Pulp have released Live!, a document of last summer's show at the O2 in London and, remarkably, the first live album of a career that started in the mid-1980s. It is out on Rough Trade, with a concert film to follow later in the year.
The timing makes sense once you look at what the band have actually been since they came back. The 2011 reunion was a live operation almost exclusively, producing one new song in four years, the 2013 single After You, which was an unfinished We Love Life track finished off. The second reunion in 2022 ran the same way, headlining festivals and touring hard while the back catalogue got aired in arenas and fields.
When More arrived in 2025, their first album in 24 years, it sounded like the emotion of all those shows fed back into the writing. Reviewing Live! for The Quietus, Claire Biddles pointed to Spike Island as the example: a lyric about do-overs and reunions built on the Stone Roses concert, where the part that sticks is not the wordplay but the delivery of one phrase, "This time I'll get it right".
Jarvis Cocker described the album title as both a statement of fact, since it is a recording of a live band, and a challenge to everyone listening to come alive. The songs from More sound freer in this setting, the six-minute prog of Sunrise more unspooled, the disco of Got To Have Love more organic.
The older material gets the same treatment. Sorted for E's & Wizz opens with Cocker guiding the crowd somewhere more enigmatic than the song's own setting. This Is Hardcore starts with the extended End Of The Line remix introduction, a minute of stark strings playing the ending before the beginning, with the string section staying high in the mix against Mark Webber's guitar. On O.U. (Gone, Gone) a single string player mimics the stylophone from the 1992 original.
The crowd is the other instrument. The intro has the Scottish actor Kelly McDonald announcing over synths that an encore happens because the audience wants more, and from there the room carries every word of Disco 2000, takes the melody when Cocker switches to speech in Something Changed, chants the refrain of the new song Slow Jam, and sings the chorus of Help The Aged outright.
It ends where it has to. At the climax of Common People, Cocker joins the drumbeat and handclaps by banging on a drum twice his size, in the biggest room the band have played. Live! files under indie and rock and is logged on the release calendar.
The facts
- Live! is Pulp's first live album, recorded at the O2 in London
- It is out on Rough Trade
- A concert film of the run follows later in the year
- The band's 2025 album More was their first in 24 years
- Pulp reunited in 2011 and again in 2022
- The album includes the new song Slow Jam
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