Jarvis Cocker

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2005

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Pulp's singer and musician, Jarvis Cocker is castaway by Sue Lawley.

Jarvis formed the band Pulp in the late 1970s and says that as a gawky, self-conscious teenager he felt pop music did not properly inform him about the disappointments and miseries of growing up - and he was determined to write songs that included "the messy bits and the awkward, fumbling bits".

He had to wait more than a decade to find success - but Pulp went on to become one of the most popular bands of the 1990s, with hits including Do You Remember the First Time? Sorted For Es And Wizz and Common People.

The band's crowning glory was its performance of 'Common People' at the Glastonbury festival in 1995.

The following year, Jarvis Cocker made headlines again - this time the tabloid front pages after he invaded the stage while Michael Jackson was performing at the pop industry's annual awards ceremony. Fans were thrilled, but it marked the beginning of a difficult time in the singer's life.

Now he is married with a young son and living in Paris and has recently written songs for Nancy Sinatra and Marianne Faithfull as well as writing the music for the film Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire.

DISC ONE: Theme - Robert Mellin DISC TWO: Transmission - Joy Division DISC THREE: Mouldy Old Dough - Lieutenant Pigeon DISC FOUR: Ten Guitars - Engelbert Humperdinck DISC FIVE: The War is Over - Scott Walker DISC SIX: Lady With the Braid - Dory Previn DISC SEVEN: I See a Darkness - Johnny Cash DISC EIGHT: Sailing By - Ronald Binge

BOOK CHOICE: Sombrero Fallout - Richard Brautigan LUXURY CHOICE: A bed with a mosquito net CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Sailing By - Ronald Binge

Desert Island Discs was created by Roy Plomley.

Producer: Leanne Buckle

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2005.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a musician after a long struggle on the fringes of the pop world,
0:34.4	his band Pulp achieved great fame and cult status in the 1990s. Its album different class sold 2 million copies and at Glastonbury in 1995 his song Common People became a pop
0:46.4	anthem. Tall, gangly and on the face of it a bit of a nerd but in fact perceptive and eloquent, his music and lyrics made lack of success acceptable and appealing.
0:57.0	He himself lost his way after that triumph, drinking too much and making an exhibition of himself on celebrity occasions but he's over
1:04.8	that now married and living in France he's presented a television series on art and written
1:10.1	the music for the latest Harry Potter film.
1:13.0	What I like about people he says is that they don't do what they're meant to.
1:18.0	We've been haphazard and we've sorted it out and that's human isn't it?
1:22.0	He is Jarvis Cocker the great height of your
1:25.8	success though Jarvis was that 1995 appearance at Glastonbury wasn't
1:29.6	it when you stood up and everybody knew the words to common people.
1:33.0	I guess so, I mean it's quite scary to me that it's now 10 years ago, but yeah, I mean that was
1:39.9	the event that made the success a kind of concrete fact.
1:44.8	Yeah, but the irony is you'd written it and you'd always been, if you like, as a kind of
1:49.1	of outsider and what you discovered in that moment was that you were every man, you know, what you felt meant
1:55.0	you felt meant something to all those people.
1:57.0	Well that is, yeah, that is a strange thing.
1:59.0	I mean, you're a human being and even though everybody likes to think that they're
2:06.2	fantastically interesting and very unique the basic things that drive people
2:11.0	are always the same things and so if you manage to kind of no matter how
	...

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