Jarvis Cocker is bare, save for a spray of chest hairs, beneath the sort of muddy-brown suit Oxfam would probably reject on fashion grounds. He slips a few donuts onto his fingers, then he and various members of the band and audience start nibbling them. When the charismatically bony singer holds out his food-laden hands towards his devotees own outstretched arms, he's not unlike a cross between Jesus Christ and The Pilsbury Doughman.

Plums are next. Jarvis gets pensive about the merits of ripe plums, sour plums, sweet plums, bitter plums, then proceeds to fling a couple of suspiciously squashy mauve ones with black dents in the side towards the Pulpfans at the front of the stage. "How far do you wanna go?" asks the lugubrious Yorkshireman, launching a kung fu kick in their general direction. "All the way!" reply the eager hordes without a moment's hesitation. "Do you want the whole hog?" begins Jarvis' second decisive question, "or just a bit of the hog?"

I can answer that. Tonight, Pulp - Sheffield's greatest eccentric techno space-pop miserabilist cabaret troupe since The Human League - offer the hog in its entirety, entails, fleshy parts, exoskeleton and all. As hogs go, it's quite delicious.

The hog, as well as the muddy-brown suit, the hairy chest, the donuts and the plums, might also explain why, after 10 excruciatingly long years, Pulp are still performing to small-yet-devoted crowds in little pubs and clubs across the land, a Wheeltappers & Shunters turn for the Ecstasy generation.

Pulp appear perversely attracted to the idea of the heroic failure, almost doomed as a result to languish in cult-credible obscurity. Everything about them and their attitude screams, no, speaks, no, wait, whispers diffidence and self-deprecation. It's no surprise that Pulp's sharpest comedic barbs are aimed mostly at themselves.

When they're not putting themselves down, Pulp are busy trawling through the detritus of early Seventies British culture, as obsessed as Morrissey with such long-forgotten (working class?) minutiae as star jumpers, "Look-In" annuals and feather-cuts. Actually, a more pertinent comparison would be with World Of Twist, those other northern purveyors of electronic pop in kitsch clothing.

Unlike WOT, though, Pulp are more glum than glam, less high camp than low rent, ignoring life's glitzy, ritzy possibilities to explore the seamier side of love and life instead. Oh, real trauma!