Jarvis Cocker has a trick. For the not-so-rare occasions when he has to act as an interviewer on television and radio shows, the musician from Sheffield, Great Britain, “prepares no more than ten questions on four or five different topics and then lets the conversation flow.” ” When he gets stuck or suffers a bout of stage fright, as he almost did the day he interviewed one of his heroes, Leonard Cohen, he resorts to one of the prepared questions, even if it doesn't matter at all.
Despite everything, the trick of interviewing him doesn't work. With Cocker, the conversation always seems to be flowing, but it does so through unexpected channels. Every question asked triggers a cascade of reflections, anecdotes and memories, which he reproduces with humor, economy and method behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “I realize that I have a tendency to ramble a lot,” Cocker admits when we meet at a hotel in Barcelona, a city where he has gone to write his memoir “Good Pop, Bad Pop” (Blackie Books ) to advertise. “You ask me specific and direct questions and I give you miles of answers. “But if I learned anything from writing this book, it is that almost everything is connected, that things are much more complex than they seem, and therefore there are no easy answers,” he says.
Good Pop, Bad Pop is the literal result of a months-long search for memories. Specifically, in a small attic or storage room of the house where the musician lived in London and where he kept “an almost unbelievable number of items, from packs of chewing gum to bars of soap, notebooks, flyers from clubs, concert tickets, postcards, guitar picks, photos, Shirts, toys.” Jarvis began writing about “this insane pile of rubbish that has accumulated over the years” because he was convinced that it contained, in some way, the essence of his own story. Also that of his band Pulp: “It started as a childhood project, the path to becoming the only thing I really wanted to be, a pop star, when I was about 13 years old and hadn't even learned to play the guitar yet.”
“During the year I spent alone in New York, devoting myself entirely to the task of being a star. It was terrible,” says Jarvis Cocker.Vicens Giménez
A little later, this projection of his youthful fantasies turned into a somewhat precarious musical project, for which he looked for “accomplices” in his immediate environment, because, as he says: “My role models were always the Beatles, and a career as a soloist seemed like that too “For me, an infinitely more boring option.” Pulp existed for Jarvis Cocker even in the years when the band was a wasteland, with no records, no concerts and hardly any rehearsals, while their leader was in his years of languid bohemianism in Sheffield was involved or studied art “without the slightest conviction.” ” in London.
Between 1978 and 1993, the group took a very long journey through the desert, seemingly taking a few steps back or sideways for every step forward. They finally burst onto the scene in 1994 with a brilliant and very timely album, His 'n' Hers, which was followed a year later by Different Class, the instant masterpiece that took the world by storm. From night to day, Cocker moved from the underground to the forefront of the music and media fronts. The world discovered a formidable writer of narrative songs modeled on the British manners of Ray Davies or the humor and everyday magic of Robyn Hitchcock. What's more, this lanky, short-sighted guy with the impossible haircut also turned out to be a stage monster, an unparalleled cocktail of theatricality, sophistication, authenticity and charisma. If Damon Albarn and the Gallagher brothers were the figureheads of the Britpop revolution, Jarvis was its cursed poet and shadow leader.
That was the start of what Cocker now describes as the “most troubling” years of his life, the period in which he realized his childhood dreams of world domination and ultimately, as he says, became a changed man: “Not necessarily better, me .” Not a complete idiot, I hope, but a suspicious, tormented, vain guy.” Fame and success, as he admits, were very bad for him: “When I was 14 years old, I imagined what my life would be like as soon as I If I became a pop star, I assumed I wouldn't live in a house, but in a luxury hotel, with a butler, no sheets to change or laundry to wash, and I'd lie in bed watching Batman episodes all day .”
That dream came true after the success of Different Class: “I spent the year alone in New York, devoting myself entirely to the task of being a star.” It was “terrible,” and Cocker is wondering these days as he watches the sequel of “Good Pop, Bad Pop” writes how he is supposed to manage to describe this 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 I lived in an abandoned factory before moving to London.”
“I realize that I tend to talk a lot,” Cocker admits. Vicens Giménez
It would be something different. “A long and probably quite boring dissertation about my creative processes, which I thought I would call “This Book is a Song.” He had it as a work “with its intro, its first verse, its bridge, its Chorus, his second verse”. And he had devoted nearly two years of “slow and fitful” work to it. “Because I'm a turtle: I almost always finish what I start, but at my own pace, without rushing.” Mónica Carmona, his literary agent, had given him “a great order” at a book fair: “It was submitted to him “A few paragraphs explaining my idea, which was very vague, and when he came back from the fair.” He told me, “Jarvis, we sold your book. Now you have to write it.” So I got to work because she believed in me and I didn't want to disappoint her.
In 2018, after completing promotion of his album Room 29, on which he collaborated with Canadian Chilly Gonzales, Cocker focused on writing. This book is a song; Despite everything, it didn't start: “After several months of work, I was assigned an editor and she told me, with a brutal honesty that greatly surprised me, that almost nothing I had written was useful. Just a very short part, the chronicle of the day when I decided to empty my attic and began to tell the story of some of the items I had stored in it. The editor told me she found it quite interesting: “Forget the original idea, it's the trash that comes out of your storage room that's really worth it.” And I listened to him.”
As he carried objects, photographed them, and wondered what they meant to him and why he had chosen 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 want to be, not the person we are. When we face the bare facts in a photo album, an old notepad, or a storage room full of junk, the truth emerges. And sometimes it’s disturbing 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 he is depressed by the fact that the design changes and. “that the memory of the original packaging is lost” like tears in the rain. Cocker has accepted the challenge to show himself for what he is: a man “who dreams of greatness, who devoted much of his prime to wasting time, who always had ambition but whose will and perseverance often failed him “.
Looking back also showed him how deeply music has always been rooted in his life: “When you ask me about my oldest musical memory, I feel that strange tickling in my shoulders and neck again that I get with my voice when listening to the radio feel mother, songs like If You Could Read My Mind by Gordon Lightfoot. I was so small that I took what I heard at face value. I truly believed that the radio sprites could read my thoughts and enter my brain. It was an exciting and unsettling feeling.” Other signs that the young cocker had an inevitable date with the pentagram? Jarvis was “born on September 19, 1963, the day She Loves You went to number one in the UK charts,” and his father “left home in 1970, the year the Beatles split up.” Date it meant to him, since then, “the end of innocence.”
Jarvis Cocker, during a concert at Glastonbury, 1994. Rob Watkins (Alamy / Cordon Pres
Incidentally, his elusive father had played trombone in a band that included Joe Cocker. “We had no family relationship, but his last name was like ours.” One cocker won in the end and the other soon left the music: “I know that my father was humiliated by this old story of crossed fates. If he had stayed at home, perhaps he could have accompanied me in my first steps with the guitar, which I learned to play on my own, with a lack of natural ability that still accompanies me today. Luckily, shortly after, the punk taught me that a few chords could be enough. This technique was important not least because at the age of 13 I was embarrassed that I wasn't able to play Beatles songs. Neither his grandfather, “a possible organist, but only at Christmas and some birthdays,” nor his mother’s brother, “who had a group with whom he played in tourist towns like Torquay and gave a concert in Germany.” His uncle died when Jarvis was very young, and all he left him “was a pair of lederhosen with suspenders, which were all the rage in Germany, but which you couldn't wear in Sheffield unless you were prepared to put yourself out there.” be ashamed.”
Cocker attributes his passion for music to myopia: “I was always very nearsighted and had multiple diopters. The strange thing is that they didn't notice until I was five years old. Before I got my first glasses, my field of vision was reduced to just a few meters. The rest was a blur, 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 had much more weight in his life than the visual one, he admits.
In the final part of Good Pop, Bad Pop, Cocker discusses a “traumatic” event that ultimately changed his life: “I don't want to tell it here because it's a dramatic twist and I prefer not to give spoilers. But I want to share what I learned from it. It 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 have found that reality is an extraordinary source of stories and that it is not even necessary to transform and embellish it. The brain is already selecting the essential details for you, the ones that have caught your attention and will captivate those who listen to you. From this discovery came songs as commonplace and precise as “Common People,” “Babies,” “Do You Remember the First Time?” and “Do You Remember the First Time?” or Disco 2000. Also Good Pop, Bad Pop, a book that wanted to be a song and ends up being a fascinating spell to restore your memory.