Their first live album since Party Clowns, an ill-forgotten piece of work which hides away some interesting moments, Pulp dive deep into the concert film arena. Disco 2000 is the obvious choice as a lead single for their Live! album, an aptly titled release profiling their two More shows at The O2 in London. Those two performances yielded a collection of performances up to scratch for the Jarvis Cocker-fronted band, and yet their rendition of Disco 2000 here has a lyrical flub not even a minute into the song. That may put off the passing listener, but to those who attended one or two (or eleven) of the reunion shows, they’ll know it’s all part of the performance. Certainly not intentional, but Pulp has maintained a scrappy image in the face of a sleek album rollout that saw them top the charts for the first time since This is Hardcore. Live! feels like another welcome extension of the encore first started in 2023.
What Disco 2000 (Live!) does is effectively and cleanly capture the energy of a live Pulp performance. Irrespective of the tone or style, a successful live album captures the moment. It is the cornerstone of a cultural movement, and More was exactly that for Pulp. It is up there with your Stop Making Sense album releases, the towering Talking Heads live show. Place it alongside the often-overlooked Hard Rain from Bob Dylan, a live album which captures not the spirit of the songwriter, but the moment. Live! seems set to be a time capsule for a time we’ll look back on with fondness and anecdotal tales of self-discovery and setting the world in our immediate vicinity to rights. Hearing the familiar grooves is a comfort, but listening to what Pulp can do with this new line-up and a thirty-year gap between the first release of Different Class and now, is staggering. What they do so well here is understand the scope of what these songs mean to the next generation.
Add in some flavoursome extra pieces with More, and the band has a new jolt of instrumental inspiration. Live! Is a chance to celebrate what the band has done so well on this reunion tour. They are at their very best, on their biggest tour, and at the time sounded truly unstoppable. Disco 2000 may be an easy crowd-pleaser to get the gig going, but that does not guarantee an audience will be taken along for the ride. They are here, and that fine balance between crowd volume and instrumental bliss is finely tuned. Guitarist Mark Webber and drummer Nick Banks both sound electrifying here, an entertaining duo which is brought together well by fourth original Pulp member, Candida Doyle, on keyboards. That core four-piece still sound as vibrant and pop-adjacent as they did on the first release of Disco 2000.
All of that is crucial for the successful transfer of a hit song that has delighted millions to a live version thirty years later. Those who picked up the remastered Different Class will no doubt have worn the Glastonbury 1995 live album out, particularly an early cutting of Disco 2000. What remains is the sincerity and the spirit. Pulp has captured it again, decades later, in a different part of the country and in a wholly new context for the song. It is strange now that they’re fully grown, but Cocker and company make sure not to delve into nostalgia all too much when adapting this track to the stage. There are pangs of newness and lessons learnt now overlapping those hopeful lyrics of reunion. There has been a reunion, there is a call for more and another encore. Live! scratches that itch until the band rallies forward on stage again.
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