"Pulp is... wearing suede trousers with nothing on underneath... doing a wheelie on a Raleigh Chopper... going to the supermarket in a lurex jumper... being very knowledgeable about antique glass..."
The small yellow brochure placed strategically around the venue lists 44 Pulpish things to do, and it doesn't even scratch the surface. When Pulp take the stage they bring with them a glut of possibilities.
We have a bass player in a turtle neck sweater and a haircut that has no rightful place in this world. We have a guitarist, Russell Senior, who looks like all the Velvet Underground crossed with David Byrne. But floating above all this is the religious experience that is frontman Jarvis Cocker.
Jarvis wears clothes so unfashionable his body seems to be revolting against them. His jacket looks like a sheep turned inside out. His jeans travel so far up his back they form a relief map of the lower part of his body (hubba!). He dances with the same graceless beauty that Nicolas Cage displayed in Wild At Heart - all karate kicks and hand-chops. And he's forever pointing at something.
Visually, Pulp are so fascinating that it's a shock when your mind returns to the music. They are The Fall in Las Vegas with the added bonus that Jarvis unlike Mark E Smith can form whole sentence. Space features Jarvis on stylophone sounding suspiciously like My Bloody Valentine. Separations opens with Fiddler On The Roof style grief from Russell's violin and then switches without warning to Candida Doyle's playschool synth (which, in technological terms, seems one step up from the stylophone).
At a time when you'd require more than Vicks Vapo-Rub to keep up with the current bpm rate, Pulp are a flaming spaceship returning to a time when dancing wasn't just exercise with cigarettes. They are such a good time you might just die watching them.
And Jarvis Cocker, in case you missed the clues, is God.