By Michael Dwyer
Former Pulp frontman Jarvis CockerCredit:Tom Jamieson
That scene from Blade Runner haunts me as I read Jarvis Cocker’s book. The one where Harrison Ford recognises his own memories in photos belonging to a terminated humanoid. Disturbing. Could he be manufactured too? Not a unique being, but a mass-produced man/machine programmed with the same brain matter as every other individual of his generation?
Weirdly, the singer from Pulp knows exactly what I’m thinking. “I think that’s interesting, because especially at the moment, we’re living through such a cult of individuality,” he responds. “Everybody wants to feel unique … but we are more similar than we realise. That was why I wanted to explore it, really.”
Good Pop Bad Pop is Cocker’s “inventory” of things. Things the Sheffield pop star and broadcaster has been accumulating all his life in boxes and plastic carrier bags, at last pulled out, sorted, photographed and evaluated, one by one, from an overstuffed loft in London. It is, of course, the story of his life.
“In a way, it was like seeing your brain laid out in front of you,” he says. “Because these inconsequential things, they’re part of the fabric of the life that you are inhabiting. They’re kind of litter in your consciousness, and if you’re of [the same] age, we’re all exposed to those and they create a shared cultural atmosphere.
Remnants of Imperial Leather soap from Jarvis Cocker’s book Good Pop Bad Pop.Credit:Courtesy Jarvis Cocker
“You’re blind to it when you’re a kid because you just think, Oh, life’s always been like this. You don’t realise that you’re entering the drama at one particular scene and that it will change.”
The props in Cocker’s drama are as random as a book of smutty cartoons, plastic Christmas cracker trinkets, an old fizzy drink can ring-pull, an Altai Computape cassette and a cellophane “fortune teller fish”. I mention these objects because, being of the same age and Anglo-pop heritage as Cocker, they awaken memories of my own: sensory flashbacks as vivid and deeply personal as a suddenly recalled dream.
“Yeah, I found that the objects were quite potent because they triggered memories that I wouldn’t have been able to access otherwise,” he says. “We’ve all got what we think of as our life story going through our head, and certain memories you replay and replay and they get kind of worn out, or you embellish them and they get altered.”
But something as forgettable as a stub of Cusson’s Imperial Leather soap, sticker still attached, can jolt synapses from deep slumber. After contemplating that icky artefact for a bit, Cocker remembered keeping it as a teenager because he was sad about a recent change to the label and packaging. It’s one of many telling acts of unconscious determination strewn through his inventory.
‘I do think it’s a dangerous thing to analyse your own creativity too much.’
Design captured his imagination early. Pulp was a logo and a fashion code years before it was a band, as evidenced by a school exercise book unearthed from his loft. He famously studied at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design in London, as referenced in his band’s best-known song, Common People.
Today his Shepherd’s Bush office is lined with dazzling Vivienne Westwood wallpaper. Directly behind him, trademark unkempt hair and black-rimmed glasses these days offset by a cropped grey beard, is a vaguely Klimt-ish poster sourced from M/M design agency in Paris and freshly framed by his partner, artist Kim Sion.
A young Jarvis Cocker at home in Sheffield.Credit:Courtesy Jarvis Cocker
He lived in Paris until recently to be near his son Albert, who he shares with his former wife, stylist and fashion director Camille Bidault-Waddington. “But he’s now 19, so it would be kind of creepy if I was still just hanging around making his breakfast in the morning,” he says with a smirk.
The book was no fun to write, he says, though he’s clearly taken loads of joy in the design: a riot of found objects illustrating rambles about their provenance and significance in his personal chronology. This main narrative is cut with mini essays in various nostalgic typefaces and layouts about spectacles, television, John Peel, the Velvet Underground and other shockwaves in the cultural atmosphere.
The pleasure in writing came late in the process, he says, “and in that way it’s different to songwriting. With a song sometimes the very first moment that you hit a guitar … that’s as exciting as it gets. Then when you try and record a song, sometimes you might feel like you lose your way, or you’ve lost the spirit of it.
An old Barry White cassette, also featured in Good Pop Bad Pop.Credit:Courtesy Jarvis Cocker
“Obviously writing is not like that at all. Writing you have to think about. You can’t just bang your fingers on a keyboard and expect a sentence to have appeared. So I had to kind of rewire the way that my brain works in order to do it.”
Again with the brain wiring. As per the title of his book, Cocker believes this grey-matter moulding happens in good and bad ways. One loft relic he remembers buying off a WH Smith’s bargain table in 1979 is a jokey cardboard facsimile of a handbag, as carried by the recently appointed leader of the Tory opposition. “The Thatcher bag,” he writes, “heralds the beginning of bad pop.”
The “Thatcher clutch” is Cocker’s sample of bad pop.
It’s a notion that needs some unpacking. But it’s fundamental to his philosophy on life, art, and the looming perils of a world run by evil humanoid programmers.
“Good Pop is popular; something that comes from the population itself, a kind of generated art form, which is what music is. The roots of rock music are really abject: people in slavery, basically, trying to make something to make life tolerable. It’s something that’s come from the ground up. It’s not culture that’s passed from on high.”
Bad Pop is populism, he says: “this idea that you manipulate public opinion by playing on base instincts, offering shiny things to fool people. And I think the Thatcher bag, even though it was intended as some kind of satirical thing … that was a hallmark of this new type of Toryism.
‘Looking at this attic full of junk, I’m under no illusions it’s just rubbish. It should be in a landfill really.’
“One of the most famous things they did was to employ Saatchi & Saatchi, one of the biggest advertising agencies, to do their election campaign. They started using these tools of mass culture to manipulate public opinion, and they’ve just gone from strength to strength since then,” he says, feigning a note of triumph. “That’s over 40 years ago.
“I’m not a political commentator,” he says, although he also reveals that Good Pop Bad Pop is a title he “recycled” from a pamphlet he wrote campaigning for a second Brexit referendum due to the “false pretences” of the first. The idea of power wielded on high to thwart the collective will of individuals is clearly close to his heart.
It reminds me of the first time we met, in London back in 1998, when the UK pop charts were being systematically manipulated by record companies to engineer a new generation of pop puppets like Billie (Piper) and Aaron Carter.
“What I liked about the charts in the olden days was that they were a little bit lawless,” Cocker says now. “Record companies did try and control it. They would sign somebody and put a lot of money behind it but it didn’t always work. It always seemed like the public had the upper hand in some way. They decided what they wanted to be popular.
“For me, when it changed in the UK was around that time we were talking … It’s hard for a modern person to understand what a CD single could be, but they started this thing where a CD single came out and the first week of release, it would be 99p. And then the second week, it went up to three pounds or something.
“Immediately the narrative of the charts disappeared, because records … would go in at No.1, and then the next week, they’d just disappear. It became controlled by the commerce. Ironically, what happened was it killed the charts off. So it’s interesting that once they found a way of controlling it, they actually killed it as a commercial entity.”
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO JARVIS COCKER
To the uniquely creative mind, heightened awareness about what’s going into it is key. At one dramatic turning point in his journey, Cocker’s process of sorting his loft detritus and writing his book leads him to describe his entire artistic impetus as a slightly tongue-in-cheek formula: “Scott [Walker] + Barry [White] + Eurodisco + Gritty Northern Realism = The Future.” He’s joking, but only kind of.
“I do think it’s a dangerous thing to analyse your own creativity too much,” he says. The cautionary tale in his book is the time he interviewed Leonard Cohen in his capacity as a BBC Radio 4 broadcaster, “making the schoolboy error of trying to ask him about his creative process, and him being very polite, but very firm about not wanting to talk about it”.
“I think the reason I try and talk about it at all is that I do believe that creativity is hardwired into every human. In a way that’s what distinguishes us from other animals. We can take our experiences, think about them and then produce something that another member of our species will look at and go, ‘Oh, yeah, I know what you’re on about.’
“It’s a magical kind of thing, and everybody can do it. It doesn’t mean that everybody does do it, but we’ve got that ability to do it. And for whatever reason, I’ve always wanted to encourage people to do that.”
Given what seems, at times, like a borderline hoarding disorder, he knows of what he speaks when he says, “I think life as just a consumer is very, very soul-destroying, and dull. You have to create. It’s fun to create. Creativity can be knitting, or cooking something … it doesn’t have to be some kind of masterpiece. So that’s why I go on about it.
“Looking at this attic full of junk, I’m under no illusions it’s just rubbish. It should be in a landfill really but … You mention that formula that I quote at one point in the book, but really, it’s all of it. All these things, no matter how mundane they are … when it’s all mixed together, it creates some kind of chemical reaction and something comes out.
“To me, that’s a magical thing. Because you do it. You make it happen, as a person. It’s like we’ve all got a superpower. And we should all use it more.”
Jarvis Cocker will appear by videolink at the Melbourne Writers Festival (mwf.com.au) on September 10 and at the Sydney Opera House’s Antidote Festival (sydneyoperahouse.com) on September 11. Good Pop, Bad Pop is published by Random House, $39.99.
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