July saw the 2025 lineup for Tramlines featuring the usual festival favourites orbiting around one celestial being, Pulp. Their gravitational pull is palpable on the Friday night of Tramlines: already several hours before the headline slot, an audience is descending on the main stage and an excited buzz hangs in the air. Varied demographics showed up for each act but Pulp’s crowd truly is a mix, with those who grew up alongside Jarvis Cocker coalescing with young families and university students.
The act before, Spiritualized, finishes and I find myself wishing that something a bit more invigorating had been the precursor to the headline act. Finally, the screens light up, announcing that this is their 571st concert. This is how Pulp does an encore. As the band bursts into action – all thumping bass and slide guitar – Cocker ascends to the top of the stairs and kicks off the night by taking us to ‘Spike Island’. “I was born to do this/ Shouting and pointing” could not have been more true – Cocker is a natural frontman and captivates us from the first note of the night with an ease that shows Pulp’s proficiency.
Brimming with energy, he is animated and unpredictable, never keeping his hands still and dancing with a charming awkwardness. He throws grapes and, later, chocolates, into the audience as well as into his own mouth, missing but shrugging it off. Cocker takes the thousands gathered at Hillsborough Park on a night out, with a backdrop that reflects our journey through the discography and into the past. The now-closed nightclub Limit materialises onto the screen, and Cocker ruminates on the lost art of disco, being able to head down the stairs and into a ‘Slow Jam’. The song is smooth and the bass is rounded, and lingers in my head for weeks afterwards – any moment of boredom is met with Cocker demanding “we should be having a slow jam!”. ‘Sorted for Es and Whizz’ takes the party up a notch “in the middle of the night” but questions what we do when we come down.
The intro to ‘Disco 2000’ is met with uproarious approval, a Sheffield favourite. It feels mired in layers of self-awareness – “Let’s all meet up in the year 2000/ Won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown?/…I never knew that you’d get married/ I would be living down here on my own”. 35 years on from the song’s release, they’re back in Sheffield, but singing to a crowd that clings onto every word and shouts it back. At the same time, this is their first tour since Pulp disbanded in 2002, and so the lyrics feel bittersweet.
Cocker notes the significant number of young people who have congregated for his sermon, and asks if Sheffield is still the city of sex. He then announces that he has a very special skill: “I can tell where in Sheffield people are from just by looking at them”. He walks down from the stage and along the barrier, naming places: “Attercliffe… Broomhill…Crookes”. Each person shakes their hand and Cocker keeps walking, talking, naming places in a hypnotic trance that increases in speed, until, for the first time in 13 years, Pulp plays ‘Sheffield: Sex City’.
“I just wanna make contact with you!” Cocker proclaims. The synth keyboard is jazzy and the crowd is bobbing as he delivers a breathy monologue about cigarettes and chocolates and a pileup in the city centre caused by fornicating dogs. The hysteria continues until “the entirety of Park Hill came in unison at 4:30am” and his question is answered in the affirmative.
Later, the stage lights drop to a sultry red, a throne appears at the top of the stage, and Cocker climbs up the steps to recline across it. He sips from a cup and surveys his subjects. Drumbeats, brass, an ominous piano riff. Then the strings soar. “You are hardcore, you make me hard” sings Cocker. He transforms to leering, proclaiming his desperation to solicit the subject for a movie to “star in…together”. For such a mixed crowd, it’s not exactly a family show, but everyone is loving it. “And then it’s over! I wanna know…what do you do for an encore?” We circle back to the start of the night. This is an encore. This is how Pulp pulls out all the stops.
Next, he pulls Sheffield legend Richard Hawley onstage for ‘Sunrise’ and then ‘Last Day of the Miner’s Strike’. Tramlines is the first crowd ever to hear the latter live in the 23 years since the song’s release, and Pulp’s frontman explains how elements of the song came together for him in a dream. The night out continues; “everyone remembers their first time” says Cocker. He reminisces on the band’s first ever gig at the Leadmill, which closed its doors to much outcry this summer as the latest in a series of local music venue closures. The crowd boos and groans – the resentment is shared.
The beginning of ‘Do You Remember The First Time’ rings out and all is forgotten. Cocker’s voice is crooning and rousing at once, effortlessly moving between registers, and in a crowd of thousands it feels that he is speaking to you specifically. “But you know that we’ve changed so much since then/ Oh yeah, we’ve grown” continues the theme of coming-of-age and homecoming that Pulp weaves through their performance. Standing in Hillsborough Park after two years of university soundtracked by Pulp, I am forced to reminisce. The lead guitar riff is laced with nostalgia and bittersweetness and feels like stumbling into an old friend, tipsy and confused.
Nearing the end of the show, Pulp plays ‘Got To Have Love’, a single from the new album released in June, unerring in its honesty despite Pulp’s accrued worldliness. Amidst soaring violins, Cocker brutally announces: “without love/ you’re just jerking off”. Then he speaks in a hushed tone over a female chorus: “when love disappears, life disappears/ and you sit on your backside for 25 years”. Coming back to the stage, now grown up, Cocker has a harsh wisdom to share with the crowd that’s less hidden in his younger chutzpah and bravado. “Do you even know how to spell it?” he demands.
Next, a guitar is picked until the intro of ‘Babies’ rings out over Hillsborough to huge cheers. “Well it happened, years ago” Cocker begins. This performance is a testament to his storytelling ability as we are effortlessly pulled in and out of different scenes, decades apart, around the country.
“But soon I wanted more!” ‘Babies’ showcases Pulp’s favourite themes at their very best – a gritty coming of age, a longing for more, a nostalgia for an easier time, all told through the image of a friend’s coveted older sister. This song is a crowd pleaser and the chorus reverberates around me back toward the band: “I wanna take you home/ I wanna give you children/ and you might be my girlfriend” is so simple yet holds so much. “I only went with her ‘cause she looked like you, my god!” the crowd yells.
The audience is frenzied enough that the next song is evident. “This song was written in London but could not have existed without Sheffield” Cocker announces. Something he was told in London stuck with him, he tells us, then Hawley returns to close the show and we are encouraged to get on our friends’ shoulders.
Much of the crowd is two people tall, the synths come in and we are taken on a pilgrimage to 1980s London for ‘Common People’. There is nothing new to say about this song and it would be remiss to try. Every teenager and sixty year old in the crowd is singing, the synth tempo steadily climbs as Cocker wryly describes pool, roaches, and a girl who could “call [her] dad to stop it all”, and Hawley’s slide guitar keeps a cinematic line running over the gritty lyrics. “Laugh along with the common people, laugh along even though they’re laughing at you”. Pulp is a Sheffield treasure and ‘Common People’ has soundtracked every Friday night for its students for years (some singing along with more self-awareness than others) so seeing this live was otherworldly.
The song crescendos and we are treated to an encore from the latest album. “A Sunset” is a mellow, sweet melody with a choir that rounds off the show. “It’s just a sunset/Someone said/Something is coming to an end”. The final message is to forget materialism and see the beauty everywhere. The night is over, the sun has set. The crowd leaves almost dazed after huge applause.
Pulp’s sheer skill and expertise is incredibly evident in their ability to weave together songs written four decades apart without breaking the scene, and Cocker’s perfection as frontman. He simply shapeshifts between characters. Storytelling, stage presence and craft all fuse together to treat Tramlines not just to a concert but an encore to Pulp’s career.
