Jarvis Cocker

"I’d gone to college because it seemed the group wasn’t going to do anything. But as I left college in ’91, it felt like we were allowed to have fun again. Bands like Stereolab and Suede had started, and we played some concerts with them and got to meet some of the bands that were around in London at that time. By ’93, it was all turning into something interesting—I don’t think they’d come up with that horrible word “Britpop” yet, but there was a new movement of bands. It was before it really broke and got spoiled by getting too commercialized. It still was really just a bunch of people in secondhand clothes getting wasted in Camden, which was fun."

" I’m very lucky because I do it at the BBC, so there are no advertisements, and I’m allowed to choose all of the music myself and invite people in to interview them. For instance, there’s a group of girls called Stealing Sheep and I quite like their records, and there’s a label called Clay Pipe Music that releases really nice, short-run albums, often kind of pastoral sounds, sometimes electronic stuff. I can really just make the show two hours where I share stuff that I like with people. I love doing that."

"Time gets flattened out, because now we’re into the digital age. Usually, I’m quite a retro person, but my manager was one of the first people to buy an iPod, so I got one. But then I thought, When am I ever going to use that? It took me ages to take it out of the box—maybe four or five years—and then I just couldn’t see the point of carrying it around. The first song that I ever downloaded was Leonard Cohen’s “Death of a Ladies’ Man.” Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker are the two real touchstones in terms of people I’ve listened to consistently throughout my whole life. If you listen to that first Pulp record, it is just a direct rip off of his first album—though I’m not saying it was as good as that. I was very lucky to [meet Cohen] when his album Old Ideas came out. I hosted the playback of that in London, and then I interviewed him about it. I was nervous about doing that, but I’m really glad that I did. I didn’t get to know him so much, but at least I got to meet him, and I was able to tell him how much his work had meant to me."

"My main thing for music has always been the radio; that’s where I’ve heard things. Around age 5, when I was getting ready for school, my mum would get us up, and we would have breakfast in the kitchen, and the radio would be on. It would be the BBC Radio 2, which is the easy listening station. So I remember hearing a song called “If You Could Read My Mind” by Gordon Lightfoot whilst I was having my hair brushed and trying to keep still—because if you moved when you were having your hair brushed in the morning, my mother used to get in a really bad mood."

"I kept reading about punk, but the local radio station wouldn’t play punk; they didn’t think it was real music. That led to me one of the musical discoveries of my life. One night, I really wanted to hear what this punk music was and, turning the radio dial, I heard John Peel’s radio show. I started listening to it and taking songs off there all the time, and that became my musical education. It made me want to form a group; the early Pulp were really just a ragbag of the influences that we’d picked up from listening to John Peel’s show every night. The first Devo album came out that year [in 1978], and I went to see them play at the City Hall in Sheffield, which was quite influential. One of the first songs that Pulp learned how to play was the Devo song “Gut Feeling.” A couple of years later, when we first did some recordings, I took them to John Peel—he used to do these road shows at colleges, and I just went along to the one he did in Sheffield and hung around and gave him the tape after when he was putting all his records back into his DJ box at the end. He listened to it on the way home, and that really changed my life. Then he gave us a session [in 1981]. We were all still at school. I was 16 or maybe just 17, and the drummer was 15 and he looked about 12. He could hardly reach the bass drum pedal to play the drum."

"Doesn’t life go by so quickly? God. 2003 was a big year for me. It’s when I got married and became a father—well, I’d like to point out that I’d got married nine months before I became a father. It’s illegal otherwise. That’s when I was living in Paris, too, so I was mentally living in a country where I didn’t really speak the language so well, and also exploring that terrain of being a father and wondering what I was going to do. At that point, I thought, Well, maybe that’s it: I’ll stop music now at 40. That’s like a nice, round figure. Maybe I’ll try to do something else with the rest of my life. It was a transitionary time, and when I think about the music I was listening to, I think about the music that my wife at the time listened to, like Cat Power’s You Are Free and Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Master and Everyone, which has a profile of him and his resplendent beard on the cover. I think that she was even playing that in the birthing room when my son was born. I’ve tried not to influence my son with music. I mean, there’s music around in the house, but I’ve tried not to indoctrinate him because if you try and push a child in a certain direction, they’ll always go in the opposite one. I do remember him being in the room when a Velvet Underground record was on, and I was thinking, I wonder what his brain is making of this. But he didn’t cry, not even when “The Black Angel’s Death Song” came on."

"This is a project from Ben Wallers and Alastair Mackinven from Country Teasers. We moved in similar circles in the mid-90s. I saw them do the whole of this at the Moth Club earlier this year. You could think 'oh what a funny idea to cover the whole of Pink Floyd's The Wall', but they actually did it really well. I used to be a Pink Floyd fan, and one of the first albums I bought was Dark Side Of The Moon, but The Wall is where I parted company with them, I thought it was just a self-indulgent mess. So I was amazed to go and see that they'd actually made it palatable, they'd done something interesting with it. I know it's not coming from a take the piss point of view, Ben's got an actual affection for that record, and they'd really thought it out. The Wall is one of the most indulgent, over-produced records ever done, and so the idea of two guys on a stage at the Moth Club doing it is like 'how the fuck are you going to do that? Where's the choir, where's all this?' But it worked, it was really good. I preferred their version of The Wall to the Floyd one. I remember going to see the film version of The Wall, and Bob Geldof played the main character, and it was so rubbish and painful, the worst kind of that rock star moaning about nothing in particular. There's something in that record to do with a performer's relationship with an audience that's interesting - there is something strange about getting up on a stage and performing in front of people. In Ben's live performances as The Country Teasers or The Rebel, sometimes people think he's trying to wind the audience up or whatever, but it's always important that the audience is there and you're never allowed to be a passive spectator. I don't know if that's why he finds [this album] an interesting thing to deal with, but you could tell that there's a reason for it, it wasn't just 'let's try and do something ridiculous'. "

"You asked for albums, but albums are already a bit away from pop because of they're a more serious proposition, so all of these are albums that I own on vinyl, and because I'm of a certain age that's what I think of as a record. We didn't have a big record collection in our house when I was growing up, but my mum had three Beatles albums, Sgt Pepper, Revolver and Abbey Road. Even though I was a kid I could tell that Sgt Pepper and Revolver sounded like music that had happened a while ago, but Abbey RoadM sounded more modern. It still does sound quite modern, because on second side where all the songs run into each other, that's quite a thing, not many people had done that since and not many have since. There's an art to an album. If you've got an album that's got a shit song on it, especially if it's in the middle of a side, you're not going to play it as much because you know you're going to have to get up and skip that track. That's what I've tried to do with these, it's records that I don't mind putting on then you can relax or talk to people or whatever, but you know you're not going to get some kind of fucking horrible shitty stinker of a song on it. Abbey Road - I was young at the time, 10, 11, 12, whatever, and the track that ends side one, 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' that was mind-blowing to me, the way it went on and on and on at the end, with this big synthy wooshy noise. I've since found out its Ringo playing this machine that sounds like wind that you get in classical orchestras. It was a psychedelic experience in a living room in a normal part of Sheffield in the early 70s, where, you know, psychedelic experiences weren't that common. I'll always remember it, that song in particularly took me somewhere. And that's the end of that side - if you had Abbey Road on CD it wouldn't be right, it only really works as a statement if you listen to it for ages and then it suddenly stops and then you're left in silence for a while until you can be bothered to get up and start again. I started with this because it plays with what an album can be. It's great.
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