But Cocker is anything but that. Yes, he is a thoughtful man but when the conversation turns to him he is also a man dogged by doubt; confident, yes, especially when he takes action such as his 1996 Brit Awards stage invasion with friend and former Pulp member Peter Mansell, to protest against Michael Jackson’s performance. Jackson performed surrounded by worshipping children and a rabbi, while making ‘Christ-like’ poses and performing his then-recent hit, Earth Song. But there’s no large ego at play here just a quietly composed and sometimes self-questioning man.
For instance, he doubts his own pulling power. Newly returned to the stage and record racks as a solo artist after a lengthy sabbatical that began after Pulp went on an extended hiatus from the music business in 2002 – a hiatus from which it has yet to return, he will later confess that he wondered whether he had anything left worth saying. Similarly, he is in the process of curating the wonderful Meltdown Festival in London, something Nick Cave did so successfully in 1999. Cocker himself appeared at the 2000 Meltdown after being asked to by legendary singer/songwriter Scott Walker. “I’m trying to get on top of it,” he says. “I’m ringing people I’d like to get to do it. I’ve got 8 days to shape it. Nick Cave’swas very well thought out, there were lots of interesting things going on. Actually, I’ve been trying to get him to play but he hasn’t returned my calls.”
I tell him I doubt that it’s personal. He doesn’t seem too convinced.
So enter the world of Jarvis Cocker with this in mind: on September 19, Jarvis Cocker, formerly of Sheffield, England, will be 44 years old; next year his band Pulp may yet celebrate its 30th birthday since forming in 1978 as Abacus Pulp while Jarvis was just 14 years old and a student at The City School. Cocker was already 32 when Pulp delivered the seminal 1990s album Different Class, the definitive Britpop album of the era that also houses one of the anthems of its time, Common People. Different Class proudly sits several rungs higher than anything other contenders such as Blur and Oasis could manage despite delivering anthems in Song 2 and Champagne Supernova, respectively. Jarvis has been with us along time. It just doesn’t seem that way. And it’s hard to work out why.
Even post-Pulp he hasn’t exactly been sitting on his high-achieving Midlands bum: he re-emerged in 2003 under the pseudonym Darren Spooner in the band Relaxed Muscle, and began a series of collaborations that saw him work with and/or appear on albums by Richard X, Marianne Faithful, The Lovers, Charlotte Gainsbourg and cover songs by Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg for tribute projects. He also directed videos for Aphex Twin and Erlend Oye and Nightmares On Wax. Most recently, Cocker appeared on the new Air album, Pocket Symphony.
Air being a French electronica concoction rather like a perfectly whipped parfait, it would seem Paris is treating Mr Cocker well. He agrees, with reservations. The quality of indie record shops apparently could be better. Yes, Paris is pretty good for world music and there are certainly plenty of venues moving to a different beat but when it comes to indie shops … well, guv, there’s no Rough Trade is there: “I was spoilt a bit when I was living in London because I went to Rough Trade and they knew me there and they would suggest stuff. Still, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that doesn’t happen here because you do tend to get caught up in that modern disease, ‘Aaah, it must be good because it’s new.’ And you have to hear everything by every new band. So moving to Paris was good for me. It got me out of that.” It is also impossible to keep up with the flood of music issued worldwide. After all, there’s something like 30,000 albums issued (new and rereleases) in the US each year alone and more than 90,000 worldwide. “Yes, that does make it difficult,” he agrees.The majority will disappear without trace. It has to be a silent fear for every band and musician.
For Jarvis, Paris offered its own quandaries: “I was thinking about maybe not performing my own stuff anymore and I also wanted to make friends in a new city so doing a song was good way of making friends, hence that eclectic bunch of projects. I saw them as excellent side projects but then I realised you have to have a central project for something to be a side project. So I had to get it together.”
The result is Jarvis,a splendid solo debut that, as usual, had the critics pondering. The BBC for instance could decide whether it was either a “brilliant postmodern pastiche or the sound of a man in the midst of a midlife musical crisis, not so much buying the sports car as making its soundtrack”. Little did they know that Cocker had been consumed by doubt. “I had this thing of thinking ‘shall I bother’? I’d founded Pulp when I was 14, I’d been doing it for 25 years. You have to face the fact that maybe you’ve said everything you have to say, so it was a pleasant surprise to get the urge to do it again.
“I had a slight moment of feeling ‘Oh, I’m going to make a fool of myself’ but once I got started it began to fall into place.
“I’ve always had a theory that what you write about has to come from life. So instead of forcing things I just let the songs come and put the theory into practice. I kept creating until I’d collected enough stuff to inflict on people.”
Parenthood also had it’s impact on Jarvis the record. And while Cocker declares that talking about parenthood and its effect is a bit of a grey zone, but he does say that having children lessens the amount of free time time you have and a result how self-indulgent a person can be.
“People have often written about how I like to be an outsider. If you have had a kid you can’t do that anymore,” he says, “simply because you’ve brought a kid into the world that didn’t ask to be there. You have to become involved. The thing that should come out of parenthood is getting over yourself a bit. [The author] J.D. Salinger wrote that kids are like guests in the house … ” Much like the lovely old saying that children are lent to you for 18 years then they are gone. “Yes, well, in theory,” he laughs. “These days they seem to be staying at home as long as they can.”
His kid will probably be a bit chuffed in a few years time when he realises that dad both appeared in the massively successful film, Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire, and contributed three tracks – This Is The Night, Do the Hippogriff and Magic Works – to its soundtrack. In the film, he makes a brief appearance as the lead singer of the wizard pop act, the Weird Sisters, who appear un-named in the film because of a legal stoush with the real-life group, Wyrd Sisters. Other Weird band members are Jonny Greenwood and Phil Selway from Radiohead, Steve Mackey from Pulp, Jason Buckle (relaxed Muscle) and Steve Claydon (Add N to (X). Nice company if you can get it.
“That was a weird one,” he says. “It came at a fortuitous time. i had just decided I wanted to carry on performing and got offered this high profile thing. It was good for my ego as quite a few high profile artists were up for it.
“The way we recorded the tracks also informed the way we recorded the album. Because the band in the film is supposed to be a live band playing at a Christmas party we decided to record the songs live. So you work the arrangements out in advance. I determined when I had enough songs that we could do the solo album in a similar way. It was neat little group in the film though. We were in film for only about 10 seconds though, in part due to those lesbian sisters from Canada. But we were there for three days and shot all three songs pretty comprehensively.”
So the beautifully unpredictable life of Jarvis Cocker continues unabated. Better than pulp fiction, this true-life story is one for all of us common people, after all.
You can see Jarvis Cocker if you have tix to the V Festival or Best of V Festival. Check out the full coverage of V Festival here and Best of V, here
funkygeek
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