing, but you just have to keep your wits about you, and make sure you’re doing things for the right reason, and try not to get too up your own arse.”

When he was still at school, in one of his exercise books, Cocker wrote out a “Pulp master plan”. It makes an appearance in the film. But really, he says, they’ve never had one. “I’m glad things that things didn’t go according to a plan. That’s the great thing about groups. You know that you have to work with other people, and everybody adds something to it, and then you get something that you can’t really say exactly where it came from.”

Pulp’s End of the Road set last week marked the end of a tour that started in 2023, though the band are planning to meet up again in October, to celebrate it all. They’re going to see Abba Voyage together. Will there be another encore? “You know, it’s like a tree,” says Cocker, philosophically. “A tree doesn’t decide it’s going to grow. If the weather’s right, it’ll grow a branch. And if the intellectual weather is right in the next couple of years, maybe we’ll sprout another record.” He said it himself: there has never been a master plan.