JARVIS COCKER: Steel City mooner

When a man in his mid-forties says that modern pop music is a load of rubbish, it wouldn’t ordinarily be more of a news story than one involving the words “bear” and “woods”. But when the outburst is from Jarvis Cocker, it merits column space.

“The kind of pop I was brought up on is over,” he told Radio Times. The X Factor and Pop Idoltook the brunt of his rage as he claimed that, rather than future pop stars, such shows discover “people who show off how many notes they can fit into a ten-second period”.

Cocker still has plenty of time for pop’s independent sector, though, which is hardly surprising as it nurtured his band, Pulp, and reveres them to this day. Almost alone among his contemporaries, “Jarv” is loved by both ageing Britpoppers and 2007 teens.

He was a teenager in Sheffield when Pulp played their first gig at Rotherham Arts Centre in July 1980. The boy Cocker had been forced by his mother to wander the streets of the steel city in lederhosen: as an introverted teenager, his parents got him a job in a fishmonger’s to make friends. All this gave him an outsider complex that later translated into songs such as MisShapes.

Pulp toiled for years on the gig circuit, an art-pop band plugging Dogs Are Everywhere and They Suffocate At Night, singles that barely scraped into the independent chart, let alone the real one. In the late Eighties Cocker had the indignity of performing several shows in a Bath chair after he almost broke his back falling out of a window while trying to impress a girl at a party.

Pulp finally broke into the charts with Babies in 1994 and the anthemic Common People in 1995, yet Cocker’s celebrity was hammered into the public consciousness only thanks to a spontaneous performance at the 1996 Brit Awards. As Michael Jackson sang the unctuous Earth Song, sobbing “what about the elephants”, Cocker took the stage and signalled disapproval by waggling his bony bum in the air. Such was Jackson’s standing at the time that Cocker was locked in a cell overnight. Having “slogged away in obscurity” for 12 years, he said, “suddenly people give a toss”.

You are a national institution when Melvyn Bragg gives a toss. Having in the past year played alongside both Serge Gainsbourg’s daughter Charlotte and the Brazilian postpunk sensations CSS, and released his first solo album, Jarvis Cocker is the subject of a South Bank Show on Sunday. As a Brit abroad – he is now a resident of Paris – he seems to be more adored than ever in Blighty: he also curated the 2007 Meltdown festival at the freshly reupholstered Royal Festival Hall, where he will play on June 23. Motörhead, John Barry, the Jesus and Mary Chain and Melanie are also part of his eclectic bill. Pop Idolwinner Michelle McManus presumably wasn’t available.

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