WWe all have an attic (it could also be a basement shack, the garden shed or just that dusty moving box in the corner under the desk) that we urgently need to clear out. You don’t dare to tackle the stuff that you forgot, wanted to forget, that is linked to memories, beautiful, sad, embarrassing, and yet you firmly resolve to finally do it, for many years, at the weekend, completely definitely.
Jarvis Cocker has overcome his weaker self and finally cleaned up the “giant Toblerone box” on the top floor of his apartment building. And sometimes it seems like the singer of the band Pulp put all that junk in there just to write about it.
Clearing out as a memoir: Many people who were young in the 90s, who listened to British guitar music and for whom the sling with the tie was an idol, were waiting for a book like “Good Pop, Bad Pop”. In 1995, Jarvis Cocker became the star he always wanted to be. How he succeeded also has to do with the things that came to light in the attic.
Entrance to Jarvis Cocker’s memory store
Which: © Jarvis Cocker
There’s this printed yellow polyester shirt, for example, which he pulled for ten or twentypence from a charity bazaar’s clothing box in Sheffield in the late ’70s (Cocker was born in 1963). Cocker grew up in the city of stainless steel but also of the important electro label Warp Records, mainly among women, as he likes to emphasize, after his father left (in Australia).
Second-hand clothing was not only affordable for style-conscious teenagers, it also created a sense of identity. He learned about the world by appropriating what it considered “worthless,” writes Cocker, “the true beginning of the pulp aesthetic.”
Pulp has been the name of his band since it was founded in a teenager’s room in 1978. The Tensai Rhythm Machine, with which their first strumming was recorded, was found in the attic, as was the first semi-acoustic electric guitar on the Cocker, which taught itself to grip chords. And “pulp” (to be translated as “scrap” only in a sub-complex way) is the cosmos whose fixed star Cocker saw himself as a boy when he drew the appropriate dress code in a school exercise book.
It took a while until, after a few rather unsuccessful records, nerdism and megalomania, his deeply felt class consciousness and happy coincidence came together in a song that die The anthem of the 1990s became: Pulp’s “Common People”.
Jarvis Cocker beim Tomavistas Festival in Madrid, 2021
Quelle: Mariano Regidor/Redferns/Getty Images
Cocker counts the way there as a coming-of-age smorgasbord of someone who sensed his creativity, but was far from knowing how to steer it into glorious paths. And if the inventory in his attic is to be believed, Cocker needed all sorts of strange catalysts for it.
Being creative means drawing from yourself and your time, but embracing change is what we learn with Cocker – and the “label on a brand’s soap bar Cussons Imperial Leather, which still has a very small amount of the soap itself stuck to it”. He’s kept it in the attic for all these years because he was once outraged that the company changed the design of the packaging, which is why there’s also an old jar of Marmite from the yeast extract era when it had a metal lid.
Such finds are said to have been the impetus for the exhibition of his attic clutter that Cocker organized some time ago in London. The finds are immortalized in the extraordinarily beautifully designed book, along with all the other things that Cocker doesn’t want to part with after all: the broken health insurance glasses, the John Peel sessions recorded from the radio, the “Fantastic Dirty Joke Book” (with trying to enlighten his son) and the 1982 Yamaha keyboard with the disco button (which taught Cocker how to dance and without which the other immortal pulp song Disco 2000 probably wouldn’t have come into being).
Source: Kiepenheuer + Witsch
And should you also read the book if you always thought Jarvis Cocker was a pompous brat, nineties pop for kitsch and decluttering for garbage disposal? Absolutely! Cocker’s memories are a cultural-archaeological trip into music history. They explain not only the man who was – and is – Pulp (a reunion tour is planned for 2023) – but how the Britpop phenomenon came about without even having to listen to a single of his songs. But that doesn’t do any harm!
Jarvis Cocker: “Good pop, bad pop. The things of my life”, from the English by Harriet Fricke and Ingo Herzke. Kiepenheuer & Witsch Verlag, 400 pages, 38 euros