Pulp, Bedgebury Pinetum, Cranbrook

This is pop music

Jarvis Cocker's decision to support Pulp's pastoral concept album, We Love Life, with a tour of Britain's forests proves typically imaginative, uncommercial and correct. My expectation of walking through a dark wood, parting the last barrier of branches and coming across one of the UK's finest bands playing in a misty clearing proves a little fanciful. But Bedgebury's large space in a Kentish forest is still a literal breath of fresh air, far more than a gimmick. The album's songs of rural renewal gain strength from a setting so far from clammy city venues, and so small-scale and relaxed compared to corporate festivals, that you feel the relief that moved Cocker to write them.

On a perfect summer's evening, Pulp also demonstrate that their more selective appeal since the heady days of Britpop is hardly their fault, with a grandly intimate per-formance. Walking on in a yellow charity shop cardigan, Jarvis is soon mixing dryly polite asides with the weirdly angular, elbow-jutting dancing that so terrified Michael Jackson. The consistency of Pulp's career is also emphasised by their first selections, the new record's "Trees" and "Weeds" bracketing the Nineties hit "Sorted for E's and Wizz". The vision of "20,000 people standing in a field" proves a little optimistic at this stage of Pulp's life. But its bubble-bursting account of the vacant comedown after a loved-up rural rave sounds more brutally clear-eyed now than ever. We Love Life's songs, then, sound almost like a manual for deeper, more structured spiritual questing in such a setting, an attempt at mature moving on after thrashing teenage kicks.

But it's the songs that connect most fiercely this evening are from 1998's This Is Hardcore, the great, lost album of male mid-life crisis that unfairly cost Pulp their commercial crown. On "Help the Aged", Cocker holds out his hand to us on behalf of the infirm, and murmurs of them, "You may see where you are heading. And it is such a lonely place." An assault on the eternal-youth lie of pop culture, using pop music's full, epic arsenal, it's followed by the album's still darker title tune, Cocker's face lit in blue for a memoir of porn obsession. Lowered to his knees, he gives an unhealthy growl, and sings: "This is hardcore. There is no way back for you." His mic droops.

Perhaps there is a reason this isn't music for the masses. And yet, when Pulp's biggest hit, "Common People", finally comes, it's still shockingly uncompromising. As Jarvis springs across the stage, and Pulp pound behind him, all the song's vengeful spite at its slumming rich girl is revealed. "They'll tear your insides out," Jarvis warns her of his common people, and the crowd of every class roar their approval. This is pop music.

The tour continues in Dalby Forest, nr Pickering, North Yorkshire, on Sat; Thetford Forest, nr Brandon, Suffolk, on Sun. Tickets: 0115-912 9130