Jarvis Cocker is a latter-day folk hero in Britain. He talks to Caroline Sullivan about his and Pulp’s new album
Jarvis Cocker is one of rock’s great kitchen-sink lyricists, so it was fitting that our first meeting took place in a kitchen. It was late 1992, at a party in a south London council flat. Cocker lived a few streets away, in a council place of his own, so he’d turned up with a couple of members of the not-yet-famous Pulp. He was without doubt the oddest- looking person there, clad head to toe in polyester and towering over everyone else as he leaned against the washing machine.
Feeling rather sorry for him, I struck up a conversation and invited him to a Shakin’ Stevens gig I was reviewing. I had the idea I was doing him a favour, a notion humiliatingly shattered when Cocker (“His real name, apparently,” I noted in my diary) failed to ring on the appointed day.
Anyway, it made a good anecdote three years later, when he became one of the most famous people in Britain. Cocker became a hero overnight when, at the 1996 Brit Awards, he leapt on stage amid Michael Jackson’s Christ-aping “Suffer the little children” performance, wagging his bum at the audience and ruining the religious ecstasy Jackson had hoped to engender.
Cocker had been riding high anyway, with Pulp’s 1995 album Different Class having topped nearly every critics’ poll, but the Wacko Affair made him Britain’s favourite pop star. He was adored by kids and grannies, his naff slacks became almost fashionable and he even became a waxwork at Piccadilly’s Rock Circus. Life doesn’t get much better, eh?
And now, in 1998, he’s loping into a French caf in Islington, wearing a limp black nylon shirt which seems to have come from a jumble sale. Does he plan to wear it for the post- interview photographs? “I wouldn’t wear this,” he replies, affronted. “It belongs to the guitarist.” But of course – the royalties from the two-million-selling Different Class allow him to frequent a better class of jumble these days. Even so, the result is the same. The woman’s cardigan draped around his girl-sized shoulders and his crimplene half-flares are authentically, Cockerly, cheesy.
Vogue has proclaimed that Jarvis’s look is over, but no one appears to have told him. If they did, it’s unlikely he’d take any notice, for his eccentricity is deep-rooted. Had he been less eccentric, he might not have had to wait more than a decade for success (the band began in the early Eighties). On the other hand, had he been as ponderously normal as Noel Gallagher he couldn’t have written the mega-hit Common People, Sorted for E’s and Whizz or a handful of other songs that are among the best ever recorded by an English group.
He now has public licence to be as eccentric as he likes and, indeed, is expected to be. What’s it like when people expect you to be Jarvis all the time? “You’re defined by public opinion,” he says in a mellifluous voice more suited to a regional newsreader. “You end up looking at yourself from the outside, very schizophrenically. I’d never wanted to construct a public persona because I used to pride myself that what you saw was what you got.”
Because fame came late – he looks far younger than 34 – Cocker has a conflict with it. He’s old enough to be cautious with his new-found wealth, still riding a bicycle and living in a rented apartment. He claims he can’t afford to buy a place because royalties are democratically split with the rest of the band. But he couldn’t resist sampling the high life of showbiz partying.
“I thought, maybe this is what I’ve got to do now,” he says in his own defence. “I was a novelty, so I got invited to all sorts of things. That’s what does me in about show business, the way the ramparts are really built up to prevent you storming the inner sanctum, but if you do get through, you’re suddenly part of the showbiz family. In the end it just wasn’t for me, because those people just talk about nothing and I can’t stand that.”
Yet he continues to be a world-class party animal – though not for reasons you’d expect.
“I go out because I can’t stand my own company. I get on my own nerves. That’s why I can’t live on my own. I’ve always disliked myself quite intensely, and I’ll do anything to avoid thinking.” But why? He says he doesn’t know, but you have only to listen to The Professional (B-side of the single This Is Hardcore) to realise he’s not exaggerating. “Cocker is short for a sucker of …” goes part of the chorus.
“The Professional is probably the biggest dose of self-loathing I’ve written recently. I wasn’t feeling very good about myself at the time.” The toll exacted by fame and drugs (more of which later) is there for all to hear on the new album. Those who loved Different Class for its vibrancy and wryness are in for a severe shock, because rarely have confusion and misery been expressed so palpably on a pop record. That’s not to say it isn’t magnificent.
“This is the sound of someone losing the plot/ Making out that they’re okay when they’re not,” runs the first track, The Fear, and it carries on from there. Help the Aged warns: “One day you’ll be older, too … you may see where you are headed and it’s such a lonely place,” while Glory Days seems a clear warning about drugs: “I did experiments with substances but all it did was make me ill”.
Of the last, he’s understandably cagey. There have been music-biz rumours about drugs for the past year, but he says only, “It’s not surprising people take drugs. Reality can seem disappointing compared to what you see on TV, and drugs push you closer to what you see on the screen.” For what it’s worth, this particular morning he’s clear-eyed and perfectly lucid.
This Is Hardcore’s most disturbing and magnificent number is the title track. More a suite than a song, it’s about the stages of watching a porn movie, from “You are hardcore, you make me hard” to a climactic “What exactly do you do for an encore?” It’s not the content, graphic though it is, that disturbs, but the utter lack of pleasure in Cocker’s voice. That could account for it going into the British chart at a disappointing 12, their lowest new entry in four years, but it is nonetheless one of Pulp’s most stunning songs – the first chart single directly inspired by pornography.
“Porn’s on the telly when you’re on tour, and I got interested in the way people look at people in porn films, just as objects. Men look at the tits and women look at the … [his voice trails off] I mean, there’s not much empathy going on.
“It’s typical that I’ll think about something in a really inappropriate way. I’m not into it erotically, because once you’ve got over the surprise of seeing a penis going into a vagina it’s boring and mechanical. I’m just making a study of the human side of it. It’s the first time I’ve ever made, shall we say, a thorough examination.”
It’s a long way from Common People, but that, presumably, is what fame does to you, especially if you’re a sensitive soul who never believed you’d actually get here. But as he hastens to point out, the LP ends on a hopeful note, fading out with Cocker dreamily murmuring, “The answer was here all the time.” The bad times that spawned the songs are behind him now, and despite his “self-loathing” he seems chipper.
“The way to get through the things that were frightening me was to actually write a song about it. The Fear was about panic attacks. Certain decades have certain illnesses, like with the Eighties it was ME, and in the Nineties it’s panic attacks. I wasn’t happy at the time I wrote it, and I was thinking more than I ought to about whether it was worth doing another album at all because I felt like Different Class had said it all. It frightened me, to think that might be it … I hope the album does really well,” he adds with his soulful-owl gaze. “It’s done its therapeutic duty for me, so I hope people get something from it.”
Even if they don’t, he can dine out on the Wacko Affair for the rest of his life. “Ironic that you become more famous for a random, silly act than anything else. But it was nice that people agreed. To this day, people shout out to me, `Nice one, Jarvis!'”
And rightly so. British rock would be a poorer place without his synthetic fibres and his singular vision.
This Is Hardcore track by track
The Fear:Begins with Hammer horror motif from keyboardist Candida Doyle, and leads into one of Jarvis Cocker’s gloomiest lyrics ever -“the sound of loneliness turned up to 10”. Disintegrates into a welter of feedback, but there’s a lovely melody beneath.
Dishes: Closer to the Pulp of Different Class, built on a lulling keyboard line and ascending guitar riff. “Iam not Jesus, though Ihave the same initials,” sings Cocker in Perry Como-esque croon.
Part Hard:Weird, unPulpy guitars, as if Cocker had stumbled into a Van Halen rehearsal. Interesting contrast to the rest.
Help the Aged: First single about old age and infirmity to reach British top 10 (“You may see where you’re headed”). Not to be listened to when feeling morbid.
This Is Hardcore: Tinkly piano accompanies epic about porn-watching. Despite its desperation, a majestic number, spacious and almost regal. Their Bohemian Rhapsody
TVMovie: Generic indie-guitar tune welded to Cocker’s rawest lyrics, about missing someone so much “Ican’t even think of anything clever to say”.
A Little Soul:Uninspired filler tune.
I’m a Man: The crescendoing chorus is an ironic amalgam of all Britpop groups.
Seductive Barry:Initially ominous opus that proceeds at a snail’s pace for eight minutes – one of the album’s stand-outs.
Sylvia:Lovely, sweeping rawk anthem.
Glory Days: Big, singalong number.
The Day After the Revolution:About starting afresh, the song strides along, sweeping away the confusion and depression that precedes it.