Pulp have performed an orchestral cover of ABBA‘s ‘The Day Before You Came’ as part of a live radio session. Watch below.
The Sheffield band played a special set in BBC Radio 2’s Piano Room last night (Monday February 2) at London’s Maida Vale Studios, alongside the BBC Concert Orchestra.
READ MORE: Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker: “This is like going back to when you start a band”
Jarvis Cocker and co. treated listeners to new arrangements of ‘Something Changed’ from 1995’s ‘Different Class’ and ‘Hymn Of The North’ from their latest studio album, ‘More’ (2025).
To round off the brief performance, Pulp aired a cover version of ABBA’s classic 1982 single ‘The Day Before You Came’.
“This is gonna be quite dangerous for me, because this song that we’re covering is a song that can make me cry,” explained Cocker. “Sometimes you get a song [that] you can’t really analyse why it’s making you cry, but it does.
“So I hope I don’t do that in the middle of it. If I do, I apologise to everybody.”
He continued: “When they said we had to do a cover, that was the first one that came into my mind. So I thought, ‘OK, let’s do it’. I’ve got some tissues, just in case.”
You can watch Pulp’s Piano Room performances below, and listen back to the full session here.
The session comes shortly after Pulp were nominated for Group Of The Year at the BRITs 2026, which take place later this month. Meanwhile, the band have contributed to the star-studded new ‘Help(2)’ charity album in aid of War Child.
‘More’ marked Pulp’s first full-length record in 24 years, and earned them their first UK Number One album since 1998’s ’This Is Hardcore’. The LP was also shortlisted for last year’s Mercury Prize, but lost out to Sam Fender’s ‘People Watching’.
The project landed at Number 16 on NME‘s 50 best albums of 2025 list, with the single ‘Spike Island’ coming in at Number Nine on our 50 best songs of the year rundown.
This summer, Pulp will play their “only major UK headline concert” at Manchester’s Wythenshawe Park, before topping the bill at End Of The Road 2026. They’ll headline Mad Cool Festival in Madrid, too.
Jarvis Cocker performs with Pulp at Glastonbury 2025. Credit: Andy Ford for NME
Cocker recently teased that Pulp “might write some more songs” together. The update came after his bandmates Nick Banks and Candida Doyle told NME that the band were “not itching” to make another new album. “An EP, maybe, or a single,” Doyle said.
When NME asked Cocker last summer if fans could expect a follow-up to ‘More’, he responded: “Maybe. We tried to not have a concept for this record or think, ‘This is it, this is our last gas’. I used to think that a lot.
“I had this weird thing that when an album was mixed and finished where I’d think, ‘Oh, I can die now and it would be OK’. That’s a terrible way to think about your life, really. I didn’t feel that with this record.”
He added: “On the sleeve inside it says, ‘This is the best that we can do’. That’s all you can do at any point of your life. Hopefully not in another 24 years, but maybe in a couple of years, there will be something else to say.”
In other news, Cocker recently expressed his support for a Palestinian author who has been removed from Adelaide Festival‘s Writers’ Week. Pulp will play a free headline show at the South Australian city’s Elder Park as part of the event this month.
The post Watch Pulp’s orchestral cover of ABBA’s ‘The Day Before You Came’ appeared first on NME.
