麻豆约拍

Jarvis’s mother was at art college when she learned she was pregnant with him and left soon after. His father was studying English and had creative leanings, acting in plays and playing music. Jarvis says he doesn’t remember much about his dad. “He left when I was seven, so all the stories about him are really hearsay. The only things I remember about him from living with him were that when he burped he would say ‘Archbishop of Canterbury’ and that he used to bath me and my sister sometimes.”

Elvis Costello, whose thick glasses inspired Jarvis's look.

2. Punk music changed his life

It may not seem the most obvious influence for quite a mellow musician, but punk started Jarvis on his musical journey. He was 13 years old and suddenly saw that technical skill was not essential to make music. “It was such a relief,” he says. “The message was ‘Here’s one chord and here’s another. Now go and form a band.’ There was nothing about having too much musical ability.” He ultimately put together his band Pulp from, as he puts it, “finding people with nothing else to do… In the history of Pulp, people have always been chosen more because we get on together rather than, ‘wow, you’re an amazing player’.”

3. He found his look in jumble sales

The seeds of Jarvis’s distinctive retro look were sown in his younger years; his mother was very crafty and would sew clothes for him and his sister. “She also made the first toy I had, which was this kind of Humpty Dumpty thing,” he remembers. “You realise from an early age that you could make things. You don’t have to buy them.” When Jarvis got older he started putting together his wardrobe from jumble sales. “Clothes are a creative act. They’re people’s first impression of you,” he says. He decided his look was going to be a mix of Elvis Costello (“I started wearing [thick glasses] because Elvis Costello wore those”) and vintage. “I just went to jumble sales and bought some old man’s clothes… my mother was appalled.”

4. The first song he wrote was Shakespeare Rock

Jarvis has been writing songs for decades. He was at school when he wrote his first, the evocatively titled Shakespeare Rock. “We were studying Shakespeare in English and everyone thought it was a bit boring,” he says. “So I just wrote something with some words about Shakespeare.” He still remembers the lyrics: “Got a baby, only one thing’s wrong. Quotes Shakespeare all day long. Said baby, why you ignoring me? To be or not to be.”

Jarvis comes from a working-class background in Sheffield but came very close to going to Oxford University, in a time when that was an even tougher path than it is now. “I sat the Oxford entrance exam and was asked to go for an interview,” he says. “I then kind of messed it up, because he asked me questions about Thomas Hardy and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I just pretended I had read it and I hadn’t. So he very easily caught me out, and that was the end of that.” But that turned out to be no bad thing…

Jarvis Cocker performing at the 2017 麻豆约拍 Proms with conductor Jules Buckley and the Heritage Orchestra.

6. The first time he was on the radio was a John Peel session

The day before Jarvis messed up his Oxford interview, he had appeared on radio for the first time, on the show hosted by one of his heroes, John Peel. He was 18. “We got our first John Peel session while we were still at school,” he says. He had been a long-time listener of Peel. “I think the important thing about the John Peel show was that he would play often quite challenging and out-there music, but afterwards there would be his comforting bedtime story voice… I would listen [every night] quite quietly, so I didn’t get told off because I had school the next day. I discovered so much.” It would be almost 12 years before Pulp appeared on the show again. “We got to the end of school and hadn’t been signed by a multinational record label,” Jarvis says. “The rest of the band decided to be sensible and go to university.” Jarvis persisted with trying to become a musician.

Though he’s here to talk about his cultural influences, Jarvis tells Wilson he believes “life is more important than culture”. He explains: “All culture is an attempt to capture the magical reality of being alive.” He speaks about a day that illustrated this point for him, visiting Creswell Crags, near Sheffield, a neolithic settlement with the oldest cave art in the UK. Jarvis says he became surprisingly emotional looking at a small carving of a horse on the side of a cave. “If you make an artefact – a vase or a song or a painting, whatever – if you do it right it will last forever,” he says. “This thing scratched on a wall by some anonymous person, what, 40,000 years ago? It just touched me. It still worked. It’s still communicating something. That is something magical.”

8. The woman from Common People remains a mystery

In his twenties, Jarvis studied fine art and film at St Martin’s College, which is where he met the woman who would inspire one of Pulp’s biggest hits, Common People. The song’s lyrics tell of a wealthy woman who studied sculpture at St Martin’s and longed to live among the “common people”. The song came from a night in the pub. “We were talking and this woman just came out with that, she wanted to move to Hackney and live with the common people,” he says. “For me, in Sheffield, to call someone common, that’s an insult. The way she used the word and the way I understood it, I realised there was this gulf.” Over the years, people have tried to identify the woman in the song, including one rumour that she was later the wife of a Greek finance minister. Jarvis says that’s not true and the woman’s identity is still a mystery, even to him.

Listen to Jarvis Cocker on This Cultural Life