Common People

In 2013, Habicht invited Cocker to come along to a London Film Festival screening of Love Story, his freeform art-imitates-life-imitates-art portrait of filmmaking and falling in love in New York. Habicht dreamt that it could lead to a possible collaboration, but didn’t realise how swiftly such dreams would be reality. Not only was Cocker keen to collaborate, but ASAP – the reunited Pulp were scheduled to play a hometown show in Sheffield in under two months, and, sensing it may be their last-ever, wanted to document the occasion. “I basically had six weeks to get the production up and running in time for the concert. I doubted that it was enough time, but I was happy to throw myself into it. We were still looking for funding when we were filming the concert, which I have to say wasn’t so pleasant. But it’s the only way the film could’ve been made, as fast as it was.”

“I basically had six weeks to get the production up and running in time for the concert."

Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets lives up to its makers’ goals of not submitting to the tropes of the generic concert spectacular. “As artists, Pulp weren’t interested in telling one how many albums they’d sold or awards they’d won. The inspiration was not making one of those conventional rockumentaries. We didn’t want to make another film with talking heads spouting statements about their greatness, with the band presented on stage as these rock gods, with the audience at their feet. We wanted to make something that had never really been done before. A film about Pulp, but also about Sheffield, where they’re from, and about people.”

The film finds Habicht discussing Cocker with newspaper vendors and fishmongers, council estate kids and pensioner choristers; he started making Pulp by wandering the streets with his camera. “Lots of documentaries have researchers that go out and vet people in advance, but I much prefer turning myself over to the randomness of real life, and letting that dictate where things take me.”