Given that Pulp songs often have the effect of glimpsing a sordid slice of small-town English life, it was oddly fitting that they performed the first half of their Liss Ard set from behind a Venetian blind draped across the full width of the stage.
Previewing a selection of as-yet-unheard songs from their forthcoming album was a brave opening gambit, but their idiosyncratic mixture of country and soul-tinged melody, melodrama and deflating prosaic detail (sample lyric: "Is this a microwave I see before me, as the clock strikes 3 a.m.") won over an initially impatient crowd of equal parts die-hard Pulp fans and general Liss Ard festival-goers.
When the blind was finally raised to a rousing Sorted For E's And Whizz (their quizzical look at rave-drug culture and occasion of their first taste of tabloid infamy) the coy foreplay was over and the audience well and truly deflowered by This Is Hardcore. The erotic epic was performed to the accompaniment of Jarvis Cocker's bum-wiggling and groin-thrusting in characteristic cool geek sartorial anti-style (tight creased slacks and a garishly-patterned pull-over that Mrs Merton's Malcolm would be proud of).
Behind Cocker's effete posturing lies a talented songwriter and the band are adept at slowly building up a wall of sound; their lack of reliance on the big hit singles was a measure of their confidence (no Mis-shapes or Disco 2000). It's hard to imagine another pop group of their stature pulling off an accompanied short story, read aloud from a paperback by Cocker, holding the crowd as spellbound as slowburning epics like The Fear from the This Is Hardcore LP.
"I'm not Jesus, though I have the same initials" he sings on Dishes, a paean to the humble banalities of domestic life and relationships, but when they are in full flight Pulp rise above their peculiarly English subject-matter with a flair not seen since the heyday of The Smiths.