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Pitchfork Feature: Interview (04-02-07) <Part 2>

Pitchfork: Are you comfortable and pleased with the level of celebrity that you have now? You seem like you get to engage with people professionally whom you want to deal with; you're away from England's tabloid culture; you're on Rough Trade. You seem to be settled.

Jarvis Cocker: I'm pretty pleased at the moment, yeah. Obviously, when I released the record I was nervous, and I didn't know how people would take it, what they would think of it. But yeah, I have to say that I've played concerts and I felt comfortable performing. I haven't felt like a fake or something. And I felt involved in singing-- cause I didn't know whether I'd still want to twitch about on stage, and unfortunately I do. And stuff like getting the Meltdown or whatever, I'm very excited about doing that.

Pitchfork: You've certainly taken to these curatorial roles. Even your last Pulp show was that sort of event, wasn't it?

Jarvis Cocker: Yeah, it was. We got the chance to put quite a few bands on up in Sheffield in what used to be a big steel factory. There are these kind of forces at play in the world today which are kind of sucking the juice out of some aspects of culture, but there's still a lot of good stuff going on. And it's a case of digging it out and creating scenes where that stuff can be presented in a way that you don't feel like you're being ripped off or something. And that interests me a lot.

Pitchfork: These exterior forces definitely color your record, do you feel like it's more of a western thing or just a UK/U.S. thing? Do you feel the same sort of cultural negativity in Paris?

Jarvis Cocker: It's weird, France is different, because they have this kind of rule where they're very protective of their own culture, and on the radio for instance, at least 40% of the music played has to be French. You can think, "Now that sounds quite a noble idea," but actually in practice, it's terrible because the radio is shit.

So I don't know what the answer is. But I don't think it's rampant commercialization. But then again, I don't think some kind of protectionist thing is the answer, either. So what the fuck is the answer? I don't know what I'm talking about, do I? We're going to have to have lots of very lively debates about this.

Pitchfork: Does it feel like it's getting worse? I was in England recently, and it's always been situated between America and the continent, and it feels kind of like it's culturally lurching more toward America and away from Europe in a sense.

Jarvis Cocker: Yeah, it's weird, I mean obviously it's physically nearer to Europe. Don't get me wrong: I'm not anti-American. I mean, obviously the administration that's in charge at the moment is pretty dire. I suppose some of that was on my mind when I did my record, because my son was born about a week before the Iraq war kicked of. I was excited to have a kid, and then kind of worried that he probably wasn't going to live very long, like everybody else.

Pitchfork: You said you've been happier now, but the record seems, maybe because of these issues, a little angrier in some ways than some of the other records. And not just toward the west in general, but also the class issues you've always addressed: Ten years ago you wanted to sleep with someone's wife as an act of revenge, and now there's murder creeping up in a few songs.

Jarvis Cocker: I don't know if it's angrier. Well, you could take a song like "Cunts Are Still Running the World": I believe that statement. But I also think-- when I first came up with that title, I kind of laughed and said to myself, "Well there's no way I can write a song with that title. It's too stupid." But then in a way, that became a challenge to actually finish the song. So there's humor in that song as well. I don't know, because I generally don't like people that write songs that attempt to deal with social issues, you know, and so I'm kind of horrified that I do it. But then again, if you feel strongly about something, you've got to say it, haven't you? And I hope that song at least has the saving grace of being entertaining by swearing a lot. But at least I' not there with my acoustic guitar playing a ballad. I don't know, too many people bland out when they get older. Not just artists, but people in general. I think that's bad.

Pitchfork: You recently did a series of Pulp reissues. Did you enjoy the process of combing over the past in such detail?

Jarvis Cocker: Yeah, it was more pleasurable than I thought it would be. I went and sifted through a lot of stuff that was up in my loft. Because I knew they wanted to do some bonus discs, and they were going to put all these shit remixes on, and I just thought, "Who wants to listen to a dance remix from 1996"? So I went and found some demos, and I kind of expected-- I thought, "Well if we didn't release them at the time, they must be shit." But I was actually quite pleasantly surprised. I mean, some of the songs weren't properly fully formed and stuff, but I thought they were interesting enough to let people hear. I thought it would be better for people to hear that than some bad attempt at a hi-NRG mix of "Disco 2000".

And I thought, I wasn't ashamed-- I mean, some of the songs are stupid, like there's a song off the Different Class disc called "Catcliffe Shakedown", which is just ridiculous. It goes on for about seven minutes, and it's got about seven different bits of music, and they're all really stupid. But it's got something about it. Kind of interesting. So I was pleasantly surprised, because I generally don't listen to old stuff. You spend so much time recording something and then performing it. I'd rather suck off a dog's knob than listen to one of my own records.

The biggest surprise that I got was a track that was on the bonus disc of This Is Hardcore, which I think was the only studio outtake we've ever had, which was a song that we just abandoned called "It's a Dirty World". And when I listened to that, I realized that I must have been pretty fucked up at that time, because it's better than about six songs that actually ended up on This Is Hardcore. So that was the biggest surprise, really. I thought it was a really good song.
Pitchfork: Do you have any plans to do a similar reissue of We Love Life?

Jarvis Cocker: We could do quite a good one of We Love Life. There were loads of songs that never went onto that record.

We haven't got any outtakes of the stuff we did with Scott Walker, but there were songs we did-- because we had abandoned doing it with [producer] Chris Thomas before then, and we also tried some things with other producers-- so there's quite a lot of stuff. It might see the light of day one day.

Pitchfork: Is that whole Pulp period of you career completely closed off? You still work with [bassist] Steve [Mackey]...

Jarvis Cocker: Yeah, I mean, I saw Nick [Banks] the other day, the drummer, he's in another band up in Sheffield. And I saw [keyboardist] Candida [Doyle]-- she's even played on stage with me a couple of times. The only person I really haven't seen is [guitarist] Mark Webber, but then he never goes out of the house, so it's not surprising. I mean, Steve lives only about 250 yards away from his house, and he never sees him. But I mean, we're all still friends and stuff, so if we all suddenly have some weird, collective hysteria, we could play together again. But I'm certainly not planning it at the moment.

Pitchfork: Sheffield's had quite a bit of attention lately with the Arctic Monkeys and Long Blondes, both of which consider Pulp a kind of a touchstone. How does that feel to be a statesman figure in a way?

Jarvis Cocker: Oh dear, you make me sound like I'm about 150 years old. Well, I'm glad that Sheffield's got some attention. I mean just because somebody's in Sheffield doesn't mean it's good. I think the Arctic Monkeys are pretty good, I heard the new track by them ["Brianstorm"] the other day, which I liked. The Long Blondes, I can't listen to more than about three songs. They're nice people, but there's just something about the frequency of their voice. In a way it reminds me of Barbara Streisand. You know how Barbara Streisand obviously has technically got a great voice, but she's a master of the held note, so you've got a note that will last about eight seconds, and it fucking drives me insane. And it makes you feel out of breath as well. And somehow [Long Blondes singer] Kate [Jackson] seems a little bit like that. There are some good songs on that record, but I can't listen to the whole album.

There's a group called Little Man Tate, who are an absolute pile of shit.

Pitchfork: When you do the Meltdown Festival, what sort of ideas do you want to explore? Any specifics when it comes to-- like you said, audience participation?

Jarvis Cocker: I just want to jumble things up a bit. And, yeah, get people involved-- and a wide range of people as well. I don't want it just to be the people who normally go to the South Bank, who are theatergoers or whatever. I think life is more interesting when everybody's jumbled up together. When people separate out into cliques and things, it's okay, but it's a bit limiting. You can always learn things from other people. This is my theory, anyway.

Pitchfork: You're testing a lot of theories these days.

Jarvis Cocker: One of them's going to come true one day, and I'm going to make a breakthrough.

Pitchfork: Right, all you need is one, and then you're a genius.

Jarvis Cocker: And then my name will live forever.

Pitchfork: Do you have any other outlets, besides the Observer thing and Meltdown, to explore these ideas about how music is changing within the fabric of the cultural landscape?

Jarvis Cocker: I don't know. I might just let it lie after that. I don't know what I'll do. I had an idea for a book the other day. It's brilliant. I can't tell you though, because otherwise somebody else will nick it. But I might try and do that after I finish doing the touring for this record.

Pitchfork: Do you have other outside music projects that you're working on at the same time?

Jarvis Cocker: I haven't got plans, but I never really planned any of those other ones. It was just people approached me, so if somebody interesting comes and asks very politely, I might have a go.

Pitchfork: Now that you're writing again, are you going to try to work on another record after the promotional cycle of this one?

Jarvis Cocker: I'd like to. We're going to rehearse, and I've got this scheme that I'm going to write a couple of new songs and maybe we could rehearse them, and maybe we could play them in Australia and then in America. You know, just to keep going with it rather than doing this thing where you do a record and then wait a while until you do another one. So I'll just have to see how it goes, but in theory that's what I'd like to do, yeah. As I say, I did a bit of soul searching, which lasted about three seconds, about whether to carry on doing it, and once you've decided to carry on writing and performing, you may as well not waste any time and keep on with it. Because you know Pulp have always been a sluggish band, and I guess that's because I'm a sluggish character; I'm a bit slow. For some reason I find it hard to work quickly, and it's the one major regret that I've got, that for a band that's existed for so long, and for someone who's been involved with it for so long, our actual recorded output is pretty dire really, as in, there's not that much of it.

Pitchfork: Well, you've said you can't just turn on the creativity, but it seemed like the one moment in your career when you had to-- after "Common People" was a hit and you still had yet to write most of Different Class-- you rose to the challenge of being in the spotlight, and having to write knowing that you're going to have an audience. Were you conscious of that? Did it feel after more than 15 years of plugging away that this was a make-or-break moment?

Jarvis Cocker: Yeah, very much so. The knowledge of that really affected the way that record turned out and the kind of songs that went on it. I was very excited, you know. I'd been waiting for my moment. I didn't want it to slip away. So we did capitalize on that. And I suppose, you know, this record I've just done was kind of exploratory in a way, because I didn't really know what people would make of it. I feel like I've got a bit of a better handle on what people make of it now. And from playing it live, I feel I've got a vague idea of what I'd like to do next. But I haven't done it yet, so it's pretty hard to talk about it, I suppose.

Sorry, I've been eating a lot of nuts during that.

Pitchfork: I was worried it had been 45 minutes of nothing but chocolate.

Jarvis Cocker: No, I've moved on to almonds. Have you been feeling sick through the whole interview then, thinking he's laid there...

Pitchfork: Right, you're on the couch with bon bons or a box of Milk Tray talking about your sluggish output.

Jarvis Cocker: No, I was eating nuts...I'll dispel that unpleasant image from your mind.
by scummy | 2007-04-13 00:30

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by scummy

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