> A Bit More Personal: An Interview with Jarvis Cocker

A Bit More Personal: An Interview with Jarvis Cocker

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:24:49

Jarvis Cocker Videos

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?

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