Pulp film What Do You Do For An Encore? reaches cinemas and MUBI

Pulp's concert film and documentary What Do You Do For An Encore? has a release plan and a director's account of how it was made. Garth Jennings cut 90 minutes out of two sold-out nights at The O2 in London last summer, on the tour behind More, the band's first album in 24 years.

MUBI is handling it. The film previews for one night in UK and Irish cinemas on 18 September, reaches Canadian theatres on 23 September and US cinemas on 24 September, then streams on MUBI from 25 September. Spin puts 20 songs in it alongside four decades of previously unseen footage, with Jarvis Cocker narrating.

The moment both outlets single out is a stripped-back Something Changed, from Different Class, played in tribute to the band's late bassist Steve Mackey. "There was a moment when the four of them stood in front of a curtain and sang Something Changed," Jennings told NME. "I found that very moving." He describes small shots of Mackey scattered through the film rather than one memorial sequence.

Jennings is not a stranger to the band. He directed the videos for Help The Aged in 1997 and A Little Soul the following year, and when he heard rumours of a reunion in 2022 he texted Cocker offering to film it. That turned into directing the live show itself, then the documentary. A first attempt to shoot the 2023 shows collapsed when the financing fell through, and Jennings tells Spin the delay improved the film, because by the time it was revived the band had recorded More.

The archive approach was Jennings's idea rather than Cocker's. Cocker says he expected a straight concert film and describes watching the rough cut as seeing his life flash past, partly because clips of his mother and grandmother are in it. Jennings says the team went through the band's houses and BBC holdings and used found material throughout, avoiding talking heads entirely.

What comes across in both interviews is how little the band have left to prove. Jennings points out there are 18 people on stage and that nobody is trying to settle anything, which he contrasts with the tension around This Is Hardcore when he first worked with them. Cocker, for his part, says Pulp have no touring plans but does not think the band is over.

Pulp documented the same run on record earlier, covered in the live album from the London comeback shows, and closed their run at End Of The Road, whose bill we covered in the festival's 20th anniversary stage times. It is the sort of indie release the site tracks on the release calendar alongside the records themselves.