Jarvis Cocker (2009)
Interview Background
Pulp’s Different Class is my favourite Britpop album, since it’s the perfect summation of everything glorious about the music of the ‘90s. Jarvis Cocker’s songs offered a mix of underdogs, inescapable suburban banality and jaded sex escapades with a shabby neighbourhood backdrop. Cocker traced his characters’ minor victories and hometown glories with incredibly smart and subversive lyrics, their synth pop presentation creating shining radio songs in spite of the despair at the heart of some of these three-minute wonders. Chatting to Jarvis Cocker ahead of his 2009 tour, it was only natural talk would eventually turn from his second solo album Further Complications to Different Class and the possible resurrection of Pulp. Cocker was a thoughtful interviewee with a dark sense of humour and an impressively low Sheffield accent. I’m sure my Britpop-loving teenaged self would have freaked out if I was to learn I’d one day have the opportunity to tick members of Blur, Pulp, Stone Roses and Suede off my interview list, but my heroes have generally proved to be incredibly genial conversationalists. Given Cocker was in short supply and high demand in advance of his tour, my phone interview with the astute writer was split over two separate publications – one in print, the other online. I’ve included both here, since I don’t believe either can currently be found on the internet.
The following are edited version of interviews first published in Rip It Up and Time Off Media, October 2009.
Jarvis Cocker - Complicated Shadows
by Scott McLennan
Cutting a besuited silhouette that could see him likened to the Nick Cave of Britpop, Jarvis Cocker has been spitting pithy vignettes that analyse, antagonise and proselytise for a quarter century. Dissecting modern life in tunes that both champion and ridicule social monotony, Sheffield’s favourite songwriter son returned this year with his second solo album Further Complications.
Just as Pulp’s landmark Britpop album Different Class was followed by the self-loathing of This Is Hardcore, the former Pulp frontman’s latest release sounds like SS Cocker has run aground on some icy mid-life crises.
“One thing that has been a little unhelpful with this record is that unfortunately news my marriage had failed came out around the same time as the record,” Cocker admits. “That was actually old news to me, but it meant people tended to see this record as a break-up album. It wasn’t conceived as that - I don’t feel that it’s a break-up album. I feel that it would be a little crass and a little cheap to do that. I think that for anybody writing songs you’re on really dodgy territory using stuff from your personal life for your lyrics. It’s also inevitable in some way because you have to write about something, and if it’s going to have any emotional resonance for you it’s got to be something that’s happened to you. For me that’s how it works anyway, but I am wary of it.”
A key component of Cocker’s oeuvre is his songs about young women coming to terms with their sexual magnetism. From 1994’s Babies through to his most recent single Angela, Cocker’s scrutiny of these females has delivered remarkable results. But at what age do canny, voyeuristic songs that chronicle the routines of neighbourhood girls move from the lyrical work of a solid gold wit to the musings of a lecherous old has-been? Cocker chuckles when asked if he fears becoming an old perve like his French hero Serge Gainsbourg.
“Well I think it’s too late for that. There is an element of perviness to me and there always has been, but I’m okay with that.”
Just as Gainsbourg inflamed the British media via his duet with his daughter titled Lemon Incest, Cocker has also pushed buttons. Pulp’s Sorted For Es And Wizz (a single which caused a press uproar in 1995 thanks to its drug references) was backed by the B-side PTA, a song about a paedophile school teacher.
“PTA was one of the few instances when it wasn’t really based on personal experience. It was imagining a character, but everyone has untoward thoughts that flicker through their consciousness for whatever reason. I get interested in those thoughts and decide to put them in songs – maybe that’s my way of neutralising them? I do think that sometimes if you don’t give voice to those things then maybe they fester away inside you and become a problem. One line that springs to mind on this record is on I Never Said I Was Deep – ‘I’m not looking for a relationship, just a willing receptacle’. It’s a pretty disgusting sentiment, but I found myself thinking it one day and I was appalled by it.
“I thought I’d try to investigate it, so I did,” Cocker adds with a schoolboy laugh. “I also thought it was a fairly funny thing to say as well.”
For Britpop fans, Pulp stand up as one of the landmark acts of the ‘90s. Considering Cocker’s masterful eye for absurdities in suburban life, it seems fitting that Pulp’s legacy includes an incongruous appearance on the Mission: Impossible soundtrack and a cover of Common People by William Shatner. Cocker suggested earlier in the year that he wouldn’t consider a Pulp reunion until he’d witnessed Blur’s Hyde Park show in July and weighed up their comeback. So what was his verdict on Blur?
“Well they did it very well but they made me realise you have to put a lot of work into it. It worked and people really seemed to love it – the audience were very pleased to see them do it. Whether Pulp will ever do that I don’t know. It’s not something I really can see happening in the immediate future, but who knows?”
In 1997 this writer included Pulp’s song FEELING CALLED LOVE on a mix-tape to try and kick-start a teenage romance with a girl next door. Sadly the ploy failed, so what tune from Cocker’s back catalogue might have worked better?
“I think all of the records I’ve been involved in are pretty hopeless when it comes to smooching, because they tend to somehow have the quality of analysing the relationship while you’re in it. You don’t want that when you’re trying to get it on – you just want one idea in your mind and stick with it. I suppose if you want a romantic song, then Something Changed off the same album Different Class is rather romantic. On the latest record You’re In My Eyes has a disco groove too. It’s a long song, so you might even get past first base on that one.”
But aren’t the final lyrics to that one something tragic like, ‘I don’t want to lose you again’?
“Yeah, but it’s a slightly science fiction story about when you get those bits of retina that dislodge themselves and go floating around your eye and become visible when you’re looking into a clear blue sky. I liked the idea that maybe those bits of your optical equipment contained memories of the person, the last image they saw is preserved in there. In the song the beam of light from the mirrorball hits one of those and brings that person back to life. I guess it’s a bit morbid as a make-out song, but it’s kind of romantic…”
Further Complications (Rough Trade/Remote Control)
Jarvis Cocker - Pulp Fiction
by Scott McLennan
Formerly a Communist state within the Eastern Bloc, the Czech Republic's 1989 return to liberal democracy has seen free enterprise flourish. While the landlocked European country has little in common with Britpop stalwart Jarvis Cocker, the country’s leading supermarket chain shares its name with the former Pulp frontman’s six-year-old son Albert.
Considering Cocker’s most famous music video featured the lanky and bespectacled chap sitting in a giant shopping trolley and singing about the mundane lives of Common People, it’s an odd happenstance.
“Well that’s interesting,” Cocker concedes. “I’ve never been to Prague so I’ve not seen them myself, but maybe I’ll have to go. My son would be ‘psyched’, as they say. Did you visit the supermarket? Was it good? I don’t know what the equivalent is in Australia, but there are different grades of supermarkets, aren’t there? The worse grade one in England is called Netto and then you go up to posh ones like Waitrose.”
Beginning a conversation with Sheffield’s finest lyricist about something as trivial as international grocery stores might seem like a grotesque waste of an opportunity to delve into his mind, but Cocker’s deep and thoughtful intonations makes it seem absurdly appropriate. After all, Cocker’s most engaging lyrical feats have always been the vignettes that capture life’s most inconsequential moments rebirthed as three-minute pop gems. From the baffled observations of an outdoor rave in 1994’s Sorted For Es And Wizz through to current album Further Complications’ wistful observations about growing old alone, Cocker makes the trifling reflections sound glorious.
On Further Complications tune Hold Still, Cocker rues ‘I’m alive but I plan to die in the future’. So how often does the 46-year-old consider his mortality?
“Every time I look in the mirror,” he chuckles. “No, I don’t know. I think I’m like everybody else in that I try not to think about it too much, otherwise you can end up in a state of paralysis, can’t you? As you get older those things rear their head more as people die or become ill. After a certain age I think you like to think of yourself as neutral, as if you’re not really getting older, but you are and if you’ve got kids you see them grow up and developing. That’s part of that song – that you think of yourself as trying to hold still while your kids develop and grow. You’re hoping to hold still but it’s impossible.”
Finally finding belated success in the 1990s with the albums His N Hers, Different Class and This Is Hardcore, Britpop darlings Pulp were put on hiatus in the early 2000s around the same time Cocker married French stylist Camille Bidault-Wallington. The release of second solo album Further Complications earlier this year coincided with news that the pair had separated, which caused many critics to cast the Steve Albini-produced release as a break-up album.
In a 1996 interview with a British magazine Cocker stated, “I think I’d have to retire from writing songs if I married. Otherwise I’d be putting my marriage in my lyrics.” So how did that work out for him?
“Will it didn’t, did it?” Cocker laughs macabrely, referring to his marriage rather than his lyrical fodder. “It’s a difficult thing, you know. If a lyric is going to have any emotional resonance for you it’s got to be something that’s happened to you. For me that’s how it works anyway, but I am wary of it. I don’t know if I’ll ever write about [my separation], but I wouldn’t write about those things so close to the event and you’re still going through that.”
Current hyperbole about a Pulp reunion seems premature, with the neatly dressed 46-year-old preferring to take Further Complications on the road. Post-Pulp forays have included a Harry Potter soundtrack appearance, production of a Charlotte Gainsbourg solo album and a sea shanty on the treasured Rogue’s Gallery compilation, but Further Complications marks his most angry, straightforward rock output yet.
“I think circumstances dictate what you do and the way this album came about was really the discovery when I was touring the last [Jarvis] record that the band I was playing with could perform rock music in a fairly authentic way. That kind of intrigued me, because I guess I kind of gave up on rock music years ago, around the time of the punk thing which started me off making music. At the time rock was the orthodoxy that punk was rebelling against. During the course of touring [Jarvis] the drummer was heavily into Black Sabbath and the guitarist was very much into ‘60s garage music and they’d play me this stuff. I was really like a football manager I guess, playing to the strengths of his squad.
“On the last record I kind of wrote in isolation in Paris and then got people to play it for me on the record, but this time because I liked the way the band played I thought it would be more interesting to write the album with them. I also thought it would speed the process up as well, so that’s what happened really and I guess that’s why it ended up sounding like it did.”
Despite its merits, it’s hard to deny Further Complications stands in the shadows of Cocker’s impressive earlier output. When it comes to iconic albums of the Britpop era, it is hard to top Different Class. A dozen peerless pages from Cocker’s lyrical diary backed with perfect pop arrangements, it’s regularly nestled beside OK Computer, Parklife and Definitely Maybe in those intransigent lists that attempt to summarise the era’s finest musical moments. What makes it even more staggering is the fact Cocker managed to bang out the album’s lyrics at the kitchen table one night over a bottle of Spanish brandy after lead single Common People unexpectedly hit the top 10. Since his tales of adultery, class wars and suburban sex spewed forth in a single sitting, have any of the resulting lyrics ever niggled?
“Not really, since although I wrote all the stuff in one night I must have had bits of paper with ideas written on them,” Cocker concurs. “I think it was all just waiting to come out. It came out pretty well, but I think I probably did tinker with stuff a little bit in the process of getting the record finished, but it’s hard because I don’t listen to old records and so I haven’t heard those songs for a long time. There isn’t anything that springs to mind to make me think, ‘Oh, I wish I’d written that differently’, but perhaps Monday Morning was a bit throwaway and could be improved. I don’t know – I’d have to listen to it and I don’t particularly want to do that.”
It’s always seemed rather strange that the Different Class song I Spy, which was ostensibly about screwing a neighbour’s wife, was included on the Mission: Impossible soundtrack. Just one more perverse moment on Cocker’s oft absurd rap sheet, it’s as if the producers of the Hollywood film didn’t listen to the song’s lyrics before they chose it for Tom Cruise’s 1996 hit.
“They probably did, yeah,” Cocker agrees. “I’ve never actually seen that film so I don’t know how they even used it in the film, but I like the idea of Tom Cruise faffing about while it’s playing in the background.”
Further Complications (Rough Trade/Remote Control)
Pulp’s Different Class is my favourite Britpop album, since it’s the perfect summation of everything glorious about the music of the ‘90s. Jarvis Cocker’s songs offered a mix of underdogs, inescapable suburban banality and jaded sex escapades with a shabby neighbourhood backdrop. Cocker traced his characters’ minor victories and hometown glories with incredibly smart and subversive lyrics, their synth pop presentation creating shining radio songs in spite of the despair at the heart of some of these three-minute wonders. Chatting to Jarvis Cocker ahead of his 2009 tour, it was only natural talk would eventually turn from his second solo album Further Complications to Different Class and the possible resurrection of Pulp. Cocker was a thoughtful interviewee with a dark sense of humour and an impressively low Sheffield accent. I’m sure my Britpop-loving teenaged self would have freaked out if I was to learn I’d one day have the opportunity to tick members of Blur, Pulp, Stone Roses and Suede off my interview list, but my heroes have generally proved to be incredibly genial conversationalists. Given Cocker was in short supply and high demand in advance of his tour, my phone interview with the astute writer was split over two separate publications – one in print, the other online. I’ve included both here, since I don’t believe either can currently be found on the internet.
The following are edited version of interviews first published in Rip It Up and Time Off Media, October 2009.
Jarvis Cocker - Complicated Shadows
by Scott McLennan
Cutting a besuited silhouette that could see him likened to the Nick Cave of Britpop, Jarvis Cocker has been spitting pithy vignettes that analyse, antagonise and proselytise for a quarter century. Dissecting modern life in tunes that both champion and ridicule social monotony, Sheffield’s favourite songwriter son returned this year with his second solo album Further Complications.
Just as Pulp’s landmark Britpop album Different Class was followed by the self-loathing of This Is Hardcore, the former Pulp frontman’s latest release sounds like SS Cocker has run aground on some icy mid-life crises.
“One thing that has been a little unhelpful with this record is that unfortunately news my marriage had failed came out around the same time as the record,” Cocker admits. “That was actually old news to me, but it meant people tended to see this record as a break-up album. It wasn’t conceived as that - I don’t feel that it’s a break-up album. I feel that it would be a little crass and a little cheap to do that. I think that for anybody writing songs you’re on really dodgy territory using stuff from your personal life for your lyrics. It’s also inevitable in some way because you have to write about something, and if it’s going to have any emotional resonance for you it’s got to be something that’s happened to you. For me that’s how it works anyway, but I am wary of it.”
A key component of Cocker’s oeuvre is his songs about young women coming to terms with their sexual magnetism. From 1994’s Babies through to his most recent single Angela, Cocker’s scrutiny of these females has delivered remarkable results. But at what age do canny, voyeuristic songs that chronicle the routines of neighbourhood girls move from the lyrical work of a solid gold wit to the musings of a lecherous old has-been? Cocker chuckles when asked if he fears becoming an old perve like his French hero Serge Gainsbourg.
“Well I think it’s too late for that. There is an element of perviness to me and there always has been, but I’m okay with that.”
Just as Gainsbourg inflamed the British media via his duet with his daughter titled Lemon Incest, Cocker has also pushed buttons. Pulp’s Sorted For Es And Wizz (a single which caused a press uproar in 1995 thanks to its drug references) was backed by the B-side PTA, a song about a paedophile school teacher.
“PTA was one of the few instances when it wasn’t really based on personal experience. It was imagining a character, but everyone has untoward thoughts that flicker through their consciousness for whatever reason. I get interested in those thoughts and decide to put them in songs – maybe that’s my way of neutralising them? I do think that sometimes if you don’t give voice to those things then maybe they fester away inside you and become a problem. One line that springs to mind on this record is on I Never Said I Was Deep – ‘I’m not looking for a relationship, just a willing receptacle’. It’s a pretty disgusting sentiment, but I found myself thinking it one day and I was appalled by it.
“I thought I’d try to investigate it, so I did,” Cocker adds with a schoolboy laugh. “I also thought it was a fairly funny thing to say as well.”
For Britpop fans, Pulp stand up as one of the landmark acts of the ‘90s. Considering Cocker’s masterful eye for absurdities in suburban life, it seems fitting that Pulp’s legacy includes an incongruous appearance on the Mission: Impossible soundtrack and a cover of Common People by William Shatner. Cocker suggested earlier in the year that he wouldn’t consider a Pulp reunion until he’d witnessed Blur’s Hyde Park show in July and weighed up their comeback. So what was his verdict on Blur?
“Well they did it very well but they made me realise you have to put a lot of work into it. It worked and people really seemed to love it – the audience were very pleased to see them do it. Whether Pulp will ever do that I don’t know. It’s not something I really can see happening in the immediate future, but who knows?”
In 1997 this writer included Pulp’s song FEELING CALLED LOVE on a mix-tape to try and kick-start a teenage romance with a girl next door. Sadly the ploy failed, so what tune from Cocker’s back catalogue might have worked better?
“I think all of the records I’ve been involved in are pretty hopeless when it comes to smooching, because they tend to somehow have the quality of analysing the relationship while you’re in it. You don’t want that when you’re trying to get it on – you just want one idea in your mind and stick with it. I suppose if you want a romantic song, then Something Changed off the same album Different Class is rather romantic. On the latest record You’re In My Eyes has a disco groove too. It’s a long song, so you might even get past first base on that one.”
But aren’t the final lyrics to that one something tragic like, ‘I don’t want to lose you again’?
“Yeah, but it’s a slightly science fiction story about when you get those bits of retina that dislodge themselves and go floating around your eye and become visible when you’re looking into a clear blue sky. I liked the idea that maybe those bits of your optical equipment contained memories of the person, the last image they saw is preserved in there. In the song the beam of light from the mirrorball hits one of those and brings that person back to life. I guess it’s a bit morbid as a make-out song, but it’s kind of romantic…”
Further Complications (Rough Trade/Remote Control)
Jarvis Cocker - Pulp Fiction
by Scott McLennan
Formerly a Communist state within the Eastern Bloc, the Czech Republic's 1989 return to liberal democracy has seen free enterprise flourish. While the landlocked European country has little in common with Britpop stalwart Jarvis Cocker, the country’s leading supermarket chain shares its name with the former Pulp frontman’s six-year-old son Albert.
Considering Cocker’s most famous music video featured the lanky and bespectacled chap sitting in a giant shopping trolley and singing about the mundane lives of Common People, it’s an odd happenstance.
“Well that’s interesting,” Cocker concedes. “I’ve never been to Prague so I’ve not seen them myself, but maybe I’ll have to go. My son would be ‘psyched’, as they say. Did you visit the supermarket? Was it good? I don’t know what the equivalent is in Australia, but there are different grades of supermarkets, aren’t there? The worse grade one in England is called Netto and then you go up to posh ones like Waitrose.”
Beginning a conversation with Sheffield’s finest lyricist about something as trivial as international grocery stores might seem like a grotesque waste of an opportunity to delve into his mind, but Cocker’s deep and thoughtful intonations makes it seem absurdly appropriate. After all, Cocker’s most engaging lyrical feats have always been the vignettes that capture life’s most inconsequential moments rebirthed as three-minute pop gems. From the baffled observations of an outdoor rave in 1994’s Sorted For Es And Wizz through to current album Further Complications’ wistful observations about growing old alone, Cocker makes the trifling reflections sound glorious.
On Further Complications tune Hold Still, Cocker rues ‘I’m alive but I plan to die in the future’. So how often does the 46-year-old consider his mortality?
“Every time I look in the mirror,” he chuckles. “No, I don’t know. I think I’m like everybody else in that I try not to think about it too much, otherwise you can end up in a state of paralysis, can’t you? As you get older those things rear their head more as people die or become ill. After a certain age I think you like to think of yourself as neutral, as if you’re not really getting older, but you are and if you’ve got kids you see them grow up and developing. That’s part of that song – that you think of yourself as trying to hold still while your kids develop and grow. You’re hoping to hold still but it’s impossible.”
Finally finding belated success in the 1990s with the albums His N Hers, Different Class and This Is Hardcore, Britpop darlings Pulp were put on hiatus in the early 2000s around the same time Cocker married French stylist Camille Bidault-Wallington. The release of second solo album Further Complications earlier this year coincided with news that the pair had separated, which caused many critics to cast the Steve Albini-produced release as a break-up album.
In a 1996 interview with a British magazine Cocker stated, “I think I’d have to retire from writing songs if I married. Otherwise I’d be putting my marriage in my lyrics.” So how did that work out for him?
“Will it didn’t, did it?” Cocker laughs macabrely, referring to his marriage rather than his lyrical fodder. “It’s a difficult thing, you know. If a lyric is going to have any emotional resonance for you it’s got to be something that’s happened to you. For me that’s how it works anyway, but I am wary of it. I don’t know if I’ll ever write about [my separation], but I wouldn’t write about those things so close to the event and you’re still going through that.”
Current hyperbole about a Pulp reunion seems premature, with the neatly dressed 46-year-old preferring to take Further Complications on the road. Post-Pulp forays have included a Harry Potter soundtrack appearance, production of a Charlotte Gainsbourg solo album and a sea shanty on the treasured Rogue’s Gallery compilation, but Further Complications marks his most angry, straightforward rock output yet.
“I think circumstances dictate what you do and the way this album came about was really the discovery when I was touring the last [Jarvis] record that the band I was playing with could perform rock music in a fairly authentic way. That kind of intrigued me, because I guess I kind of gave up on rock music years ago, around the time of the punk thing which started me off making music. At the time rock was the orthodoxy that punk was rebelling against. During the course of touring [Jarvis] the drummer was heavily into Black Sabbath and the guitarist was very much into ‘60s garage music and they’d play me this stuff. I was really like a football manager I guess, playing to the strengths of his squad.
“On the last record I kind of wrote in isolation in Paris and then got people to play it for me on the record, but this time because I liked the way the band played I thought it would be more interesting to write the album with them. I also thought it would speed the process up as well, so that’s what happened really and I guess that’s why it ended up sounding like it did.”
Despite its merits, it’s hard to deny Further Complications stands in the shadows of Cocker’s impressive earlier output. When it comes to iconic albums of the Britpop era, it is hard to top Different Class. A dozen peerless pages from Cocker’s lyrical diary backed with perfect pop arrangements, it’s regularly nestled beside OK Computer, Parklife and Definitely Maybe in those intransigent lists that attempt to summarise the era’s finest musical moments. What makes it even more staggering is the fact Cocker managed to bang out the album’s lyrics at the kitchen table one night over a bottle of Spanish brandy after lead single Common People unexpectedly hit the top 10. Since his tales of adultery, class wars and suburban sex spewed forth in a single sitting, have any of the resulting lyrics ever niggled?
“Not really, since although I wrote all the stuff in one night I must have had bits of paper with ideas written on them,” Cocker concurs. “I think it was all just waiting to come out. It came out pretty well, but I think I probably did tinker with stuff a little bit in the process of getting the record finished, but it’s hard because I don’t listen to old records and so I haven’t heard those songs for a long time. There isn’t anything that springs to mind to make me think, ‘Oh, I wish I’d written that differently’, but perhaps Monday Morning was a bit throwaway and could be improved. I don’t know – I’d have to listen to it and I don’t particularly want to do that.”
It’s always seemed rather strange that the Different Class song I Spy, which was ostensibly about screwing a neighbour’s wife, was included on the Mission: Impossible soundtrack. Just one more perverse moment on Cocker’s oft absurd rap sheet, it’s as if the producers of the Hollywood film didn’t listen to the song’s lyrics before they chose it for Tom Cruise’s 1996 hit.
“They probably did, yeah,” Cocker agrees. “I’ve never actually seen that film so I don’t know how they even used it in the film, but I like the idea of Tom Cruise faffing about while it’s playing in the background.”
Further Complications (Rough Trade/Remote Control)
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