Pulp's Jarvis Cocker: "It is incalculable, how much influence The Beatles had in encouraging ordinary people to be creative"

“We’re four Popes in since Pulp’s last record”.

I figured it wasn’t a bad entree into an interview with Jarvis Cocker.

“I didn’t think of it in those terms,” Jarvis laughs.

And thus does the lead man in Pulp, one of the ‘Big Four’ of Britpop, ease into a fascinating interview about the creative processes behind More, the band’s first album since 2001’s We Love Life – and lots more besides.

There is a caveat however. In Jarvis’ rather brilliant 2022 memoir Good Pop, Bad Pop, he recounts a stern warning once imparted to him by none other than pop’s Poet Laureate, Leonard Cohen. “We’ve got to be very careful exploring these sacred mechanics,” he was warned, “because somebody will throw a monkey wrench into the thing & we’ll never write another line again, either of us.”

“No, no,” Jarvis gamely elaborates, “it’ll fizzle and disappear if you do that.”

But he goes on to courageously describe the creation of More in fine detail, revealing a ruminative, serene and gracious artist in masterful form.

BEING A SERF

Six of Pulp’s seven previous studio albums represent a discerning eyewitness account of late 20th century British life. Here we are, already a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and More – the band’s eighth – is something of an interpretative older brother, or revelatory uncle, to the band’s mammoth album Different Class.

“Yeah, maybe,” Jarvis considers, “obviously we’ve used the cutouts on the cover that we’d done for Different Class, and I don’t know what put that idea into my mind. Maybe it was because it felt similar to Different Class, as in, we had to record it quite quickly.

“In fact Different Class was recorded very quickly,” he recalls, “because we’d had a hit with ‘Common People’ and we hadn’t got an album to follow it up with. I’d become very convinced that record had to come out as soon as possible, otherwise we’d miss a moment. And this was a similar thing.

“It wasn’t like we’d had a hit or anything, but we had a tour booked for this summer, so we knew if we were going to do a record, it would have to come out before the tour. As it happens, it’s going to come out one day before the tour starts. A deadline does tend to sharpen your mind.”

More was recorded at Orbb Studio in E17, London. Photographer Tom Jackson took a rather groovy portrait of the band and session musicians against the wood panelled backdrop of the main studio room, looking very much a curiously – if extraordinarily serious – hip gang.

“Yeah,” Jarvis confirms, “we get on reasonably well. It’s quite funny having so many people in the band. We played on Jools Holland the other night and we had those nine people, but then we had a string quartet as well. So, it was like Earth, Wind & Fire, or something. Yeah, a massive band.”

I offer my condolences on the death of Steve Mackey, the band’s bassist, who passed away in 2023.

“It’s kind of difficult for me to talk about that,” Jarvis says, “because obviously he was a very important part of the band. He passed away before we did the tour in 2023 and we dedicated the tour to him. I would talk about Steve before we played ‘Something Changed’ and the album is also dedicated to him. I’m sure the fact he passed away had some influence on us. It certainly focused us to realise that you haven’t got forever to do things.”

Steve Mackey

A couple of tracks on More date back to when Steve was in the band.

“I had the title, ‘Grown Ups’,” Jarvis relates, “but I guess I wasn’t a grown up, so I didn’t know what to write about. And then the song ‘Got To Have Love’, I did write words for that, but I didn’t have any love in my life at the time, so I couldn’t really sing that properly either. But I thought it would be good to finish those songs. To have grown up and to understand now what love is are good things in my life.”

On ‘Grown Ups’, Cocker’s pen is as sure as ever, as he talks of “Mature life decisions / Like the one that I heard of / from Jeremy Sissons”.

Who’s this Sissons fella then?

“Well,” Jarvis explains, “I changed his name. It was someone that I was in school with and I just bumped into him in Sheffield, and he told me that he’d moved near the motorway, because it was good for him to commute to London. I thought it was a joke or something, but it wasn’t, that’s what he was excited about.

“As a kid,” he elaborates, “I was always getting told off at school for being immature. But I just thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to grow up, I can’t see the point’. There’s a line in that song about Mowgli – “Why did Mowgli decide to come out of the jungle?” – because when I saw The Jungle Book, I just thought, ‘Why didn’t you just stay in the jungle and have a good time with those animals? Why do you want to go and get a girlfriend? Just stay young and keep playing’. Anyway, I have evolved beyond that now!”

Jarvis was even younger than Mowgli when he began envisioning himself in a band, something which he tells me was a common youthful dream in Sheffield at the time. The Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’ was at No. 1 the week Jarvis was born.

“It is incalculable,” he reflects, “how much influence The Beatles had in encouraging ordinary people to be creative. I had the good luck to be brought up under that benevolent feeling of people thinking: ‘We can do this’. The lid got screwed back on that in the ‘80s, and that was what was so dispiriting for me. We’d done a John Peel Session, and I thought, ‘Now we can start to play, and this is going to be my life, and it’s all going to be exciting, like the ‘60s’. Unfortunately, it was the ‘80s, and Thatcher just screwed the lid tight and said, ‘Fuck off. Go back to being a Serf’.”

It’s often documented that Pulp’s first gig was at Rotherham Arts Centre in July 1980, but it was in fact at City Comprehensive School in March 1980. Playing your own school took cojones!

“It did,” he laughs. “The first thing we did at school was a film show with the guy who had made these two Super 8 films, and we recorded a soundtrack on cassette and played it at the same time. And that was very popular at the school, and so then we thought, ‘Okay, let’s play a concert’. And it was a disaster. That seems to be a personality trait that I still haven’t really managed to kick, which is to think about something for a long time,  and do it less well and less well. The more I think about it, the less well it turns out.

“That cycle has kind of repeated throughout my life. It was the same with videos. I made a video for ‘Babies’, that was pretty good, then I made one for ‘Razzmatazz’, tried to make it too fancy. We went to Paris and thought we were going to shoot it at the Moulin Rouge, and we ended up shooting it in a seedy hotel room. So, I’m trying to stop myself from doing the same with our tour that’s coming up. The tour was great in 2023, now we’re doing it again. Am I going to overthink it and spoil it? Hopefully not.”

GETTING A SECOND CHANCE

Pulp were also inspired by the late 1970s punk scene and indeed, proto-punks The Velvet Underground’s debut record. Your classic album Jarvis, if you were to choose one?“I guess so,” he replies, “it was pretty hard to get hold of their records. The only one that I could get hold of was a compilation of the first three albums. The first Velvet Underground song I heard was ‘Waiting For The Man’; I just was amazed by the way they sequenced it. It went on to stuff from the third album, which is super mellow.

“So, I had my mind blown by them. That’s why I’ve always used strings. They had Mo Tucker playing drums, so it was alright to have a woman in a band. You know, a lot of foundational things for the band came from listening to The Velvet Underground.”

Coupled with the Warholian idea that you can find artistic merit in what other people might throw away or view as mundane?

“I guess you know that’s part of the name of the band,” he elaborates. “Although we started off with this more complicated name – Arabicus Pulp, which is some kind of coffee derivative that’s traded on the stock market.

“It was the Pulp part of it that appealed to me, because I knew that comics, cheap detective novels and certain films were called pulp – like it was throwaway culture, culture that was looked down on. I mean, pop music was considered to be a throwaway confection when it first came out in the ‘50s, and it hasn’t done that. It hasn’t disappeared. All those early records are really revered now. This thing that people said was a cheap, low form of culture really excited me.”

Photo: Tom Jackson

Let’s dive into More proper. The production on this record is exquisite.

“Well,” Jarvis simply explains, “that’s James Ford. With the last couple of records, we kind of produced them ourselves, but I did think for the More record we would need a producer, just to have somebody in control. The band were a bit wary of doing a record, because the previous two Pulp records,This Is Hardcore and We Love Life, had taken a long time. A lot of that was down to me not getting words finished and changing my mind and stuff like that.

“So,” he continues, “it would make them feel more relaxed about it. James Ford came up because Emma Smith and Richard Jones, who did string arrangements on the album, are in a band with him.

“So, I knew that I would be able to find out if he was interested fairly easily and listening to the stuff that he produced, I liked the fact that he didn’t have a signature sound. He just seemed to bring out the best in the people he recorded.”

That he does. Exhibit A, on More, being ‘Got To Have Love’.

“It sounds like I’m having a go at the listener,” Jarvis says, “but I’m actually having a go at myself. If your love-life isn’t in a good place, or if you don’t have love in your life, it’s not a good idea to try and create things or build things, because it’s a foundational part of your personality. And I’d had a long term relationship which had fallen apart, and I thought that was it, that you only get one go. I’d messed it up and that was sad for me, but luckily, I met somebody else, who is now my wife and realised that you could get a second chance. I was very grateful to realise there was still hope for me.”

I point to the Beckettian nature of the lyric: “For 25 years, hedge your bets & twist & bust & try & fail & work on an album & build a jail.”

“If you think about songs too closely, you will kind of scare them away,” Jarvis observes. “Talking about it even, you said about the Leonard Cohen thing, I’m kind of a bit loathe to talk about it, because then I might start thinking about it too. It’s a hard thing to describe. I think the best description of it is by Tove Jansson.

“In one of her Moomin books, there’s a story about Snufkin, the character who goes around playing a flute. I think it’s called ‘Our Summer Tune’ and he’s saying – ‘I can tell that I’m going to write a song soon. I can kind of see it out the corner of my eye, but I’m not going to look at it directly, because I’ll frighten it off. I’ve got to wait. I’ve got to wait until it wanders a bit nearer to me, and then I’ll be able to reach out and get it’.”

A DARK SECRET

Respect the muse. I understand. However, I can’t resist talking about ‘Farmer’s Market’, in which he recalls, “When I first saw you babe / In the car park of the Farmers Market / Backlit by the sunset / Or maybe the fires marking the end of the world.” That’s wonderful stuff, Jarvis.

“Thanks,” he replies. “That’s about my wife and it’s her favourite song on the record. As it says in the song – “Ain’t it time we started feeling?” I guess that’s the nearest this record has to a kind of concept - trying to feel things rather than think about things. Don’t get too hung up on your ideas about what the world is. Try and feel your way through.”

“I promised myself and the band, that I would write the words before we went into the studio” he divulges, “and it really reaped benefits, because it made the songs more defined before we went in. So, we would record the music, and then James Ford would ask ‘Can we put a guide vocal on it?’

“And in the olden days, I would have just said no, because I hadn’t written the words yet. But a lot of those guide vocals ended up being the actual vocals that you hear on the record. ‘Grown Ups’ is just one take of me singing it. I’m quite proud of that.”

On ‘Slow Jam’ and ‘Background Noise’, the band’s touch is so deft, so beautiful. More strikes me as possessing little anger, less class struggle, more pastoral poetry…

“We recorded 13 songs,” Jarvis replies. “One song is on the b-side of the 7-inch of ‘Spike Island’. But there was another song that was quite an angry song, musically, and that was the only one that I hit a block with the words. I kind of beat myself up over that a bit, thinking, ‘Oh, well, does that mean you’re a softy now and you don’t want to make a statement?’ But it just didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the record and so I think we will probably go back to that. There’s plenty to get angry about. So maybe that’s going to make a really abrasive, nasty record. Let’s see.”

The lyric on the lead single ‘Spike Island’ – “The universe shrugged, shrugged and moved on” – expresses the Stoic idea that sometimes when you realise that you are not the centre of the universe, rather than diminishing you, it makes you more powerful.

“For sure,” Jarvis agrees. “I mean, that’s what happened to me when I moved to London. I’d left school and I was doing the band full time and ended up being really miserable because it wasn’t working. I fell out a window in the aftermath of the single not being noticed and stuff like that. It just meant too much to me.

“And I went to London thinking that was it, I was giving up music, but I couldn’t quite do that. And then we played some shows, just towards the end of me finishing my degree, and because I was more relaxed about it and not feeling like it was the centre of my life to be in a band, the concerts went down a lot better."

There’s still plenty of intimacy on the record with ‘My Sex’ and ‘Tina’.

“Well,” Jarvis relates, “‘Tina’ is in the tradition of Pulp songs with women with names that end in A – Deborah, Sylvia, there was a b-side called ‘Paula’. I don’t know why I’ve got that obsession. It’s this idea that you can spend your whole life thinking that you’re going to meet a perfect person and you never will if you’re in that mindset.

“It was based on somebody who I think I maybe spoke to once in my life, but I did develop a bit of an obsession and it kind of dawned on me that was not the most mentally healthy thing for me to ever have done.

“And ‘My Sex’,” he continues, “I liked that title. It’s my ideas about sex coming from a female angle rather than a male angle, because there were no men around apart from my grandfather, who was past having sex anymore. So, I would get titbits of information about what sex might hold for me from eavesdropping on my mom talking with her friends, who would talk about sex quite a lot.

“Because they were all single again, so they all dated. It was strange when I started to try and have relationships, to be aware, or to think that maybe I was aware, of what the woman might be thinking about.”

A therapist told Jarvis that the way he spoke about how he had been writing songs was similar to the way somebody would talk about a perversion.

“Well, I hope I’m getting over that now,” he suggests. “I mean, that was one of the obstacles. I’ve mentioned my wife in this interview a couple of times. But it’s always been a thing that I would have stress with partners, when they would come to a concert and then say, ‘That’s the only time I find out what you’re thinking about. The only time I find out what’s on your mind is when you’re on stage talking to absolute strangers and singing songs to them’.

“I realised that wasn’t such a healthy thing. So, this time, I played my wife the songs as we were recording them. Whenever I was sent a rough mix of them, I played them to her, not to get her approval. But I thought it’s an important part of me, so she should know it.

“So hopefully I’ve lost that perversion thing. Because I think the reason my therapist said that, was because it was something I took a lot of pleasure in, but I didn’t share with anybody. It was some kind of dark secret that I would only share with 4,000 people in a room, but I never had to see them again. So hopefully, fingers crossed, I may be coming out of that particular version.”

Photo: Tom Jackson

AROUND THE CAMPFIRE

We’ve treaded precariously close to the Sacred Mechanics, but without betraying them. So let’s risk delving into the song that kicked off this autumnal phase of Pulp – ‘Hymn Of The North’.

“Yes,” Jarvis affirms. “That was the thing that lit the fuse, really. We’d been playing it at soundchecks, because I’d written that song for a play by Simon Stevens called Light Falls, which was performed in Manchester back in 2019.

“He came up with that title – I would never have dared to write a song called ‘Hymn Of The North’, especially since I hadn’t been living in the north for quite a long time. But he’d lived in the north, and gathered material for this play, and he wanted a soundtrack that comes in at various important points in the story. So, I wrote it.

“In the play, it’s a mother who dies and visits her children and sees what they’re doing with their lives. I’ve just got one child, my son, Albert, and at that point in 2019, he was 16. I suddenly became aware that he was only going to be in school for a couple more years, and then he was going to have to go and be a person in the world. It kind of blows your mind as a parent and I’ve got some of those feelings out in that song.”

So how will Pulp cram all these bangers into a set that is already laden down with hits – ‘Common People’, ‘Disco 2000’, ‘Babies’, ‘Do You Remember The First Time?’, ‘Underwear’, ‘Something Changed’, ‘Sorted for E’s & Wizz’...

“I’m very happy that we’ve got Lisa O’Neill playing with us as well,” Jarvis  proffers. “She supported us at, well I always call it Hammersmith Odeon, but it’s now called the Eventim Apollo. It’s a venue that I’d always wanted to play in London.

“I’ve seen some amazing shows there and Lisa opened for us there. And both nights I went and listened to her from behind the curtain that we have in front of the stage. And so, she very graciously agreed to open the show for us in Dublin. I’ll be hiding behind the curtain listening to her again.”

Pulp are also among the artists to have publicly defended Kneecap, signing an open letter from their record label Heavenly Recordings, supporting the band.

“I just think politicians should never get involved in passing judgement on creativity,” Jarvis states. “I just thought you have to say something about it. I was asked if we would sign a letter. And I said, ‘Yeah, I think that’s an important thing’.”

 

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The abiding element on More is the sun. And the last track is ‘Sunset’, a relative to ‘Sunrise’, the final track on Pulp’s last record, We Love Life.

“That is supposed to sound a little bit like people singing around the campfire,” Jarvis specifies. “So it could be at a festival. That came from a poster on the wall in Steve Albini’s studio Electrical Audio in Chicago. An artist had this thing where she sold tickets to the sunset and took people to the top of the hill and just reminded them of something that is at the end of every day. Sometimes it’s not as spectacular as other times, but you know it’s there, and you can look at it for free.

“As you said earlier on, the trouble with human beings is that we often just overlook all those things that are great about the world, and they just become invisible to us. If that song makes some people go out and look at a sunset, I would really be happy. It would be like, ‘Yes, the album is a success now’.”

More is out now on Rough Trade Records. Pulp play 3Arena, Dublin tomorrow, June 10.