Biodata
Meet Jarvis Cocker. Thirty-six years of age, six feet four inches tall and weighing little more than ten and a half stone. He likes chips does our Jarv, although you wouldn’t think it. He’s the northern lad come good. Prone to depression, introvercy and over analysing, yet an acquirer of skills and ways to hide and destroy these negative traits. He feels blue, he doesn’t sit in his room with the sad music on loop gazing out the window at the dreary daylight. He does something manual, like mending the radio. Okay this is shit advice, but we admire you for trying Jarv. He started the band “pulp” in his late teenage years. Almost two decades and a million line-up changes, later they hit the big time. Jarvis always knew he’d either be a success or a bum. There aren’t many shades of grey when it comes to jarv. He saves them for his confusing melee of breakdown pop. Pulp consist of Jarvis, Steve Mackey [bass], Nick Banks [drums], Candida Doyle [keyboards] and Mark Webber [guitar]. Russel Senior used to be in there on guitar and sometimes-vocals but he left around 1997…and now is in a band called Venini. It’s a shame. Russel was a class act. Back in the 80’s, the decade that style forgot, he still managed to look like a cad on acid. With his piercing blue eyes that fixed you in a manic stare and his suits in shades of white. Before joining Pulp he used to sell Antique glass, if that helps. Anyway, he left. Jarvis spent many long years on the dole, after his short teenage job punting fish for a local drunken fishmonger on the market. He once spent one aching afternoon wandering around Sheffield in the rain trying to sell a small portable washing machine to someone. He later encapsulated this day in the lyrics to “Space”, ending with “did you ever think this day would happen?” I dunno. Not like this. There was the infamous incident where he fell several storeys from a window ledge and broke his pelvis and some other random bones. He was trying to impress a girl and somehow ended up hanging off said ledge with his fingertips, knowing there was no way he could get himself back up again, so he dropped. Ouch. He spent six weeks [or was it months?] flat on his back. Still, it helped him take stock, when some stocktaking was exactly what he needed. He smokes silk-cut cigarettes, is partial to a drop of brandy and has experimented with most drugs. Although his views on drugs are now a bit blurry. There’s a photoshoot of him posing in a T-shirt with the words “just say no” on it. But come on! This is Jarvis here! It’s bound to be sarcasm of some description. Pulp have quite an impressive back catalogue, but things are in limbo right now. No new material for a long time. I’m wondering what’s going on. And also if even Jarvis knows. Classic albums include “His N Hers” which plays like halcyon daze of girls and boys and sex, and then throws in rape or murder [ we never know which ] and the great powerlessness of anyone to do anything. There’s a tired tone and we meet the unwanted girlfriend, replaced by an amazonian goddess with long black hair. We meet the used girlfriend, who really should get up and leave but who hasn’t got the strength, to be frank. His N Hers is an album of reminiscence, of past pains and bittersweet stories, of people in worse positions than us, and of people that don’t seem to give a shit about anything. It’s a sad album. “Intro – the gift recordings” plays like a psychedelic journey into disco, with strings. It’s heavy on the sex, light on the substance, heavy on the style. We start with a frenzied furrow into synthesised sounds and aching vocals on top. We glide through the drum-heavy “styloroc nites of suburbia” and feel quite insignificant. We dart through “razzmatazz” and feel futile and empty and lonely and dazed but really fucking high to go. And soon we’re wrapping up with “inside susan…a story in 3 parts”. We follow her from slutty teen to disillusioned teen to thirty-something middle-class socialite in a marriage with a man who adores her, but who never gives her the one thing his money can’t buy. “Freaks”. A long-standing favourite. Breakdown pop at it’s finest. “Life must be so wonderful” is an ironic odyssey on the life of…well you decide. It feels like me. I cry to this song, and every time I hear the two opening drum rumbles I feel something move inside. It’s empathy, it’s realisation, it’s pain. It’s whatever you want to call it. It hurts. But I like hurting. I’m masochistic you know. I can’t talk about this album. It defies description of any sort. I’ve starved myself to it, slit myself to it, crying to it, written my suicide note to it. It’s fucked up and it’s dangerously depressing, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll adore it as much as I do. The last Pulp album was “This is Hardcore”. It was another classic. Hardcore porn meets memories meets love meets getting old. Love and sex and beauty. But love is to love as sex is to sex. We’re not talking crossover here. We’re not talking motion-picture celluloid sex with smooth skin and synchronised shouts. This is sex in middle england, with smelly juices and crumpled stained shirts and if it were ever filmed, destined to be soft-focus porn with a dog dribbling in the corner. Jarvis is a talent like no other. He’s white, he’s a northerner and he sings about sex in a way that doesn’t make us think “oh yeah, do it to me baby”, but rather “I’m not sleeping in the wet patch, thank-you very much.” His music is about regrets too, and Christ, we all have them so how can anyone not empathise here. Regards to you Jarvis and a big salute to the rest of Pulp too. ::.::
