On the steps of a Paris art gallery Jarvis Cocker is — Sacré bleu! — waggling
his bum. He found Galerie Chappe after visiting an exhibition there last
year — a friend was one of 15 artists contributing portraits of Amy
Winehouse. He liked the L-shaped room, and he liked the fact that even
though it was located in busy, touristy Montmartre, the gallery was off the
beaten track, “so you don’t just get lots of idiots walking in all the
time”. Cocker, then, is among friends for this impromptu performance. He
does his Crazylegs Crane dance in the doorway while his band play inside
(rain had stopped them playing on the pavement, as originally planned).
Onlookers applaud, cameras click and whirr.
We’ve been here before, of course. At the 1996 Brit Awards, an outraged (and
drunk) Cocker pricked the pomposity of Michael Jackson’s performance by
storming the stage and shaking his tailfeather. A stint in the police cells
and a tabloid storm later and man who was then the singer with Pulp was the
most famous pop star in Britain.
Things have moved on a great deal since then. The Britpop-era Cocker was a
fashionably gawky iconoclast, a bespectacled beanpole of a pop idol leading
a band who represented the cerebral wing of Cool Britannia. But it was hard
to remain an arch-hipster when people were falling over themselves to show
you a good time. The singer was photographed at all the right parties, and
quite a few wrong ’uns, too. Jarvis — it seems almost right to still refer
to this national treasure by his first name — knew the wheels were coming
off when he found himself accepting an invitation to a drinks reception in
honour of Action Man. After the giddy heights of Different Class in 1995 and
the era-defining hit singles Common People, Disco 2000 and Sorted For E’s &
Wizz, Pulp’s final albums before splitting in 2002 were dark, conflicted
affairs.
Last week he and his band took over Galerie Chappe for six days. They began
each day with a two-hour rehearsal which passers-by could observe through
the window. Every afternoon presented an array of participatory musical
events hosted by Cocker: Bring An Instrument, Improvisations On A Theme,
Guest Performance, Children’s Day and so on, all broadcast on his website.
The results were mixed. One day “the Parisian Pete Doherty” turned up for a
jam (“he was s***”). The children who came were too overwhelmed to help the
band with a beat, so Jarvis led them in a game of Simon Says . . . followed
by a ten-minute version Frère Jacques (“bit of a French cliché”). But the
music Jarvis and his band improvised for a bellydancer, a yoga class and an
aerobics session worked well. And the turnout for their climactic gallery
mini-gig was impressive.
Broadly, Cocker was interested in the question in these straitened times of:
“What is music?” Rather than join the endless debate about the death of the
record industry, he saw an opportunity. With the business of music in
crisis, could the relationship between “pop” and “art” be recalibrated? “I
just think it’s more about approaching things with a bit of imagination. I
wondered, ‘What would happen if you moved music into the gallery?’ We needed
to practise anyway. And this was a nice change from where we would normally
be, in a grotty rehearsal room.”
He was also promoting his second solo album, Further Complications. “I know
everybody has to weave the credit crunch into every single aspect of
society,” he says in a warm, droll Yorkshire accent untouched by six and a
half years of living in Paris — he moved there with his wife, Camille
Bidault Waddington, a French fashion stylist; their son Albert, 6, was born
there. “But going through it and seeing a market failure and a loss of faith
in the capitalist model, to me it sticks in my craw to then aggressively
market myself to people. It just doesn’t seem appropriate somehow.”
Better a ramshackle art happening-cum-installation than appearing at Radio 1’s
One Big Weekend with Snow Patrol or T4 On The Beach with the Saturdays?
Indeed.
“Maybe I’ve just got to an age where I just can’t be arsed doing things that
make me feel crap,” Cocker, 45, says. “So you may as well just do things
that you enjoy. Say it doesn’t get you a multi-platinum album, at least you
had a good time.”
We’re talking in the basement of an Italian café in Soho. Three days, after
the end of the gallery residence, he is still processing what it was all
about, not least because he has 36 hours of video footage to edit. He looks
tired but comfortable, an impression lent weight by his straggly beard,
shaggy hair and sports-jacket-shirt-and-V-neck-jumper combo. A beat poet
with a donnish air and a (mostly) quiet life in Paris. He has, I suggest,
done a good job of normalising his life after his high Nineties.
“I bloody hope so!” he chuckles. “But, yeah, it’s a funny thing to talk about
’cause in some ways I must look like a contradiction. Obviously onstage I do
a lot of attention-seeking behaviour — ‘look at me, ooh look at me doing me
funny dance!’ But you’re doing a show, so you should give ’em summat to look
at, really. But then I need to switch off. Whatever passes for normal for me
is very important, otherwise there’s nothing to feed what I write about. My
lyrics have always been fairly straightforward. They’re very
narrative-based; there’s not much room for interpretation. Therefore my
songs have to be about something. So my real life is precious.”
Fortunately (from a songwriting point of view) and unfortunately (from a
personal position), Cocker’s real life has been in some turmoil. Last month
the tabloids revealed that he and his wife had split up. At a stroke the
raw, clattering album — produced by the minimalist American punk veteran
Steve Albini — sounded less like a midlife-crisis, last-chance-to-rock
outing than a cri de coeur. And the spiky titles — I Never Said I was Deep,
Homewrecker! — suggested anger and frustration.
Cocker admits that he was most worried about how his wife would view the
plaintive I Never Said I was Deep (“that’s probably what should be etched on
my tombstone,” he says wryly) and the lusty Leftovers (“I come to you filled
with guilt and self-loathing . . . I fall upon your neck just like a
vampire”). The latter was inspired by a short story, In The Heart of the
Heart of the Country, by the American author William H. Gass.
“I’d never read
that writer before, but it seemed to be autobiographical, about this
middle-aged guy in this backwoods town who’s mourning the breakdown of a
relationship. And there was one phrase that stuck in me mind. He was
describing his mixture of disgust and surprise at the fact that he still had
desire left. He likened it to still having some sweets in the bottom of the
paper bag the day after Hallowe’en.” Jarvis knew the feeling. “In some ways
I wish I was out of that. I wish I could retire from the game.”
The sexual game?
“Yeah. And just be a neutral, reasonably friendly person. ‘cause it takes you
to problematic places. But then I realised that wish was kind of ridiculous.
So there is an anger to it in a way. There’s one part of me wants things to
be a bit flat and under control.”
Cocker divides his time between Paris and London (he has a place in trendy
Shoreditch), with regular forays back to his home town of Sheffield. But he
wants to remain in the French capital for his son, who is at school in the
city. And he has established a life there – one of his friends is the
American film-maker Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums), another expat.
Anderson has created a role for Cocker in his forthcoming, stop-motion
adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox. “Petey” is a mandolin-strumming
puppet who looks and sounds like his real-life counterpart. Cocker and
Anderson have written a song for the film — “a little hoedown number”, says
Cocker, who also wrote music for and had a cameo role in Harry Potter and
the Goblet of Fire. “I did a narration bit at the start of Mr Fox, too, but
they showed that to test audiences in the US and they were very bamboozled.
So I’ve ended up on the cutting-room floor. I tried to enunciate
clearly!”
There is no mistaking Cocker’s words and intent on Further Complications. Was
making it a cathartic experience, given his emotional situation at home?
“There’s always got to be some catharsis in everything that you do. Well, for
me anyway. Otherwise I can’t really get excited about it. But you have to be
careful — you don’t want to be alive only in your songs. And I try to
balance that — it’s good to not lose sight of the fact that songs and music
are supposed to be entertaining. I didn’t want to just make it like, ‘Look,
here’s Jarvis in his therapy session — would you like to listen to it?’
Songs are the places where I try and work things out, for sure. They have
that function. But I hope that it’s not a closed shop.”
His forthcoming tour, however, promises hard and fast entertainment. Having
established the new music’s art-gallery credentials, Cocker now wants to hit
the rock’n’roll mark. “I wonder if I’m gonna get through them alive,” he
says of the shows. “Those songs were conceived and recorded live, so it
should be a bit of a rip-roarer.” Cocker does his best wry smile. “As long
as I don’t have a heart attack after the first three shows, it should be
pretty good.”
Further Complications is out now on Rough Trade; www.jarviscocker.net
