Photo by Jeanette Lee

Beyond the Pale, the new album by Jarvis Cocker’s group Jarv Is… is out now and the former Pulp frontman has opted for an innovative video promotion for it that doesn’t involve touring. He was aided in this cause by directors Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard—co-directors of the great Nick Cave documentary, 20,000 days on Earth—who shot the group live at Peak Cavern, Derbyshire. The film premieres tomorrow on YouTube at 8pm BST (that’s 3pm EST, noon if you’re on the west coast) and you’ll have 24 hours to watch it before it disappears.

Cocker posted on YouTube:

Beyond the Pale was written (& partially recorded) in front of a live audience, so it feels extra-strange not to be able to take it on the road at the moment. Fortunately, our friends Iain & Jane suggested a way round the problem: set up our equipment in a cave & they would film the results. We have invented a new way of playing a concert.

 

 
Backing Jarvis Cocker during the program are Serafina Steer, Emma Smith, Andrew McKinney, Jason Buckle, Adam Betts and Naala. There’s a trailer for the concert below. Once it’s live you can view it here.
 

Brian Jonestown Massacre.
 
A small act of kindness can change everything. Alain Bibal was gifted a camera for his fiftieth birthday. It changed his life.

He started taking photographs of the thing he was passionate about—music. His first outing with his camera was to an Arctic Monkeys concert. He took a picture of lead singer Alex Turner. The image featured the singer’s head projected onto one of the screens at the side of the stage. The photograph was different. Eye-catching. It was picked up by the press. Alain Bibal was now a rock photographer.

But being a rock photographer (or just a photographer) is never that easy. It is something one has to work at constantly. Bibal started taking photographs of the bands who visited his home city Paris. Brian Jonestown Massacre, Tess Parks, Jarvis Cocker, the Limiñanas, Angel Olsen, and the Lemon Twigs. He traveled to England where he photographed Sleaford Mods, Suggs, Dandy Warhols, and Nick Cave. His work appeared in magazines, newspapers, and websites.

Bibal started taking pictures in his teens and twenties, then drifted into the world of work. Getting a Leica camera for his fiftieth changed everything. It reignited his talent and long held desires to be creative. He had always loved the work of rock photographers like Pennie Smith and Kevin Cummins. Photographs that were gritty, real and captured an unguarded moment of truth.

Bibal works on film, digital doesn’t interest him, working on film is more disciplined, demands more concentration. When embedded with bands at concerts or on tour, Bibal uses only two rolls of film to capture that perfect image. It means he has to stay focussed on telling a story with his camera that connects with an audience. His resulting pictures are brilliant, powerful, and iconic.

The moral of the story: be kind, you might just change someone’s life.
 

Tess Parks.
 

Pete Doherty.
 

Jarvis Cocker.
 

Jason Williamson—Sleaford Mods.
 
More of Alain Bibal’s brilliant work, after the jump…
 

 
Pulp, if you think about it for, oh, about ten seconds, would seem to be the very most perfect candidates ever to be picked to record a James Bond theme. In 1997 the Britpop band submitted “Tomorrow Never Lies” for Pierce Brosnan’s second outing as 007, but the the film was re-titled Tomorrow Never Dies instead and their song shelved in favor of a mediocre Sheryl Crow number. Sheryl fucking Crow? That had to have hurt!

Cocker was asked about what happened by James Bond fansite MI6:

“It was weird. They set up a kind of American Idol situation, where they asked about nine different artists to come up with a Bond song. They listen to nine different attempts of working “tomorrow never dies” into a lyric. We were told on a Wednesday that the deadline was Friday. Consequently, I was really pissed off when they went with Sheryl Crow instead.”

What deaf idiot musical supervisor made this blinkered decision? So stupid.

“Tomorrow Never Lies” eventually came out as the B-side to Pulp’s “Help the Aged” single in 1997, their fifth consecutive top 10. It was later re-issued as an extra track on the expanded edition of This is Hardcore in 2006.

Here’s the opening credits for Tomorrow Never Dies with Pulp’s song swapped in instead of Crow’s. It works great, doesn’t it?
 

Jarvis Cocker takes a selfie as his alter ego “Darren Spooner”

After Pulp went on their rather extended hiatus back in 2001, Jarvis Cocker kept quite active. He got married, became a dad and a stepfather, moved to Paris, DJ’d, and did voice-overs for Wes Anderson. He also worked on solo albums and various one-off collaborations with the likes of Nancy Sinatra, Marianne Faithfull and perhaps the strangest project of his career, Relaxed Muscle, a freaky duo formed with electronic musician Jason Buckle. Previously Cocker had worked with Buckle when the latter was a member of the Sheffield-based All Seeing I collective. Cocker recorded with them and even appeared live with All Seeing I on Top of the Pops in 1999 singing “Walk Like A Panther.”

Relaxed Muscle was a dirty-sounding, dirty-minded concoction conceived to be an “anonymous” band. The name seems to refer to Viagra, which relaxes smooth muscle to allow for more blood flow to the penis. One of the songs on the album, A heavy nite with… Relaxed Muscle, is called “Rod of Iron.” You get the idea. Musically they sounded sort of like Suicide meets Cabaret Voltaire meets Add N to (X). Richard Hawley played guitar under the moniker “Wayne Marsden” which is the name of a kid who bullied Jarvis at school.

The lengths Cocker—who was billed as his alter ego “Darren Spooner”—went to hide the fact that he had anything to do with Relaxed Muscle (which I think was a pretty open secret) included using a Darth Vader voice box during phone interviews with journalists and wearing a skeleton leotard bodysuit and deliberately naff corpse paint on his face in photos, videos and when they played live. Few were fooled.
 

 
Cocker spoke about his split personality with Self Service magazine’s Ezra Petronio in 2003:

Which brings us to Darren Spooner. How did he come about?

Jarvis: Oh, right. Well, that happened years ago. Pulp was making a video for one of our songs called “Mis-Shapes”, which is on that DVD. It’s not one of our better songs, to be kind. And the concept the director had come up with, which we agreed with, was that I was going to play two characters in the video. So I played myself, and then I played this kind of rough guy who was the leader of this gang. In England we used to call them townies. It’s the kind of guy who would go out on a Saturday night and they’ve all got a sort of short-sleeved shirt on even when it’s the middle of winter, and just want to have a fight after the pub. Kind of like that. So I drank about three quarters of a bottle of brandy, and then did my acting bit, and anyway, I got into character, and suddenly the name Darren Spooner came into me mind. I don’t know why because I was so drunk, but I guess because it sounds a bit like Jarvis Cocker, it has the same number of syllables. And I became Darren Spooner for that day. And unfortunately when I went home, I couldn’t get out of character. My girlfriend at the time came into the flat we shared and I was on the kitchen floor singing “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” by Michael Jackson. Anyway. So that was the first appearance of Spooner back in 1995. And then it became my pseudonym, like when I was on tour and I checked into hotels.

And for those last couple of years did he reappear? Is there any trace of him in the last couple of years of Pulp?

Jarvis: I’m sure it comes out now and again. But more probably he comes out when I’ve had too much to drink.

So for that video you shot, he made an official kind of coming out.

Jarvis: Yeah, but then, I didn’t want people to know it was me.

Oh, well done!

Jarvis: I thought if I had skull makeup on, people wouldn’t know. At least I wouldn’t look like myself. I was happy with it. He’s like an anti-superhero, a super nasty hero. And I thought he was quite good. I was nicking his look really. As l said, a lot of it is instinctive, so I can’t say why really.

Make-up can’t really disguise how tall someone is, can it? By the time Relaxed Muscle played live, the pretense was definitely over, although I don’t think that really mattered to any of the participants, who seemed to be having a good time:
 
More Relaxed Muscle, after the jump…

 
If you fancy having Jarvis Cocker hanging off your Christmas tree this Holiday season, then hop on over to BBC Radio 6 Music where you can download your very own Jarvis Cocker tree decoration.

Other poptastic baubles include Laurie Anderson, and…er…Paul Smith and Peaches. Each decoration comes in its own festive non-denominational colors and is as easy to fold together as a drug wrap. Download yours here.
 

 

 
Tune into Jarvis Cocker’s festive radio show from 2011, after the jump…
 

 
Since 1942, guests on BBC’s long-running radio program Desert Island Discs have imagined what they would take with them into exile. Each “castaway” who visits the show gets to choose eight records, one book—the Bible and the works of Shakespeare are yours for free, so those boring answers are out—and a luxury item. There’s something about contemplating this unlikely scenario over the course of an hour-long broadcast that tends to disarm the guests.

Jarvis Cocker was Sue Lawley’s guest in April 2005, and as you’d expect, he brought along a fabulous playlist. Prompted by Lawley between songs, Cocker tells an abbreviated version of his life story, lingering on events from his youth in Sheffield that are at once sad and hilarious. His mother mistook pregnancy for a case of appendicitis; she forced him to wear lederhosen to school. He fractured his pelvis trying to impress a girl by swinging from window to window. And so on.
 

 
Since the podcast version of the show only includes clips of the songs, I’ve linked to the full recordings in the list below.
 

The songs:

Robert Mellin, “Theme” from The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, performed by Gian Piero Reverberi

Joy Division, “Transmission”

Lieutenant Pigeon, “Mouldy Old Dough”

Engelbert Humperdinck, “Ten Guitars”

Scott Walker, “The War Is Over”

Dory Previn, “Lady with the Braid”

Johnny Cash, “I See a Darkness”

Ronald Binge, “Sailing By,” performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra (castaway’s favorite)

The book:

Richard Brautigan, Sombrero Fallout

The luxury item:

A bed with a mosquito net

 
Here’s the full radio broadcast, for your enjoyment:
 

 
One of the pleasures of crate-digging for old 45s are the colorful labels—the swirly Capitol design to be sure, but also Dunwich, Cameo, Etiquette, Chess, and Laurie, just to name a few. Jarvis Cocker of Pulp currently has an exhibition running at Red Bull Paris that plays on just such glories, an exhibition called “20 Golden Greats” that whimsically imagines an alternate world in which Jarvis was putting out singles for Polydor, London, and Belter Records. In an interview, Cocker mentioned that Pulp has received gold and even platinum records, but he had no interest in them and gave them to his mum for safekeeping.

His interest, however, was sparked by the idea of painting his own record labels for imaginary songs he never recorded for labels he was never involved with. For instance, there’s “22/7” for Map City Records, home of We the People; “Partystopper” for London Records, who obviously put out songs by some band called the Rolling Stones; “Love Handles” for Polydor, home of Slade and Motörhead; and “Am I Missing Something?” on Capitol, of the aforementioned orange and yellow swirl.

Jarvis clearly appreciated the economy of suggesting an entire recording session and radio run of a song with just a couple of words: “Titles are an important part of the music; in just a few words, they reflect an artist’s imagination. ... As a songwriter, someone who works with words, I enjoy the challenge of expressing something in barely three words.”
 

They started out as regular records, but in an apparent twist of egomania, I decided that they should be Gold records. At certain points in my career I received gold and platinum records but I always felt a little bit embarrassed, I was never quite at ease with the idea and always gave them to my mother because I certainly didn’t want them in my house.

This was the challenge I faced with this exhibition: how to make the gold record something desirable, something with class and sophistication, because as far as I’m concerned, gold records, and especially those you see lined up on the walls of recording studios, are always rather ugly.

 
The show runs through August 28.

Here are a few of Cocker’s imaginary gold records:
 

 

 

 

 
Cocker worked up these three tracks to accompany the exhibition: .
 

 
Some more of the labels—click on the image for a better view:
 

 

 
via It’s Nice That
 

 
There are not many pop lyricists as good as Jarvis Cocker. Listen to the best of his solo work or the songs written with Pulp and you’ll hear a man who eavesdrops on life and turns the everyday into poetic gold.

When he started, Jarvis had a romanticized view of the writer’s life—the noble poet ensconced in some distant high tower contemplating his own suffering and angst. This all changed after a brief spell in hospital when he tuned into the conversation of his fellow patients and found their lives and tales to be more fascinating than his own. It changed the way Jarvis wrote his lyrics—changing from songs of myself to songs of experience.

When Pulp headlined at Glastonbury in 1995, Jarvis explained his inspiration for the band’s new single:

“‘Sorted for E’s and Wizz’ is a phrase a girl that I met in Sheffield once told me… and she went to see The Stone Roses at Spike Island and I said “What do you remember about it?”. And she said, “Well there were all these blokes walking around saying ‘Is everybody sorted for E’s and wizz?’” And that’s all she remembered about it and I thought it was a good phrase.”

 

‘Drugs: Pulp Fiction’—NME fire an early warning shot about ‘Sorted…’.
 
When Pulp released the “Sorted for E’s & Wizz” as a double-A side with “Mis-Shapes” in September 1995, there was a sense that “Sorted…” would have the curtain-twitchers of Tunbridge Wells scratching angry letters to the papers. But as it turned out, it wasn’t the lyrics or the song’s title that saw a tabloid hate campaign launched against Pulp, but rather the single’s sleeve that caused a furore, as music paper Melody Maker explained at the time:

The cover of the single features a photograph of a page from a magazine folded into the shape of a speed wrap. No drugs are shown on the sleeve. The inside booklet features a series of origami-style diagrams showing how to fold a piece of paper to make a speed wrap. Again, drugs are neither mentioned nor shown. However, under pressure from retailers and Island Records, a new, plain white sleeve has been printed.

The press denounced the cover as a “sick drugs stunt,” and the Daily Mirror ran a campaign to ban the single claiming the band were “offering teenage fans a DIY guide on hiding illegal drugs.”

 

Exhibit A: The offending drug wrap cover.
 
I think it fair to suggest that most teenagers or twenty-something Pulp fans in the 1990s already knew how to make a drug wrap, because everyone was sorted for E’s, wizz, coke and anything else you could get your jammy little mits on during that decade—and this includes a whole tier of hypocritical Fleet Street journalists and TV producers, who snorted in their executive toilets but damned users in print and picture. Right or wrong, it was just the way it was, and Pulp’s song reflected the ubiquitousness of that culture.

But the Daily Mirror wasn’t just content with keeping down some working class pop stars, their journalists cruelly phoned a father whose son had died from taking ecstasy, and used his experience to damn the band. Classy.
 

 
It forced Pulp to change the single’s cover and opt for a clever and rather tasteful knitting pattern design for the song “Mis-Shapes.”

As Jarvis explained the change was more about giving people the chance to hear the song than just giving in to the ire of a few media pundits. In an interview with the Melody Maker, he discussed what happened:

When did you first become aware that the Mirror was going to run with the story?

Jarvis Cocker: It was about half past 10 on Tuesday night. It was my birthday. Usually I would be out on my birthday, but I wasn’t that particular night, and I got a call saying it probably was gonna happen. The next thing I heard about it was my mother calling up at quarter past 10 the next morning, saying breakfast TV and various people had been ringing her up trying to get my number and trying to get her to make a statement about it, and stuff. But me mum’s alright, she’s not daft, so she didn’t say anything to them.

It surprised me, cos the thing that I was anticipating having trouble with was getting the record played on the radio. I’d been told that, because it mentioned drugs, they wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. They wouldn’t listen to it, and so they wouldn’t realise that it was just a song about drugs. It wasn’t saying drugs are fantastic. So, you know, I thought we were home and dry, but then they started taking exception to the sleeve. It’s stupid, cos that’s basically an origami diagram. Origami does not lead to drug addiction, as far as I know - I might be wrong. Nowhere on the sleeve does it say, ‘Put your drugs in this handy container’. People say it’s obvious what it’s for, but it’s them who’ve spelt it out. It’s like saying if you have a picture of a gun on a record cover, that means you’re gonna go out and shoot people. The subject matter of the song is about drugs, so it’s appropriate that it has drug related imagery.

Any road, the Daily Mirror took it upon themselves to ring up the Association Of Police Officers and get their opinion on it. It was kind of weird, cos they rang back and said they thought the song was great and they had no problem with it, but they thought the sleeve was bad. That was a problem for us, cos basically that could have led to it being banned from a lot of shops. So I thought to myself, I think it’s an important song for people to hear, and if the sleeve is gonna get in the way of people hearing the record, I don’t want that. I’ve been quite angry today cos there’s all this stuff to do with the chart people and all this daft formatting business, and they’re saying if you change the sleeve then it’s another format so it’s not eligible for the charts any more.”

 

 
More from the Melody Maker:

Ironically, the pre sales on the single were already well over 200,000 before its release on Monday - the biggest advance figure in Island Records’ history, according to the label’s marketing director, Nick Rowe. Regardless of the tabloid reaction, with Sorted For E’s & Wizz, Pulp seem to have tapped into the wider debate going on in the media concerning drug use in Britain. Recent examples being Channel 4’s ‘Pot Night’ and the current series, ‘Loved Up’.

Jarvis Cocker: I’m not saying I did it cos I thought we could open up a forum for discussion, but I think the drugs thing in Britain now is something that people can’t ignore any more. So many people are doing it you can’t just say it’s these fringe elements and they should be rehabilitated. People are just doing it on a recreational basis and treating it in the same way as they treat drinking or having some fags, so you can’t just say everybody who does it is an evil monster, and you can’t just like shut your ears to it every time somebody mentions it. There’s got to be some kind of a change in attitude to it. That’s why I thought it was great that it got played on the radio, cos that to me showed that there had been a change in attitude to drugs.”

 

Exhibit B: The offending diagram showing how to make a wrap.
 
Despite all the unnecessary hoo-hah about nothing much in particular, “Sorted for E’s & Wizz”/“Mis-Shapes” went on to hit the number two spot in the UK pop singles charts.

Below Pulp premiere “Sorted for E’s & Wizz” at Glastonbury 1995.
 

 
To mark “Yorkshire Day” today, Yorkshire Tea created life-size cakes of Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker (who’s from Sheffield) and Judi Dench (who’s from North Yorkshire). There were other life-size cakes made of Spice Girl Mel B and Louis Tomlinson from One Direction. Sadly, there are no photos.

I was in Sheffield a few months ago and saw the premiere of Pulp’s documentary Pulp: A Film about Life, Death and Supermarkets during the Sheffield Doc/Fest. They’re proud of their local heroes there. Even the Pizza Express had paintings on the walls of Jarvis, Phil Oakey from the Human League (no mistaking that asymmetrical hairstyle for anyone else) and Richard Hawley so you could look at them while you ate.

This takes it to a whole other level, though…

 

 
via The Star and h/t Nicholas Abrahams

 
Greetings from the super fun Sheffield Doc/Fest!

After spending a delightful two days in Glasgow, where Tara and I met our friend and longtime DM ally Paul Gallagher in the flesh for the first time (and where we saw the Necropolis, the University of Glasgow and the beautiful West End district, plus ate some insanely good curries), we arrived in Sheffield shortly before the big hometown premiere of New Zealand-born director Florian Habicht’s Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets.

Habicht’s film is as much about the city of Sheffield as it is about the group it spawned. In the few hours before the screening began, I walked about the city center for a while to soak up, you know, the local atmosphere and found myself very charmed by the city and her residents. Young people out and about, laughing and having a good time, families with little children and plenty of old people milling around too (there are lots of older fellows, the type who wear wool caps and call you “guv’nor,” sitting on benches bullshitting all over Sheffield). The Kiwi filmmaker had parachuted into the city in a similar manner—he’d never been here before he started filming—but when he went around looking for local color (and finding it in spades!) he took along a film crew. The results, I thought, were magical, but I’ll get to why in a moment.

When the box office opened, there were probably a good 2,000 people milling around in front of Sheffield City Hall waiting to get in. You could tell that a situation was brewing whereby the whole town basically wanted to be involved. People from all walks of life were queuing up and there was—truly—a “special” feeling in the air. I was excited myself. I’ve been a huge Pulp fan for over twenty years, but sadly I was never in the same city as they were when they played America (which was almost never). When I got back to the hotel to collect my wife, I saw Jarvis Cocker and several of his family members in the lobby getting ready to walk over to the venue (where the band members greeted friends and fans alike on the steps outside City Hall).

Inside the venue, with both balconies packed to the gills, a palpable feeling of excitement was in the air. A huge neon PULP sign topped the screen. When the film started, everyone in that room seemed totally psyched. I know I was.

Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets did not disappoint. It’s not, strictly speaking, a “rockumentary.” It’s close to being one, but it expands on the form so much that the term becomes kind of meaningless to describe it. What it is is an affectionate portrait of a city and of a band that are that city’s favorite sons and daughter. Nominally “about” Pulp’s final hometown show, many of Sheffield’s quirkier denizens get as much screen time as the band. When the film ended, the locals in the movie were asked to stand up and take a bow, and nearly all of them had been sitting in the section we were sitting in. I felt that the film was a triumph—moving, funny, sweet, eccentric—and the reaction from the audience, well, it’s the kind of thing that makes you feel like you are smiling with your heart. Two people who I spoke with were moved to tears. How many rock docs can you say that about?

Well, you can say it about Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets, that’s for sure. There was a mediocre review of the film in The Guardian last week that complained about Habicht’s film that “you can’t help thinking he’s missed the point of Pulp. Their music denigrated the people [of Sheffield] as much as it celebrated them.”

BULLSHIT! Try telling this to anyone in the audience in Sheffield on Saturday night. Introducing “Common People” onstage in the film, Jarvis tells the hometown audience that although the song isn’t about Sheffield and doesn’t take place in Sheffield, it could only have been written by someone who is from Sheffield. I think it was The Guardian that missed the point. Entirely. Would that the reviewer had seen Terry, the newspaper seller who makes a few appearances in the film being treated like he was a celebrity at the afterparty, he might’ve had a different opinion.

PS: After writing this, but before posting it, I ran into director Florian Habicht in the hotel lobby, introduced myself and basically said everything to him in person that I have written above. 
 

 
Don’t blame the band for the late arrival of this brilliant new tune on Dangerous Minds, blame me (though they could have picked a better time to put this out than on December 26th when I’m on my hols, ferchrisakes.)

By far the best of the ‘Britpop’ bunch, you’ll probably be aware that Pulp got back together again, after a ten year absence, for a string of live dates last year.

Well they didn’t just tour. They also went into the studio with none other than LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, and laid down a brand new tune called “After You,” a power-disco-pop gem that fits snugly into the band’s canon of modern classics. It leans towards the band’s more uptight-funk sound—it’s even got a bongo breakdown—but as ever is carried along by Jarvis Cocker’s caustic with, and a delivery that combines hard-nosed snark with pure sexiness.

Here’s to more brand new Pulp tracks in 2013!

Pulp “After You”
 

BONUS! After the jump, the entire, two hour Pulp headline set from the 2011 Reading Festival.

 
Pulp performs “Common People” and “Like A Friend’ last night on the Jimmy Fallon Show.

Jarvis Cocker is a rock star at a time when there ain’t a lot of ‘em left.

Pulp is on tour and if you’d like to see Mr. Cocker and his band, here’s some upcoming tour dates:

10 April 2012 Radio City Music Hall New York, NY, USA
11 April 2012 Radio City Music Hall New York, NY, USA
13 April 2012 Coachella Indio, CA, USA
17 April 2012 Warfield San Francisco, CA, USA
19 April 2012 Fox Theater Pomona, CA, USA
20 April 2012 Coachella Indio, CA, USA
23 April 2012 Palacio de los Deportes Mexico City, Mexico
4 May 2012 SOS Festival Murcia, Spain
6 July 2012 Ruisrock Turku, Finland
8 July 2012 B’estfest Tunari, Romania
13 July 2012 Fiera della Musica

 
The sound quality is a bit rough and the picture rather watery, but there are still plenty of interesting things going on in this ‘lost’ interview with Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker and Russell Senior from 1995.

Recorded during Pulp’s first tour of Spain, the interview was conducted by writer and poet, Bruno Galindo, who asked Jarvis & Senior about the band, their career, their lives, the success of the album Different Class, and easy-listening music.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

This is Hardcore: Jarvis Cocker talks Pulp at Glastonbury 1995

Photo by Rankin

DM pal Rod Stanley, editor-in-chief of Dazed & Confused magazine (who is getting married tomorrow, congrats Rod!) recently interviewed the world’s last proper rockstar, Jarvis Cocker, about the moment when Pulp triumphed at their legendary show at the Glastonbury festival in 1995.

Dazed: I watched you play in 1995, when you replaced the Stone Roses at Glastonbury… I remember you walking out on to the stage and taking a photograph of the crowd – do you still have that photo?

Jarvis Cocker: I don’t even remember taking it. When we played there, we were added to the bill very last-minute so we had to camp on site. The night before, I had real trouble sleeping because I was so nervous… and there are these photographs of me there with this haunted look. So, I wish I did have that photograph. There are certain things of that night that are burned into my memory, I can remember going on and I can remember the end, but the middle bit has just been erased.

Dazed: There were a lot of those fisherman hats in the crowd … John Squire had broken his arm… and there was a kind of “impress me” atmosphere – but you won them over. Was that gig an affirmation? You had been together for almost 15 years as a band at that point.

Jarvis Cocker: Yeah it definitely was, especially that particular concert, because the thing that changed things for Pulp was that ‘Common People’ was a big hit – that had happened in May, and we played Glastonbury in June. So, I think it was the first show we’d done since we had become popular… and it was quite a moment because everybody sang along, and you realized that you’d crossed over into a different kind of world. As you say, they weren’t throwing the Reni hats at us. Or stones, or roses… I think they threw more roses than stones.

Dazed: I saw you again at Glastonbury, 1998, when you headlined the main stage on the Sunday night.

Jarvis Cocker: Yeah… very wet.

Dazed: Absolutely mud-soaked. And you congratulated everyone for staying, shouting “You… Are… Hardcore!” And got pretty much the biggest cheer from any audience ever.

Jarvis Cocker: I’m always impressed by audiences… I’m such a poof I would just go home. Especially on Sunday, you know what Glastonbury can be like, it’s a psychic obstacle course – and if you’re wasted and wet and been there for three days and haven’t slept very much, you would be well in your rights to go home. So, the fact that people were still there, I was just grateful.

Read the rest at Dazed Digital.

Below, Pulp achieve lift-off at the Glastonbury Festival, 1995
 

 
The great greatest British disc jockey, John Peel would have been 72-years-old today.

In the years since Peel’s death, there has been no one, absolutely no one, who has stepped into his shoes to do what he could do. You’d think that it would be the case that some new golden-eared music fanatic for a new generation would come along and tell us all what’s good to listen to, but clearly—and sadly—that’s not happened. This is a testament, of course, to just how culturally influential this one man truly was.

In the clip below, Jarvis Cocker tells a charming anecdote of a star-struck youthful meeting with Peel that led to a “Peel Session” for Pulp in 1982.
 

 
Via the awesome Sabotage Times