I shouldn’t have worried; it was magnificent. The setlist, the staging, the audience interaction all exactly what you would want and even exceeding expectations.

There’s no support, the show begins with a recorded spoken intro by, I think, Kelly Macdonald promising us a night we’ll remember for the rest of our lives and the curtains part to reveal the band silhouetted against the backdrop of a full moon on a big screen as they open with the first track from new album More, Spike Island. The lights change to fully illuminate the foursome revealing that only Cocker is 3D, the other figures being cardboard cutouts atop the expansive stepped stage set and auxiliary musician that include a string section and backing singers as the evening progresses.

A terrible laboured joke on the weather follows; “We’re turning Birmingham into BURNINGham. It’s hot outside but we’re going to make it even hotter in here,” followed by two more new tracks including Grown Ups and the first appearance of the night of Cocker’s trademark stage whisper. “Why am I telling you this? I DON’T REMEMBER.” before the we hear the first of the classics, Sorted For E’s and Whizz and Disco 2000 to truly get the evening going.

A birthday shout out for a couple of audience members is followed with impeccable timing by Help the Aged. Tom Jones used to have underwear thrown on stage and it’s in keeping with the Pulp aesthetic that a sock arrives during Tina, “though it could actually be a legging judging by the size,”

The first half of the set concludes with This Is Hardcore, lent a gloomy, Bond themesque mood by the burlesque dancers superimposed onto a spinning roulette wheel while Cocker delivers the opening lines seated at the high at the rear of the stage in a huge, leather armchair, projecting an air, intentional or otherwise to me, of Jimmy Savile before ending on a euphoric Sunrise with the final bars playing out with Cocker windmilling in front of a projected sun, nicely bookending the lunar opening.

A 15 minute break in proceedings and the audience are invited to vote for one of two songs to be played in part two. The band retake the stage to play an acoustic Something Changed and a particularly bleak rendering of The Fear with the band tragicomically joined on stage by a gaggle of what I only know as wacky, waving, inflatable arm-flailing tube men in monochrome. This is followed by the oldest material of the night, including by popular demand Razzmatazz, the victor in the half time public vote.

Acrylic Afternoons is accompanied with a distribution of sweets to the audience members closest to front and a history lesson recalls the band’s first visit to Birmingham, performing at the Hibernian on Pershore Road in 1992 plus a balloon-related fiasco at the NEC in 1998 that I can’t do justice to but you’ll have heard about before segueing neatly into Do You Remember the First Time?

The set closes with the two more crowd pleasers, Babies and finally, predictably but no less welcome because of it, a triumphantly extended Common People, Cocker stalking the front of the stage with a mini camera projecting individual audience members onto the big screen during the inevitable mass singalong.