jarvis cocker
Pulp Will Reunite for Shows in 2023
Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker teased the band’s return to activity last week on Instagram, and yesterday confirmed the news during a London Q&A about his new book, Good Pop Bad Pop. A source close to the artist has further confirmed to SPIN that Pulp will indeed play some shows in 2023 but that no other details were yet available. Formed in 1978 when Cocker and original guitarist Peter Dalton were teenagers, the beloved U.K. band released seven albums during its initial classic era from 1983 to 2001. Pulp split in 2002 but reformed as a touring entity between 2011-2013. The band hasn’t released a new studio album since 2001’s We Love Life, arguably one of the best in its discography. Beyond the new book, Cocker has been active with solo projects in the time since Pulp’s last breakup. He ...
Jarvis Cocker Covers the Velvet Underground and the Fall for Dance Exhibit
Jarvis Cocker’s new solo project JARV IS… released its first album earlier this summer. At an exhibition about dancer and choreographer Michael Clark (aptly titled ‘A Musical Response to Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer’) the other night, Cocker and his band performed versions of the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs,” the Fall’s “Big New Prinz” along Cocker’s solo songs “Further Complications” and “House Music All Night Long.” The performance took place at London’s Barbican. “Take a look for yourself. Walk around, and slowly it will start to dawn on you, as it did on me: Dance is the language of the human body. And nobody speaks it better than Michael Clark,” Cocker said in a statement. Watch the performance below. [embedded content] Earlier this year, the former Pulp frontman spo...
The 25 Best Albums of the Britpop Era
Contrary to popular belief, Britpop was not a subgenre. It was also not a catchall for every bit of culture being manufactured in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. (That would be “Cool Britannia,” and like Britpop it almost exclusively applied to English entities.) Instead, Britpop was originally a press-driven crusade to champion domestic talent that represented the customs and lifestyle in their music. The credit (or blame) for the whole thing really goes to journalist Stuart Maconie, whose “Yanks Go Home” cover story in the April 1993 issue of Select framed indie acts like Suede, Pulp, Saint Etienne and the Auteurs as an antidote to the “bad grunge” that was “killing British music.” Although Suede frontman Brett Anderson graced the Select cover, he publicly derided th...
Jarvis Cocker Talks First Album in 11 Years and His First Time Crowdsurfing
There was a time when live music was all there was. No shaky mobile phone camera videos of concerts uploaded to Instagram Stories or YouTube. No hissing bootleg tapes recorded out of the lint-ridden pocket of a teenage concertgoer’s knitted wool sweater. No sounds emanating from a needle against a scratched-up piece of easily shattered vinyl. And originally, JARV IS… was going to be just that – a live music experience with little connection to a medium of plastic permanency. Thankfully, though, Jarvis Cocker, the bespectacled, lanky, former frontman of mid-’90s British indie band Pulp, and now frontman of JARV IS… decided against that. Instead, his band just dropped the wild, claustrophobic, profound Beyond the Pale, which is part pandemic record, part tribute to live music, and part musin...
Jarvis Cocker Says Fame Is Kind of Like Pornography
Jarvis Cocker gave quite the graphic analogy in a new interview. During a chat with The Sunday Times, the Pulp frontman compared fame to pornography. And honestly, it makes perfect sense. “It was a very strange time for me because I’d achieved my lifetime’s ambition and then found that it didn’t satisfy me,” he said when reflecting on the celebrity that followed Pulp’s 1995 hit “Common People.” He continued by saying fame “reminded me of pornography. Of how pornography takes an amazing thing – love between two people expressed physically – and kind of grosses it out.” The time was a confusing one for Cocker, who recalled thinking “What am I gonna believe in now?” He clearly figured it out though, because 25 years later and the 56-year-old is still making music. On Saturday, Cocke...
JARV IS Shares Latest Single ‘Save The Whale’
Jarvis Cocker’s solo debut album was going to be one of the highlights of the year. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the date got moved, but now we have some answers. The record, titled Beyond the Pale and being put out under the JARV IS moniker, will now be out on July 17. From that album, the Pulp singer has already shared “Must I Evolve?” and “House Music All Night Long” from the collection. Now you can add a third song to it. The video for “Save the Whale” was recorded while Cocker was in quarantine and features images posted online of him over the past few years. Here’s what he had to say about it. “The title popped into my head as I was leaving the cinema after having seen Nick Broomfield’s Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love documentary. The “Smooth World...
