‘Do you remember the first time?’ sang Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker back in 1994. Nearly three decades on, a dwindling number of people will. As the Sheffield indie legends return for a third innings, following a previous shortlived reunion from 2011 to 2013, their original, unlikely journey from art-pop misfits to Britpop giants recedes further into collective memory. When they take to the stage at TRNSMT on a Friday-night bill alongside George Ezra and Niall Horan (both of whom were only just born the year Pulp’s breakthrough fourth album His ‘n’ Hers came out) what are the youth of today to make of a band fronted by a 59-year-old man with the look of a highly sexual geography lecturer, singing songs about pills, porn and partying like it’s the millennium? 

Somewhere between the blokey bravado of Blur and the androgynous glam-sleaze of Suede, Pulp finally found their place in the mid-90s after more than a decade of rattling around the British music scene trying to trade promise for purpose. Did they bend to the zeitgeist or did the zeitgeist bend to them? Who can say. But beyond dispute is that by spring 1995 they’d given Britpop one of its first, and best, breakout chart anthems in ‘Common People’, a song about sex, class and voyeurism which seemed to capture a lot of what was in the cultural ether at the time, not to mention rocked like an absolute bastard. 

Between Candida Doyle with her retro keyboards and jumpers and, on bass, the sharp-suited Steve Mackey (who sadly died earlier this year), Pulp had style in spades. None more so than bespectacled, snake-hipped frontman Jarvis Cocker. A thinking man’s pop star for sure, with his witty kitchen-sink lyrical dramas from the seamier side of British life, like Alan Bennett getting down and dirty at the disco.

But he was a game working-class lad at heart too, who leaned in gladly (all too gladly, at times) to the drugs, shit-talk and scandalry of the day. A lesser, or at least less interesting star would never have been able to live down drunkenly clambering onstage to join Michael Jackson at the BRITs in 1996 and wiggling his arse in absurdist protest at the King Of Pop’s messiah complex. Cocker’s subsequent media crucifixion only made fans love him more.

Pulp quit somewhere still close to the peak of their powers in 2002 and have wisely left their discography alone since (albeit Cocker continues to write and record music in a similar oddball idiom, both solo and in other projects). But as a live band onto their now second reunion, they continue to roll back the years, with exhilarating mass singalongs to undying outsider anthems that somehow keep finding traction with new generations. Whether or not you remember the first time, you’ll definitely remember the last.

Pulp play TRNSMT, Glasgow Green, today.