| Perhaps the most remarkable thing about former Pulp front man Jarvis Cocker’s debut solo album Jarvis, is that it exists at all. Following the announcement of Pulp’s indefinite hiatus in 2002, rumours abounded that Cocker – who had enjoyed virtual household-name status for a period in his native England – was done with pop life. The imminence of his 40th birthday and the dismal U.K. chart performance of the band’s Hits compilation were said to be contributing factors to his alleged retirement. He moved from London to Paris, settled down with his girlfriend and her young son from a previous relationship and, barring an unremarkable in-joke album in 2003 under the name Relaxed Muscle (for which he used a pseudonym and a disguise), all but disappeared from public view.
Speaking from his home in Paris, while his son audibly amuses himself in the background, Cocker sounds in remarkably good spirits, whether discussing his burgeoning solo career or Pulp’s turbulent final years, in which the band made the critically admired but commercially disappointing albums This is Hardcore and We Love Life.
Cocker says, despite having been a long time coming, Jarvis was made in a way that was a direct reaction against Pulp’s increasingly fussy methods. It was recorded mostly live in the studio, in a mere 13 days. "In 13 days, Pulp probably wouldn’t have even recorded the snare drum," he quips. "We’d still be putting mikes in different places.
"I found working this way much more pleasurable than the way I’d often worked with Pulp, which was to record everything separately," he continues. "And it was good also because when you record live, you have to work on the arrangement and make the song work there and then. (With) Pulp, we just kept filling up tracks – 74 tracks of this or that – and eventually we would gain some kind of density that made it work. That’s one way of making records, but I really didn’t want to do it like that this time.
"It sounds kind of stupid, but it was almost like you’ve been pregnant for a while and once the pregnancy has gone full-term, it’s gotta come out. I felt that it was ready and if I waited too long, I’d run the risk of going off the songs or messing them up in some way."
But the making of Jarvis didn’t represent a complete break from Cocker’s past studio experiences. Accompanying him on all but two of the album’s dozen tracks are former Pulp bassist Steve Mackey and guitarist Richard Hawley, who was briefly an auxiliary member of Pulp and is now an acclaimed solo artist.
"It was good to work with people who I could just communicate with very basically and say, ‘Stop playing that – that’s shit,’ and also people who I knew so I didn’t have to always explain everything," Cocker says of his longtime collaborators. "When you’ve known people for that amount of time, they kind of know what things you like and don’t like.
"Making records with other human beings at this point in history, when, if you want to, you can make everything exactly in time – it’s more interesting to me to just play with people and see what happens. You know that it’s not going to be perfectly in time and maybe not perfectly in tune, but you get something that you can’t get through doing it in a more controlled way."
Cocker’s relatively off-the-cuff approach serves his newest songs well. Jarvis represents a loosening up of not only the singer’s previously meticulous approach to recording, but of the Jarvis Cocker whose songs on This is Hardcore and We Love Life suggested an increasingly bleak outlook. Jarvis tracks "Fat Children" and notorious "hidden bonus track," "C---s Are Still Running the World," combine social commentary with biting, mischievous humour, while the refrain of "Everything is going to be alright" on closing track "Quantum Theory" may be the most unashamedly sentimental thing he’s ever sung.
"My worldview has changed, definitely," Cocker agrees. "Psychologically, I wasn’t in a particularly great state (on the last two Pulp albums). I’m not saying I’m the greatest now, but I’m certainly a bit... happier.
"You have to eventually come to some kind of acceptance of yourself; I wouldn’t advocate complacency, but you do have to kind of realize that you’ve got to a certain age and you’re probably not going to change that much," says the 43-year-old. "There are always going to be things about yourself that irritate you – or that disturb you, even; tendencies to certain modes of inappropriate behaviour.
"And you know, there is that tendency to think, ‘If I get married and have a kid, maybe that’s when I’ll suddenly become mature and I won’t want to do all these stupid things anymore.’ And then you realize that you do." |
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