Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing.

I'm Izzy Souty and today I'm going to be talking

to the incredible Jarvis Cocker. Best known as the lead singer of Pulp, Jarvis is also an

accomplished broadcaster having hosted Sunday service on BBC 6 music for eight years as well as

the Radio 4 documentary series Wireless Nights. His new book, Good Pop, Bad Pop,

described by The Guardian as A History of Jarvis Cocker in 100 Objects, examines the accumulated

debris of his life via items he finds whilst clearing out his attic. Thank you so much for

joining me, Jarvis. Nice to be here. Nice to get out of the loft for a minute.

Yeah, of course. So I love the book. It's so warm. It's so funny. It really is so funny.

Like, there's an early bit about a guy at a car boot sale tipping up a vase and like a brown slurry falls out of it down his sleeve.

Like a discarded pot noodle.

And there's so many bits that made me laugh out loud, which is very unusual for me

because I'm quite cynical now about humour, but you broke that.

There's a bit where you talk about the NME Awards, and the lead singer of a band comes on who you don't name,

and he's trying to swing the mic round around his head to make him look cool and it gets wider and wider. In the book I call The Circumference of Danger because he, yeah, because he was just letting the cable out more so that it was spinning, you know, and the band were having to like duck. He obviously hadn't practiced it so he didn't know how to bring the cable back in and then start singing.

It's actually a real art, isn't it? I'd never thought about it until I read that. Yeah. He should have just rung up Roger Daltry. I suppose he could have given him a master class in it or something. He's the one who's famous for doing that. Yeah. I've never tried that. I just think it's dangerous. Well, it is. It feels like the kind of thing that you shouldn't have to practice, doesn't it?

It feels like the kind of thing you should be like, hey, I just feel like doing this. And that's obviously what he thought. And then he did need the master class. He did need the masterclass. And it's that noise of a microphone falling on the ground is such a terrible noise. We could, you know, when you go,

that's a gentle version of it.

And as he said, didn't hit anyone, thankfully. such a terrible noise. We could, you know, when you go,

that's a gentle version of it.

And as he said, it didn't hit anyone, thankfully.

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