‘All voices are important. All voices should be heard,’ Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker told the 10,000-strong opening night Adelaide Festival crowd on Friday night (27 February).
Cocker was reading from a hand-held note during an interlude in the band’s penultimate song, the crowd-pleasing anthem Common People. Minutes earlier, he had introduced the song by saying it was, ‘inspired by a conversation with someone I disagreed with’.
It’s the closest Cocker – Jarvis to his fans – came to rebuking the former Adelaide Festival Board over their censorship of Palestinian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah. The Board’s actions led to the cancellation of Adelaide Writers Week last month.
An alternate writers’ festival, Constellations: Not Writers’ Week, runs from 28 February to 5 March 2026.
Read: Writers’ Week – Adelaide’s alternate book festival gets ready
Cocker’s phrasing was subtle but pointed. He continued: ‘There’s no us or them. It’s all us, we are all the same. But then, as I look out at you in this audience, you all look different, and that’s the magic of it.
‘It’s when we’re together – when we’re all together – that the magic happens. We can’t perform without you – it would just be a very long and expensive rehearsal.’
Reinforcing Cocker’s point, a group of inflatable air dancers, some black, some white, sprang into wildly flailing life as the band launched wholeheartedly back into Common People. Keyboards and tom toms were pushed forward in the mix to give the almost 31-year-old tune (originally released in 1995 as the lead single from their fifth studio album, Different Class), a fresh edge.
Jarvis sang, and the crowd sang along:
‘Sing along with the common people
Sing along and it might just get you through’
Pulp concert was on a knife’s edge
Pulp’s free gig in Elder Park on Friday night almost fell victim to the previous Festival Board’s ill-thought through actions; the Sheffield band had cancelled their performance prior to the replacement Board’s apology to Abdel-Fattah in January. That the concert went ahead at all was primarily due to frenzied last-minute negotiations behind the scenes by the Festival team in January, ArtsHub‘s sources say.
And what a concert it was. Cocker, for whom the phrase ‘geek chic’ might have been invented, is a quixotic frontman, skinny, bespectacled and yet somehow effortlessly cool, even when arched backwards and singing into an upside down microphone while performing F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E. early in the band’s set.
The band opened with Sorted for E’s & Wizz from 1995’s Different Class, and thereafter played songs old and new – including Disco 2000, This is Hardcore and Do You Remember the First Time? The set showcased Pulp’s ear for tales of kitchen sink melancholy and melodrama, self-deprecating wit (including a memorable story about being shown up by pop singer Peter Andre during an early tour of Italy) and catchy, pulse-racing party anthems.
Pulp’s final track – there was no encore – was the much gentler A Sunset, the closing track of their 2025 album, More, played straight after Common People had whipped the crowd into a frenzy. The song was a very deliberate choice, Cocker explained: ‘So we can all go home quietly.’
‘Oh, I’d like to teach the world to sing
But I do not have a voice
And I’d like to buy the world some time
Some time and a choice’
At the end of the song, after acknowledging the Adelaide crowd once more, Cocker’s closing words as the band exited the stage, were, ‘Good night. Mind the roads’.
Nice one, Jarvis.
Pulp played Elder Park, Adelaide on Friday 27 February for Adelaide Festival. The band play Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl on Tuesday 3 March and the Sydney Opera House Forecourt on 6-7 March 2026.
Richard Watts visited Adelaide as a guest of Adelaide Festival.
