Pulp's encore film widens ahead of MUBI on Friday

Exclusive streaming on MUBI begins on 25 September. Directed by Garth Jennings and narrated by Jarvis Cocker, the 90-minute film pairs the 2025 More arena nights with four decades of never-before-seen archive and Cocker's school-day masterplan.

Pulp's documentary *What Do You Do For An Encore?* moves to exclusive streaming on MUBI on 25 September.

The 90-minute film is directed by Garth Jennings and narrated by frontman Jarvis Cocker. It fuses footage from the band's biggest-ever arena show on the 2025 global tour for the album *More* — their first in 24 years — with four decades of never-before-seen archival material. Twenty songs run through the cut.

Framed in the spirit of *Stop Making Sense* and *The Last Waltz*, the film charts the Sheffield group's journey from obscurity to cultural touchstone. It is cast as a vibrant tribute to a band of brilliant misfits whose irony, rebellion and razor-sharp social commentary helped define an era of British pop culture. Cocker draws on diary entries from his school days in the 1970s for flashbacks that map his masterplan for the band's success. He has said the film answers the question in its title after the successful reunion that brought *More* and the arena dates that followed.

Sheffield beginnings and the long wait

Pulp formed in Sheffield in 1978. At their critical and commercial peak, the band consisted of Jarvis Cocker, Russell Senior, Candida Doyle on keyboards, Nick Banks, Steve Mackey on bass and Mark Webber. The early catalogue ran through the 1983 album *It*, the mid-1980s EPs *Little Girl (With Blue Eyes)* and *Dogs Are Everywhere*, and *Freaks* in 1987 — years of cult standing before the wider breakthrough of the 1990s. Remasters and live documents kept the archive in circulation: a 2012 remaster of *It*, the 2012 set *Party Clowns: Live In London 1991*, and the single *After You* in 2013.

The silence that followed made *More* in 2025 a genuine return: the first studio album in 24 years, led by the single *Got to Have Love* and extended by *The Man Comes Around* the same year. *Begging for Change* followed in 2026. The global tour behind *More* supplies the film with its centrepiece — the largest arena shows of the band's career — set against the home movies, old television and unseen archive that fill out four decades of work and waiting.

That span is the point of the cut. Rather than treating the reunion as a full stop, the film places the 2025 nights inside the longer story: the school-day diaries, the slow build from the early records, the peak line-up, and the return that finally answered the question hanging over any band that walks back into arenas after a generation away.

Jennings, the cut and the week ahead

Jennings had already worked with the group on the videos for *Help The Aged* in 1997 and *A Little Soul*. The documentary is a MUBI production, made with Octavia Peissel for Opal Films, Danny Gabai and Amy Rattray for VICE Studios, and Paul Dugdale. Barney Pilling edited.

For listeners who carried the records from those early Sheffield releases through the peak years and on to *More*, the film offers the arena return and the back catalogue in one continuous thread, held together by Cocker's narration from the exercise-book masterplan to the encore the title asks about. The MUBI exclusive from 25 September puts the film in front of audiences immediately after the limited theatrical window.