Live review

Pulp, Finsbury Park, London

1st July 2023

With Wet Leg and Baxter Dury in support, it’s an evening of idiosyncratic joy on offer.

Words: Lisa Wright
Photos: Jenn Five
6th July 2023

Summer 2023 might be a heavyweight year for musical legends traversing the circuit (Blur! Springsteen! Monkeys! Elton!), but we’d wager that no entrance will rank quite as high on the iconic scale this year as Jarvis Cocker’s delivery onto the stage at Finsbury Park.

With an enormous glowing moon beaming down from the back of the stage, Cocker rises slowly from beneath it, his gangly limbs posed and silhouetted by the light behind him. If the opening credits to James Bond were to feature a near-sexagenarian with a penchant for velvet and plastic specs, they’ve got exactly the man for the job, and as a reintroduction to Pulp it’s utterly perfect: flamboyant, a little bit ridiculous and entirely like no other.

Sandwiched between headline shows from Jamie T and The 1975 over a three-day stint at the North London park, where both of those artists stack their bills high with supports, Pulp have opted for a short but perfectly-curated evening. It’s easy to see why opener Baxter Dury and Jarvis are firm friends; taking the more deadpan wit of his recorded material and slathering it with a stage persona that we can only describe as completely insane (where he procured the hairy wolf mask that he dons halfway through, who can say), there’s a cheekiness to Dury that tracks entirely with the band at the top of the bill. Recent tracks ‘Aylesbury Boy’ and ‘Shadow’ are windows into the musician’s storied past, but in the present he’s clearly having a total hoot.

Fresh from a stadium tour supporting Harry Styles, Wet Leg are almost unrecognisable from the nervous, giggling band that first graced our stages barely more than 18 months ago. Sporting an Arsenal shirt and a pride rainbow guitar strap, vocalist Rhian Teasdale has relaxed into a completely commanding frontperson - leading the crowd through their every-award-under-the-sun-winning debut album with the confidence of someone fully settled into their role at indie’s top table. As is often the way on windy-ish days at Finsbury Park, the sound is quiet - not conducive, sadly, to ‘Ur Mum’’s traditional “longest and loudest scream” crowd participation - but never mind. Wet Leg will surely be headlining shows of this size by themselves before LP2 is out.

25 years on from their first Finsbury Park show and with the tagline ‘This is what we do for
an encore...’ gracing this latest run of reunion dates, there’s an innate sense of giddy
nostalgia to tonight. However there’s something about Pulp’s celebratory outsider status that
means they’ve never found themselves slipping into parody. In their thirties by the time they
broke through into true superstardom, Jarvis and co were always the exception, not the rule,
in terms of how to be A Big Band, and tonight comes on like a glorious toast to the weirdos -
a raising up of a group who did things entirely their own way and found their tribe of not-so-
common people as a result.

The big radio hits ‘Disco 2000’, ‘Babies’, and a penultimate ‘Common People’ are interspersed
strategically throughout, but it’s the randy deviations (‘Pink Glove’) and epic adventures
(‘Sorted for Es and Whizz’) that really show what Pulp were always about: bookish but lusty,
with a kitchen sink romance that neatly encapsulates both the study and the bedroom. An
emotional ‘Something Changed’ is dedicated to the band’s late bassist Steve Mackey, and
‘Do You Remember The First Time?’ to the audience members who were there back in 1998. It may only be a small portion of the crowd tonight, but a quarter of a century later, the
love in the field for Pulp and their inimitable frontman is just as tangible as in their heyday.