Here you go, the quotation marks turn funny when pasting. ArrGee, not having a go but can you post related topics in existing threads (ie the one that's already got all the recent Jarvis interviews) rather than start a new topic each time? It's easier to track and some of the interesting threads below don't get bumped off the main page.

 

 

In the the early days of March, Jarvis Cocker and his new band the imaginatively titled Jarv Is performed at a rave club under a former railway arch in London. It was a sold-out show: a mass of bodies crammed cheek-to-jowl for two hours in a steaming cavern.

Thank you for coming, given the potential health risks, Cocker joked from the stage. And we all laughed back because, back then, the bat flu was something you only worried about if you had recently returned from Wuhan.

The following day we met at his record company offices. I spotted his shoes before I spotted the man: a pair of neat brogues peeking around a doorframe. Some 25 years after the height of his fame, there cant be many pop stars still recognisable from their footwear alone. For the next 90 minutes he delivered soft-voiced, thoughtful monologues familiar to anyone who tuned into the BBC Radio 6 Music show he hosted for nearly eight years from 2010. What those listeners wouldnt have been able to see was Cocker carefully adjusting his horn-rimmed spectacles as he spoke. The vision of him as a 1970s polytechnic lecturer remains a cliché thats impossible to shake. But so too is the one of him as chief reprobate of Britpops sauciest band, Pulp. When, at the end of the interview, I asked what he was doing for the rest of the afternoon and he said he was off to unblock his girlfriends sink, it took me a moment to realise it wasnt a euphemism.

We covered many hot topics of the day: #MeToo, environmentalism, the Labour leadership contest and the future of the BBC. Strangely, though, the virus didnt get a mention. Were we really that short-sighted? Or just playing it cool? As we stood up to leave, neither of us reached out a hand to shake goodbye.

It was kind of hovering above us and then it happened, he says when I call him again last month. This time he is in Paris, where he headed as soon as lockdown restrictions began to ease, so he could visit his 17-year-old son, Albert, from his previous marriage to the French fashion maven Camille Bidault-Waddington.


I came on the Eurostar, he says. You have to fill in a form saying why youre going, and childcare is one allowed thing. He wore a mask for the whole journey. But it was very strange. I arrived here on a really sunny day and I didnt know but it was the day when the cafés reopened. I came out of the train station and there were people sat there drinking coffees outside. It was as if it had all been a hoax.

Under normal circumstances hed see Albert for at least a week every couple of months, so their prolonged time apart during lockdown was quite a thing ... Im a bit embarrassed to tell you this, but when I got here, even though I suppose we shouldnt actually make any contact, I thought that was too much. So I found a clean sheet in one of the drawers and I made him put that over him so I could hug him.

Spring 2020 was supposed to see Cocker, 56, releasing Beyond the Pale, his first proper album in a decade, to inevitable fanfare and a nationwide tour. But instead the tour has been postponed indefinitely, the record pushed back until later this month, and he instead spent the time stuck in the Peak District doing pilates with his girlfriend, Kim, a consultant who used to run her own photographic agency. Cocker is unfazed by the unravelling of his plans. For starters, theres a song on the album, House Music All Night Long, that he says is all the more prescient for its delay. Its about being trapped at home while your lover is out having a good time: Saturday night, cabin fever Goddamn this claustrophobia he sings in that intense, whispery Jarvis Cocker sort of way.

During the lockdown a lot of people said that summed up their experience of how they were living day to day, he says. So it feels like its the right time for it to come out at the moment.

He describes his time in the Peak District as a really creative period of isolation, much of it fuelled by his insomnia.

Ive tended to suffer from it periodically through my life, but I think a lot of people found that their sleep was disturbed because we were suddenly living in a completely new environment. I soon learnt not to watch the News at Ten, because that was too close to going to bed. So I would watch the News at Six and hope that I could then do something entertaining, so I wouldnt be brooding over what Id seen.

To help others wrestle with their sleeplessness, he began broadcasting bedtime stories every Sunday evening on Instagram. I got into reading stories when my son was younger, and I think its important to hear another human voice when maybe youre feeling a bit alone or vulnerable in the night.

With the aid of a laser hed found in his shed and Kim, who doubled as his dance partner, he also began a series of Domestic Discos live videos of his home DJ sets broadcast to the world.

I hope that it was useful in some way if you dance to a record you get that kind of merciful release from thinking all the time, he explains. The [other] thing I liked was that people could send you messages while it was happening. They could comment on the song that you were playing. They could communicate with you and each other. So it was one of the few things that I found during the lockdown where you had that feeling of a live event.

How long hell have to wait until hes allowed to perform at a real live event again, I really dont know. Because a rock concert is one of the least socially distanced environments you can be in. And thats when its really fun when everybodys squashed in together and you get this collective experience.

Home discos and bedtime stories aside, what becomes of a pop star without a live audience? If youre Cocker, you still find a reason to fret about the state of your lockdown hair. The photoshoot for the interview is scheduled to take place the day after we speak and for the last week or so thats been one of the main stresses. What am I gonna look like? Am I gonna look like some wild man whos been living in the woods for years? Judging by the photo above, he at least managed to get his hands on a beard trimmer in time.

Ironically, the one thing he hasnt finished in his creative isolation is the book he is writing on creativity. Hes rather vague on the details, but it sounds as though its part self-excavation, part cultural history. He shuffles around on the other end of the phone line when I bring it up, listing all the other things that have eaten into his time instead. It does sound like Im making an excuse now but I am still doing stuff on it, yeah, he trails off. Maybe being stuck indoors for weeks on end hasnt been so conducive to creativity after all.


Of all the bands in the Britpop era, Pulp were always the thinking fans standout pop group. Witty, articulate and stylish, they formed in Sheffield in 1978 and toiled in arty obscurity for almost two decades before the hit single Common People made Cocker a star at the venerable age of 32. The self-titled misfit had long dreamt about infiltrating the mainstream, but when the high life finally came knocking, he quickly found it unfulfilling.

It was a very strange time for me because Id achieved my lifetimes ambition and then found that it didnt satisfy me, he says.

Instead, fame reminded me of pornography. Of how pornography takes an amazing thing love between two people expressed physically and kind of grosses it out. Afterwards he remembers thinking: What am I gonna believe in now?

When Pulps chart successes began to fizzle out, he escaped to Paris, dabbled in some films (including a cameo playing a rock star in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) and dived into increasingly esoteric musical projects, re-emerging in 2008 with his BBC 6 Music show.

He says he resisted radio for a long time because my father did that. His dad, Mac Cocker, was a well-known radio presenter in Australia, where he emigrated after walking out on the family home when Jarvis was seven.

I didnt really see him after he left, but he did come back one time and gave me some cassettes of him interviewing [the gnarly 1970s rock group] Little Feat. I was only about 11, so to me it was just two blokes talking. I thought, Whats the point? Everybody kind of resists turning into their parents, then at some point you realise that its inevitable because if your genetic informations come from two people, youre bound to share some things with them, even if you want to deny it.

Many years later, after Cocker had become a celebrity in his own right, he and his sister went to Australia to try and reconnect with their father before he died, but it was just too late to really establish a meaningful relationship. And thats a really weird feeling, a kind of uncomfortable feeling. So when I split up with my wife, a big priority was to make sure that I remained part of my sons life.

After his father left, Cocker was brought up in a very female-dominated environment on the outskirts of Sheffield living with his mother and sister, and with his aunts and grandparents helping out. And then all the people who lived across the yard basically all the dads left at once. I think they must have discussed it in the pub: So, well all scarper at the same time.

I learnt about sex from eavesdropping on my mum and her friends conversations after school. I remember something that my mum or one of her friends said once, where they were talking about this guy, and they said, Oh, hes too nice. She decided she was gonna stop seeing him because he was just too nice, he laughs. As a kid I was thinking, Well, youre always told to be nice. So, sex and sexual attraction, its not a cut-and-dried thing, is it? I mean, that thing of whether you get a spark between two people is really elusive, why one person will turn you on and another person wont.

The lyrics of Pulps songs always dripped with prurience: lust, longing, sexual politics and the accompanying nitty-gritty. Now I know why. Even his new album cant help itself: You sat down on the work surface / I got down to work on your surface goes one memorable line in a song called Swanky Modes that Cocker admits is me remembering something from back in the early 1990s just after Id left college.

I am astonished to hear that his mother the woman whose ripe conversations taught the young Cocker about sex is an upstanding Tory parish councillor for the Nottinghamshire village of Carlton in Lindrick.

Oh aye, my mothers always embarrassed me, he says wearily. Weve always been at completely opposite ends of the political spectrum, but shes my mother. She voted for Brexit and so I had to ban discussion of that for two Christmases running, just because I didnt want there to be massive arguments. I could see why it makes sense to her, from her life experience and stuff, but Im still not gonna agree with it.

In December Cocker narrowly avoided an unexpected Christmas No 1 when an online campaign was launched to get his 2006 song Running the World an explicitly mouthed tirade against the ruling political class to the top of the charts in the wake of Boris Johnsons election victory. In the event it missed out to LadBabys I Love Sausage Rolls.

Today he would prefer to talk about his support for Extinction Rebellion and environmentalism rather than party politics, yet his leanings are undoubtedly towards the left.

How far left? Was he a Corbynista?

I thought he was good, yeah. I think the upsetting thing for me now is that Labour actually did become a left-wing party again for a bit, and then that didnt work. So now I dont really know what the Labour Party is going to be.

Keir Starmer seems OK, the one or two times Ive seen him on TV is all the enthusiasm he can muster.

Common People Cockers takedown of a Greek art student he met while studying at Central Saint Martins School of Art, who asked him to take her on a social safari to see how poor people lived wasnt just one of the greatest English pop songs of all time, but an anti-cultural-appropriation anthem before the cause was even fashionable. But wasnt pretending to be more working class than he really was just as bad, I wonder. Im common as muck, thats the total truth of it, he insists. But in terms of socioeconomic background, not in my head. Because to me poverty isnt just an economic thing, its an intellectual thing. And I was lucky enough that although I lived in a pretty poor area, we had books.

He tells a story about when he first lived in London: Id been squatting for a long time. Then we eventually managed to get a council flat and sometimes my girlfriend used to go and babysit for the people next door. One evening she wanted to read the kids a bedtime story, but the only printed matter she could find in the whole house was an Argos catalogue. And Ive always remembered that because, to me, that is poverty. Whereas you can pick up an incredibly cheap second-hand paperback for 20p, and within the covers of that book you can find something that will really open your world.

Sometimes theyre even cheaper than 20p. He starts telling me because I ask about the time he decided to teach Albert the facts of life. Because my father wasnt around for any kind of birds-and-bees chat, I thought, Im gonna do it. We sat down and he adjusts his spectacles before launching into a story about a dirty book he found on the back of a bus as a schoolboy. Everybody fought for it and somehow I ended up keeping it. God knows how, I wasnt the toughest of the kids. Anyway, it was very tame with some black-and-white pictures of semi-naked women and some very rubbish jokes. But I used that as the starting point of saying, Look, I found this on a bus when I was around your age and I was very curious to know about sex. And probably the place for you to find that out is online, [but] what youve got to realise is that stuff, thats not what sex really is. And the way that women are portrayed isnt really what women like thats a mans weird idea of what they want, or what they think they want women to be like. I was just trying to get across the idea that sex is something that both the man and the woman like, and dont be bamboozled by that, yeah?

What happened? He just laughed at me, I told him there were some condoms in the bathroom and that was the end of it.

And with that I leave Cocker to get back to his blocked sink.

The Jarv Is album Beyond the Pale is released on Rough Trade Records on Friday

Huh? Are you annoyed? Its just a suggestion. And I've kindly retrieved the article you asked for.

I get that and I'm glad you see it's not a personal attack on anybody.
It's only a quiet forum for a half-remembered/irrelevant artist to the world at large, I understand that too.

I guess I'm just appreciative of posters like Fran who quietly add news/links to topics where something similar is already being discussed. Or Stephen posts a long, interesting interview with Russell but after a few days its out of sight/mind cos of new threads which bump it off the first page. Maybe its just me but if there are lots of new reviews of the Jarv Is album/interviews with him, isn't it a bit unwieldy to start a new topic on each one when discussion can be easier on a smaller number of threads?

And, again, not meant personally, but sometimes these new topics are only started because someone is looking for something (a video link/article/recording they haven't paid for that others have) and by drawing attention through a new topic, they expect someone to provide it for them.

Once you're signed into the forum, the topics which have new posts since you last checked have notifications which light-up. As you say, its not the busiest of forums, so its quick and easy to see what topics have been updated if you don't check in for a few days/weeks.

Didnt realise that ArrGee is a mod, so obviously he can decide what to do. Again, it's not a MAJOR issue, and I have slighlty bigger struggles at the moment, - as I'm sure we all do, at an uncertain time for most of us.

It's just an observation about a little place online that I care about and feel have contributed to over a number of years.

Eamonn wrote:

Didnt realise that ArrGee is a mod, so obviously he can decide what to do. 

 

Must be doing a good job that I go so unnoticed   Thanks for pasting the article.

why is everything behind a pay wall these days?  Don't even get the one free article on FT.  No comment.

 

https://www.ft.com/content/037ed8eb-72ca-4953-b527-d1d8308d655b