Good Pop, Bad Pop — Jarvis Cocker’s lofty legacy

In the 1980s, a tall young man in glasses and second-hand clothing was a common sight at jumble sales in the South Yorkshire city of Sheffield. He roamed among the used knick-knacks with a black dustbin bag, snapping up unconsidered trifles: bright polyester shirts, lurid ties, tweed jackets, plastic novelties.

A hoarder’s proportion of these cut-price hunter-gathering expeditions ended up collecting dust in Jarvis Cocker’s loft, joined by other flotsam and jetsam from the Pulp frontman’s life. It is “a self-curated creative archive”, he states grandly while inspecting a packet of chewing gum that he has kept for 20 years.

Good Pop, Bad Pop is a tour through the contents of Cocker’s loft. Our visit to his personal junkyard is prompted by an unspecified requirement on the 58-year-old’s part to sort through the mementoes and work out what to throw away or keep. (He has no idea why the gum is there: it gets binned.)

The result is a droll, jumble sale-like memoir of the formation of a gloriously unlikely British rock star. The anecdotes triggered by each objet trouvé provide a pick-and-mix account of his band Pulp’s rise to glory as one of Britpop’s Big Three alongside Blur and Oasis in the 1990s.

Of that triumvirate, Cocker and his Pulp bandmates were the hardest to pin down. They were northern, like Oasis, but also had art-school links, like Blur. They were old hands, not newcomers, having toiled for years in indie obscurity before breaking through. Cocker was in his thirties in 1995 when they had their first hit single with “Common People”, an effervescent anthem that managed to distil the messy clutter of British life — class, inequality, hypocrisy, sex, wit, resentment — into six perfect minutes of pop music.

He wrote (and still writes) clever, funny lyrics whose cleverness and funniness partly lay in disguising their seriousness. His arch stage persona conveyed a knowing approach to fame: the superior knowledge of its frivolity, and also the undignified knowledge that he wanted it for himself.

This ambivalence feeds into the concept behind Good Pop, Bad Pop’s title. What Cocker calls “Good Pop” is represented by the Top 40 singles charts in which the mysterious diktats of popular will are democratically revealed by the latest hits.

Meanwhile, “Bad Pop” is symbolised by the discovery in his loft of a cardboard facsimile of Margaret Thatcher’s blue handbag, sold as a joke item during her first victorious general election campaign in 1979. It is meant to have something to do with using the techniques of popular culture to manipulate public opinion — but Cocker loses interest in his slender argument. It gets sidelined, and the Thatcher bag is given the heave-ho.

His book is better treated as the episodic portrait of an agile, autodidact’s mind, with laugh-out-loud passages of comedy and stylish illustrations. Underpinning the random array of items (flyers, old Marmite jars, his first jumble-sale shirt, a Lemsip sachet) is the story of how he made himself into who he is, his acquisition of a personal style and outlook.

A crucial document is an exercise book that contains his manifesto for how Pulp should look, written after he forms the band at school in 1978. Drainpipe trousers, pointy boots, “rancid” ties: Cocker’s charity-shop chic, a life-long look, was sketched out by his teenage self.

The exercise book also has punk-inspired braggadocio about how Pulp would smash the system. Their first gig in the school hall provides a corrective. Cocker wears floral red trousers and a lime-green top made by his sister on a sewing machine. Pyrotechnics provided by a chemistry teacher operating a Bunsen burner prove a damp squib. Crushing embarrassment ensues. Like the building of Rome, another city of seven hills, Sheffield was not to be conquered in a day.

Cocker’s hometown, formerly the “Steel City” of Victorian manufacturing might, underwent a steep period of decline during the 1980s, accelerated by Thatcher’s programme of deindustrialisation. Cocker writes about Sheffield warmly in Good Pop, Bad Pop, but he depicts it as a backwater rather than one of England’s top music cities.

Pulp, in his telling, are perennial outsiders, recording their first songs in a cheap home studio whose owner’s wife insists on having a CCTV in the bedroom to make sure the musicians do not get up to any nonsense. A break comes when Cocker accosts the BBC DJ John Peel with a cassette tape of their songs, which leads to a national radio appearance. But then the door swings shut again.

Cocker turns Pulp’s wilderness years into an entertaining fable of persistence and self-faith. We do not reach their Britpop breakthrough in the 1990s. His semi-memoir ends on a mock-epic note, with his hospitalisation in 1985 after falling from a window ledge while trying to impress a girl, like a low-budget version of Bob Dylan’s storied motorcycle accident in 1966. He has kept her get-well card to him, which bears the arch message: “Hang in there Jarvis.” Hopefully we will not have to hang around long before his next trip to the loft.

Good Pop, Bad Pop: An Inventory by Jarvis Cocker Jonathan Cape, £20, 368 pages

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney is the FT’s rock critic

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