There are, on paper, better ways to spend a Saturday night before Christmas than in a massive old steelworks in the no-man's land between Sheffield and Rotherham. But there are worse, too: freezing to death in Sheffield city centre, perhaps; or going to see Oasis at the sports stadium down the road.
And to be fair, the Magna Science Adventure Centre is hardly your average remnant of Britain's industrial past. Once the biggest steelworks in Europe, it's now a truly awe-inspiring and slightly chilly museum converted, for one night only, into a fabulous place for a gig. The Auto Festival is the brainchild of Pulp bassist Steve Mackey, a chance for some of his favourite bands to play in a more unorthodox, stimulating space than usual.
The main attraction is Pulp, of course, and the rumours suggest this may well be their last gig, after two decades which have seen them earn a place amongst the best British pop bands of all time. First, though, there's plenty more fine stuff to get through, beginning with a man singing what he describes as a "ten-minute song about domestic violence". This is James Yorkston, the most interesting British singer-songwriter of 2002, who sounds like a folk Velvet Underground.
Meanwhile in the Warp arena, Capitol K is playing his curious and frankly not very good brand of indie electronica to the longest bar queue in recorded history. Moving swiftly on, we find jolly Lemon Jelly, loitering around the point where house music meets Radio 2. It's all very nice, too, if a bit self-consciously wacky: it takes a particularly arch graphic designer to make music best suited to be played on a wireless at a village fete.
Four Tet, aka Kieran Hebden, also draws on some quaint English traditions to fuel his music. But hunched over two laptops back in the beautiful and freezing Warp space, his music is a micro-detailed, mind-blowingly impressive world away from that of Lemon Jelly. After a few months as tour DJ for Radiohead and Super Furry Animals, Hebden is on brilliant form, atomising and reconfiguring ancient string-instrument samples amidst a hailstorm of beats.
It's a suitably incongruous warm-up for Pulp, always the most adventurous and open-eared of Britpop bands. Their wonderful 'Hits' album may have tanked in the charts, and everyone seems to think Jarvis Cocker has become disgruntled with stardom and showmanship. But watching him posing and waggling on a podium as they begin with a rushing, sentimental 'Do You Remember The First Time?', it's hard to countenance any abdication of responsibility. The set is predictably canny, plenty of old hits mixed with a few rarities to turn on the faithful: a Scott Walkerish amble through early-'90s b-side 'Lyndhurst Grove', a pointed version of 'Happy Endings' from 1994's 'His'n'Hers'. Highlights? The grimy, poignant 'This Is Hardcore', if only to remind us that the song which destroyed their mainstream career was also their best. A wildly spiralling 'Sunrise', a breathtaking mix of reflective balladeering, pop theatre and full-on spacerock. And finally, 'Common People', in the dark Krautrock form it's taken for the past couple of years, pummelling and cruel rather than an ironic celebration.
"That's the last time you'll see us for a bit," says Cocker at the death, "but we may meet again one day. Who knows?" If it was the end of Pulp - and it's not clear whether the band are sure, let alone the audience - they couldn't have gone with any more style.
The night, however, is far from over. Here are The Kills, a gnarly and streamlined mix of Royal Trux and PJ Harvey, who'll be brilliant when they've written a couple more tunes. Here are Royksopp, playing their mumsy techno and all those advert-friendly hits, strangely reminiscent of Orbital in nice jumpers. Here's Schneider TM: three men from Berlin in labcoats with a totally unidentifiable zither-type thing, some lush and inventive electropop and the frightening noise of a harmonica played through a vocoder. And here's the bus to take us away from this hearteningly eccentric festival and back to a drabber real world. Really, we must spend more nights out at old factories in the future.
