Pulp @ the Anthem, Washington, D.C., US, September 6, 2025

Pulp

Pulp @ the Anthem, Washington, D.C., US, September 6, 2025, September 6th, 2025

Sep 16, 2025 By Mark Redfern Photography by Wendy Lynch Redfern Web Exclusive

Do you remember the first time you first saw Pulp? I do. It was in Birmingham, England in May 1995 when Pulp mimed along to “Common People” for a BBC Radio 1 chart show right after it was announced that the song had reached #2 on the UK singles chart. Yes, they were pretending to play the song, lip syncing as was every artist on the show, for a radio broadcast when no one could actually see them, with some audience cheers added to the mix to fool the listeners back home. A kinda pointless performance, except to those in the live audience who at least got to see the artists. My first proper time seeing them was at the Brixton Academy in London that December, when the band were finishing up their biggest year to date and taking a victory lap after their album Different Class, released two months earlier, hit #1 on the UK albums chart. Stereolab opened and I took my brother (11 years my senior) to show him what the kids were listening to (I was 19 at the time). The last time I saw Pulp was two years ago in London, when my wife Wendy and I saw them two nights in a row at the Eventim Apollo in London during their second reunion tour. Wendy’s first time was at Radio City Music Hall in New York City with me during the band’s first reunion tour, in 2012.

And the first time our 12-year-old daughter Rose saw Pulp was on September 6, 2025 at the Anthem in Washington, D.C. Rose had heard Pulp playing in our house and on car rides since she was a baby, being that they are a Top 5 all-time band for me. Still, in the week before the show we listened to a playlist of songs the band were likely to perform and showed her some iconic Pulp videos (including “This Is Hardcore”—one of the greatest music videos of all time, “Bad Cover Version”—another classic, and, of course, “Common People”). She was ready enough.

The Anthem is a 6,000 capacity venue in the Wharf district of D.C. While the band can command bigger crowds back in the UK and the show wasn’t quite sold-out, there was a healthy almost full crowd of aging Anglophiles and younger fans. In fact, before going into the venue we spoke to two families with elementary school aged boys sporting Pulp T-shirts. For one boy (in a yellow “I’m Common” T-shirt similar to one I had in the ’90s) it was his first ever concert; the other boy had already seen Pulp once before. For once Rose wasn’t the only kid at the show (as was the case when we took her to see Jessie Ware at the 9:30 Club in D.C. in 2023 and was also the situation the next night, when we all saw Nilüfer Yanya in Richmond, VA). Wendy and I had only been to the Anthem once before, to see Air perform Moon Safari last October—which was a show Rose was also supposed to go to, but she got a bad cold with a fever and had to hang out in our hotel room on her own instead. It’s a fantastic venue, both spacious but somehow also intimate enough, with excellent sound. There was a heavy National Guard presence in the area around the venue, thanks to President Trump’s supposed crime crackdown in the city, which was a bit unnerving except that the troops mainly just stood around or walked around or even posed for pictures with locals.

There was no opening act and Pulp took the stage for their Here Comes More: Live 2025 tour stop soon after 8 p.m. When I saw them in both 2012 and 2023, Pulp played greatest hits sets, with them debuting only one new song in 2023. But in June the band released More, their first new album in 24 years, so the set list was destined to feature a selection of new songs mixed in with the classics. Luckily More is an excellent comeback release and I was looking forward to hearing the band run through some of its highlights. Wisely, they opened the show with two beloved Different Class singles—“Sorted For E’s & Wizz” and “Disco 2000”—before playing More’s first single, “Spike Island.”

Before taking the stage, soundless footage from old black & white 1930s films (Busby Berkeley musicals I suspect) played on the video screen. “This is a night you will remember for the rest of your life,” an announcement promised just before the band took the stage. In Los Angeles that same weekend we had multiple friends who were going to see Oasis, so it was a bicoastal Britpop weekend. In the middle of the stage, as it was in London in 2023, was a staircase that led up to the video screen behind the band. Frontman Jarvis Cocker started “Sorted For E’s & Wizz” at the top of the stairs and replaced the line “Cause I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere / Somewhere in a field in Hampshire” with “Somewhere in a field in Washington, D.C.,” which is no doubt something he adjusts for every city. When the opening guitar part for “Disco 2000” started the crowd went positively wild.

“We are Pulp. You are D.C. It’s Saturday night. Are we going to have a good time?” asked Cocker after “Disco 2000,” to cheers from the crowd. “Okay, we’re going to take you somewhere very, very, very exotic. It’s in the north of England and it’s called Spike Island.”

Their comeback single slotted in nicely with the classics and then it was back to Different Class, with album cut “F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.,” the letters from the chorus flashing up on the screen behind the band. “This song is a test of your ability to spell,” said Cocker before the song. “Looking out, I can see that you look like good spellers. Are you ready? This is the first of two times that you get to spell the most important word in the human language.”

The only major snafu of the night came next, when they started More song “My Sex” and Cocker immediately forgot the words, leading to him halting the song. Beforehand he warned us: “We haven’t played it that many times because I find it really hard to remember the words. We played it in Atlanta two days ago and I think I got 95% of the words right. So here, in Washington, D.C., on Saturday the 6th of September, 2025 I hope to get every single word right. And if I don’t I will have tried my best.” After the false start, he asked his bandmates, “Has anyone got a phone on them so I can look up the words?” After a bandmate helped him out it was time for “take two,” which worked better. It is a lyrically dense song in which Cocker almost raps.

Before More’s “Farmers Market,” a song about meeting his wife,” Cocker threw out grapes and chocolates to the audience, from his pocket. He also tried to catch a grape in his mouth but failed and ate it off the floor anyway (the five-second rule seemingly also applies in his native Sheffield).

“This Is Hardcore,” from the 1997 album of the same name, was the epic centerpiece of the main set. The “End of the Line” remix of the song briefly played before the band launched into the six-minute song, starting with the Peter Thomas Orchestra horn sample and then Candida Doyle’s memorable keyboard part (which left me wondering if she still had the bubble ring filled with green liquid that she wore in the music video). Images from the video appeared on the screen behind the band.

“Sunrise” was, alas, the only song Pulp played from their 2001-released, Scott Walker-produced underrated album We Love Life (no “Bad Cover Version,” which is okay, as it’s hard to hear that song without adding in the voices of the celebrity impersonators from the music video). The last half of the six-minute album closer was sufficiently rousing, as on the album, with an extended climax, and we were only on song eight in the set! Cocker played a huge drum and did some of his signature dance moves in silhouette at the top of the stairs.

Pulp’s core lineup is Cocker, Doyle, drummer Nick Banks, and guitarist Mark Webber. Former bassist Steve Mackey tragically died in 2023 (on my birthday) at the all too young age of 56 and former guitarist/violinist Russell Senior left Pulp at the height of their success in 1997, despite originally joining the band way back in 1983, briefly rejoining for some shows in 2011. Live these days the four core members are backed by various other amazing musicians but for Different Class single “Something Changed” the core band gathered around Cocker at the front of the stage for a stripped down version of the song, Cocker playing acoustic guitar for the first time, as old photos of the band appeared on the video screen.

Pulp may have started to gain mainstream appeal with 1994’s His ‘n’ Hers, and hit it big the following year with “Common People” and Different Class, but their first album, It, came out in 1983, albeit with a completely different lineup aside from Cocker. These days they rarely play much from before His ‘n’ Hers, but they did delight longtime fans by pulling out the 1992 single “O.U. (Gone Gone),” which was also included on the compilation Intro – The Gift Recordings. It was the oldest song Pulp played at the Anthem and Cocker got one-half of the audience to sing “O” and the other half “U.”

Surprisingly it took until song 11 for Pulp to play anything from His ‘n’ Hers, with “Acrylic Afternoons” followed by another track from the album, “Do You Remember the First Time?” Before the latter, Cocker reminisced about the first time the band played Washington, D.C., knowing the exact date, the 4th of June 1996. “That’s going on 30 years now,” he said, pointing out that it was at the 9:30 Club, where they also played in 1998 opening for Radiohead during a secret surprise show when day one of the Tibetan Freedom Concert (which both Pulp and Radiohead were booked to play) was cut short due to poor weather and when an audience member was struck by lightning. Both bands still played the second day of the festival. Cocker then threw a 9:30 Club T-shirt out into the audience (“don’t fight over it!”).

Before Different Class’ “Mis-Shapes” Cocker asked for the lights to come up so he could see the audience. “I’m dedicating this song to everyone in the audience because many of you are mis-shapes,” he said before launching into the outsiders anthem.

“People think love is a romantic and soppy thing, but it’s actually the basis for all human life,” said Cocker before More highlight “Got to Have Love,” Webber’s mid-song guitar solo as transcendent live as on the LP and Cocker’s promised second chance for us to spell out the word “love.” That was followed by “Babies,” featured on both Intro and His ‘n’ Hers and the band’s first Top 20 hit in the UK, with the spoken word version of the music video briefly appearing on the video screen leading into the band’s performance of the song, with Cocker on electric guitar.

The main set ended with the band’s best known song, “Common People.” “It was written when I was living in London but I would have never been able to write the words for it if I hadn’t come from Sheffield first. It’s about a word which means different things in different parts of the world. But the title of this song escapes me at the moment. Candida can you help me, what is this next song called?” Cocker asked, to which Doyle played a vocoder computerized voice saying “Common People.” Three decades later, in what some call late-stage capitalism, the class struggle themes of the song are still very relevant. And of course the song went down a treat, the audience pogoing along.

The five-song encore commenced with This Is Hardcore’s opening track “The Fear,” a song in which Cocker grappled with his newfound fame following the band’s massive success in 1995 and 1996. Four tall inflatable tube men, like those found outside used car dealerships, sprouted up in front the stage, giving the song an added air of menace as they swayed to the music, backlit by the stage lights. For the encore Banks returned to the stage in a “Free DC” T-shirt, a movement in protest of the Trump administration’s takeover of local law enforcement. As I’m currently reading Banks’ excellent 2023 memoir, So It Started There: From Punk to Pulp, I took particular interest in Banks’playing at the Anthem, such as when he did drum fills, something he discusses in the book.

“This is one we haven’t played in quite a long time. It takes place on a Saturday night. Can you guess what it’s called? You won’t have to wait for too long,” Cocker said, before singing “We like driving on a Saturday night,” the opening line to “Joyriders,” the first track on His ‘n’ Hers and another welcome song for oldschool fans.

When “Help the Aged” came out in 1997 as the first single from This Is Hardcore, Cocker was only 34, but now he’s 61 and much closer to the age of the elderly subjects in the song. Fittingly, he admitted that he can’t hit the song’s high notes anymore and asked for the audience’s help.

When Cocker announced they were going to next perform a song they wrote for a film, Trainspotting fans were disappointed that it wasn’t “Mile End” and likely only diehard Bond fans knew that Pulp had written a song to potentially be the theme for Tomorrow Never Dies, which was rejected in favor of a Sheryl Crow song and released as the slightly retitled B-side “Tomorrow Never Lies.” Instead we were treated to “Like a Friend,” which was written for Great Expectations, director Alfonso Cuarón’s modern take on the Dickens novel starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow. The film wasn’t all that…great, but the song was and was included as a bonus track on the U.S. release of This Is Hardcore. It really should’ve been on the UK version of the album too and released as a single from it (it probably would’ve done better on the charts than “Little Soul” or “Party Hard,” neither of which cracked the Top 20). Cocker somewhat randomly dedicated “Like a Friend” to the late disco/soul singer Sylvester (it was his birthday) and the band’s logo appeared behind them as they played the song.

Earlier Pulp had played We Love Life album closer “Sunrise” and to end the concert they went out with More’s last song, the fittingly titled “A Sunset.” Cocker pointed out that fellow Sheffield artist and longtime friend and collaborator with the band, Richard Hawley, wrote the music for the song and that the lyrics were inspired by a sign he saw in a recording studio that read “tickets to a sunset,” the point of the song being that the obvious outcome for all the greed in the world would be for someone to start charging people for something as free as looking up at a sunset. As the song ended, the band all came together at the front of the stage to soak in the rapturous applause, the audience knowing that the previous two hours was well worth the ticket price. And as for Rose, it seems she will remember her first Pulp concert as something very special indeed, declaring it the favorite of the recent shows we’ve taken her to.

www.welovepulp.info