Death, love, sex, mistakes, marriage and ‘More.’ Pulp is back after 2 decades

 

Near the end of my Zoom interview with Jarvis Cocker, the inexhaustibly creative Pulp frontman excitedly reached for something just beyond the screen’s frame. He was sitting in the house he’s been sharing with his longtime partner and recent bride, Kim Sion, and his well-appointed office had some talismans nearby, apparently. Cocker waved an envelope toward the camera, one marked with some Buddhist script. That made sense — we’d been talking about Leonard Cohen, one of Cocker’s heroes, who’d been a Zen monk during the latter part of his life. I thought Cocker might pull out some kind of prayer card, but what he soon showed me was a blank check

Cohen spontaneously gave Cocker that gift (not genuinely cashable, of course) as they talked about the strange and sometimes stressful life of the professional creative. “I was so nervous to interview him,” Cocker told me. “But I had to do it. I do believe that you should meet people that you admire; it’s silly to be scared of it. Cohen was a very elegant guy, but he was also a very human person, and that’s an important thing to realize. Everybody can create, that’s the thing. It’s all about trying to express what it is to be alive as a human being. Everyone’s got a different take on that. You’ve just got to try and tell your story.”

 

Pulp has been the primary vehicle through which Cocker has followed Cohen’s life advice throughout a career that’s also included radio broadcasting, television hosting, memoir writing, solo music ventures and immersive theater excursions over many decades. The band’s sound shows off these influences within a bubbly stew of glam, French chanson, post-punk chaos and Top 40 romanticism. Pulp released four albums before 1995’s Different Class made it a key spoke in the wheel of Britpop next to Oasis’ bratty brothers and Blur’s trend-spotting polymaths, and Cocker was the one among Britpop’s stars who connected rock’s past most clearly to its present, his wry charisma evoking both The Kinks’ Ray Davies and Kurt Cobain. As he’s aged, Cocker has touched on other archetypes, going through a rave stage, a Serge Gainsbourg fixation and, recently, a Dylan dive. His latest music takes a chance by remaining centered in himself.

 

Early on, Cocker developed an approach to songwriting that blended the outsider’s view punk offered with the freeing flamboyance of pop and classic rock. In a career that’s spanned more than four decades, Pulp has become a shadow Coldplay for the thrift-store set by crafting anthems for people too shy or awkward or self-conscious to raise their lighters in the air. Cocker’s acerbic eye for detail matches his earnest belief that the grand gesture can have an effect, at least on a personal level. In this, he’s very much like Cohen, a compulsive confessor embracing anti-heroism as a hierarchy-toppling stance.

When I spoke with Cocker, he was in the middle of a busy interview schedule promoting More, Pulp’s first album in 24 years, which came out this week. The band welcomed the evidence of its continued popularity after playing two series of reunion concerts, one in the early 2010s and the second starting in 2022; it also lost an old friend when bassist Steve Mackey, who’d opted out of that second tour, died in 2023. With that loss and his mother’s recent death still fresh in his mind, Cocker couldn’t help but invoke the old sage Cohen on More. He’s been cultivating his own style of mindfulness. “When you’re young you might want to project a certain image,” he said, recalling a time when he uncovered and read something he’d written as a young man that “just didn’t ring true.” More, he says, is “about the same kinds of things I’ve always written about, but I probably approach it in a different way.” Wisdom of the elders? He’ll take it.

 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ann Powers: Pulp has been your creative mainstay since you were a teenager, and yet for More you tried something different in the studio. You’ve said that for the first time you brought in more fully-formed lyrics. In the past you often basically winged it. You’re being more careful now.

 

Jarvis Cocker: It’s only taken me 61 years to get to that stage.

 

You weren’t alone when you were doing it the old way. Years ago, I interviewed Greg Dulli from The Afghan Whigs — I was obsessed with their album Gentlemen, and was probably reading way too much into the lyrics. I asked him how he wrote them, figuring he must have really labored over them. He said, “No, I went into the studio at 3 a.m. and just sang whatever came to mind.”

 

Well, that’s a good way of getting words. People often have to reach a place where they almost fool themselves that they’re not doing it so it seems like you’re digging it out of yourself, but you’re just allowing it to kind of pass through you — you just open your mouth and it comes out. Some people can do that amazingly. I’m not amazing at doing that. That’s why I’m excited about the fact that this record was recorded quickly, in three weeks. Not because we saved a lot of money, but because it meant that whatever came out was ready to come out, you know?

 

I’m reminded of the famous conversation between Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen when Cohen said he took seven years to write “Suzanne” and Dylan said he took like five minutes to write “Positively 4th Street.” You’re somewhere in between, I guess.

 

You know, I spoke to Leonard Cohen around the time when the Old Ideas record came out and, and I made a bit of a mistake of attempting to ask him a little bit about his process of writing. And he very patiently said, “We must not discuss the sacred mechanics. Otherwise neither of us will write a song again.” I thought that was a great phrase, “sacred mechanics.” A lot of people, myself included, are a bit superstitious about discussing how they write songs. You know when it’s flowing correctly, but when you try and turn your mind back and think, “Where did it come from?,” you can’t usually pinpoint it.

 

I semi-famously kind of wrote most of the words Different Class in one very drunken evening round at my sister’s house, just because we demoed the songs instrumentally, and now I had to finish the words off. Then I tried it on This is Hardcore — just got dead drunk — and didn’t write anything.

 

One thing about this record is it comes after you’ve done other kinds of writing. You published a great memoir. You’ve worked on some theatrical pieces, like with Chilly Gonzales; the Jarv Is project is so different. Did those other experiments, those other very successful methods of writing and storytelling, come into this process?

 

One of the main things that got this record going was I had written a piece of music for a theatre piece called Light Falls by a playwright called Simon Stephens. I think he spent a year up north and he’d written this play that was set in the North of England, and he said, I need a piece of music for it, and I know the title. It’s got to be called “The Hymn of the North.” And I thought, “Whoa, that’s a big title, I might never be able to set foot in the North again after trying to write a song like that.”

That song is a little bit of drama in itself. You know, it shifts.

 

He sent me the script, so some of the material in the lyrics comes from that. Some of it is inspired by me thinking about my own son, who was 16 at the time. I was thinking, “He’s going to leave school this year — what is he going to do?”

 

I love that song. And as a mother of a college-aged kid myself, I hadn’t really thought about that, but it’s a perfect song from a parent to a kid: that beautiful thing where you kind of shift from the idea of “I only hope” to “You’re my only hope.”

 

Thank you. Well, I thought about him leaving home, then I started thinking about how I was with my mother. My mother passed away just at the start of last year. [At the time, me] and my mother were close, but I could sometimes go for two months without speaking to her. And I thought, “Well, if my son did that to me, I’d feel really bad. I’d think he’s fallen out with me.” So I tried to be more attentive to my mother after that.

 

You know, family ties are weird things. When children are small, it’s hard because they’re always trying to do really dangerous things whenever you turn your back. But it’s a very defined relationship. You’ve just got to stop them from killing themselves and give them some food and give them guidance and stuff like that. But then when they’re older, you say, you’re going to go live your life.

 

It is so complicated, that push-pull between protection and freeing and respecting them as an adult and being frustrated as a parent and remembering when you were a kid. This album was actually made at a time in your life when you had really gone through a lot as far as your deepest intimate relationships. Your mother passed away. You had separated from your wife and then gotten back together. These are these fundamental, core relationships. Did this feel, I don’t know, like more primal or something, given all that was going on in your life?

 

Yeah. It was written in the aftermath of those things. I suppose you do discover that people are really kind of the most important thing in your life, really. When I first moved to London to study at Saint Martin’s, I brought a lot of things from Sheffield with me, things that I thought were important to me, and then carried around to various squats. And when we got thrown out of the squat, we had to carry these big bags of rubbish to take them to the next place where we lived, and then eventually they ended up in this house when I finally had enough money to buy a house. Then as soon as I had the house, I moved to France and some other people lived there and it was just all gathering dust for 20 years. And I always thought, “Oh, I should deal with that stuff one day. You know, it seems that at one time I thought it was important and it’s just in the dark gathering dust.”

Now the time when I chose to do it is probably significant because, as you say, I did split up with my wife before we were married and I spent a year away from her. And pretty much in the first week of our separation, I decided to look at the stuff in the loft and take pictures of it, try and remember why it was there. And it was useful in a way, because the objects reminded me of things in my life. But I haven’t dealt with it. I thought I’d rather hang out with people than with objects. You know, I realised it wasn’t that important. You know what I mean?

 

What you’re talking about with objects, it makes me think about Walter Benjamin, who wrote a beautiful book in which he used different objects to write about his childhood in Berlin. And I think of the details that you get in classic Pulp, your way of songwriting, the sense of what someone’s sweater feels like or the sense that a room is too hot or something like that, seemed so important to me in the songs.

 

That kind of detail is really important because, in a weird way, by being very particular about something, people believe it more, because it’s something that you could only pick up if you’d actually lived through the thing you’re describing. I didn’t know that when I started. For me, the reason I put details in songs was when I moved to London, I started to write more explicitly about Sheffield. And part of that was really just because I felt I was in danger of forgetting where I’d come from. I’d moved to a new city that’s very different, so I wanted to kind of fix [Sheffield] in my mind. I thought that if I put the names of streets that I used to be on [in the songs], that would help to keep those memories.

 

The intense identification that your fans have with you comes from that specificity of your writing. Do you feel that kind of connection from the other side?

Now the time when I chose to do it is probably significant because, as you say, I did split up with my wife before we were married and I spent a year away from her. And pretty much in the first week of our separation, I decided to look at the stuff in the loft and take pictures of it, try and remember why it was there. And it was useful in a way, because the objects reminded me of things in my life. But I haven’t dealt with it. I thought I’d rather hang out with people than with objects. You know, I realised it wasn’t that important. You know what I mean?

What you’re talking about with objects, it makes me think about Walter Benjamin, who wrote a beautiful book in which he used different objects to write about his childhood in Berlin. And I think of the details that you get in classic Pulp, your way of songwriting, the sense of what someone’s sweater feels like or the sense that a room is too hot or something like that, seemed so important to me in the songs.

That kind of detail is really important because, in a weird way, by being very particular about something, people believe it more, because it’s something that you could only pick up if you’d actually lived through the thing you’re describing. I didn’t know that when I started. For me, the reason I put details in songs was when I moved to London, I started to write more explicitly about Sheffield. And part of that was really just because I felt I was in danger of forgetting where I’d come from. I’d moved to a new city that’s very different, so I wanted to kind of fix [Sheffield] in my mind. I thought that if I put the names of streets that I used to be on [in the songs], that would help to keep those memories.

The intense identification that your fans have with you comes from that specificity of your writing. Do you feel that kind of connection from the other side? 

You know, I tend to talk on stage because everything to do with songs and performance, for me, is about trying to communicate with people. And I tend to talk to the audience on a kind of, like, one-to-one basis. I did start to wonder, when you mentioned my book — when I was writing that, you know, I discovered this thing that I’d been shortsighted, probably, from birth but no one had noticed. So I only got kind of diagnosed when I went to school and I couldn’t see the blackboard. The whole world must have seemed like some kind of fuzzy blob to me, without being able to see any detail whatsoever. So I wonder whether that’s where my way of addressing an audience has come from, that I used to think that everything out there is just one murky thing. And I just address them and hope that they can hear me, but I can’t see them.

Maybe that’s your attachment to detail, too, your desperate desire for detail.

Well, yeah. Before I had glasses, the only things I would be able to see would be things very near to me, things like on the floor or, or things directly in front of me. So I could probably only see detail, I couldn’t see the bigger picture.

When you say that about needing to be close, that makes me think about the way you sing. You love the grand gesture, obviously, but also there’s intimacy. I feel like in a Pulp song you are very close and then suddenly we’re in a huge space. Have you thought about that dynamic of closeness? Intimacy versus a kind of grand gesture?

I thought about that a bit last night. There were these listening parties to say thank you to people who’d worked on the record, and the only downside to that for me was I had to listen to the record, which I don’t like doing. I’m fine with performing songs, but with listening to things I’ve made, I don’t like to do it with other people. So anyway, I listened to the songs and … there is a close and far away thing. There’s also the kind of building to a kind of frenetic climax kind of thing as well. I mean, “Common People” is probably the best example of that — it increases in speed and intensity over all the length of its six minutes. It’s probably partly to do with a kind of frustration of wanting to get something across, but also to get across an excitement, you know.

Pop music was something that I listened to from the day that I was born. I liked the excitement that pop music that I heard on the radio would produce in me. And, you know, that’s what made me want to write songs, to see if I could make myself feel that with things I wrote myself. And that was a good thing about hearing the record last night, because at certain points I did get a slight tingle, so then I thought, “OK, that was enough for me.”