Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day. The podcast that celebrates the things

that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding

that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger because learning how to fail in life actually means

learning how to succeed better. I'm your host author and journalist Elizabeth Day and every

week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. My guest today is a

musician, broadcaster and author best known for a band he formed in 1978 as a teenager at secondary

school in Sheffield. He planned out his vision for that band meticulously in an exercise book,

including detailed diagrams of what they should wear. They would go on to become one of the most

successful UK groups of the 1990s. Their hit common people turned the band's front man into a star

at the age of 32. He became a defining face of the Britpop era, clever, stylish, satirical, and an

veteran live performer who keeps his glasses secure with a rubber band at the back of his head. He went

on to write and to present radio programs. His BBC Radio 6 music show was beloved by listeners and

won awards. And now he has written his first long form prose book called Good Pop Bad Pop. It finds the

author clearing out his attic and taking an inventory of the ephemera that formed his eventful

iconic life. Not a life story then, so much as a loft story. He writes, I've learnt over the years

that the most important things in life are not always immediately obvious. My guest today is,

of course, Jarvis Cokker. Jarvis, welcome to How To Fail. Thank you very much Elizabeth. Hi.

Hello, it is such a delight to have you on this podcast because I, along with so many millions

other people listen to your music all throughout the 1990s. And now I discover that you're a really

good writer as well, which is quite frankly just greedy. So you describe Good Pop Bad Pop as an

ongoing project of self-excavation. What do you think you've excavated about yourself during the

process of writing it? Well, that's a very good question yet. I was thinking about that the

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