I haven't yet written up my own thoughts and feelings on the two amazing Brixton nights, but I'll get 'round to it soon. In the meantime, read the below (and weep!)

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/music/review-23982886-pulp-o2-academy-brixton---review.do

Essentially a Right Said Fred with northern accents, Pulp were red-carded by the public after their disastrous 2001 album We Love Life.

A decade apart brought nothing of substance - for some of the septet, nothing at all - hence the inevitable re-formation and a highly lucrative summer spent playing the European festival circuit.

His six backers were silent and statue-like but besuited, bespectacled leader Jarvis Cocker, a man with the voice of football manager Neil Warnock and the body of Stephen Merchant, was a contradictory ball of confusion, fudging the line between laughing with and laughing at. He brought genuine warmth and the sense that we were gossiping over the garden fence by sharing wine with the front row like a genial Yorkshire Messiah as he read out fan letters. On the other, he hurled barbs at band members and for all the faux intellectualism of quoting Charles Baudelaire and John Bunyan, who both died on an August 31, Cocker failed to recognise the Mexican flag when one was thrown on stage. "I'm a bit of a twat," he admitted at one point. He may have been joking, but you could see where he was coming from.

As they were in the last century, they were undone by the shallowness of their songwriting, especially the sneering of Common People and the as-dated-as-Betamax Have You See Her Lately? But there were moments when Pulp, boosted by fellow Sheffielder Richard Hawley, gelled and where they threatened to shake off the novelty act tag.

Disco 2000 was handbag-wavingly naff in 1995 but it's evolved into a covert gem as a new-found soaring surge added steel and oomph, while Sunrise, Something Changed and O.U. (Gone Gone) proved to be the great lost Pulp singles. A mixed bag indeed. What happens now is anyone's guess - but they'll always have a home on the nostalgia circuit.

Pulp play the 02 Academy Brixton again tonight: sold out.