Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker: ‘We only have a finite amount of time to do the things we do’

“I used to watch a lot of telly as a kid,” says Jarvis Cocker, relaxing on a sofa in the meeting room at Rough Trade Records HQ in Notting Hill. “It would give me a representation of the world that wasn’t real. I would see a giraffe and think, ‘Right, now I know what a giraffe is like,’ But I didn’t really. The first time I saw a giraffe in real life I was like: ‘Oh fuck, it’s massive and it’s got a blue tongue!’”  

We are talking about the importance of boredom in the creative process. In his 2022 book, Good Pop Bad Pop, Cocker published a page from a notebook he kept in his early teens, in which he had sketched out a comprehensively detailed idea for a pop group called Pulp. They would dress in vintage clothes from charity shops and play sensitive, smart, funny songs. It was an idle doodle, born out of having nothing else to do, that would eventually help change the cultural landscape of Britain.  

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Pulp formed in 1978 but it was in the mid-90s that they found major commercial success, winning countless awards and selling more than 10 million records. Cynics remember the Britpop years for glib Sixties nostalgia, day drinking and frivolous appropriation of the Union Jack. What some forget is Pulp’s pre-eminent role in that era: defined by their witty and insightful interpretation of British life – frustration, confusion, unrequited love, suburban sex, woodchip walls and alienation. 

Jarvis Cocker’s poignant lyrics traversed an intersection between the mundane and the romantic. The band executed the songs with an anthemic joy. “Do You Remember the First Time?”, “Babies”, “Common People”, “Disco 2000”, “Sorted For E’s and Wizz”: these were miles apart from the Mad For It spirit of Oasis or art-school knees-ups of Blur. They became unofficial national anthems, created in the fervent mind of a kid who had grown up bored. 

Technology has now outlawed boredom, so will we ever see creativity like that again? 

“There is a risk of ennui, where we all feel as if we’ve seen everything and know everything already,” says Cocker. “But you don’t know anything. It’s a different kind of boredom, you know, it’s like a kind of overstuffed feeling and it doesn’t leave much room within you to create things, because you’re stuffed with other people’s ideas.”  

Yes, he says, he does have Netflix (when we meet, he’s just finished watching season three of The White Lotus with his wife) and he has a phone (Scrabble is his favourite app). But he also takes time out to exercise and meditate. It is working for him. Since first tasting stardom, Cocker has become a permanent fixture at the forefront of British popular culture, releasing solo records and collaborations and serving as a radio host, a curator, an author and occasional actor. He has now returned to the project that first endeared him to us: Pulp are set to release their first new album in 24 years. More is a lush pop album, infused with humour, melancholy and a deep emotion that, says Cocker, denotes his new approach to writing. “I’ve got really into writing about my feelings, quite late in life.”  

At 61, he is as stylish as ever. His look is resolute: wide-lapelled tweed jacket, checked shirt, massive specs. His messy nest of hair remains as boyish as it was, as does the sparkle in his eyes as he spends an enjoyable (for me, anyway) hour sharing his thoughts on ageing, fatherhood, Donald Trump, Keir Starmer and the challenges of dancing on stage in your 60s. Spoiler alert: Jarvis has still got it. 

Read more:

• Pulp star Nick Banks explains how Jarvis Cocker incident with Michael Jackson changed everything
• E’s, discos and studying sculpture: How Britain has changed since Pulp last released an album
• Self Esteem and Julie Hesmondhalgh on self-doubt, sisterhood and fighting back in dark times

Were you nervous about working together as Pulp again?

It’s weird because we don’t hang around with each other outside of the band any more, but I was aware of what the others were up to with various projects. Candida [Doyle] was doing her counselling work, Mark [Webber] was doing his film stuff, Nick [Banks] was playing with [Sheffield band] The Everly Pregnant Brothers. But when you’ve made music with people for that many years, you have an unspoken understanding. I tried to make things easier by writing my lyrics before we went into the studio, for the first time ever. Because that’s what kind of led the band to grind to a halt in the first place. It was taking me so long, I just felt embarrassed that the rest of the band were hanging around waiting for me to get my finger out.   

People have said Oasis are getting back together because they want to feel relevant. Are you driven by something similar? 

It sounds a bit crass, but Steve [Mackey, Pulp’s bassist who died in 2023] passed away just before our last tour and it made me realise that we only have a finite amount of time to do the things we want to do. And for Steve, it was no longer an option, but it was for us. Plus, I enjoyed the Pulp shows in 2023 so much. Mainly because we can do these big shows where we have many people’s attention all at once for two hours. Entertainment is so fragmented these days that being able to put on a show like that, even with half of them pointing their phones at you, it feels special. I’m already deep into planning the shows that will follow this album. 

You’ve always been an energetic performer. Do you need to stay fit to get through the shows? 

I go to the gym once a week, but I’m not really fit in comparison to an athlete. I have to plan out the set list to make sure that I follow up a faster song with a slower one, so I have a bit of time to get my breath back. I have the energy, though, I want to perform, which drives me. In the early days, I just used to stand still on stage. Then one night in about 1980, upstairs at the Hampshire Hotel in Sheffield, my guitar stopped working and I freaked out. I decided to lie down on the stage and start wriggling around. And everyone cheered. So I thought ‘OK, maybe this is what I start doing from now on.’  

Has meditation played a role in your creativity? How did you get into it? 

Mainly through my wife. And also, someone introduced me to the work of Alan Watts while we were driving to San Francisco to play a concert. I remember we were listening to the Grateful Dead on the stereo, and I said, ‘This isn’t getting me in the mood.’ So someone said, ‘Try listening to Alan Watts.’ He was a radio host who talked about Eastern religion and spirituality in this sort of Radio 4 voice. I got really into it. I like the idea of meditation and Buddhism; it’s not about some type of Supreme Being that exists in a faraway part of the cosmos or something. It’s all about what’s inside you. Every person’s got it inside them, but it’s just you’ve got to try and access it some way, and it’s a way of doing that. It’s difficult, but I always feel better after I’ve meditated.  

Would something like that have helped you back in the 90s when fame felt overwhelming? 

Probably, yeah, but, you know, it’s when you’re ready for things. I could have gone to see a psychiatrist or something as well, but I didn’t. I don’t know why, but luckily, I survived. It sounds corny, but when I became a dad in the early 2000s, that helped me get some perspective and balance. I looked after my son a lot, I was hands-on. He’s just turned 22, so hopefully he can look after himself now. 

How do you feel about your son growing up in the era of Donald Trump and Andrew Tate? 

Women brought me up. All the males in our family just disappeared, and that had a significant effect on me. I know Andrew Tate exists, but I’ve never seen anything to do with him because it’s similar to Donald Trump. I don’t watch the news. I think I’ve seen him occasionally, you know, like when he nearly got shot dead. But in Trump’s case, I think it’s to do with attention. That’s what he wants. Everything is an attention-seeking ploy, so the only way to deal with that is not paying any attention to it, right? As for Andrew Tate, I did worry when my son first got his phone that he would encounter weird ideas about stuff. I thought, ‘If I don’t discuss certain subjects with him, then who will he learn from?’ 

When I was in my early teens, I found this dirty joke book on the back seat of a bus. I was starting to be curious about women and sex, so I took it home and tried to understand the jokes, but I couldn’t. My dad had left when I was seven. I had no one who ever explained this stuff to me. So I ensured I talked with my son about that sort of thing because it can be confusing. I even showed him the joke book as a way in. I still have it, I don’t throw anything away. 

You seem to take fatherhood very seriously… 

Yeah, because he was something that I’d made. I thought, if I have one, I must be a proper parent. I have to be involved. My sister and I eventually met my father in Australia, years after he left us. Still, we never established a proper relationship with him because the gap between us was too large. Having experienced that, I knew I had to stay involved in my son’s life no matter what, even after his mother and I split up. I couldn’t just disappear on him like my dad. 

There is a track on the album called “Grown Ups” about getting older. How are you finding that? 

It is an obsession. I wrote “Help the Aged” when I was only 33, which seems so young to me now. I could never see why anyone would want to stop being a kid. Being a kid is great: you get cooked for, looked after, play and fantasise. And then suddenly, you’re an adult and have to start taking stuff seriously and making an effort. It’s boring. But I have now reached an age where you have to take some things seriously. 

Like what? 

There is no point in constantly trying to distract yourself from the serious stuff in life. I’ve lost people. My dad left when I was young. I’ve lived through break-ups. And people have died. Death isn’t something you can distract yourself from. 

How would you distract yourself? 

When I was younger it was things like drink. I remember the first year I went to the Brits and was asked to present an award I was so nervous about meeting famous people. So I decided to get drunk in order to get myself through it. It worked for a while but it couldn’t last, although I have never been to rehab. Nowadays, when people get their phones out and start scrolling, it’s almost always because they are bored or feeling low. I’m the same. I often go on my Scrabble app and try to beat the computer. If I set it at the intermediate level, I can usually win, which makes me feel good. But ultimately, I know I am doing it to avoid painful feelings. If I acknowledge those feelings and work out where they are coming from, I always feel better for it.  

The 2025 iteration of Pulp finds itself in a very different landscape to the one in which it first found commercial success. In the mid-90s songs like “Common People” defined an era in which Britpop ruled the charts and New Labour were on the rise, promising a more egalitarian Britain after years of Tory role. Pulp were figureheads for working-class creativity, in a period when it felt as if traditional social boundaries were being smashed. But recent research has shown that the proportion of working-class musicians, actors and writers has shrunk by half since the 1970s. While it might have seemed at the time as though Cocker was on a revolutionary crusade for working people in the 1990s, he already thought that the battle had been lost a decade earlier. 

Working-class people are less represented in the arts than they were when Pulp started out. Why is that? 

In terms of the traditional working class, there’s just not much of it left. We don’t have much of a manufacturing industry in this country any more. I don’t suppose people miss those jobs that involved physical work and were often quite dangerous and harmful for your health. But they brought community areas where people lived together, knew each other and helped each other. That has gone to a large extent. That working class was invisible for a long time until the 60s, when you had films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. And then The Beatles, who were not only working class but actually better than anyone else at what they did. It was a potent signal to all the other working-class people in the country. So a revolution happened then. And then, sometime in the 1980s, it kind of stopped. Thatcher came in, plus Reagan in America, and they put the working classes back in their box. Society became about being individualistic again. I think what we’re seeing now, with the arts being dominated by the middle and upper classes, is not new; it’s the outcome of a process that has been going on since Thatcher. 

Do you have any hope that Keir Starmer might improve things? 

Well, it reminds me of when Tony Blair got into power in the Britpop era. After the initial excitement, it became clear quite quickly that it wouldn’t be a Labour government, and I think it’s similar with Keir Starmer. It’s better than the Tories. But even if they wanted to do something radical to help the working class, I think it would be too difficult. Big Issue is an anomaly in the press landscape – most of the press are Tory supporters with no interest whatsoever in socialist ideas. Any leader who attempted to bring in truly left-wing policies would be crucified in the media. 

Have Labour courted you much over the years? 

Just before the 1997 election, I was in New York trying to escape all the negative attention I’d been getting. This was a few months after I’d jumped on stage at the Brit Awards [interrupting the performance of Michael Jackson]. It was a difficult time for me. A call came through to my hotel room, and someone from Labour said, ‘Can we count on your support?’ And I was so paranoid, all I could think was, ‘How do they know I’m here?’ You’re taking me back to the dark times here. I used to think being in a band was an escape from bad feelings in life. That’s what I thought back in those days. But now I realise that you can’t escape from those bad feelings. You have to look them in the eye. And when you do that, they will usually struggle away. The more you avoid complicated feelings, the more of a big deal they become. I suppose this record is about me facing up to a lot of the stuff I spent years worrying about and avoiding. 

There is something quite relaxing about time spent in Jarvis Cocker’s company. He carries himself with an easygoing vulnerability that is removed from the slightly ironic smartarse he once was. He says he has learned to think less and feel more. When he was younger, he spent hours contemplating his lyrics, analysing the meaning and second-guessing how they might be received. Now, he says, he can lean into however he feels and put it straight on the page without beating himself up. The songs on More are no less compelling for it. The man who was once a figurehead for every awkward, insecure misfit that ever stood nervously at the side of the disco is finally comfortable in his own skin.  

More by Pulp is out on 6 June (Rough Trade). They are touring the UK in June and play Sheffield on 25 July

In August 2020, Jarvis Cocker brought a bit of razzmatazz as he guest-edited a special edition of Big Issue, celebrating what he called ‘Heroes of Our Times’, who “have excited or inspired me during The Time of Covid.” There were essays from the likes of poet Caleb Femi, Emma Dabiri and one of the last pieces by great anthropologist David Graeber. Cocker also interviewed artist Jeremy Deller and delivered a Letter To My Younger Self. Back copies of this and other issues are available to buy at Big Issue Shop

Read more by Sam Delaney for Big Issue

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