Jarvis Cocker’s couch and the secrets of Pulp

We all know that she came from Greece, was thirsty to learn, studied sculpture at St. Martin’s College and wanted to live like ordinary people. That was where our narrator Jarvis Cocker he met her in his memories Good Pop, Bad Pop (Penguin, 2022) there is only one reference to that song from the nineties that turned Pulp in one of the UK’s biggest bands during the height of the Britpop. Everything else is left to the reader’s imagination.

The story of Pulp begins in Sheffield, England, from the mind of a young Jarvis Branson Cocker with a master plan to conquer the world with good pop. It was 1980. The plan took over 15 years to come to fruition, saw a number of band lineup changes and various mishaps that helped shape Pulp’s sound and identity.

Jarvis Cocker and his conspirators grew up in the wake of punk and began to form their identity during the bleak 1980s amid the government of Margaret Thatcher. The city of Sheffield lacked the music scenes that were cultivated in places like London or Manchester. That is where the master plan begins to take shape.

Cocker’s book contains a faithful reproduction of this master plan conceived from the notebook of a schoolboy with the first steps in his musical development. The band made their first appearance on the legendary broadcaster’s show John Peel in 1981, two years before releasing their debut Itbut it was not until 1995 that he appeared again with the album Different Classtheir fifth album.

The memories of the musicians are all very similar. The narratives are focused on telling the childhood stories of the artists, exploiting the founding myths of the musician and the rock bands, and offering the reader one or another anecdote with juicy gossip. In Good Pop, Bad Popthe founder and lead singer of Pulp gives us a glimpse into his personality and life through a series of objects that serve as hotspots for his obsessions.

The pretext for telling this story is to clean up a space that has stored things for years. On Jarvis’s couch are reflections on his own style, how Jarvis found his voice and how he has told us stories full of details. There is an obsession with nostalgia and the past through certain everyday objects such as a toy, a second-hand shirt or a plastic bag.

Like Ray Davies of The Kinks o Paul Weller of The Jam, Jarvis Cocker shares that tradition of lyricists who present us with whole worlds in their songs and show us the British idiosyncrasy in a very particular way. Pulp became one of the bands that helped define Britpop as a countercultural movement in the 1990s, much as Swingin’ London had been thirty years earlier. It was a generation that embraced the sounds of the sixties and updated them with a revitalized vision that looked optimistically towards the utopia of the new millennium.

Good Pop, Bad Pop leaves many hidden mysteries about its author and about Pulp. If you dear reader are looking for the juicy gossip about the golden age of Britpopyou won’t find them here. You won’t really find all the keys to deciphering Pulp’s letters, either.

We still don’t know who is the inspiration for “Common People” and we don’t have any more information about the girlfriend who gave him that album of Marianne Faithfuljust as we do not know who Deborah really is, whom we promised that we would meet in the year 2000, at that fountain by the side of the road as in Disco 2000.

For Jarvis Cocker separating the garbage from the memories is a meditation on creativity, it is a method to find your style and the inspiration to follow the same dream of making a rock band and conquering the world with “good pop music”.

antonio.becerril@eleconomista.mx