More about: Jarvis Cocker

Jarvis Cocker is a strange kind of icon. Despite being one of the most defining figures in the 90s British music scene, adding a dose of avant-garde into the brit-pop, top of the pops, mega star era; a criminal amount of people seem to not know who he is?

When I first dug into his new book ‘Good Pop, Bad Pop’, the regularity with which someone would say “who?!” when I mentioned the author was stranger. Having spent years of my life in Sheffield, Jarvis is a household name up north. In fact, in Sheffield he seems to have transcended to a kind of mythical leader with his name on plaques across the city, his songs blasting from bars every week, his lanky frame plastered on club posters city-wide. But more than that, he appears as a symbol of hope, a presence felt in every local gig and every frontman trying to do something a little odd. If Jarvis could do it, why can’t they? And that’s kind of what he’s getting at in this book.

As a biography disguised as a personal archive, ‘Good Pop, Bad Pop’ is so anecdotal, it feels more like Jarvis has invited you round for a cuppa and a rummage around some old relics. Slowly moving through his attic, pulling out random finds from a plastic spaceman to a school notepad containing his younger-self’s handwriting, scribbling out ‘the pulp masterplan’; the small and silly finds huge significance in his story. Using these objects as a jumping off pad to bounces us from his childhood, through his first performances, into punk, into Thatcher Britain and out into his big career – Jarvis’ objects and origins are beautifully normal.

Talking NHS prescription classes and jumble sales, the most interesting thing about ‘Good Pop, Bad Pop’ is how entirely average Jarvis’ life is. In the most part of the book, his external life is no different from every other kid growing up in the north, and that’s what’s so nice about it? At a time when music is so dominated by nepotism babies and secretly-rich stars that co-opt working-class identities to appear more relatable, reading Jarvis’ story is so refreshingly real. As a genuine portrait of a tale so many northern kids are still living, Jarvis’ origin story of second-hand guitars, cobbling together a personal style from pocket money finds and trying to balance creativity with a need to survive feels like an essential one to hear right now. And refusing to hold back on the grittier details, he isn’t shy to take shots at the Thatcher government that tore Sheffield and northern England apart, and the implications that had on the local music scene and his work. In this light, shown through relics of lyrics scribbled on dole receipts and old Lemsip packets from his old damp flat – tracks like ‘Common People’ become a kind of protest song.

But it’s not all doom and gloom, in fact, other than Thatcher, very little gains the dreaded title of bad pop. For the most part, the book is a celebration of all the little influences and inspirations that make up Jarvis’ artistic world. Moving from thunderbirds comics and a discussion of the endless possibilities and merge of fact and fiction presented to kids of the late 60s, into Beatles and Barry White records, Jarvis’ entirely average youth blossoms into something vivid and captivating. Seemingly able to find a bit of magic in even the smallest things, his attic full of small oddities like Marmite jars and old pennies feels full of building blocks that make up a truly unique artist.

And a remarkable, almost accidental one. Throughout, Jarvis seems to become aware of odd little moments where his career could have easily splintered into something totally different. What is his childhood meningitis had wiped him out? Or if his mum hadn’t met a handsome man on holiday that would go on to give him his first electric guitar? Or is John peel simply walked the other way and didn’t take the Pulp tape? Ending the book with his St Martin’s acceptance letter as a nod towards that lyric and the career that was to come, it was interesting that it was his childhood and all these little lucky accidents that Jarvis deems essential to his story, leaving the rest or the ‘successful years’ to be told by wiki and common knowledge.

In fact, Jarvis seems to credit falling out of a window as the turning point of his career. Dedicating a beautiful moment to the experience of laying on Division Street, waiting for an ambulance to come and scoop up his multiple broken bones and send him off to a hospital for a couple of months, it seems like his equivalent of the Oscar Wilde quote; “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” But instead, for Jarvis is was more ‘we’re all in the gutter, so I think I’ll write about that’. Staring at Sheffield from a different angle and then stuck in a hospital with a cast of injured miners, you can start to connect the dots as to where his lyricism will take shape and take off – centring on the experience of underdogs and giving them all a dose of good humour.

Despite housing a whole host of incredible celebrity encounters, important moments on the path to Pulp and a kind of time-capsule for the 80s scene, the beauty of ‘Good Pop, Bad Pop’ is its intimacy and domesticity. An inventory of significant knick-knacks and historic bits-and-bobs that will no doubt find their way into a museum someday, Jarvis’ attic summarises it all perfectly; harbouring the birth of an icon in a space of total normality.

Good Pop, Bad Pop is out now.

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More about: Jarvis Cocker