Jarvis Cocker and Garth Jennings on Pulp, ABBA Voyage and AI Slop

Jarvis Cocker and director Garth Jennings met over Zoom to talk about their new film, Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore?, a hybrid concert film and documentary on the Sheffield band's origins and reunion, now streaming on MUBI.

Jennings came to the project indirectly. He reached out to Cocker when he heard rumors of a reunion tour, offering to film it. "Jarvis came to meet me, I thought to talk about that, but actually we ended up talking about: how would you stage a show like this?" Jennings said. "If it's going to be an encore, what should it look like? How should it feel?"

Both men cite a shared reference point: ABBA Voyage, the virtual ABBA show running in London. Cocker described a moment of insight. "There was no band actually performing; they weren't 'giving their all.' They'd given their all in the capture stage, but there was nothing there. And yet the belief of the audience made it work." That realization, he said, "told [us] something very profound about how concerts work, and so I think it got us off on the right foot."

Jennings, who has seen ABBA Voyage three times, called it "the best magic trick ever because it is just imagery on screens at 120 frames per second." Cocker was told KISS would be the next act to get the treatment — news he received without enthusiasm. "I bet the Rolling Stones would do it; they don't often turn down a chance to earn something," he joked.

The film draws on an archive assembled from multiple sources: Cocker's own tapes from a 1995 BBC special on Pulp, still on Betamax and unwatched until now; guitarist Mark Webber's holdings; home videos; and material raided from TV station archives, including international broadcasts and a Saturday-morning children's show appearance on Live & Kicking that Cocker says he wishes he had never seen.

Cocker frames his relationship to the '90s with ambivalence. "The '90s is when the best and worst things happened to me," he told interviewers for '90s, an exhibition opening at Tate Britain. The best thing, he said, was that "bands that would normally just have been called 'indie bands' were, for some reason, allowed to be major bands as well." The worst was the disillusion that followed fame: "when we actually did become famous I realized it wasn't gonna be the '60s again. It was the '90s."

His takeaway is a refusal of nostalgia. "The only time you have is now. So rather than trying to make something that was in the past happen again, you have to try and make something happen now. And maybe that's what could be good about now: that things are so bad that it would be great for people to make something for themselves."

On the staging of "Sunrise," Jennings described a lighting rig "like something they would have used at the end of Close Encounters" — a real, blinding light before which Cocker "has to turn around before the very last beat, because you could get a tan off that." "It is like you're getting cooked," Cocker confirmed.

Cocker noted in the film that 14 years passed between Pulp's first exposure on the John Peel show and the band's first hit, and the O2 show captured in the film was their biggest ever, roughly 30 years into his career. Asked about artists like Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg, Cocker pointed to their late-career persistence: Cohen was working months before his death, and David Bowie released Blackstar two days before his. "You use creativity; you're writing about your life, but it also gives you life."

On contemporary culture, Cocker invoked the phrase "AI slop." He named the band Pulp because the culture he loved as a child — Batman, comic books — "was considered to be throwaway rubbish," yet "often the more kind of throwaway aspects of modern culture are the bits that last." Whether AI will produce slop that defines the 2020s, he cannot say; he lost touch with the pop charts around the mid-2000s and hasn't known a #1 in a decade.

Jennings offered the counter-argument: "The idea of 'slop' sends people the other way, which is to put a premium on authenticity. The real thing just got more valuable, hopefully." Cocker agreed, with a challenge: "If all the kind of rubbish stuff is produced by a computer, then you have to then set your sights on producing something that can't be done by a computer, so it might actually be an inspiration to people to up their game."

The pair closed by sketching — half-seriously — a motivational video series called Up Your Game, Jennings proposing leotards and "Milli Vanilli meets motivational speakers." For now, their collaboration exists as Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore?, streaming on MUBI.