Photo: Daniel Cohen
In 2017, Jarvis Cocker was asked by Sigur Rós to perform for their Norður og Niður festival in Reykjavik. He had plenty of new songs he’d been working on, “although none that I thought were worth inflicting on other human beings,” he jokes over the phone from his home near the Peak District. At that gig he played, in one form or another, all but one of the songs that make up his new album under the name JARV IS…, recorded with a quickly-assembled band that includes Serafina Steer and her Bas Jan bandmate Emma Smith, the James Taylor Quartet’s Andrew McKinney, All Seeing I’s Jason Buckle and Three Trapped Tigers’ Adam Betts.
After the Reykjavik show went well, the band continued to develop those new songs on a tour of small UK venues. They initially didn’t intend on recording them in the studio at all, Cocker tells us, until a particularly excellent live recording of a show in the Peak Cavern near Castleton (better known to locals as The Devil’s Arse), became the core of a full-fledged studio LP.
The eventual record, Beyond The Pale, was initially set for release on May 1, the same day the band were due to embark on a full-fledged tour of the UK and beyond. Like so many others that tour was cancelled in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, with the record now out on July 17. When he speaks to tQ he’s in self-isolation, having just returned from Paris where he was visiting his 17 year-old son, and compares lockdown to the forced hermitage he experienced after his invasion of Michael Jackson’s 1996 BRIT Awards performance saw his infamy skyrocket to the point it was hard to leave the house.
Nevertheless, he’s been staying busy through lockdown, reading Bedtime Stories for the nation, inspired by the way the sound of a human voice late at night helps him with his bouts of insomnia, and live-streaming to his fans via Instagram in a series called ‘The Domestic Disco’.
The perfect time, we thought, to set Cocker up for a chat with Jeanie Finlay, tQ’s favourite filmmaker whose work is currently the subject of a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Moving Image. The two share an inherent northernness and a love of melancholic joy, as well as a surprising mutual knowledge of the cave systems of the Peak District. Their conversation below is a delight, and covers JARV IS…, the scientific evidence that prehistoric cave-dwellers were the world’s first ravers, the awkwardness of when Sue Lawley sung the entirety of Dory Previn’s ‘The Lady With The Braid’ to him on Desert Island Discs, giving up drinking in the studio in an effort to please Scott Walker, political upheaval, optimism and more.
Jeanie Finlay: The lovely people at The Quietus asked me if I’d be interested in doing this. I’m not completely sure why, I think they hoped that I might do something interesting. So please be kind to me if it’s not a normal music interview.
Jarvis Cocker: No that’s better! I mean we’ll just have a conversation, that’ll be nice. When I was doing a radio show on BBC 6Music for a few years called the Sunday Service occasionally I would have people on there and interview them. I tried to use my experiences from being interviewed over the years to try and create an environment that would not be too stressful, because I know that interviews can be a nightmare. I’ve noticed from interviews in the past that sometimes someone would have a list of questions and then they’d ask you the question, then you start answering it and then when you looked at them, because when you have a conversation you’re looking for a bit of back and forth going on, they’d just be looking at the piece of paper, looking at the next question. The thing about a good conversation is you don’t know where it’s going to go, and that’s what’s nice.
JF: Absolutely, It’s like a strange walk I think. When I first started making films I used to type out all of my questions and I would have it glued to my hand, but now I’m so absorbed in whatever I’m making that I know it inside out. I don’t do that many interviews anymore, my films are quite often just being with people, but I never have anything written down because then you’re not listening to what’s going on. But then today because I thought I was doing something slightly different I did write some notes down. I did my homework.
JC: I used to have a rule with myself that I would I have to write at least 10 questions on a piece of paper and I would have that piece of paper on the table in front of me. I would start off with the first question but then I only really looked at it if it seemed like we were going to run out of things to say, and lots of times we never did. So really the list of 10 questions was just like Dumbo’s feather.
Photo: Jo Irvine
JF: I talk to filmmakers a lot about Dumbo’s feather, that sometimes they just need to be told it’s going to be okay and they should just get on with it. Stop talking about it and just do it. So let me ask you one of my official questions. I read a phrase on your press release which says ‘JARV IS… is an ongoing live experience, because life is an ongoing live experience’. That sounds good, but what does it mean?
JC: Normally what you do is you get a song, you finish it, you record it, then you go and play it. But what we were doing was finishing the songs in public, which I think is a better way to do it because the end result is something that’s got a human element to it. I guess that’s what people always did back in the mists of time. Before recording existed you’d have an idea, you’d think ‘ooh, I’ll try it out, see what people make of it.’ You’d think ‘well they liked that bit but they weren’t bothered about that bit.’ And the song kind of changes its shape depending on those performances that you give of it. I just thought well, why not just forget about recording altogether? This could be it, this new band could just be a live thing. And if you want to hear those songs and you just come to a concert and you hear them then that’s it, I quite liked the purity of that.
JF: Does that feel more exciting as well? Because it could morph and change as the performances evolve?
JC: Yeah, they did. I mean it’s not like when we first played them they were just formless jams with me grunting over the top, they did have words and stuff, but it was just working out you how long this bit was going to be, and how long that bit was going to be, perhaps a bit like when you’re editing a film or something you know you’ve got your material but then you give it a flow by changing the length of sequences or maybe trying this scene next to that scene rather than where it was before, and suddenly the whole picture changes.
It is something that I’ve always done, even back in the days of Pulp we would have songs that were a bit more freeform, And so I evolved this kind of sign language. I’d say ‘when I put my hand up like this, that means we’re going into the next bit’, or ‘when I jump that means you’re going to part three,’ or ‘if I hop then that means we’re going in to part four.’ And then the thing is that once you play the songs a few times, if something really works one night then you make a mental note of ‘I’ll keep that bit in’.
What stopped it from being this lovely pure live thing was we were recording the concerts just to be able to monitor how we were getting on, and then we played in a cave pretty near to where I’m talking to from now, a cave in a town called Castleton. The name I like to know it by is the Peak Cavern, but the more popular and crude name is the Devil’s Arse
JF: I’ve been there! One year the Sheffield International Documentary Festival opened with a screening in that cave. It was kind of amazing but also very strange, like seeing the film programmer from South By Southwest shoved onto a tiny coach winding up into the Peaks, sitting in a cave with a wet bottom watching this strange documentary.
JC: Sounds very atmospheric! So you know the place. We played two nights there in April 2018, and on the second night just seemed like a really good recording. Two of the songs that are on the record, the main body of the music was recorded in that cave, ‘Must I Evolve’ and the other one ‘Sometimes I Am Pharoah’. I suppose there’s a part of me, having grown up in the pop era, that still has the idea that you look for this perfect song, and you try and capture a song for all time in this one definitive version, I can’t really shake that, I think it’s just the way I’ve been brought up. The two women in the band Serafina [Steer, harp, keyboard, backing vocals] and Emma [Smith, violin, guitar, vocals], they’ve got a bit of classical training but they do quite a lot of improvisation so they’re not really hung up on that, they’ll do something different each night because that’s what makes it interesting for them.
The JARV IS… band
JF: I’m a real fan of Serafina’s harp stuff, she’s amazing.
JC: Serafina’s very important to the group. When I was doing the radio show I was sent a copy of her album Change Is Good, Change Is Good which was the first record I thought was really amazing that I knew that I would never have heard if I hadn’t been doing the radio show. I just thought that the way she constructed songs was so interesting. I’m quite traditional really, I want it to go verse, chorus, verse chorus, middle bit, verse, chorus, but her music is still very melodic but the structures will go all over the place and I was so impressed by that. So I ended up producing a record for her, and I was really hoping she’d be up for being part of it and she brought Emma because she was in a band called Bas Jan, they were in the group together, so Emma came along with her.
JF: So is the band a democracy or is it a benevolent dictatorship?
JC: I suppose I am still the person who writes the words so in terms of setting the tone or the mood I guess that’s my thing, but I don’t generally tell people what to play. For a start they’re much more accomplished musicians than I am. But I will say if there’s a certain feel or something that I’m going for.
JF: It’s interesting you talk about the tone of it, because I was listening to your very strange Desert Island Discs, and at the end of it you talk about how you want things to be funny and sad. I’m very interested in the idea of melancholic joy, and how that can permeate art.
JC: Well I’m impressed that you listened to that! I think Sue Lawley was still hosting it then.
JF: She was strangely admonishing actually, very proper!
JC: I remember the weirdest part of that program was, there’s this song I chose called ‘The Lady With The Braid’ by Dory Previn, and the format of the show was she’d ask you the questions, and then when it comes to the record choices you would actually listen to it together. But it was strange with that one because she put the Dory Previn song on and said ‘this is one of my favourites too,’ and then she sang the whole thing to me. It was just the two of us in quite a small radio studio, so it was quite a weird experience because you know, I didn’t know her! I’d only met her 20 minutes before to record this show. But anyway I’m digressing there…
JF: It’s such a British institution doing Desert Island Discs, it’s like ‘you’ve made it now.’
JC: Also it’s a weird situation because you’ve been asked to pick eight pieces of music that are the most precious to you, music that you really love and you feel very attached to, so when you listen to it with someone you don’t know it feels like you’re doing something quite intimate, it feels kind of awkward, you know?
JF: Do you think the selections you made would stand the test of time for who you are now? Would you make different choices?
JC: I think maybe I would change them. I can’t remember all the records that I chose actually. Some people do get asked to do it twice, if I survive long enough maybe I’ll get asked again. But you asked about the happy-sad thing, and I think that is still something that I’m drawn to. I don’t really like art that doesn’t have any humour whatsoever in it. I’m not looking for a Carry On film or a farce, but I think there does have to be some element of humour, because I think humour is something very fundamental to humans, it’s a way of us dealing with difficult situations. It’s like if you can make a joke about something you diffuse something that really could be damaging or stressful. Like there’s a song on the record called Swanky Modes which is a sad story about somebody dying
JF: Who’s the song about? That is a question I wondered when I listened to it…
JC: Well I can’t tell you that, it’s the songwriters’ version of the Hippocratic Oath! But there are some lines in it that I’m quite pleased with, like ‘Some fell by the wayside, some moved up to Teesside’, which you know, is kind of funny, but the overall mood of the song isn’t funny. I think sometimes when you hear something you really like you can sometimes want to cry, it doesn’t mean you’re totally sad. Sometimes I’ll laugh as well, if I hear something that I think is really great I’ll just start laughing. I think if it hits you emotionally and it hits you so out of the blue that you’re kind of shocked, you either laugh or cry.
JF: The ultimate goal for me is if people watch my films and they cry in the dark surrounded by strangers then I’m totally happy, that’s what I really want.
JC: And have you had that?
Photo: Daniel Cohen
JF: Yes, and it’s completely intoxicating. I want to make people laugh but I want to make people cry, I want them to think about their emotions. You feel the sadness more if you’ve been able to laugh as well.
JC: I totally agree with you there. It’s more human then, when something is total, relentless pessimism and melancholy then something in me turns off from it. I know that there is a lot of sadness in the world and that every life eventually is a tragedy, but there are also moments of really transcendent happiness in life that shouldn’t be forgotten about.
JF: There were a couple of songs on the album that really made me think about dancing in a field in Teesside as a teenager and waiting for the police to come, when I was making that transition from indie to dance music and discovering that it was the best thing in the world. They were ‘House Music All Night Long’ and ‘Must I Evolve?’ They felt more wistful about the past than the sort of ambivalence in a song like ‘Sorted For E’s And Wizz’. I wondered if I’d read that right, and if that’s how it landed for you?
JC: I’d not thought about that but you’re probably right actually. The thing is that ‘Sorted For E’s And Wizz’ was still written maybe six years after the actual events. It was about all this false dawn aspect of rave culture. I was very blown away by it all when I encountered it, when I moved down from Sheffield to go to St. Martin’s. I really liked this inclusivity and people all being loved up, which obviously you can say was because they were off their heads on ecstasy, but I didn’t think it was totally that. That was just something that allowed people to be open and friendly to each other. I thought ‘wouldn’t that be great if that went out and infected the whole of society and we were all just nice to each other’. Obviously it didn’t happen, the experience of trying to get a lift home from the rave was a thing I described in ‘Sorted For E’s and Wizz’ where people who had been all friendly to us were like ‘nah mate’.
But I realised what a formative musical event that was for me, getting into rave music, and just experiencing how primal it was. That’s what I was really blown away by. It was music made on machines, but then it was taking people back to a really primal state. There was a disco called The Limit in Sheffield, but it was just always like people trying to cop off with each other or having a fight. So suddenly to go to this thing where people weren’t doing all that, they weren’t even really drinking, everyone was drinking Lucozade, it was the first time I’d seen Lucozade outside a hospital…
Photo: Jo Irvine
JF: Lucozade was the thing your nan gave you when you were ill.
JC: Exactly, it still had that kind of see-through orange plastic wrap, it was like a bunch of flowers you could drink.
JF: My grandma used to heat it up for me.
JC: So it was that, everybody just coming together as one and just dancing, dancing, dancing. We didn’t know it at that time but that was probably the last major sub culture too. It was something I aspired to, feeling like you hadn’t really heard anything like it before but somehow it was familiar because it was taking you back to some kind of pagan ritual in a cave kind of vibe.
JF: Did you think about that much when you were making the new songs for the album? Was it about recreating that feeling or just revelling in the memories?
JC: There was that, and there was also this book that I’d found called The Mind In The Cave. I’d been to this place called Cresswell Crags when my son was younger. I’d brought him up north to see my mum and we decided to go for an outing to this place, not too far from Sheffield. It’s like a kind of Neolithic settlement.
JF: I’ve got this whole range of places that I go for a walk that are an hour’s drive from Nottingham and that is one of them.
JC: It looks a bit like a quarry, doesn’t it? It’s like a rock wall and then it’s got holes in it when the caves are. First off I thought ‘It looks a bit like Park Hill Flats in Sheffield. I liked the idea that it was like a caveman high rise. And then I didn’t know all this but it’s got the UK’s only surviving bit of cave art. In one of the chambers there’s a little bit of a carving of a horse’s head. I remember as I was looking at this crude carving of a horse’s head on this cave wall, it was like what we were talking about earlier, when you get that sudden feeling that you’re going to burst into tears when something moves you. So when we went through the gift shop, which you always have to do of course, there was this book there called The Mind In The Cave, so I bought that mainly because I thought the title was interesting, and I’ve been reading that on and off.
I think just the idea that our modern consciousness was formed in those caves, people talking but also learning how to communicate by putting something on a wall, it’s the roots of artistic expression. There’s been a lot in recent years of how technology is changing the way people think, about how nobody’s got an attention span anymore because the internet makes you hop from subject to subject all the time. I kind of thought that to know whether there’s any truth in all you’d have to know what human consciousness was in the first place.
Then I got excited by this thing, this guy had found out that sometimes you would find like maybe something like a kilometre into a cave system, there would suddenly be loads of paintings at a certain point. And they’d found out that the reason was that at this point if you were to clap or play something you’d get this crazy echo going. He was saying well they probably would have some kind of a ritual there and you’d have the paintings on the wall and you’d have the flickering light from the flaming torches and you’d have this crazy echo going round. And I was thinking ‘there we are, it’s a rave!’ They were raving in the cave! Rave in a cave!
Photo: Jo Irvine
JF: And you’ve made the soundtrack to go with it!
JC: I thought ‘that’s it,’ that’s why I thought were getting into a primal state when I was at Sunrise 2000 or whatever it was called, because it was, we were regressing to that original thing. I’m sure you probably get that feeling, when two ideas come together or when things somehow seem to drop into place in your mind, it’s quite an exhilarating feeling, isn’t it?
JF: I think it’s totally intoxicating. I was thinking about, I was reading about your song ‘Save The Whale’ and thinking about this idea of Leonard Cohen, the Nick Broomfield documentary and Patrick Caulfield paintings melting and merging together. It’s really interesting. Would you ever allow anyone to, I know you made a documentary about Sheffield, but would you ever allow anyone to follow you round and just to be with you and observe?
JC: I’ve always tried to avoid that a bit. Sometimes people have said ‘Can we film you when you’re in the studio’, but to look at it’s just people sat there looking at a computer screen and listening to the same bit of music over and over again; it’s not exactly a spectator sport. In the past when I would go in and sing something that would be like my chance to just lose it, and I kind of liked that. If somebody had been there filming it I wouldn’t have been able to lose it, you know? I used to do various things to try and lose my self-consciousness, one of which used to be drinking quite a lot. I don’t drink when I sing now.
JF: When did you stop drinking when you sing?
JC: Towards the end of Pulp we were doing a record called We Love Life and one of my musical heroes Scott Walker was producing it. I was too embarrassed to get drunk in front of him, I wanted him to think I was alright! I thought if I got pissed he’d think ‘who is this idiot?’
JF: I’m wondering what your feelings are about your fame, what that feels like over a sustained period of time, and whether it feels different now?
JC: It is different now because it’s just not as intense. The things that I’m most famous for are quite a long time in the past. When I got here last night from Paris my girlfriend picked me up and we drove up here. It was quite late so we didn’t want to cook and we went to an Indian restaurant. I was waiting outside because I’m quarantining – just pointing that out so I don’t get prosecuted – and a bloke who works in the restaurant who I know vaguely started talking to me – from a safe distance – and he brought up the Michael Jackson thing.
It took me half a minute to realise what he was talking about, because it is a long time ago, it’s almost 25 years ago. He was going ‘I like that thing that you did’ and I said ‘OK well thanks’, but back then the aftermath of it was just kind of mind-bending, because suddenly everybody in the country recognised me, and I just wasn’t ready for that. I don’t think anybody can ever really be ready for that. It was ironic because I’d been in a band for ages and I’d been wanting people to take notice of me, doing lots of attention seeking behaviour and all that stuff, so I kind of got my wish come true in a much stronger way than I ever could have imagined was possible. The immediate repercussions were a bit unpleasant because I just didn’t go out for a long time because it was really just a hassle. There’s been a lot about how with lockdown there’s been a lot of calls to mental health helplines and stuff like that. Being stuck in and not being able to interact with people in a normal way, it really isn’t good for you, and I think we’ve all realised that to certain degrees over the last few months. I think that’s one of the positive things we can take from the lockdown, we have a bit of a renewed faith in each other or realisation that we need each other, and that’s a nice thing, I think.
JF: Was that important to you when setting up The Domestic Disco? I was thinking about the audience interaction element because it’s intimate yet private, was that your intention?
JC: Because I was feeling kind of a bit done in, like everybody was, at the start of lockdown, especially because we’d finished this record, it was supposed to come out on the first of May, and we were also supposed to start a tour on the first of May. I was all geared up for that excitement of what a live concert is. So when I saw that you could do this thing on Instagram live, it was the first thing I’d seen during lockdown where it actually felt like a live event. It felt like the kind of atmosphere you would have a concert or at a party.
JF: Can you describe to me what crowd-surfing feels like?
JC: I’ll try. The first time I did it was the second time we’d ever played ‘House Music All Night Long’ to an audience. We hadn’t quite finished the song, The verse and the chorus and everything was all in place but there’s a bit in the middle where it was there musically but I didn’t know what I was going to do. I thought ‘I’ll seek inspiration from the audience’. I’d arranged to have a radio mic and so I got down off the stage and went up to the crowd barrier, I put the mic to my lips and it just hadn’t been turned on. So, I chucked it because you know, I’m petulant like that, but then I was just stood at the front of the audience with no mic, and not really knowing what I was supposed to do.
So I thought ‘what the fuck can I do now’ and it flashed into my mind: ‘crowd-surf.’ The feeling is amazing actually because you just give yourself over to it, you lie there and the audience are supporting you and you’re really just trusting them to not just let you fall on the ground. I kind of just laid there for a bit looking at the roof of the tent we were in, travelling out into the audience. And then it suddenly occurred to me that I couldn’t stay there too long because the rest of the band would get bored. And then, it was really magical because I just raised my head a little bit and looked towards the stage and as I did that it was like they just knew and I got transported right back to the crowd barrier again.
Photo: Bradley Wood
JF: It’s like bees silently communicating as a swarm or something.
JC: I’ve done it a couple of times since and it’s a very special feeling, I have to say.
JF: Did you ever feel scared?
JC: One thing that put me off it was that once in the early ‘90s Pulp played this show in Paris, it was us and I think Huggy Bear, when they were opening a Rough Trade Shop in Paris. There weren’t that many people at the concert, and this big guy who used to follow Huggy Bear around got on stage and did a stage dive and everybody moved out of the way. He just went smack on the concrete floor and really hurt himself.
JF: I also wanted to ask you about the Bedtime Stories. I’m a really big Dolly Parton fan, and I was struck that Dolly has been soothing the nation by reading stories too. I wondered whether you are both sort of unconventional national treasures, and what you felt about that term.
JC: Obviously it’s meant as a compliment, but sometimes… well especially when people said it in the last couple of years… I’m talking about Brexit basically. Because I was very vocally against that and still think it’s one of the most pathetic things ever, especially now. There’s freedom of movement in Europe and it’s so sad that we’ve chucked that away. I’m a little bit bothered about people knowing that I’m English because it’s a bit embarrassing at the moment because of this psychotic thing we’re doing. So I don’t know. It’s something that I can’t really have a perspective on.
As for the stories, at the beginning of lockdown I was having a bit of difficulty sleeping. I had a bout of insomnia, and in those situations I’ve always listened to the radio. There’s something comforting and relaxing about hearing another human voice at those times, and stories can help you with that. I used to tell my son stories when he was a kid. Kim sometimes I’ll tell her a story but it’s a joke because she falls asleep within five minutes of me starting. It’s kind of what I tried to do with the Sunday Service as well, and I still am doing this occasional series on Radio 4 as well called Wireless Nights. It’s on at half eleven and I kind of like to think of the fact that people might fall asleep somewhere in the middle of it.
JF: You mentioned Brexit, have you been following the Black Lives Matter protests and have you been engaged in any of that?
JC: What a lot of people have pointed out is that it’s a time you can’t just be a bystander, you have to make a positive statement and make a positive action, because that event that happened was so horrendous that you can’t remain silent about it. All this stuff about these statues getting chucked in the water and stuff like that, well fair enough. Historically speaking you’ve got to realise that things don’t change on their own, people have to protest and, for want of a better phrase, make a nuisance of themselves in order for stuff to change, because otherwise the people who’ve created that situation will just carry on doing it.
Our economies and our politics are still kind of based on the same thing that created slavery. Slavery was an economic decision, ‘How do we make things cheaply? Have a workforce that we don’t pay.’ Now you’ll make a T-shirt for 20p in Indonesia by paying people very little. They’ve watered it down a bit but it’s still the same principle, you exploit people in order to make capitalism work.
JF: Have there been protests in the Peaks?
JC: No, but in Paris there were quite a lot. There’s been quite a few incidents of police brutality in the surroundings of Paris.
JF: Did you go and join the protests?
JC: Yeah, like I say I think it’s important.
JF: I went to a huge one in Nottingham and it was so discombobulating to go from being in lockdown to being with 4,000 people in a socially distanced but angry and energised crowd; it felt like you were in history, not just stood on the sidelines.
JC: I think it’s interesting that it’s come almost simultaneously with the lockdown and the pandemic and everything. People are starting to talk about how are we going to deal with paying off the debt that’s been incurred by this, and that does lead to conversations like ‘well maybe this system that we’ve been using for all these last centuries doesn’t really work any more.’ The Black Lives Matter thing makes you realise that it’s been like that from the start, it’ been based upon subjugation and exploitation and it still is, and we need to find a way beyond it.
Photo: Bradley Wood
JF: I think things are being shook up now. I’m not quite sure what’s going to come next. Maybe it’s a way of putting a new foot forward.
JC: I don’t think anyone does really, but I think there will be change, I just hope that it will be positive change.
JF: Do you know what you’ll take from your time in lockdown?
JC: Well, that thing we were talking about earlier, about valuing other people more and realising that you need other people. Being social is kind of a really fundamental part of us, of what we are. It’s civilisation, isn’t it?
JF: Are you hopeful for the future?
JC: Two years ago I decided to be optimistic, it was my New Year’s resolution, and I’ve stuck with it. Even though loads of shit’s gone down I’m still sticking with it. The alternative is too distressing. I think I’ve got a fundamental faith in people and that’s what you see when you see the demonstrations that you were describing. For a long time people said ‘oh young people are so alienated from politics’, I think they are alienated from traditional politics, but they’re not alienated from issues and wanting to be involved in how things work out. I think that’s exciting actually!
Beyond The Pale by JARV IS… is released on July 17 via Rough Trade. You can visit New York’s Museum of Moving Image’s retrospective of Finlay’s films, ‘People Everyday: The Films of Jeanie Finlay’ by clicking here.
