“Shall I read out the menu?” says Jarvis Cocker. Although I am trying to act breezy, I suspect he can see through middle-aged superfans who idolised him in the 1990s and has decided to take charge. Seated in the window of Italo, a bountiful deli-café in south London stacked with everything from giant olives to chocolate songthrush eggs, he takes a menu and performs an impromptu gastronomic monologue.
I could listen to Cocker say “focaccia crumbs” and “in the sandwich department we have . . . ” in his deep, mellow Sheffield accent indefinitely, but the spell is broken when he concludes with: “For the record I am having pea and mint soup with yoghurt, sumac crumbs and bread, followed by browned butter asparagus and pecorino on toast.” I copy his starter choice and then plump for a sandwich containing fennel salami, pickled fennel, capers, cornichon mayo, Asiago cheese, white onions and rocket.
I’m optimistic that it’s going to be tasty, given the charm of Cocker’s chosen lunch venue, with its arty, non-9-5 coffee drinkers seated outside opposite a community garden. “There’s the Blade Runner-esque landscape of Vauxhall and then suddenly you’ve got this leafy square,” he muses. Despite encouragement, Cocker declines a glass of wine: “I don’t drink in the day. Makes me too sleepy.”
Not especially rock ’n’ roll, perhaps, but then Cocker is now 58, and it’s been 27 years since his band Pulp released their best-known single “Common People” — a satire on class tourism and the glamorising of poverty, set to a catchy, keyboard-heavy tune. Inspired by a wealthy fellow student at Central Saint Martins college of art who told Cocker she wanted to hang out with “common people”, the song established him as a cultural commentator. Lanky and shy at school, he forged an anti-pop-star persona that saw him described as an “unlikely sex symbol” thanks to his breathy singing, self-described “slightly edgy geography teacher” outfits and an oddly alluring dance style that’s somewhere between an amateur magician and Elvis.
Pulp was considered part of Britpop, the movement that saw indie bands move into the mainstream — although Cocker doesn’t like to be identified with it (as he spells out later in our lunch). The band’s commercial success peaked in the mid-1990s but they “fizzled out” in the early 2000s, and since then Cocker has had a left-field portfolio career. He has made several solo albums, music for the Wes Anderson films Fantastic Mr Fox and The French Dispatch, formed a new band, Jarv Is, and presented TV and radio shows including a Sunday-afternoon slot on BBC Radio 6 Music. Most of his success has come in the UK, so I ask how he would describe himself to my 35-year-old American colleague who wasn’t aware of him. “A short-sighted musician and broadcaster from the north of England,” he smiles.
Perhaps inevitably, he has now written a memoir, Good Pop, Bad Pop. Although, in line with his sideways take on life, it isn’t a typical music biography, not least because it ends before he becomes famous. I point this out. “Well, thank God for that,” he replies. “I’ve been asked to do a memoir in the past and I was never interested. It seems like you’re preparing to die and I’m not quite ready for that yet.”
Instead, Good Pop, Bad Pop uses the absorbing device of decluttering his loft of random objects to tell the story of growing up and forming a band in 1970s and 1980s Sheffield. There’s the comprehensive school exercise book detailing his “Pulp Master Plan”; a manifesto for the band he started at school (originally called Arabacus Pulp, inspired by a term Cocker saw in the commodities section of the FT during an economics lesson); surprisingly Proustian old Marmite, Rose’s lime juice cordial and Imperial Leather soap packaging kept because he had a fear of change; and a “holy relic”, a ticket to the John Peel roadshow where he managed to hand a demo tape to the influential DJ.
The cultural specificity of some of the objects and the nostalgia they stir is very Jarvis. His lyrics evoke a retro cinematic snapshot of British suburbia and its drift between emotion and ennui. “Net curtains blowing slightly in the breeze / Lemonade light filtering through the trees,” he sang on 1994’s “Acrylic Afternoons”, a dreamlike vignette about an illicit encounter. However, Cocker adds that “I’ve written a lot of songs, but one thing I discovered was that writing songs hadn’t prepared me for writing a book”.
While we eat the zingy green pea soup, its chunky sweetness offset by sumac croutons and thin slices of toasted sourdough drizzled with olive oil, a jovial man sidles over and asks to take his photo with my lunch date. “Believe it or not, I used to get called Jarvis because I looked like you,” says the fiftysomething fan. In fact, he looks comically dissimilar to the tall, angular Cocker, who sports heavy-framed glasses, cheekbone-length hair that’s somewhere between tousled and “I fell asleep on the sofa”, a tailored charcoal blazer and flared jeans.
And while the blazer is from tailor Edward Sexton and the shirt from New & Lingwood rather than the jumble sales he used to frequent as a skint teenager on the hunt for cheap vintage clothes, Cocker’s look is pretty similar to what he wore to play Glastonbury in 1995. That was the summer of the Oasis vs Blur chart battle, when the two British bands released the singles “Roll with It” and “Country House” simultaneously in a race to reach number one in the charts. (Blur ended up outselling Oasis.)
While Blur and Oasis were the key players in the so-called Britpop movement, which morphed into a bigger cultural moment dubbed “Cool Britannia”, Pulp were also considered integral along with Suede. Yet Cocker visibly winces when I mention Britpop.
“There are two words in the book which I asterisk,” he says, “one is Margaret ******** [Thatcher] and the other is the word you just said. That name is so vile because it’s got these connotations of nationalism . . . as the events of the last six years of Brexit show, that kind of jingoism is just horrible and corrosive. So that’s what put me off it at the time and why I still don’t like to use that word.”
Later, he adds that Britain has “got such a dark past and the country is founded on such crazy exploitation and imperialism. You can’t just look at a Union Jack and say ‘Oh it’s a nice pattern.’” More than 25 years on, there’s a reappraisal of the 1990s and the legacy of Britpop occurring. But, perhaps not wanting to sound too negative, he adds the caveat that “the thing it described in the early ’90s, this feeling of something from left field coming into the mainstream — that was an exciting time. And I’m really glad to have been part of that feeling of a bit of a movement.”
He found it exciting, he says, until “it became a bit careerist and everybody started competing. And the most obvious example is Blur vs Oasis.” He presented the music TV show Top of the Pops the week of the showdown: “I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something like, ‘It’s not a war, everyone’s benefited because you’ve got these two great songs being released the same week.’ I tried to be the peacemaker . . . I was like the Kofi Annan of it,” he deadpans.
At this point our mains arrive, including Cocker’s asparagus, and I remember a line in the Pulp song “I Spy”, which Cocker wrote about being unemployed in Sheffield after leaving school, and in which a bitter narrator imagines taking revenge on the wealthy. “Take your ‘Year in Provence’ and shove it up your arse,” he sang. Asparagus on toast would probably have been similarly despised by the angry protagonist. Cocker says he’s not a “class war person” but he does think his trajectory of coming to London to study at art college is “much harder for people from my background to do now”, given the cost of rent and education.
My conversational skills slightly hampered by my deliciously pickly but overstuffed and impossible-to-eat-gracefully sandwich (“It’s good it’s in that wrapper because you can take it home”), we segue from Britpop into Cool Britannia and how UK politicians wanted a sprinkle of the pop fairy dust. Cocker laughs at the recollection. “Tony Blair [then leader of the Labour opposition] really tried to pick his way in with the scene that was happening. He turned up at the Brit Awards and kept going on about how he could play guitar and stuff. And he just seemed a bit opportunistic. And then I did get invited to some kind of wooing event.”
Over the Christmas of 1996, Cocker went to New York “to get away from all the hullabaloo. I was supposed to be completely under the radar. But one day I got a call in the hotel room and there’s this woman saying something like, ‘Hello, it’s Imogen from New Labour. Just wanted to know if we can count on your support.’ And it really solidified my mistrust. You’re stalking me, basically.”
Shortly afterwards he wrote a satirical song called “Cocaine Socialism”, in which he imagines himself invited to Whitehall by a politician. “All I’m really saying is / Come on and rock the vote for me / And all I’m really saying is / come on, roll up that note for me.” The band had thought about releasing it as a big single before the general election in 1997, but decided to delay until the following year. Cocker says he was “conflicted because I really wanted a Labour government to happen, but I thought this doesn’t feel like the Labour government. I guess we had slight ego issues at that point, thinking that it might affect the results of the election or something very self-important.”
Italo
13 Bonnington Square SW8 1TE
Pea and mint soup with yoghurt, sumac crumbs and bread x2 £15
Brown butter asparagus and pecorino on toast £11
Sandwich (fennel salami, pickled fennel, capers, cornichon mayo, Asiago, white onion and rocket) £10
Assam tea £2.50
Flat white £3.50
Total inc service £45.50
I suspect part of the “hullabaloo” he mentions was related to an incident at the 1996 Brit Awards. During Michael Jackson’s performance of “Earth Song”, in which he wore white robes and adopted a crucifixion pose as child actors gazed at him in mock wonder, Cocker invaded the stage, bending over and waggling his bottom. The gesture, which Cocker said afterwards was a protest at Jackson’s “Jesus act”, got him arrested (he was released without charge), caused a media frenzy, swelled his celebrity status and had a profoundly negative effect on his mental health. When I ask if he regrets it, Cocker seems exasperated. “I really try to avoid talking about that because I’ve never wanted it to feel like I’ve tried to profit from it in some way. No, not regret as in I think it was morally wrong. It had an impact.”
Giving up on the second half of my unwieldy sandwich, I steer away from the prickly chat by asking Cocker how he felt about being famous, especially in what Vanity Fair once dubbed “the tabloid decade”. “I think it’s fairly public knowledge that I didn’t like it,” he says. Why not? “That’s another question that I have to find the answer to one day. I have some inklings, but by having gone back to the beginning of the story [in the book] I understand why things happen later on.” The “actual trigger” for Cocker clearing his loft was temporarily splitting up with his partner Kim Sion, with whom he now lives in Shepherd’s Bush, and feeling sick “of repeating the same mistakes over and over again. I just found myself doing it during the lockdown. I must have thought on a kind of instinctive level that maybe this might give me a clue.”
As part of this psychic decluttering, which feels rather timely after the mass introspection of lockdown, Cocker has also been exploring how our personalities evolve, a theme that crops up in the 2020 Jarv Is album Beyond the Pale. Cocker’s father left home abruptly when he was seven, then emigrated to Australia. “My dad died about five years ago and I never had much of a relationship with him, but I think there was one part of me that, because he left when I was so young, felt like I couldn’t change too much because he might not recognise me if he ever came back. But once he died I thought, ‘OK, you can change now.’” It’s a heartbreaking thought, but Cocker counters it by going on to tell me that he’s decided to become an optimist, a stance he counter-intuitively adopted after “that horrible winter when Trump was elected and Leonard Cohen died”.
Cocker drinks a cup of tea and I have a flat white while we discuss the challenges facing the arts and the music industry. He finds it irritating that arts education gets “presented as some kind of luxury. Art should be fundamental . . . the last thing that will get taken over by computers.” In the age of digitisation, his book questions whether there is an inherent value in physical things over digital ones, but Cocker isn’t a technophobe so much as an ambivalent interpreter of the evolving “business of being human”. The book and the stuff in his loft are “like the record of a pre-internet brain. In the future, people won’t leave so much of a trace,” he says. “It’ll be like, ‘Grandma’s died. Here’s her hard drive.’”
Our meal rounds off and we head over to the till. I pay the bill and Cocker buys ingredients for dinner: spaghetti, tomato sauce and a hunk of Parmesan. He’s already told me he’s not much of a cook. When he goes to Paris as a “Eurostar dad” — his 19-year-old son with ex-wife Camille Bidault-Waddington lives there — he says “a lot of mealtimes would be based around Marks and Spencer’s ready meals”.
There’s something about Cocker’s slightly arch manner that injects everything he does with a narrative quality. He takes his lyrics from everyday life and even the act of buying dinner seems as if it could be pop song material. There are plenty of words that rhyme with pasta but I expect the man who paired “Saint Martins College” with “a thirst for knowledge” could do something clever with Parmesan.
Carola Long is the FT’s deputy style editor
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