Psychic Lint: Garth Jennings on Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore?

The first sound we hear in Garth Jennings’s documentary, Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore? (2026), is the hum of a 20,000-strong crowd. Out of frame, fans of the band shift from foot to foot, sharing their hopes for the setlist. Splitting the staticky anticipation, the voice of Jarvis Cocker—deep, godlike—greets the audience with an ordinary “Good evening,” and an almighty vow: “This is a night you will remember for the rest of your life.” What follows is a family-album-style montage of undated footage of past Pulp concerts and preshow ritual: fast-cascading images of band members waiting in the wings, loafing in green rooms, crowding into backstage narrows; successive holding areas for this gangly frontman and his bandmates, impatient to get on stage. And what then? Jennings’s overture teases that, too. A younger Cocker—in long pants and no shoes—stamps time at the mic stand, seduces his fans (“you look very, very pretty”), and, with a gesture after Michelangelo’s hand-of-god fresco, invites a thousand Sistine Chapel Adams to reach back a finger, and connect.

It’s a fitting, time-dilating opening to a film that takes its inspiration from Cocker’s lasting fascination with space travel, his nostalgia for the 1970s lifeworld of his childhood and teenage years, and the bricoleur spirit behind his memoir, Good Pop, Bad Pop: An Inventory (2022). For their 2025 reunion tour, the band and a ten-piece string section performed in front of a vast screen—showing visuals of swiveling galaxies, Anaglypta wallpaper, and other Proustian madeleines out of the Pulp imaginary—and Jennings, similarly, seizes on numinous oddments for his documentary, which is part concert film, part pop-group biography. Turning out the pockets of a much-loved band for what Cocker calls “psychic lint”—a Milk Tray advert, a dole cheque, a ticket to the John Peel Roadshow—the filmmaker draws together the story of how a four-man outfit formed at a Sheffield comprehensive school in the late 1970s came to sell out two nights at London’s O2 Arena, their popular appeal undiminished. 

Providing likably laidback narration, Cocker brings these material souvenirs into felt relation with the documentary’s present: those exhilarating performances filmed by Jennings during the “You Deserve More” reunion tour. Where most bands struggle to reproduce the energies of hits released thirty years ago, Pulp’s renditions of alt-pop anthems like “Mis-Shapes,” “Disco 2000,” and “Common People” have lost none of their subversive, first-press urgency or flavor. That’s in part because the self-referential humor of Cocker’s original, often political songwriting inoculates the band against hypocrisy. But it’s also owing to Cocker’s unconventional stage presence: His anarchic tube-man moves and semaphoric posturing were always in a category of their own, still are. In fact, not much has changed since Pulp first played Glastonbury Festival in 1995. Their public is still made up of all ages, and sings along with abandon. Recalling that historic headlining set in one of the film’s archival interviews, Cocker reflects, “When you’re surrounded by all these people who seem to know the words, there’s no denying it then: You’ve stepped through some weird portal into another dimension.”

A friend and longtime collaborator since directing the music videos for Pulp’s “Help the Aged” and “A Little Soul” in 1998, Jennings is well-placed to make sense of the longevity of a band that drew level with their Britpop contemporaries in the 1990s, but refused to conform to their peers’ bluntly reductive performance of British working-class identity. Thanks to that familiarity and Jennings’s kinship with the Pulp sensibility, what might have been a distant, hagiographic film is, instead, full of homely warmth and affection.

In a Hackney cab bound for Jarvis Cocker’s West London home, Jennings shares his experience of rifling through heaps of ephemera, his favorite concert films, and his thoughts on invention and resistance in an age before social media.

MUBI: There’s a lovely, lively materiality to the film. You’ve photographed cassette tapes and polaroids belonging to the band, pencil sketches in school exercise books, stray jottings on envelopes, and you’ve animated some of them. How did they become central to the design of the film?

GARTH JENNINGS: Well, there’s no end of archive material with Pulp. The problem you have is: What do you leave out? There’s just so much and it’s all so resonant. It was like, We’ll film the show—that will happen in front of our very eyes. But everything else will be harvested from the past. So there was no filming of talking heads. There is voiceover, but the rest already existed. It’s reusing things that have already been made: other documentaries, TV shows, photographs, sketchbooks…

MUBI: You took a magpie approach? 

JENNINGS: We did, yeah. And that’s quite similar to the Pulp aesthetic. It’s important that the film feels like it comes from that perspective, and you’re not imposing some traditional format. I definitely think the film shares an artistic language with the band. It’s their stuff, after all. It’s like we’ve raided their attics and cellars and whatnot. But there were all these amazing things: Super-8 film, videotapes, weird little TV interviews that our archivist, Tess, found. I could have watched it all for hours.

MUBI: Can you tell me more about Tess’s role?

JENNINGS: Tess McNally-Watson, she went out there, found everything, cleared the rights for it all. There is an art to that. And she also has a real passion for the band and the project, so she didn’t just pull up a list and call up whatever was on there. She has ideas for things and is intrigued by other things, gets her hands dirty. She got right in the middle of it and pulled up some extraordinarily beautiful stuff that we’ve used in the film.

MUBI: Jarvis’s narration has a great informal, offhand quality to it. At what point in the making of the film did that come about? Did you sit him down in front of a rough cut and have him improvise over the images?

JENNINGS: Well, some of that came ready-made, because we had access to Jarvis’s book. But when we’d used that up about halfway through the film, Jarvis began writing the narration himself. He’d make links between the live footage and the archival material, some of which he’d never seen. It was revelatory for him in a way: You don’t realize why you’ve done something or turned out a certain way until many years later, when you see a pattern. Like television, for example: He hadn’t appreciated how much television had influenced him till then. I’d sometimes give him prompts, like: “Could you say something about this?” But what I liked is how he turned it into a conversation with the audience. He’ll say, “Oh the music’s starting. Time to go back to the future,” and that makes the film feel less like something we’re studying than something we’re experiencing.

MUBI: Pulp’s first album, It, was released in 1983. They’ve recorded eight studio albums in total, spanning five decades. How do you decide which are the pivotal moments in the life of a band with such a long history? Whose perspective do you take on?

JENNINGS: I don’t know if you can do everyone’s story, everyone’s perspective. You’ve got to ask who it’s for. I wanted it to be inclusive—not just for fans like myself, but also for people who’ve never heard of them before. The dream scenario was to get those audiences to fall in love with the band by the time they’d finished watching. There’s so much drama that you have to cherry-pick, and it’s clear from the beginning that this is selective. The film follows a journey from fifteen-year-old Jarvis Cocker having the idea to start a band all the way up to this one night. It’s a story from here to there. That’s what informed our choices.

MUBI: There’s a line in Jarvis’s narration that jumped out at me: “Control is overrated.” How free, or controlled, was this production in comparison to others you’ve worked on?

JENNINGS: It’s not like the animated or other films I’ve worked on where you write a script and keep following a path. This one was much wilder in that things would change on the night. Working with Pulp on the live shows was a great lesson in being flexible: having a really clear objective, but being open to the best idea at any point. And that might be at the last minute, literally. It’s the same with the archive: You have to trust that what you’re looking for is in there, approach it with a clear sense of what you’re going for, but be open to something else that may come along and maybe beat that, or color it in a different way.

MUBI: With the recording of the live shows, were you inspired by any existing concert films? Have you any favorites? I’m thinking of Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense [1984], Scorsese’s The Last Waltz [1978]…

JENNINGS: One that I’ve watched with my family quite a few times is Beyoncé’s Homecoming [2019]. Beyoncé is extraordinary. And the way it’s shot: There are cutbacks to how the show is put together, so it’s peppered with these little stories. I love American Utopia [Spike Lee, 2020]. Obviously Stop Making Sense. Anything with David Byrne in it is great! I just love film and music, which is why I spent a lot of years working in music videos. They’re also an influence: music videos from when I was growing up, like Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer [1986]; anything that put film and music together in a way that lit my brain up. I’m just in love with getting those two elements to work together; the magic moment when it clicks. The fact that I was able to work with Pulp on the staging of the show as well as the film was all those dreams fulfilled. And if you’ve got a lead singer like Jarvis, who’s mindful and clever and good with the audience, that’s just a joy.

MUBI: How much of a sense of responsibility did you feel—to the band, to the fans?

JENNINGS: The trouble is I didn’t think about it that way at the beginning. It wasn’t until we were editing the film that I realized—this is so naive, I realized really late—Oh my god, we’re going to have to show it to the whole band! I’m going to be showing Jarvis my version of his life. And I was like, Why have I done this? You should never do this. Make sure the person is dead! Dead and gone! It was a nerve-wracking moment. Luckily, it went well. But it could have gone really––

MUBI: ––pear-shaped?

JENNINGS: Yeah.

MUBI: But there’s obviously a lot of trust between you. 

JENNINGS: Yes, because we’ve known each other a long time. And he’s just great. As I say, I did music videos in the 1990s and early 2000s with lots of different bands and loved it, but I never became friends with anybody. And not in a bad way; it was just like, “Good job! Go get ’em!” The only person I had more of a connection with was Jarvis. We would ask each other for advice on things and just stayed in touch.

MUBI: You met at college? 

JENNINGS: We sort of met at college… I remember noticing him serving coffee. He was the only person wearing a suit at art school, and I thought, Who is that guy? And somebody said, “He’s in a band.” A few years later, I heard this great record and put two and two together. We met properly for the first time on the shoot for “Help the Aged.” I’d written a treatment that had a reference in it to Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death [1946], which Jarvis liked. He did wonder how I was going to reproduce the staircase on a very small budget. As with most things, I’d no idea how we were going to do it. It’s only once you’re in the middle of something that you really work it out. In the end, we had a stairlift to heaven. I made the mistake of being too chatty with the Stannah Stairlift engineer. I told him, “So the idea is that it’s a stairlift to heaven!” And the man said, “It’s what?” And I realized that he didn’t want it advertised that you might die in this chair. I had to do damage limitation: “I mean to the stars! A stairlift to the stars!”

MUBI: We’ve been seeing a lot of discussion about advancements in AI and artificial consciousness lately. Do you imagine that will impact how audiences receive the film, with all its hard evidence of artistic vision, perseverance, reinvention, and so on?

JENNINGS: I speak with my kids about this, and it’s fascinating how much of that generation has dismissed it already as “just AI slop.” They’ll say, “Ah, it’s just an AI thing.” And it’s surprising because I’m sure the guys behind it were counting on it being attractive to that demographic. I know that that doesn’t go for all of them. It will be around; it’s not going away. But it’s amazing how often I hear from younger people how much there’s a general rejection of AI-made content, and how much joy they’re taking in the opposite of that. There’s almost added value, a premium, on the authentic and the human. It’s like, Well, this is done for real and it feels great.

MUBI: If your film is “a story from here to there,” as you say, then it’s a story about process in a sense. That’s the very thing we’re being encouraged to hand off to this technology. What do we stand to lose by outsourcing it? There’s pleasure in the process, isn’t there?

JENNINGS: Yes, but also the process informs the final thing. It’s so interesting, this racing to the end product. It’s sort of anti-existence. If the whole point of life is the end result, it’s like, Then, go straight to the gravestone. Listen, we can’t dismiss it entirely. There are things it can do that are great. But what’s troubling is that the internet already has our attention, and now we shouldn’t create or imagine, because that’s too hard? Well, some things should be hard. That’s how we learn and grow. It’s making me think of that wonderful dome they built in the Arizona desert to test if they could have people living on Mars. They had everything they needed in there; everything was growing, everything was working. But then the trees, which seemed healthy, just started falling over, and they couldn’t understand why. In time, they worked out that it was because they had never experienced wind, and you need the wind to blow the trees so that they strengthen themselves. They’d never experienced any adversity; they’d never had to resist. Maybe one of the positive things that might come out of this moment is that we start to realize what is important. I hope so, anyway.