Edinburgh's Hogmanay review: Concert in the Gardens with Pulp & Hot Chip, Princes Street Gardens

Concert in the Gardens with Pulp & Hot Chip, Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh ****

Pulp undoubtedly have the big, anthemic tunes to grace the arrival of a new year, and this was a richly celebratory performance from the reborn Sheffield outfit, albeit one tinged with sadness. Their much-lauded reunion tour, bringing them back to Edinburgh for the first time in more than two decades, has also inspired them to write new music, and the bittersweet Background Noise – inserted amongst the established hits here – paid tribute to their late bassist Steve Mackey and to Jarvis Cocker's ailing mother, with the singer requesting the crowd record a shoutout for her.

Pulp were supplemented by fellow Sheffield singer-songwriter Richard Hawley on guitar, and the audience were issued with nifty wristbands that glowed in synchronised colour whenever the band sought to initiate a mass swayalong, as on the euphoric Pink Glove. Add to all that the once-in-a-lifetime chance to re-emerge straight after the pyrotechnics at midnight with the crunchy Disco 2000 and, well, the years just slipped away.

Jarvis Cocker of Pulp on stage in Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh PIC: Duncan McGlynn

Now in his seventh decade, Cocker continues to cut a magnetic, marionette-like figure. Here, he strutted and prowled with angular, spasmodic flails of his limbs, sometimes with his silhouette outlined against backdrop visuals. His dark, nuanced but evocative lyrics on sex and relationships are alternately frustrated, ecstatic and lusty, and still ring resonantly through tracks like Do You Remember The First Time?, Underwear and Babies.

So long in the music business and archly cynical about it, and so much more artistically clever than many of the contemporaries they broke big with in the Britpop era, Pulp and Cocker have always traded in grimy nostalgia, but now they carry the assured maturity of survivors. Confident enough to offer rare live run-outs of the swirling, trebly Lipgloss and the darting, lyrically rueful Monday Morning, they knew the crowd would join in and howl them through on the likes of First Time? and Mis-Shapes – big, supreme indie-pop bangers that nevertheless retain their outsider sheen of angst and alienation.

After feigning to forget their biggest hit, with something approaching pantomime villainy on their frontman's part, they then burnished Common People with the charming touch of a couple of bagpipers. With Cocker flanked by the duo on his elevated, staircase plinth for the climax, the song's closing, accelerating expression of desire to be with the common folk felt like a call for solidarity in these turbulent and polarised times.

Special mention, too, for the gig's host, comedian Susie McCabe, and indie-dance veterans Hot Chip, whose respective warm, inclusive welcome and pulsating DJ set established a cracking atmosphere before Pulp took the stage on a vibrant, electric night.