Books

Jarvis Cocker: ‘It used to drive me mad when people said: Oh, Pulp, it’s so ironic’

Sorting precious objects from junk stored in his attic inspired his memoir

Jarvis Cocker: “Everybody has to negotiate their own relationship with whatever it is that drives you to make things.” Photograph: Tom Jamieson/NYT

Peter Murphy
Sat May 28 2022 - 05:00

One of the few benefits of the Covid era: everyone got around to cleaning out their closets. In the case of ex-Pulp singer, broadcaster and now author Jarvis Cocker, that closet was a loft, and the process of sorting precious objects from the junk inspired a memoir, the hugely engrossing Good Pop, Bad Pop, out this month.

“It was a real blessing in disguise that I’d often used this loft as a place to throw rubbish if my mum was coming around and I wanted to give the impression that I wasn’t living like a tramp,” Cocker tells me as he walks his dog around Chiswick House grounds on a warm morning in May.

“Some of the things I’d brought down from Sheffield back in the late ’80s when I first moved to London. There was a lot of writing up there, but that didn’t have so much of an effect on me, it was more the kind of things that could be thought of as junk, some out-of-date chewing gum or a sew-on patch or something like that. They seemed to trigger memories more than the things I thought I was laying by for a future date.”

Clothes play a big part in the book. It’s interesting to note that Cocker established the Pulp aesthetic early on: thrift shop chic, NHS specs, straightlaced played as subversive.

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I think a lot of what’s interesting about creativity is the fact that you do it kind of subconsciously

“Clothes were a quick way in the aftermath of punk to say, ‘I’m on this side now’. Instantly flares were out, so some kids at our school safety-pinned their trousers together so that the legs were not flappy, they were really tight, and they would cut the tie so that it was really thin rather than a big fat kipper.

“And because you could buy things at jumble sales for five pence, 10 pence, I stumbled into a style really. And I was lucky, I was getting hand-me-downs from older cousins, the clothes they wore in the late ’60s, drainpipe jeans and stuff.”

Back then, in the wake of the space race and Kubrick’s 2001, futurism was endemic to the culture. Cocker was far from the only 1970s kid obsessed with comics such as Countdown. The sense of an imagined tomorrow – utopian or dystopian – was everywhere.

“I think I was confused as a kid because the moon landing happened, and obviously that was massive news, and at the same time you had Star Trek and all these comics about space, and I really did think, ‘Obviously when I grow up that’s where I’m going to live – in space’. It gave me a strange attitude to life on earth, not taking any notice of it, because I thought, ‘Why bother?’”

But that sleepwalk came to an abrupt end when, one night in November 1985, Cocker fell 20 feet from a window ledge while trying to impress a girl. He was badly injured and ended up spending several weeks immobile in hospital. The ordeal had profound implications.

Jarvis Cocker (centre) performing with Pulp during a TV appearance. Photograph: Des Willie/Redferns

“I fell to earth with a bump, very literally, and psychologically it had this effect . . . I suddenly realised that I shouldn’t be looking up into the stratosphere and imagining living in weightless conditions. Gravity did exist, and I had just found out very emphatically that it existed, and therefore I should shift my gaze down to what was surrounding me. This stuff that I thought was unimportant was actually what it was all about.”

Sometimes trauma can shock the creative process into ignition. Confined to bed, Cocker was forced to dream. He is, however, wary of deconstructing the “sacred mechanics” of inspiration.

“The example I cite in the book is Leonard Cohen, but creative people are quite superstitious about how or why it works, because if they analyse it too much they’ll chase it away and it won’t work anymore. I think a lot of what’s interesting about creativity is the fact that you do it kind of subconsciously. You’re probably trying to compensate for something that you either lost or you never had, a lot of it is happening behind the scenes, when you’re asleep, or half asleep.

“Everybody has to negotiate their own relationship with whatever it is that drives you to make things, but sometimes I think the thing that drives you to make things can also be your problem, so it’s a difficult relationship. You also have to remain a human being; you have to work on yourself a bit if you want to live in a world with other beings. It used to really drive me mad when people would say in reviews of Pulp stuff, ‘Oh, it’s so ironic,’ because I never got that. I was trying to get to something. You create in order to find out things about yourself.

One of the most haunting images in Good Pop, Bad Pop is a picture of Jarvis’s mother Christine on her wedding day

“But y’know, looking at the past is a strange thing to do. You realise that there’s more behind you than there is in front of you, you’ve got this idea that the past is a solid object, a plinth that you’ve built for yourself or something, but as soon as you start looking you realise that it’s really tricky.”

In other words, memory is an unreliable narrator. And there’s always an urge to rewrite the past because the imposition of narrative puts order on disorder. People spin yarns about the dead at wakes or funerals in order to make sense of their loss, weaving story-webs over the wound.

“I think funerals are really, really important things,” Cocker says. “Hopefully, if you weave those stories properly, the spirit of that person will flare up for one last time, and that’s what good funerals do. It’s funny that we’re talking about this now because I’ll be going to a funeral/wake in a couple of weeks, a potter-ceramicist called Geoff Fuller, he had this incredible pub going back into the late 19th century called The Three Stags’ Heads. It didn’t have any lights and it was full of dogs and it only sold two types of alcohol. He was the thing that kept that place as it was. That’s going to be quite an event. I’m hoping that it will be something like you’ve described, where people fan the flames and make that thing happen again just for that one day and give him a good send-off. He was never famous but a really amazing guy, I think he got mentioned in a Neil Gaiman story once.”

One of the most haunting images in Good Pop, Bad Pop is a picture of Jarvis’s mother Christine on her wedding day. She is 21 years old, four months pregnant, forced by circumstances to abandon her fine art degree. Cocker was struck by how young and scared she looked in the photograph. Does he think we’re programmed to fulfil our parents’ thwarted ambitions, even if we’re unaware of it?

“Actually, let’s say yes, because that’s such a nice thing to think, isn’t it? The fact that my mum had to cut short her studies at art college . . . There are a few paintings of hers that exist, that have survived that time, and they’re pretty good, I’ve shown them to other artist friends of mine and they say she had something. Obviously she had to put that to one side to care for me, and a little bit later for my sister.

“I’m just about to post her a proper finished version of the book, I’ve picked some up from the warehouse. She’s seen the printout, she’s read about 40 pages and she laughed a few times so I thought, ‘Okay, that’s good, she’s not going to stop talking to me’. It’s important to me that she likes it, and to know that she provided this environment where I was able to develop my ideas about making stuff. Just something simple like allowing me to stay in Sheffield after school finished so that I could be in the band when all my other friends’ parents said, ‘F**k off, you’ve got to go to university’. So yeah, I hope that in some way you live out the thing that was a bit thwarted within them.”

Good Pop, Bad Pop is published by Jonathan Cape