Jarvis Cocker has a trick. On the not so rare occasions when he has had to act as an interviewer, on television and radio programs, the musician from Sheffield (United Kingdom) prepares “no more than ten questions on four or five different topics and then lets the conversation flow.” If he gets stuck or suffers an attack of stage fright, as he almost did the day he was interviewing one of his heroes, Leonard Cohen, he resorts to one of the prepared questions, even though he doesn't even come to tale.
The trick, despite everything, does not work to interview him. With Cocker, the conversation always seems to flow, but it does so through unexpected channels. Each question that is asked gives rise to a cascade of reflections, anecdotes and memories that he, entrenched behind his horn-rimmed glasses, reels off with humor, parsimony and method. “I realize that I tend to ramble a lot,” Cocker concedes in our meeting in a hotel in Barcelona, a city where he has gone to promote his memoir, Good pop, bad pop (Blackie Books). “You ask me specific and direct questions and I give you mile-long answers. But if I have learned anything from writing this book, it is that almost everything is connected, that things are much more complex than they seem and, consequently, that there are no simple answers,” he says.
Good pop, bad pop It is the literal fruit of several months digging through the trunk of memories. Specifically, in a small attic or storage room of the house where the musician lived in London and where he stored “an almost incredible number of objects, from packs of gum to bars of soap, notebooks, flyers from clubs, concert tickets, postcards, guitar picks, photos, shirts, toys.” Jarvis began writing about “that insane pile of garbage accumulated over the years” because he became convinced that, in some sense, it contained the essence of his own story. Also that of his band, Pulp: “It started as a childhood project, the vehicle to become the only thing I really wanted to be, a pop star, when I was about 13 years old and had not even learned to play the guitar.” .
This projection of his adolescent fantasies became a somewhat precarious musical project a little later for which he sought “accomplices” in his immediate environment, because, as he says: “My model was always the Beatles, and pursuing a career as a soloist seemed to me an infinitely more boring option.” Pulp continued to exist for Jarvis Cocker even in the years when it was a fallow band, without records, without concerts and with hardly any rehearsals, with its leader entangled in his years of indolent bohemianism in Sheffield or studying art, “without the slightest conviction” in London.
Between 1978 and 1993, the group endured a very long journey through the desert in which with every step forward they seemed to follow a couple of steps back or to the sides. In 1994, they finally hit the radar with a brilliant and very timely album, His 'n' Hers, which would follow, a year later, Different Class, the masterpiece of instant combustion with which they took the world by storm. From night to day, Cocker went from underground to the front line of the musical and media front. The world discovered a formidable writer of narrative songs, in the wake of the British manners of a Ray Davies or the humor and everyday magic of a Robyn Hitchcock. What's more, that lanky, short-sighted guy with an impossible haircut also turned out to be quite a stage beast, an unprecedented cocktail of theatricality, exquisiteness, authenticity and charisma. If Damon Albarn and the Gallagher brothers were the figureheads of the revolution britpop, Jarvis was their cursed poet and shadow leader.
That was the prelude to what Cocker now describes as the “most disconcerting” years of his life, the period in which he realized his childhood dreams of world domination and ended up becoming, he says, a changed man: “Not necessarily better, I hope not a complete idiot but a suspicious, anguished, vain guy.” Fame and success, as he admits, were very bad for him: “When I imagined, at 14 years old, what my life would be like as soon as I became a pop star, I assumed that I would not live in a house, but in a luxury hotel, with a butler, without sheets to change or clothes to wash, and I would spend the entire day lying in bed watching episodes of Batman.”
That dream came true after the success of Different Class: “During the year I spent in New York alone and dedicated full time to being a star.” It was “horrible,” and Cocker is considering these days, while he writes the sequel to Good pop, bad pop, How are you going to manage to describe that descent into hell. But the already published book covers a much earlier period: “From my childhood in Sheffield, in a modest home, to the years when I lived in an abandoned factory, before moving to London.”
It was going to be something else. “A long and I suppose quite boring dissertation about my creative processes that I thought I would title This book is a song.” He had conceived it as a work “with its intro, its first verse, its bridge, its chorus, its second verse.” And he had dedicated almost two years of “slow and inconstant” work to it. “Because I am a turtle: I almost always finish what I start, but at my own pace, without rushing.” Mónica Carmona, his literary agent, had gotten him “a magnificent contract” at a book fair: “It was enough for him with a couple of paragraphs in which I explained my idea, which was very vague, and when he returned from the fair he told me : 'Jarvis, we have sold your book. Now you're going to have to write it.' So I got to work, because she had believed in me and I didn't want to disappoint her.”
In 2018, as soon as the promotion of his album concluded Room 29, in which he collaborated with the Canadian Chilly Gonzales, Cocker focused on writing. This book is a song; Despite everything, she didn't get going: “After several months of work, they assigned me an editor and she, with a brutal honesty that surprised me greatly, told me that almost nothing she had written was useful. Only a very brief part, the chronicle of the day when I decided to empty my attic and began to tell the story of some of the objects I had kept in it. The editor told me that she did find that interesting: 'Forget about the initial idea, it's the garbage that comes out of your storage room that's really worth it.' And I listened to him.”
Carrying objects, photographing them and wondering what they meant to him and why he had decided to keep them for so long, Cocker discovered something essential: “That the past is a lie. We all have a completely false official autobiography that we tell ourselves and anyone who will listen, but it is nothing more than a lie. It is the life of the person we would like to be, not of the person we are. When we face the naked facts, in a photo album, an old notepad, or a storage room full of junk, the truth emerges. And sometimes it is disconcerting and painful.”
The true story of Jarvis Cocker, told from the perspective of his beloved objects, is perhaps “that of a man with a superstitious and irrational attachment to the past, who keeps bars of soap from his childhood because it depresses him that the design changes and that the memory of the original packaging is lost,” like tears in the rain. Cocker has taken on the challenge of showing himself as what he is, a man “with dreams of greatness who dedicated much of his best years to wasting time, who always had ambition, but whose will and perseverance often failed him.” .
Looking back has also helped him to see how deeply rooted music has always been in his life: “If you ask me about my oldest musical memory, I once again feel that strange tickling in my shoulders and neck that listening to the radio, with my mother, songs like If You Could Read My Mind, by Gordon Lightfoot. I was so little that I took what I was hearing at face value. I really believed that the radio sprites could read my mind, get into my brain. It was an exciting and distressing feeling.” More signs that young Cocker had an unavoidable date with the pentagram? Jarvis was born “on September 19, 1963, the day She Loves You reached number one on the British charts,” and his father “left home in 1970, the year the Beatles broke up,” the date that has meant for him, ever since, “the end of innocence.”
His elusive father, by the way, had played trombone in a band that also included Joe Cocker. “We had no family relationship, but he had the same last name as us.” One Cocker ended up triumphing and the other soon left music: “I know that my father was mortified by that old story of crossed destinies. If he had stayed at home, perhaps he could have guided me in my first steps with the guitar, which I learned to play alone, with a lack of natural skill that still accompanies me today. Luckily, very shortly after, punk came to teach me that a couple of chords could be enough, that technique was not the least important, because at 13 years old I was mortified that I was unable to play Beatles songs. Neither his grandfather, “a possible organist, but only at Christmas and on some birthdays,” nor his mother's brother, “who had a group with which he had played in tourist towns like Torquay and given some concert in Germany. His uncle died when Jarvis was very young, and all she left him “were a pair of leather pants with suspenders that were all the rage in Germany, but that you couldn't wear in Sheffield unless you were willing to be very embarrassed.”
Cocker attributes his passion for music to myopia: “I have always been very nearsighted, with multiple diopters. The strange thing is that they didn't detect it until I was five years old. Before I got my first glasses, my area of clear vision was reduced to just a couple of meters. The rest was a blurry mass, faces I didn't recognize, tables and furniture I tripped over, soccer balls I didn't see coming until they hit me in the face. A hostile universe. That of sounds, on the other hand, was a clear and friendly universe in which I never stumbled.” The glasses restored balance, but the acoustic universe has had much more weight in his life than the visual one, he acknowledges.
In the final stretch of Good pop, bad pop, Cocker addresses a “traumatic” event that ended up changing his life: “I don't want to tell it here, because it represents a dramatic turn and I prefer not to do anything.” spoiler. But I do want to tell what I learned from that. He taught me to trust my intuition as a storyteller. I surprised myself by observing what was happening around me and turning it into narrative material for the lyrics of my songs. I discovered that reality is an extraordinary source of stories and that it is not even necessary to transform and embellish them, the brain already selects the essential details for you, those that have captured your attention and will capture that of those who listen to you. From this discovery were born songs as everyday and accurate as Common People, Babies, Do You Remember the First Time? either Disc 2000. Also Good pop, bad pop, a book that wanted to be a song and has ended up being a fascinating spell to recover your memory.
#Jarvis #Cocker #cursed #poet #39Britpop39 #lie #completely #false #official #autobiography