HE’S STAYING THE COURSE
For Jarvis Cocker, artistic vision is grown over time
Jarvis Cocker isn’t sure if he’s old. “I mean I feel at the moment I’d like to say I’m still middle-aged,” he says on the phone from his home outside Sheffield.
The modishly handsome and modestly famous English musician is now 56 and still best known for Common People, an alterna-hit by his former band Pulp that came in 1995. Cocker has spent the lockdown with his girlfriend, spinning records on Instagram and working on his memoirs. He’s also been on the phone promoting his new band Jarv Is ... and its new album Beyond the Pale.
“It’s Jarv Is dot dot dot,” he says. “It’s important you have those three dots at the end because, while it wasn’t really intentional when I came up with the name, it implies something that isn’t quite finished.
“I had these bits of songs or ideas of songs that had been lying around for varying amounts of time but it had never coalesced into something I was completely convinced by,” he continues. “And it was only by getting the band together and working on the songs together that they then started to develop. So when the group started it was an unfinished idea.”
The songs on Beyond the Pale have the polish and commitment to groove that one would expect of a dance-music acolyte like Cocker, in addition to the limber spontaneity of a live album.
It’s also a decidedly collaborative effort, with plenty of backing vocals and call and response, a shift from the norm where Cocker’s voice is usually the only one heard on his songs.
As lively as it is, it would be trite to say that Cocker sounds young again. For one, he’s been lucky or tastefully talented enough to have avoided the kind of missteps that push performers into over-the-hill status.
He released a single in 2006 that has since become something of a standard despite having a name that’s unprintable. Cocker also acquitted himself very well with his forays into electronic music; his efforts were decidedly unembarrassing.
Second, the world has never really known Cocker as a young man. He was already in his 30s when Common People became a smash; the band was struggling to find fame for more than a decade at that point. After 1987’s Freaks, an album with a certain charm that Cocker insists is “beyond embarrassing,” the singer enrolled in film school. But after the mixed reception to Freaks, the band seemed to lose momentum.
“I just thought, it shouldn’t be this painful,” he said. “For audiences and performer alike. That was it.”
In Cocker’s case, though, it was surrendering ambition that liberated him. He never officially disbanded Pulp and, whether it was letting go of pop anxiety, audiences catching up with Pulp’s scathingly horny character sketches, or, most likely, just Cocker’s improved songwriting, the band started to click.
“It’s kind of like if you really want someone to date you,” he explains. “If you’re kind of really serious about it, and hang around outside their house, you probably will get a restraining order put on you,” Cocker says in retrospect of his early career thirst for fame. “It’s not the way. You need to be a bit more casual about it. It took me a long time to learn that.”
Cocker subscribes fully to the idea that we all live in the world and must respond accordingly.
“I generally think the powers that be don’t volunteer to give up their power,” he says. “That’s how they come to be the powers that be. So protest, and actions such as throwing statues into the river, and stuff like that, ... I think it’s justified,” he says in explaining why he’s attended Black Lives Matter protests. “I’m not saying let’s go burn everything down, but I am saying that it would be naive to think that it’s gonna get fixed internally.”
Cocker’s focus remains the underdog and an overarching belief in the individual’s potential for dignity. “My contention is that everybody can be creative and everybody has got that creative spark in them, and I think that’s something we saw during the lockdown.”
While the last few months forced an insularity on many of our lives, examining that insularity is another thing entirely, a task best left to the brave or foolhardy. Cocker has made a life’s work of it.
“Finding your subject matter is probably the hardest part of any artist’s job,” he says. “Once you identify what it is you’re interested in, you can probably mine that and mine it and mine it for all it’s worth. And there’s something good about following something on and on because it’ll change throughout your life what you’ve got to say about it. Or what you discover about it.”