Still common: Pulp at Montreux Jazz Festival 2025
The evening starts with Andrew Trendell of NME telling us all that one in seven adults in Switzerland is a millionaire. This starts a recurring joke for the rest of the night: anytime someone well dressed or “rich looking” passes by, we say, “He’s a one,” “She’s a one,” and so on. It grows old quickly, as one thing you’re not short of in Montreux is people who look like they’ve got a few quid.
Despite being at the festival for two days at this point, there was still no normalising its beauty. Walking along Lake Geneva, exposed to accents from around the world, the smell of street food, and the distant pound of some kind of bass, the whole street is alive; it has a pulse that soon feels more natural than your very own.
The cold drink in my hand runs colder still thanks to the Swiss heat that smothers the festival like a fire blanket. During a day that has threatened thunderstorms, the sun has persistently beamed and created the perfect backdrop for music. Mountains creep up out of the water, a picturesque backdrop that the iconic Lake Stage stands at the centre of. It’s a spectacle on its own, before any music has even been played, but it comes alive to a whole other level once Bloc Party take to it.
Opening with ‘So Here We Are’, the band have a sound as timeless as it is iconic. The back and forth of the running guitars, off-kilter and funk-infused rhythm, plus the vocals of Kele Okereke are enough to remove the listener from that lakeside and plant them firmly in the dingy indie club where they first heard it.
Okereke wears Burberry shorts and an Orlando Magic jersey. He rattles through the setlist, barely talking in between songs as the band ploughs through a performance that features songs throughout their history. Tracks from their historic debut, Silent Alarm, to more recent offerings, such as 2022’s Alpha Games, are perfectly performed, the quality of the sound being just as good, if not better, than when they were initially written.
Bloc Party have a consistent sound, regardless of whether they’re playing a song from 2005 or 2022, and yet there is versatility within that consistency. It’s an incredibly hard balance to strike, vocal modulators, layers, distortion and chaos make up one track, meanwhile the next can be stripped back and tame. However, regardless of which way the song leans, it remains unmistakable.
It’s an evening of British indie, as once Bloc Party close their set with ‘This Modern Love’, there is only half an hour to kill before Britpop legends Pulp take to the lake. The cultural mix of Montreux is a beautiful thing, as people from all over the world congregate on this one strip for a couple of weeks every year to celebrate all things music. However, today, making your way around the festival, there are a lot more British accents dotted about. They usually come from people wearing Pulp t-shirts, making it clear that they’re here for one thing and one thing only: simply put, one of the greatest bands in the world.
I’m biased with this, as Pulp are one of my favourite bands of all time; however, I do believe they have a power within their music which elevates them above other artists. It was a revelation to Jarvis Cocker when he started writing music with normal people at the centre of it. After falling out of a window in Sheffield and spending some time in hospital, he began to understand the complexity of the average person, and more importantly, started appreciating the fact that these people were far from just average. Everyone has complicated lives and tales of woe and wonder which make them up, so he began telling these stories with his music, and in doing so, created a style that resonated with everyone who listened. Pulp create a community, one that people are happy to be a part of and will travel around the world following.
With that, it’s not lost on me the irony of watching their music somewhere like Montreux. “He’s a one,” we joke, looking at a man in the crowd with a millionaire quality. “She’s a one,” we say, finding a well-dressed woman with money in her DNA. Meanwhile, Jarvis Cocker and Co are on stage, recounting their lives in Sheffield, singing about the working-class city they grew up in and the working-class people who made it special. There is nothing common about watching a gig on Lake Geneva; the beauty of it is the furthest from common you could ever possibly get, and yet the disconnect between the setting and the music’s theme isn’t so overpowering that you zone out of the gig. Pulp still manages to draw you in, and the crowd get just as rowdy as anywhere in the world, millionaires and all.
Opening with some of their new songs, ‘Spike Island’, ‘Grown Ups’ and ‘Slow Jam’, the band ease the crowd into the show. Their new album was well-received across the board, and that remains in a live setting. People sing along and dance, but there is also no escaping that they eagerly await the hits. Once they began, and the crowd started singing the likes of ‘Disco 2000’, ‘E’s and Wizz’ and ‘Babies’, Montreux erupted, that storm that was promised all day came in the form of dancing shoes providing thunder, and flung pints giving us rainfall.
As is the case with a lot of Pulp gigs, the biggest song is ‘Common People’, a track which brings their set to a close in the most epic way. There is a danger of the stage breaking off and floating into the lake, forming its own island, as the crowd bounce and the city shakes around it. It’s a sight to behold, as even though there is irony in playing a song about rich people pretending to be poor amongst what is probably one of the wealthiest crowds in the world, the power of the track pierces through.
The passion with which these songs were written rises to the surface on every playthrough, no matter how much has changed for the band since they were originally written. For a moment, Montreux becomes a communist society, the one in seven becomes irrelevant, and we all only trade in the currency of good times. We draw from the bank of Pulp, acknowledging the ridiculousness of the contrast, but loving every minute of it.
From penniless to millionaires, Meersbrook to Montreux, we’re still common. And when this is the kind of music we champion, why would you want to be anything else?
