I walked into that room and saw the piano and it fell into place

Jarvis Cocker is coming to the Edinburgh Festival next month, after collaborating on a piece that plays around with the infinite possibilities of hotel life. There won’t be any Pulp, he tells Janet Christie

Jean Harlow, Howard Hughes, Marilyn Monroe… Jarvis Cocker. What do they all have in common? They’ve all checked in to Room 29 at the legendary Chateau Marmont Hotel, Hollywood, Los Angeles.

Inspired by his stays in the room, with its grand piano and a score of memories, the former Pulp frontman, singer-songwriter, writer, actor and radio presenter has teamed up with piano virtuoso Chilly Gonzales to give voice to the visitors that have inhabited the space with a cycle of songs. And next month at the Edinburgh Festival he’s inviting us to join him in Room 29 too.

From Mark Twain’s pianist daughter Clara, on a mission to summon up her dead husband’s spirit, to Jean Harlow’s honeymoon – not the explosion of passion the blonde bombshell had anticipated – this is a room that has seen more than its fair share of excitement. Now Cocker and Gonzales, pianist, composer/ arranger for Feist, Peaches, Daft Punk and fellow Canadian Drake, along with Kaiser Quartett, are using music, dance, theatrics and clips from Hollywood classics to tell its story.

Cocker became fascinated with Room 29 and the effect of its mystique after crossing the threshold when he was unexpectedly upgraded at the iconic Sunset Boulevard hotel.

“I’ve stayed there four or five times, the first with Pulp in the mid 1990s, but the real key was later, getting randomly upgraded to Room 29. I’d never stayed in a room with a piano before, and I thought what if the piano could play you songs and tell you what had gone on?

“Unfortunately I can’t play, but I’d got to know Gonzales because I’d been a fan of his Solo Piano record and we discovered we lived near each other in Paris and got friendly. We always said we should collaborate, then I walked into that room and saw the piano and it fell into place. He would send me bits of music and I’d write some words and we’d piece it together like that over three or four years.”

Cocker can’t stress enough how much this project is a joint collaboration between the two musicians. “I just wrote the words and the vocal melodies, and he did all the music. And we discussed the themes together. It’s something a little different for both of us, but I think it works.”

In terms of choosing the stories to tell, the pair were drawn to the ones from the birth of the film industry, rather than the more recent Chateau tales of Johnny Depp and Kate Moss sexathons or John Belushi’s death.

“Whenever we mention this project to people, they would ask about the fresher stories, the John Belushi overdose, but we didn’t want to go down that kind of Hello! magazine route. We wanted stories, that… yes there is scandal… but ones that would shine a light on a bigger subject.”

The bigger subject being the gap between reality and illusion, embodied in the liminal space that is Room 29. Located in the heart of la-la land, a city where the main industry is make believe, in a hotel that opened in 1929, as cinema was taking its first flickering steps, Room 29 probably couldn’t exist anywhere else.

“Stories like the one about Jean Harlow, the biggest sex symbol on the screen, yet her husband Paul Bern, a successful movie producer, was unable to consummate the marriage and ended up committing suicide a month later. For me that says something about this kind of schism between fantasy and reality, that you have this woman who has become a sex object to so many, and this guy who marries her is the envy of half the male population of the USA, and yet the reality of the woman is something he can’t handle.

“Those kind of stories, from the early days of Hollywood, when movies were born. Nowadays we have moving images everywhere, and we get our cue for how to live from them, but back then they were still making it up, inventing the language of film that we now all speak – editing, closeups, manipulating the emotions with music.

“It’s not just the autobiography of a hotel room, but also says something about the industry that surrounds the hotel, which is something I’ve always felt had a profound effect on my view of the world and expectations of it. Pulp had songs that dealt with that –

TV Movie, Happy Endings – but this was a chance to explore that further.”

It was Cocker’s love of the moving image that saw him leave his native Sheffield to study Fine Art and Film at Central St Martins in London. Born in September 1963, Jarvis Branson Cocker grew up with his mum and sister after his dad left, and while still at school, formed the band that would later be identified as part of the Britpop genre of the mid-90s, a term Cocker never embraced.

“Ah, listen we never called it Britpop. I still would never call it Britpop,” he says. “It was a f***ing horrible name. Anything with any inklings of nationalism behind it is an anathema to us and always has been.”

Cocker had taught himself guitar on a wrecked junk shop find of his mother’s, then later on a Hopf gifted to him by a German scuba diving instructor she had a holiday romance with when he was about 13.

“He was a nice guy, saw I was into music and promised me a guitar. He arrived at Christmas, but no guitar case, so I was disappointed, then when he unpacked, he’d dismantled it to transport it and put it all back together. It’s a German make, Hopf. It was my guitar and I was so excited to have one. For a long time that was my only guitar. It’s still the one I write songs on and play on stage.”

Cocker has been thinking about the scuba diving instructor of late, of tracking him down to thank him for