Pulp's encore film lands as the live pause begins

Pulp’s concert film What Do You Do For An Encore? opens in UK and Irish cinemas on 18 September, in Canada on 23 September and in the United States on 24 September, before streaming on MUBI from 25 September. The film draws on the band’s 2025 shows at the O2 in London and on archival material.

It arrives a little more than a week after their appearance at End of the Road festival on 5 September. Jarvis Cocker described that night on Instagram as the group's “last one for a while” and added that the break was “not for ever”.

Vault songs at the close

The festival set reached deep into the catalogue. Pulp gave a live debut to “Deep Fried in Kelvin”, the B-side to the 1993 single “Lipgloss”. They revived “Little Girl (With Blue Eyes)”, not played since 2012; “Forever in My Dreams”, absent since 2000; and both “The Mark of the Devil” and “Death II”, neither heard live since 1992.

Those choices sit against a long arc. Pulp formed in Sheffield in 1978. At their critical and commercial peak, the line-up centred on Cocker with Russell Senior, Candida Doyle on keyboards, Nick Banks, Steve Mackey on bass and Mark Webber. “Little Girl (With Blue Eyes)” itself belongs to the mid-1980s: an EP of that title appeared in 1985, between the debut album It (1983) and Freaks (1987). Those were years of lean releases that also included Dogs Are Everywhere and the compilation Masters of the Universe: Pulp on Fire 1985-1986.

Later documents kept the early live work in print — Party Clowns: Live In London 1991 among them — and the 2013 single “After You” marked a brief return to new material. The fuller studio return came in 2025 with the album More, framed by the singles “Got to Have Love” and “The Man Comes Around”, and was followed in 2026 by “Begging for Change”. The End of the Road date closed the live run tied to that chapter. A set built from B-sides and songs untouched for two or three decades read less like a hits lap than a deliberate stock-take before the pause Cocker had just named.

The O2, held for the screen

What Do You Do For An Encore? turns the other way: it freezes the scale of the 2025 O2 London shows and sets them beside archive footage. Where the festival night dug for rarities, the film keeps the larger-room shows of the same era in circulation. UK and Irish cinema audiences see it first; North American dates follow within a week and MUBI takes over from 25 September.

No further live dates have been announced. Cocker’s note leaves the door open without fixing a date to walk back through it. For anyone who has followed the group from the Sheffield beginnings through the long gap and the 2025 return, the sequence is plain enough — a vault-raiding festival set, a temporary stop, and a concert film that holds the recent stage work in view while the next move stays unwritten.