By Neil Durham

WHEN?: Friday 13 June 2025, tour runs through 26 September 2025

WORTH A LOOK?: *****

Setlist: Spike Island; Grown Ups; Slow Jam; Sorted For Es and Whizz; Disco 2000; F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E; Tina; Help The Aged; Farmers’ Market; This Is Hardcore; Sunrise; Something Changed; The Fear; O.U. (Gone Gone); Party Hard; Acrylic Afternoons; Do You Remember The First Time?; Mis-Shapes; Got To Have Love; Babies; Common People; A Sunset

Tonight Pulp discover shortly before taking the stage at this arena for the 1st time that More, their 1st new album for 24 years, is their 3rd UK charttopper, their 1st since 1998’s This Is Hardcore.

• Read on for reasons including how this is pop’s greatest resurrection of the year

‘Be there – 2 O’Clock by the fountain down the road’ instructed Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker during top 10 hit Disco 2000 but tonight, 30 years later, it was to be at this arena early because his band were playing 2 sets with interval from the 8pm start time.

Such is the luxury this band now has of a just-released album of brilliant new material – More – to play accompanying the hits which peaked 30 years ago with a Glastonbury Festival headliner appearance at the time of Common People just before the career high Different Class album.

We 1st saw Pulp at Glastonbury Festival in 1994 on the second stage where they emerged fully grown and 5th on the bill with a fledgling Oasis 8th.

Something has changed to paraphrase 1 of their best-loved songs that gets a beautiful moment shorn of the wider band at the start of act 2 but, in so very many ways, so very little has.

Lead singer Jarvis Cocker is a loquacious frontman who knows how to tell a good story yet is self-deprecating even on a night when the audience at least is celebrating a sense of triumph unusually associated with outsider anthems such as these.

The beauty of new album More is that it brings a sense of the worldy wise to the lyrics with tunes like Grown Ups, Spike Island and, especially, current single Got To Have Love in no way out of place tonight in what is essentially a greatest hits and treats set.

As if to underline his advancing years Cocker jokes it must be his age that makes him forget the setlist and sing More‘s Tina before 1997’s number 8 hit Help The Aged.

At the interval we’re asked whether we’d like to hear Dishes or Party Hard with the latter winning and appropriately leaning into the celebratory Friday night vibe at this venue.

All too soon it’s over with the beautiful A Sunset from More. Its lyrics talk of the everyday in what others describe as ‘the happening of the year’ and it’s perhaps this sentiment – finding joy in what surrounds us – that underscores the story of pop’s greatest resurrection of the year so far.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy Pulp Tickets
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