Pulp are in a different class at euphoric Manchester Co-op Live gig
Red velvet curtains are swept across the Co-op Live Arena stage, as a sold out crowd feverishly await the arrival of alt rockers Pulp in the uncharacteristically tropical heat of Manchester on Saturday night.
A sultry voice booms out: "This show is an encore… An encore happens because the audience wants more."
It couldn't be a more fitting introduction to a band that are back, not on some mere nostalgia trip, but with a number one album to celebrate.
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That album - More - has also conveniently produced some of the finest music of the band's extensive career so far.
It makes for some standout moments, like the upbeat singalong of Got To Have Love, alongside the belting Pulp anthems fans are lusting for in this euphoric dazzler of a show.
Emerging with cardboard cutouts of the band from their 90s prime, it serves to spotlight frontman Jarvis Cocker as the unchanging, gangly-limbed talisman at the band's heart - the elbows and hips jutting at will beneath his velvet flared suit.
His chat between songs (and often in songs) is the illuminating narration to a night that feels like an epic celebration of everything the Sheffield band have achieved since their earliest incarnation in the early 1980s.
Naturally Jarvis can "remember the first time" he performed here - at The Pavillion at Salford University in 1982, before adding: "in actual Manchester it was later that year at The Boardwalk does that still exist?" He asks the crowd to a resounding chorus of "no."
"But do you know what tonight is the very first time we've played here," he says, looking around at the vast cavern of Co-op Live - packed to the rafters with delirious fans.
The last time they played here in Manchester, two years ago at Castlefield Bowl, was to around 7,000 fans, and now here we are with 23,000.
It feels like the momentum continues to build around the reunited band that hit its first high in the Britpop era of the 1990s.
They remain in a different class though (if you'll pardon the album pun) - indeed this performance is a sheer masterclass in how to elate a crowd, romping as it does through hits and fan favourites to an inevitable, soaring, dancing, pulsating high of Mis-shapes and then Common People.
It's all played out across a visually-arresting stage set with lit staircase and a large video backdrop.
For The Fear we get perhaps the most impressive deployment you're ever likely to see of those air dancer men, usually seen on garage forecourts, who manage to give Jarvis a run for his money in the body twisting stakes.
We have a full-on rave for Sorted for Es and Whizz, indie disco vibes for Disco 2000, and Jarvis becomes like a James Bond villain for the epic, throbbing pounds of This is Hardcore.
He is spotlit on a leather chair, before creeping out to stalk the stage and rasp out the dark, delicious lyrics of the 1998 slow-burner in one of the highlights of this show for me.
He is ever the playful and often hilarious showman, chucking out grapes and chocolates to the audience at one point, before a crowd walk-through later in the show where more goodies are fed to the yearning arms on the arena floor.
"That was tea bags I was handing out," he explains back on stage. "Not condoms".
The show plays in two parts, which is unusual for live gigs these days, but it allows for the satisfying endnotes of Sunrise in the first half, celebrating the summer solstice, and Sunset as the encore.
And in returning to the stage after the interval, we get the lovely vignette of Jarvis alongside Nick Banks, Mark Webber and Candida Doyle to perform an acoustic Something Changed, after Jarvis explains how this latest band incarnation reunited after a get together in 2022.
The band's songs retain an intoxicating power, speaking as they so often do of missed chances, mundane moments, heartbreak and of growing up that make us who we are today.
They also have an abilitiy to speak to the masses in an extraordinary way - probably because we all feel a bit like those misshapes, mistakes and misfits.
Looking out at the sea of bodies across the Co-op Live Arena, jumping as one to Babies and Common People, ensured this was a night no-one here will forget. Just as the voiceover at the start of this show promised it would be.
Part one
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.
Help the Aged
Tina
Farmers Market
This is Hardcore
Sunrise
Part two
Something Changed
The Fear
OU
Pink Glove (fans' choice)
Acrylic Afternoons
Do You Remember the First Time?
Mis-Shapes
Got to Have Love
Babies
Common People
Encore
Sunset
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