Jarvis Cocker

(April 2007)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

When Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker dissolved his band and moved to France, he figured that his days as a public performer were mostly finished. It had been a good but tumultuous run: Pulp shot to stardom in the mid-'90s—over a decade after Cocker had formed the band—by releasing what would become one of Brit-pop's definitive albums (Different Class) and singles ("Common People"). Like Blur and Suede, though, Pulp's mainstream success didn't translate to America. At home, however, Cocker became a bona fide rock star and tabloid sensation; the vapidity of the surrounding culture helped inform later-era Pulp albums, and probably made an early retirement in Paris all the more appealing.

But the writing bug followed him. First came a sequence of one-off collaborations, writing songs for Charlotte Gainsbourg, Nancy Sinatra, and Harry Potter. On the newly released Jarvis (out last year in the U.K.), Cocker returns to writing for himself. Whether considering the myth-making parallels between Disney movies and pornography ("Disney Time") or profanely reflecting on the balance of global power (hidden track "Cunts Are Still Running the World"), he finds plenty to discuss amid one of his most accessible batches of songs to date.

Let's start with what is probably an elementary question: Why the long gap between the U.K. release of Jarvis and the U.S. release?

Well, it's kind of boring tactical reasons, I suppose. At the time the album came out in the U.K., Rough Trade didn't really have an American distributor or presence. They used to be involved with Sanctuary, but, you know, that stopped working. So they had to find somebody that they wanted to work with in releasing the record. I'm not working under the impression that I'm going to sell a lot of copies of my record in America. But I wanted it to come out in America because then anybody who is interested doesn't have to pay so much. It costs quite a lot when you have to buy it on import, doesn't it?

It definitely does. Were the songs on the record culled from a fixed period of time, where it was "Okay, I guess I'm going to do another album after all?" Or, did they get made sporadically?

It kind of happened over a sporadic period, yeah. I moved here to France just over four years ago. I kind of thought I wasn't going to be a performer anymore. I got asked to write some songs for Nancy Sinatra, and I thought that would maybe be a way to be involved in music but not get my hands dirty. So I wrote some songs, and I was pleased with the songs. I gave them to her, but I guess—because I was pleased with them—in the back of me mind, I knew that I would like to record those songs myself. I was happy with the versions that Nancy did of them, but it seemed a bit sad to write something and then give it away to somebody else.

So I guess that was the start of realizing that maybe I wanted to carry on doing it, which, in a way, I was slightly horrified by. I'd been in a group for over 25 years; I thought maybe it was time for me to do something else with me life. Maybe even something useful. But I came around to the idea of it. In a way, the songs came to me and persuaded me to make a record, really. Once I'd written four or five, I thought, "Okay, I am going to do this." But I never sat down and thought "I have a week to write things."

Some songs took ages to write, like there's a song called "Black Magic." I was given the sample that that's based on ["Crimson and Clover"] by Steve Mackey quite early on in the process of writing songs. It took me probably a year and a half to write a song out of it. The same with the song "Running the World"—I'd written that tune on a little keyboard that was in the house. It was for the kids, really. It took another year before I came up with the title. Then I thought to call a song "Cunts Are Still Running the World" was really stupid. It took me probably another six months to get around to writing the words.

I don't know if I'd work like that again, but it was quite good because I didn't force anything. I just waited for it to happen. I think music should be like that, in a way. It should be a byproduct of your life. I don't really like to think of it as a career or a profession. I think it's just like sweating or your hair growing—it's just something that happens whilst you're living.

There is a competing philosophy that writing is a discipline that needs to be forced, regardless of inspiration.

Yeah, you know, it's difficult. For this record, I think it worked well, but for the next one, I probably won't work that way again. One thing I have learned over my years of making records is that you can never do it the same way twice. There was this time when I was doing the Pulp album Different Class and we got all the songs written but, of course, I hadn't written any lyrics for them. There was a famous instance where the night before going into the studio I had to write the lyrics to ten songs or something. I got really drunk in me sister's kitchen, and I think I wrote nine and passed out—and then finished the tenth one on the way off to the studio the next day. And that worked; that was Pulp's most successful and popular album. But I tried to do the same thing a couple of years later when I was doing This Is Hardcore, and I fell asleep after doing one. So it would be nice to have working methods, and I know that some people are disciplined about it, but I find that variation is the thing that works for me, to put yourself in a different kind of situation and maybe look at things in a slightly different way. That can jolt some creativity out of you.

When you have those songs that are taking longer to write, do you have a clear sense of when the songs are finished? Is there a "Voila!" or "Aha!" moment?

I think for me that's one of the most exciting things about writing songs. It's not always when I know it's finished, but you sometimes get this inkling that the song is going to work—either just because you come up with a good title for it, or even though you haven't completely defined it but you know where it's going to go. Those moments, when you realize something is going to work, are the bits that make it worthwhile, really. It's very exciting. For me, at least, it's not just a musical thing. I have to know that lyrically it's going to work as well.

I was different in this record—because I was working on my own, I did actually write all of the words before I went into the studio. I really felt that I had to convince myself that the songs were good enough before going ahead with recording them. Doing those very, very rough demos was the way that I found out whether the songs were good enough.

The temptation for third parties in responding to solo albums is to equate "solo" with "personal." Do you feel that you bare more of yourself on this album, or is that a false notion?

Well, I don't know if I bare more of meself. I hated the idea of making a solo record. To me, solo albums mean indulgence, particularly self-indulgence. The personal aspect was really the only thing I could think of that would make it a viable project, really. I tried to make it more intimate, but I don't know if it's more personal—whether you find out more about me from listening to it than you would from listening to a Pulp record. But I definitely wanted it to be more intimate, so I tried to keep the instrumentation pretty simple and not overdo it. Some of the songs I've got just the piano and voice and maybe a little bit of strings in the background. I really liked that fact of being able to have things bare like that, because you haven't got so many distractions. A lot of Pulp records tended to have thousands and thousands of overdubs on them. I kind of wanted the songs to work with the bare minimum, so that would give more space for the voice. I tried to have the voice fairly loud, just so it had that feeling of being a bit more personal—like somebody telling you something in your living room.

Are all of the songs on Jarvis making their way into live sets?

There are two that we can't really play. "Baby's Coming Back to Me," one of the Nancy ones, has an arrangement with a marimba in it and stuff like that, and we just can't afford to have big instruments like that with me. There's another song called "Quantum Theory" which we did play once in London, but it's a bit hard because it's just kind of a guitar and strange noises—so we don't really play that one, either. But we play two of the songs that were b-sides, and then you basically get the record.

At the end of it, you get an inappropriate cover version. I've been aware of the fact that I'm playing to a lot of people that won't be that familiar with my record, and maybe they might expect to hear some Pulp songs—which they definitely won't hear—so at the end of the concert, we've been finishing by playing very well-known songs, but not by Pulp—just by anybody. We've played quite a variety. We started off with "Space Oddity" by David Bowie, then we did "Silver Machine" by Hawkwind; we've done "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath, "State Trooper" by Bruce Springsteen, and "Cross" by Prince. We even did "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix in Amsterdam. We try to do a different one every night, and we're going to continue with that in the States as well.

How did the search for opening bands go?
[Cocker posted an invitation on his MySpace page asking readers to submit suggestions for opening bands on his U.S. tour dates.]

I'm still finalizing that; I know I should hurry up. The problem being that I set up that search and then we went off and played in Australia, and a lot of the [responses] had links to MySpace sites, and obviously it's important to listen to what the bands sound like to make a choice. I couldn't do that whilst I was away. I got back and there were 17 pages of responses, so I'm trolling through those responses and trying to listen to everything that people have suggested. Obviously I'm going to have to do this very quickly because the shows are coming up quite soon.

But it worked—I did the same thing when we played in Europe and it was good because you felt more personally involved. You had a bit of contact with the bands before you turned up, so you felt like you knew them a bit. It worked really well.

Is there an advantage in maintaining some sort of wall or line between performer and audience? MySpace especially has altered that playing field, changing fans into "friends."

It's like when you perform a concert—there are certain conventions you have to abide by, such as standing on a stage because it makes easier for everybody to see you. But I don't like it when bands come on and don't acknowledge the audience or speak to them. Communicating with the audience has always been very important for me. Obviously you're there to play your music, but I think also you're somehow reaching out and having some sort of dialogue between yourself and the audience.

It's the same with the MySpace thing. I like it because it feels like a direct way of communicating. But I do draw the line in that I don't reply individually to posts—for one, because it would take too long. I don't really agree with creating a mystique, but you also don't want it to become too everyday.

But I like this thing of getting people to help out with suggesting support bands. It feels quite personal in that way. We don't want to get too personal. It's like if you're having a conversation with somebody—talking to somebody from a two-feet distance is fine, talking to somebody from a three-inch distance can be called invading someone's personal space, can't it?

In a recent interview, you were discussing "Cunts Are Still Running the World," and you said that you didn't like or respond to people who were writing songs that overtly attempted to deal with societal issues. Is that because you think those attempts typically fail? Or you don't think they should be made in the first place?

I think often when people try and do that, they write about things in such a broad way that it's just kind of embarrassing. When I first started writing songs that had some kind of social comment dimension, I was kind of horrified—because, like I say, I generally just don't like songs that deal with those kinds of things. I have an aversion to those songs, but occasionally they can work. For one reason or another, it felt important for me to do that occasionally. I hope that "Running the World" escapes that trap—one, by its regular use of profanity, and two, hopefully with a certain amount of humor. I guess by being a bit extreme, I suppose. I think also there has to be some kind of personal engagement, so it's not like somebody read an article in the newspaper about the evils of global warming and then just kind of made it rhyme.