'I turned into this horrible caricature': Jarvis Cocker on the Pulp explosion

Virtually ignored for ten years, Pulp joined Oasis and Blur to become one of Britpop's headline acts in 1995, with their anthemic hit singles Common People and Disco 2000.  However too much partying and an infamous Brits appearance all became too much for their frontman Jarvis Cocker. But now pop's most charismatic oddity is back...

By Jon Wilde

Last updated at 9:50 PM on 09th May 2009

'For six months it was great. I was having the time of my life. Then I realised that none of it, not even the fame, was making me happy,' says Jarvis Cocker of hitting the bigtime in 1995

Cocker has never given the impression of being the most sunshiny of characters. With his famously lugubrious manner and a complexion as pale as a candle, it's hard to imagine him relishing the prospect of a day on the beach with a bucket and spade.

But here he sits, in a sun-bathed beer garden near his home in east London, and clearly he can't wait for spring to be over and another great British summer to begin.

'I love the feeling of summer approaching,' he says.

'It always puts a spring in my step. You get the feeling of the seasons turning and everything coming back to life. You imagine what the summer is going to bring. Everything seems filled with promise.

'Then summer arrives and it never disappoints. The air is filled with the smell of suntan lotion, wet swimming trunks, candyfloss and vinegar sprinkled over chips. With that smell around you, anything seems possible.' 

His mood of radiant optimism refuses to be spoiled by talk of the credit crunch from neighbouring tables.

'I think the credit crunch is a brilliant thing,' he says, unashamedly. 'We should all stop moaning and start celebrating. When times are tough, it's an opportunity to start looking at life in a different way.

'Unless you're living on the street and surviving on a diet of discarded turkey drumsticks, there's no point in being gloomy. We've spent too long trying to cheer ourselves up by spending money on brightly coloured things we don't really need. We've stopped using our imaginations.

'Now is the time to realise that another new pair of shoes isn't going to make us feel better for long. I'm not saying that shoes aren't important. But how many pairs does anyone need?

'The things that are guaranteed to make us happy are right in front of our eyes and they don't cost sixpence. A bit of sunshine and a nice walk along the beach - you can't go wrong with that combination.

'I've always had an eye for nature, but it's the sort of thing to keep quiet about, because I don't want to come across as a mad hippy. But it makes sense to appreciate those things.'

Despite the fact that he's recently separated from his wife of seven years, fashion stylist Camille Bidault-Waddington, Jarvis has much to feel cheerful about.

Most notably, he's about to release his second solo album, Further Complications, arguably his most potent collection of songs since the heyday of Pulp. It's the culmination of a seven-year period that's seen him establish himself as something of a Renaissance man.

The mind-boggling scope of his recent activities would greatly surprise those who imagine his career was bookended by the birth of Britpop and his bum-wiggling gesture towards Michael Jackson at the 1996 Brit Awards.

He's made regular appearances on TV documentaries and curated London's Meltdown Festival. He's written songs for Marianne Faithfull, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Tony Christie and Nancy Sinatra. He's earned rave reviews for his concert lectures on the art of songwriting. He's even appeared on Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes (doing a flawless imitation of Rolf Harris) and popped up in Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire to play the leader of a fictitious pop band. While he gears up for a summer of live dates, he's also been putting the finishing touches to his work on the forthcoming animated Fantastic Mr Foxmovie.

Unless you're living on the street on a diet of discarded turkey drumsticks, there's no point in being gloomy

Meanwhile, he's been busy making plans for his summer holidays.

'You won't find me sitting around on a beach in Majorca reading a terrible airport novel and getting sunburnt. I can see why some people would want to spend their holidays doing that. If you do a job that entails sitting at a desk all day, you don't get too many opportunities to lie down during the daytime.

'But I don't do a proper job. I spend most of my time lying down. That's a big part of my job. I get a lot of my thinking done when I'm having a good lie-down.

'When I go on holiday I want to get away from that. I want to do things. If I'm on a beach, I want to be swimming or playing a bit of sand cricket. If I'm in the countryside I'll go canoeing down a river or cycle around on my old Raleigh bike. I don't mind a good hike so long as the mountain isn't too tall. Very tall mountains make me dizzy.

'For the first 15 years of my life I very rarely ventured beyond a couple of miles from my house. The exception was the summer holiday to Torquay, where we'd build sandcastles, ride donkeys, the usual seaside stuff. My grandad would take us down there in his silver-grey Jaguar, which was the most sophisticated thing I'd ever seen. It had red leather seats and there were these little tables where you could play with your toy soldiers. That car seemed unbelievably posh to me.

'When I was 11 we went abroad for the first time. Majorca. Then Ibiza. But it wasn't quite as exciting going to those places because I didn't get to ride in the Jag.

'Not all my foreign holidays have been happy experiences. A few years ago I took my family for a boat trip around the Greek islands. It was very peaceful until we stopped off at one of the islands for a bite to eat. The whole island was rammed with ravers. It was like being locked in the world's biggest nightclub. A complete nightmare.

'Personally I prefer taking holidays in Britain. I took my son (Albert) camping last summer. I wanted him to experience life in the north of England, so we set up a tent in a field in Derbyshire. I had a marvellous time. But I think he found it a bit boring.

'I think it was my fault - I didn't plan the trip carefully enough. Albert was very keen to do a spot of fishing, but I wasn't in the mood. I thought I could get away with tying a piece of string to the end of a stick and using a worm to try to catch a fish. He was only five but he could see through my ruse.

'He turned to me and said, "Dad, this isn't really proper fishing, is it?" I had to admit it wasn't. But he took it in good spirit and it was fun while it lasted.

'I seem to recall that we listened to Mungo Jerry's In The Summertime rather a lot. A classic song for the hot weather, but I took care to point out to Albert that having "a drink and a drive" is not a clever thing to do and will probably get you killed.

'I almost made the mistake of playing him Summer Night City by Abba, but just in time I remembered it was about romantic goings-on in the park. Nothing wrong with a bit of that, but Albert's too young to know about it.'

Jarvis chuckles and takes a long sip on his warm pint of bitter. Now 45, he's recently taken to cultivating a large, unruly beard. Facial growth aside, he's remarkably unchanged from when I first interviewed him in 1983. The same deliciously dry wit. The same pipe-cleaner physique. The same wonderfully eclectic taste in clothes.

Today he sports a grey linen jacket from a second-hand shop in Paris, a pale green V-neck APC jumper he claims to have found on a London park bench, a red check shirt by Yves Saint Laurent, brown Herr von Eden trousers from a market stall in Hamburg and dilapidated black shoes from a thrift store in New York.

He adds helpfully, 'I'm also wearing American Apparel Y-fronts. Not boxers. I find that boxers provide insufficient support.' 

I remember seeing a bloke on the carousel with his son at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. For some reason I started crying

He admits he gives considerable thought to his summer wardrobe.

'It's easy to make sartorial mistakes when the weather gets hot. I've tried walking around in shorts, but it's not a good look on me. In a pair of shorts I resemble a very large grasshopper. I prefer a nice pair of long canvas trousers, a shirt and sandals. No socks, obviously. I don't like too much sun on me, so I'll often resort to a hat. A beanie will do me. I like the beanies with a little zip in the side where I can tuck my bus pass for safe keeping.

'I've been known to wear swimming trunks. But only when I'm swimming. You won't find me sauntering around a beach in a pair of trunks. I'd look totally ridiculous and people would laugh at me. It's good to know your limits. Swimming trunks might work for the George Michaels of the world, but they don't work for me.' 

Unlike George Michael, Jarvis was always the most unlikely of pop stars. Growing up in the Intake area of Sheffield, he was a shy, awkward, gangly kid who had to wear spectacles from the age of five after a life-threatening bout of meningitis. 

At the age of seven, his self-confidence nosedived when his father left home to seek work as a DJ in Australia. Always a target for playground bullies, he endured further humiliation when his mother sent him off to school wearing lederhosen.

'School was never a particularly happy time for me,' he says.

'So I always longed for the summer holidays. Those six weeks seemed to last forever. I was from that generation that stayed outdoors as much as possible. If the weather was nice, I'd be out there building dens or playing on waste ground.

'I was also quite big on fire. I stopped short of setting homes alight, but I got a lot of pleasure making a fire in a hedge then running off.'

It was the advent of punk rock that gave him the idea of fronting a band. Pulp, originally called Arabacus Pulp, were officially formed during an economics lesson at school in 1978. By 1981 they'd appeared on John Peel's radio show, but success proved elusive, and for much of the Eighties Jarvis signed on the dole in Sheffield. Pulp gamely soldiered along. Band members came and went. Albums were released on independent labels to little fanfare.

By 1986, Jarvis could be seen on stage performing in a wheelchair, having fallen out of a fifth-storey window while trying to impress a girl.

'She might have been a little impressed when I was balanced on the window ledge. She was much less impressed when I landed on the pavement and shattered my leg and pelvis. The police got involved. This girl had a bit of a history of beating up men and it was assumed that she'd thrown me out of the window for a laugh. But that was all my own work. I spent six weeks in hospital and was told I might never walk again. It was a definite low point.'

Two years later, in sheer desperation, he decided to move out of Sheffield.

'That was quite an emotional decision for me. On my last day in Sheffield, I rented a rubber dinghy and went on a trip along the River Don. That's a trip I'd recommend to anyone, but it was particularly magical for me. I was travelling through the city that had always been my home and I was seeing it from a completely new angle. I was sad to be leaving Sheffield, but somehow I felt that my life had to change.'

He moved to London, found a squat and enrolled at St Martin's College of Art, where he studied film-making. Pulp continued on their cryptic course, seemingly going nowhere fast.

Then in 1994 they landed a deal with a major record label and released their breakthrough album, His 'N' Hers. The album went platinum and was nominated for a Mercury Prize.

'That was a wonderful time. At the end of 1994, we did a tour of seaside resorts. I like those places at any time of year, but I especially like them in the winter. We'd set off early for the gigs so we could spend an afternoon walking along the windswept beaches of Cleethorpes and Scarborough.

'I remember going to Blackpool and visiting the Pleasure Beach, which was all but deserted. There was just this one bloke riding on the carousel, holding his son. For some reason I started crying. There was something so poignant about that, something perfectly English. You don't find that sort of thing in Ibiza.'

In 1995 Britpop exploded. Along with Oasis and Blur, Pulp became one of the scene's headline acts. Their fifth album, Different Class, sold a million and birthed anthemic hit singles in Common People and Disco 2000.

Virtually ignored for ten years, Cocker's kitchen-sink pop songs detailing the grubby reality of small-town England were now warmly embraced by the mainstream. Suddenly he found himself absurdly famous and obligingly threw himself into a fast-paced lifestyle of beautiful girls and endless partying.

'For six months it was great,' he says. 'I was having the time of my life. Then I realised that none of it, not even the fame, was making me happy.

'I'd find myself at some party hanging out with some coked-up actor from EastEnders who'd spend all night telling me how great he was. Then I'd wake up the next morning with some woman whose name I didn't know and I'd feel terrible. It didn't help that I had a girlfriend at the time. Without realising it, my personality was disintegrating.'

His life became even more confused the following year when, after invading the stage at the Brits during Michael Jackson's messianic performance of Earth Song, he was detained by police on suspicion of assault. The incident enhanced his fame in a way he was unable to cope with.

'Suddenly I turned into this horrible caricature,' he says.

'I felt I'd turned into this grotesque showbiz figure and knew that if I wasn't careful I'd be trapped in that for the rest of my days. I'd formed a band in the first place because it was a way for me to deal with the world and communicate with people.

'Being chronically shy I needed to create a persona for myself and be involved with a band where I could be ruler of my own kingdom. Then Pulp became hugely popular and I lost control of it, which is when it all went wrong.'

His feelings of insecurity and self-loathing were poured into Pulp's 1998 album, This Is Hardcore, an uncompromising work that lost them most of their mainstream audience.

A final Pulp album, the poignant We Love Life, arrived in 2001. After which, Jarvis got married, moved to Paris to live in an apartment and started a family.

The idea of Jarvis, the quintessential English songwriter of his generation, living in France seems comically incongruous. But Cocker sees it differently. 

'I've always felt like a bit of a fraud saying that I moved to Paris. I've got a house there and my son goes to school there. But I've also kept a house in East London and I've always been backwards and forwards. It's not like I bought a cottage on the Rhone valley and started growing my own grapes. I'm a five-minute walk from the Eurostar.

'I've been playing at living in France really. I've got all the English TV channels. I even know places in Paris where HP Sauce and Marmite are available. I still think of myself as British but I'm not sure I'd want to move back here permanently.

'I don't like the way this country is changing. Brown used to be my favourite colour but not any more. Brown's Britain is an unforgiveable place.

'We've been turned into a nation of mean-hearted snoopers. There's about four CCTV cameras in the whole of Paris. There seems to be one every few yards in Britain. There's this obsession now with spying on people to see what they're doing every minute of the day. It's a much less tolerant country than the one I grew up in. I think it's a lot more difficult now for people to live their own lives.

'There's a big pressure for everyone to be completely normal. That goes against my way of thinking. My main ambition in life was to be something other than normal. I think I've succeeded in that.'

Still oblivious to the credit crunch conversations still taking place all around him, Cocker says, 'It's a beautiful day and I fancy looking at some trees.'

And, with that, pop's most charismatic oddity downs the last of his warm English pint and happily wanders off for a walk in the park.

'Further Complications' is out on May 18.

For tour details, visit jarviscocker.net

JARVIS COCKER'S MOST MEMORABLE FESTIVALS

THE SHEFFIELD SHOW (Sheffield, 1979)

'My first festival. I was heavily into punk at the time, but I was only 15, so I wasn't allowed into clubs. The Sheffield Show would let anyone in. It was an odd line-up which included the Dooleys and an early version of Def Leppard. I left before Keith Harris and Orville came on - I was hungry, so I went home for some bread and jam.' 

GLASTONBURY (1995)

'The Stone Roses pulled out at the last minute, so Pulp were drafted in to headline. Common People had only been out for a few weeks and we had no idea just how popular we'd become. When we went into that song and the whole crowd belted out the words, it almost knocked me out. An amazing moment.'

THE MIGHTY BOOSH FESTIVAL (Hop Farm, Kent, 2008)

'I came on between Gary Numan and the Charlatans to do a DJ set. Thinking I was being clever I played a steel-band version of Cars. But it was very windy and the needle kept flying off. It sounded great to me. It was an ideal festival. Not too big, and people dressed in funny costumes.'