The pop pioneer talks to the author about his creative education via nightclubs and the dole, his teenage masterplan and the enduring inspiration of the everyday
Jarvis Cocker is late. The dog walker didn’t turn up on time and he arrives at the London Library looking worried, even though he already rang to apologise. “I’m flustered,” he announces, pulling off his beanie and unwinding an elegant scarf. He’s dressed in a pleasingly autumnal palette of oranges and browns. Still skinny as a rake, salt and pepper hair uncombed, his bag full of books, the epitome of the rumpled dandy about town.
We’re here to talk about his memoir, Good Pop, Bad Pop. But don’t expect tales of Britpop debauchery. It’s an account of his upbringing in Sheffield, his protracted, passionate apprenticeship in the foothills of pop, and it ends in 1985, years before Pulp exploded into mainstream visibility. He chose the library because the book hinges around his own collection, which is substantial, though far stranger than these venerable rooms of leather-bound volumes. The Jarvis Cocker archive – as I’m sure he wouldn’t call it, being temperamentally averse to pomposity – has spent the past two decades in a moth-infested London attic, a low, narrow storage space he compares to a Toblerone.
