THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.180 - JARVIS COCKER

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

Adam talks with British musician Jarvis Cocker about Beatles, the perils of nostalgia, finding yourself (by falling out of a window) losing yourself (on the dance floor), the weirdness of pop stardom and some of the objects he writes about in his book Good Pop, Bad PopThis conversation was recorded in London on February 24th, 2022Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support.Podcast artwork by Helen GreenRELATED LINKSGOOD POP, BAD POP (BOOK) by JARVIS COCKER - 2022 (ROUGH TRADE)JARVIS COCKER'S SUNDAY SERVICE - BBC 6 MUSIC (SOME EPISODES ON INTERNET ARCHIVE) RITON PRESENTS GUCCI SOUNDSYSTEM - LET'S STICK AROUND (FEATURING JARVIS COCKER) - 2021 (YOUTUBE)JARVIS COCKER - ALINE (FROM THE FRENCH DISPATCH) - 2021 (YOUTUBE)ME OH MYRA (PARODY OF PULP BY CHRIS MORRIS FROM BRASS EYE) - (YOUTUBE)PAT FINNERTY'S WHAT MAKES THIS SONG STINK - WEEZER - BEVERLY HILLS - 2021 (YOUTUBE)ARTICLE ON PAT FINNERTY'S YOUTUBE SERIES 'WHAT MAKES THIS SONG STINK' - 2022 (GUITAR RAMBLE) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how are you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here. And I'm reporting to you from a farm track in the east of England.

It is early June 2022 and I'm going for a walk with my dog friend, keeping it on message, not mixing it up. I haven't reported to you from anywhere other than the farm track for quite a while, have I really? it doesn't have to be the farm track does it but that's just the way things work out mainly I'm here most of the time which is quite nice I like working from home but every now and again it is nice to see different parts of the world and actually I got that opportunity over the last couple of weeks. I went to visit a friend in Spain and also catch up with some various family members and all sorts of other bits and thing that I do my best to keep up with but you think I'll just I'll do that in a second I'm just doing this thing at the moment and then I'll get back to that and then six months go by you probably thought I was

hanging out with the Laura Laura Lully Queen and celebrating the Lully Jubilee. Oh, hanging out with beautiful Eddie Sheeran and Elisa Keyes and singing all kinds of songs that don't really have anything to do with Queen Jubilee. But I wasn't. I was doing all that other stuff instead. Rosie says hi. She's up ahead. Bouncing. Anyway, listen. I'm going to tell you right now, podcats,

about podcast number 180. This one features a rambling conversation with British musician, radio host, and now writer, Jarvis Branson Cocker. Cocker facts. Jarvis, currently aged 58, was born and raised in the English city of Sheffield, South Yorkshire. The first incarnation of Jarvis' band Pulp was formed at the end of the 1970s when he was still at school, aged just 15.

After a decade and a half that included line-up and style changes, art school, hiatuses and injuries, Pulp's 1994 album, their fourth, I think, his and hers, caught the imagination of British music fans with songs filled with catchy hooks and lyrics about societal dysfunction, pervy teachers and sexual yearning delivered by Jarvis in a voice that ranged from sneering yelps to confessional whispers. Pulp's 1995 album Different Class pushed them even further into the mainstream with a series of hit singles

that included the enduring anthem of class, tourism, common people. By the time Jarvis attended the Brit Awards in 1996, Pulp were one of the biggest bands in the UK and when, after a few drinks, Jarvis invaded the stage to poke fun at the messianic pomposity of a performance by Michael Jackson, he became, for a while, fodder for the mainstream media. The stresses and strains of fame in the years after that incident bled into the atmosphere that pervaded Pulp's 1998 album This Is Hardcore. And after one final album, We Love Life, Pulp split in 2002. The band have since reunited for a few live shows around 2011 to 2013,

but the last couple of decades have seen Jarvis release five further albums and several singles of his own material, as well as collaborations with other artists like Chilly Gonzales and covers of classic French pop songs, which appear on his 2021 album Chanson d'Henri Tip Top. My conversation with Jarvis took place in a nice little studio at his publisher's offices in London back in late February of this year, 2022, just before the publication of Jarvis's book, Good Pop, Bad Pop, which is a beautifully illustrated series of memories and musings about music and life in bands, inspired by souvenirs and personal effects discovered in Jarvis's loft. We spoke about the Beatles, the perils of nostalgia, finding yourself by falling out of a window, losing yourself by throwing great shapes on the dance floor,

the weirdness of pop stardom, and a few of the objects which Jarvis brought in to show me that feature in his Good Pop, Bad Pop book. We began our conversation by talking about the effect that certain sounds can have on people. For my money, whether he's singing or speaking, the sound of Jarvis' voice is always melodious, as listeners to his Sunday service show on Six Music, which ran from 2010 to 2017, will attest. So I hope you enjoy the following hour luxuriating in a warm sonic bath of pine fresh jarvis

back at the end for a bit more waffle but right now with jc here we go We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that. Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat. Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, This isn't like a bride to be nice to me. But there's some cakes here. You bought pastries. I have to admit that they're a day old. That's all right. They're nice.

It's like a coconut macaroon type thing. Oh, that's nice. Yeah? Except I won't have it now because I've made the mistake of eating on the podcast in the past. And the wave of fury that I got from listeners. Oh, really? It was memorable. What, too casual? They don't like the sound.

You know, there's people with kind of, they get triggered by eating sounds. Some people might like it. Misophonia, I think it's called. I'm sure there are people who like it, like ASMR people. Have you investigated that? ASMR?

Yeah. Only in a very superficial way, just to find out what it is, and I've listened to some of the things. I don't like it because I don't like people whispering. I do. Oh, you do do. Of course you do.

You're one of the top whisperers. You're a musical whisperer. Yeah, but I haven't investigated it very thoroughly. But I like the idea that somehow it's just the sound of the voice coming to you. And don't they do something like rub hairbrushes and things like that? Yeah. And that sounds can somehow trigger some pleasurable feeling inside your mind. Yeah.

From the one article I read about it, that seemed to be the idea. Yeah, that's exactly it i mean there's probably a whole jarvis cocker section in the asmr library i mean that's essentially what the sunday service was really wasn't it was a form of early asmr for the six music listeners well i like to think so i like to think that maybe people were kind of lulled into some, not completely unconscious state, but, you know, like semi-conscious. Because I think, you know, like those times when you, sometimes when you wake up and you hear a piece of music or something, it seems to somehow get through the defences that you normally put up

and go straight into you and make a really big impression. I remember once waking up and um the long and winding road you know the beatles song was playing and something about paul mccartney's voice on that was really it was like he was really inside my mind telling me a story you know it was really touching did you watch get back i did yeah i was a bit um are you a big beatles fan well i think a lot of people have said this but i didn't realize how big a fan i was until i watched get back right they've always been there in the background and i certainly went through a phase in my teens where i was discovering their albums for the first time and that's all all I listened to. But I never thought of myself as a massive fan.

You write about them a bit in the book, right? Yeah, because I think, because I'm a little bit older than you. Yeah, you're 1963, I'm 1969. Right, yeah. So, the Beatles were number one, I think I mentioned that, you know, when I was born. Obviously, I wasn't aware of that as I popped out. Yeah. born obviously i wasn't aware of that as i popped out yeah um but then they were kind of there in the background and then weirdly split up just around the time you know when i was seven when you start to actually have memories don't you i mean i don't remember much before the age of seven

odd little things but not i don't have a sense of myself really knowing what was going on. So, yeah, they were a kind of... So I was into them. And then as a kind of slightly older child in my early teens, I was a bit obsessed and tried to... I would stay in in the holidays and try and tape songs of theirs off the radio because they still used to play them quite a lot on the radio in those days. So, yeah.

So I was a little bit uh wary of watching get back because of that i didn't want the uh that wonderful illusion to be spoiled but it wasn't and um i liked their work ethic you know because they started just after new year and and they were getting there reasonably early in the morning, like before midday and working. Not John. He was coming in late. Well, he was, but he was still working. You know, they weren't all sitting around saying, aren't we great? We're the Beatles. Yeah. Were there elements that reminded you of Dynamics and Pulp when you watched that? Were there elements that reminded you of Dynamics and Pulp when you watched that? I'm used to those things. I mean, being in a band is boring most of the time

because you just sat around and you've got all that thing, and I know that it goes like that and it goes like that and then let's try it like this. And, you know, the endless kind of sitting around and trying things. And so I did think to myself, am I really going to sit through eight hours of rehearsal? And that is what, again, that's what I think made me wary of watching Get Back because the Beatles' music is kind of unassailable and strangely perfect with not many bad songs.

I didn't want it to be spoiled by seeing the bad side of it or the boring side. I kind of wanted them to stay perfect, but somehow, magically, they have done. Yeah, well, that's probably credit to Peter Jackson for judiciously editing all that footage. But still, some of those moments, including that amazing bit in the first one where Paul McCartney sits down, starts noodling, and within five minutes he's got get back.

That's when I knew like, oh, okay, this is going to be pretty good. Yeah, and I also like the way because obviously everybody knew that Yoko was hanging around yeah but then you know George has got his kind of Hare Krishna guy sitting in a corner yes and then at one point uh Linda comes down with her daughter from another relationship and she's kind of like just running around whilst she's trying to, you know, and I like the fact that they were trying to,

because they obviously, you know, they grew up famous. And then they were getting to an age where you might want to get married, you might want to have kids. And they were kind of trying to do it while still making a record. And when Yoko and John started wailing and everyone sort of got into it

and McCartney even joined in and that whole idea that everyone was sitting around glowering at John and Yoko like why has he brought his girlfriend here kind of thing which is what we were given to understand was the situation.

That was totally dispelled. It was great. Get my notes even though I may not actually need my notes but I did make a lot of notes in the course of reading your book, which I enjoyed so much. Thank you. So much resonated. I've got too many notes now, so maybe I'll just sort of hit them arbitrarily. But before then, in the spirit of bringing back objects from an attic raid,

which essentially is what the book is, right? Yes, it's all based on there's an attic in the top room of a house that I did used to live in for a short while, and now some friends of mine live there. And during the time I was there, I stored stuff there, and then I also just threw stuff in there, just for it to be out of the way and then um I believe that you have quite a lot of things that you've held on to

from the past you know I I wonder why one does that for me it's always like the idea that it's going to come in useful one day or I don't't know. So from time to time, this loft would bother me because I'd think, you know, there must be some important things or something's there and I should deal with it. But I never really got round to it. And then eventually I got round to it, and that's what the book is. Well, I don't actually, I shouldn't do a spoiler at this point, should I? I don't get to the end of it, but I mean, I'd grappled with some of it. fun. I liked nostalgia. I liked it every time I moved house and I had to rationalize all my junk,

as it were. And the process of going through and chucking stuff away and finding old diaries and knickknacks and mementos was enjoyable. And then suddenly, when I started feeling a little older and I had children and I had more of a defined sense of mortality, it wasn't fun anymore. Did you find that? I'm sure that's got something to do with it. There's also a more practical reason as well because this loft isn't really a loft. It's more, you know, like when somebody has a loft conversion done so you get an extra room in a house.

And so then you end up with a quite a triangular room, don't you? Because you've got the roof shape. As you describe it, Toblerone space. Yes, they are. So,

so, and then just in this particular room, just the sides are partitioned off and made into some storage space. So they're only like three foot high and then go down to nothing. So just physically, I was starting to think, well, I better go in there soon because i

just won't be able to get in you know i won't be able to bend down far enough or i'll get in and i'll get stuck you'll have to send a victorian child in there yeah so so so i had to kind of to deal with it yeah uh in the course of writing my memoirish book, I found a thing that my dad sent to me, an email about this sort of thing, because old and asked him for some observations. And he talked about heading into the attic, literally and metaphorically, one goes into the attic looking for reminders and is overwhelmed by the accumulation of things, most of which have been completely, or in Freudian analysis, probably purposefully forgotten. It's dangerous stuff and can result in severe emotional distress. The mistakes one made, the wrongs endured or inflicted on others, the hopes shattered,

the irreplaceable losses suffered, the projects of high promise unfulfilled. So I think you're getting an idea of the kind of person my dad was. Well, everybody's like that though, aren they i mean um yeah i suppose what i found one thing that saved me maybe from going too much into a kind of uh state of morbidity or whatever was the fact that i also kind of used it as a bit of a bin because it was like say if my mum was coming down to the house and the house was untidy I would just kind of get all the things that were lying around and just throw them in there

and so sometimes just rubbish would end up there so I brought a couple of things from there so you know like so a lot of the things are actually objects without any too much personal resonance you know so this is, maybe I can make this make a sound this could be a bit ASMR

wasn't that nice can you guess resonance you know so this is a maybe i could make this make a sound this could be a bit asmr oh wasn't that nice now can you guess listener what that is it's a plastic container being opened but what let's give one more go it's a mini polo dispenser i don't't know if they make these anymore, do they? I never saw that in the first place. It's like, it's in the shape of a large polo, but it's plastic and it has an opening hatch. And that takes you down in the book, a memory rabbit hole of your time living

in what was known as, remind me what the name of the place? The Wicker. The Wicker. The Wicker. Yeah, which is a part of Sheffield, yeah. Yeah, I was living in a, I had a friend who was offered a flat rent-free in return for looking after this old factory building that had been converted into like band rehearsal rooms

and there was a model railway enthusiast centre, table tennis things and i i lived there with him and the polo thing happened because he allowed someone to live there who he knew uh from school who'd had a polo addiction at school but that was in the days before sugar-free polo so with with the result that he actually was wearing dentures by the time he was 18 because he'd rotted all his teeth away. Mate. Don't do it. Don't do it. But your description of life at the wicker with Tim was quite hair raising.

It does seem to have been a kind of watershed moment for you, though, as a person embracing the kind of more artistic side of yourself and that lifestyle of having all sorts of random people coming and going through this place to the extent that Tim decided he had to get rid of all the chairs to discourage people from hanging around too long. Yeah, well, that was quite a genius move of his, really. You know, at the time when I moved into that flat, it was just after I'd left school, and we were deep in thatcher's britain

then so just about everybody that i knew was on the dole especially people in bands because you could still kind of get where you could get supplemented benefit without ever having worked halcyon days really so so you could leave you know you could be in a band and still get a little bit of money and because this factory was kind of very near to the center of town it became a popular stopping off point and what was known as the dole strolling circuit you know so people would wander around aimlessly and then come there for a free cup of tea or whatever and then often not leave so my friend tim whose flat it was came up with this very good idea of just getting rid of all the chairs in the whole building so that people would come and have a cup of tea and then kind of look awkwardly around for somewhere to sit and then there wasn't anywhere so then as soon as they finished the tea they had to go really

but it had an impact on us because uh like if you wanted to eat your dinner you had to go really but it it had an impact on us because uh like if you wanted to eat your dinner you had to go through this rigmarole of having like a tin tray on on legs and sitting on the floor to do it which i did for a while leaning against the wall yeah with your legs stretched out yeah yeah yeah which is yeah that's less than ideal it was less than ideal but it was um it was probably worth it not to have uh some of these nutters just like jabbering at you all the time you know at least you got a bit of peace but it wasn't there that you fell out of the window or was it no luckily no i would have no it wasn't yeah because you were right at the top of the yeah so i would have killed myself there yeah but but it, yeah. But it was around that time that I fell out of a window, yeah.

And to summarize the story, you'd seen someone else do a trick where they disappeared out of a window and then came in a different window or something? Yeah, it was... Yeah. No, but that's the kind of thing that somebody would do at a party, you know. Sure. And it was. It was at a party.

And it was an oldish house. So somebody pulled up the sash window, went out onto the window ledge, and then there was another window just, you know, like maybe three feet further along the wall. And then they kind of reached around the exterior of the house got onto the next window ledge pulled up the window and came back in and it so you know there was just this brief moment when they went they passed out around the outside of the building and i thought i don't know why it made a big impression on me i just thought wow that's really cool great trick and then i attempted to do the same trick in order to impress a girl that I'd gone back to her place.

And it was just a bit awkward, you know, when you kind of can't think of something to say or whatever. And so I thought, oh, yeah, look at this. And but she was living in quite a modern apartment block. And their windows were these ones that are like a metal frame. And it's it's hinged in the middle. So you you kind of do the catch and then you push it so the bottom part of the window goes outside the building and the top part comes inside like i said an old school blackboard that you could yeah yeah so so the thing is that there was no way i could go out onto that window ledge and stand erect and go around the outside of the building because the

window was poking out but so i should have just let it go then and thought of some other way of impressing her. But I don't know. For some reason, I just thought, oh, I'm going to have a go and said, well, OK, what I'm going to do is I'm going to hang from the window ledge. I'm going to swing to the other one and then I'm going to pull myself up. And she was saying, don't be stupid, you know. But for some reason, I thought that I had the strength to do that. And as soon as I was hanging from the window ledge, it became really apparent that I didn't.

Not only did I not have the strength to swing across, I also didn't have the strength to even pull myself back up and come back into the safety of the room, you know, on the window ledge that i was on already so that was um a problem and when you fell which eventually you did you broke quite a few bones fractured a few ended up in hospital and that's where you sort of had your epiphany yeah as a songwriter right and a human being maybe both yeah as i say i'd left school with this like a lot of people i suppose you you have this vague idea you think oh artists seem to have an interest in life and i and they look interesting i want to

be one but i wasn't quite sure how to do it. I had started a band, you know, I'd started a band at school, and I'd been doing the band since I'd left school, but it wasn't successful or anything. Well, I suppose it was part of the reason why I wrote the book as well, really, is that you might have this idea that to become an artist, you know, you should study the lives of other artists, or it's like you're looking, it's lofty. You're looking into the clouds.

You're seeing something that's coming from another dimension or something like that, you know. And you kind of disregard the things that are nearest to you and that are all around you. And what I credit the fall from the window with doing was being, you know know like quite literally bringing me back down to earth and then from that point something clicked you know and I kind of realized that the things that could provide inspiration and stimulation and everything were just like

really just there and I'd been at overlooking them all the time, trying to look for these mythical artistic things. But actually the stuff of everyday life was what was interesting and was what you could turn into art if you wanted to. And so as soon as that had happened, I got really excited by that and tried to put it into practice. And I've never looked back since. Yeah. to put it into practice and i've never looked back since yeah because one of the songs that you wrote at the beginning of that new phase was i scrubbed the crabs that killed sheffield well no

that's i mentioned that one in the book because that was like a harbinger can we call that sure is that the right use of that word oh maybe like a sneak preview yeah that was one a really stupid song it was as you can guess from the title i scrubbed the crabs that killed sheffield but it wasn't it was an example of writing about something that had really happened to me i had a job in sheffield castle market and our stall in the fish market, its speciality was selling crabs. And usually they would arrive on a Saturday morning so that they were fresh, you know,

because it's best if they're still alive immediately before you cook them. Apologies to, you know, people who don't like that kind of thing. But one day, for some reason, they got delivered on the friday evening before and the guy who ran the stall i don't know he used to drink quite a lot and he didn't really think it through and he put them all in some kind of like big black plastic bins of water

thinking that they'd stay alive till the next day but of course they just couldn't survive in tap water rather than sea water so they died and they kind of started rotting and the first i knew of it was when i arrived for work and there was this terrible smell but the owner of the stall wouldn't you know he didn't do that he should just chucked him away but still we sold about i don't know 10 or 20 before like some kind of you know markets inspector guy came in and said we condemned them and made us throw them all away but i often wondered whether anybody died as a result of that so i wrote a song about it in the song it kind of made it a bit more dramatic by

saying i scrubbed the crabs that killed sheffield because we didn't sell that many but um so that was an example of trying to write about something that really happened a kind of a daft song so I had tried that but it wasn't until I'd fallen out the window that it became my kind of main modus operandi and you're good in the book at not where you make a point fairly early on that you don't want to demystify the process throughout my career if we can call it that and i think we can you know people often have come up to me and said you know how do i get started in songwriting you know now how do you know that i always try to answer them i don't just walk past them or shut the door in the face whatever but i haven't really got anything to say that will help because you just have to find some way of tuning in

to your own thing that will make it happen. But it's different for every person. But having said that, I do think every person is capable of it. And I think that's, again, what is exciting about it. I think that that creative ability and also the creative urge is in everybody. It's just whether you listen to it or take it

seriously or not and there are many details and anecdotes in the book that i think do shed light on the creative process and could even be you know retained as bits of advice for example one of the items that you write about because more or less the book is in the form of an item that you've found in the Toblerone loft and then an investigation of the memories associated with that item and sometimes that goes off tangentially to musical things that you've done with pulp or whatever other times it's just the anecdote on its own, but all of it kind of feeds in in an indirect way to who you are and the work you do

and your kind of creative sensibility, if we can call it that. One of the things you talk about when you bring out the Tensai rhythm machine, guitar aoki machine that you have up there is the fact that you ended up cranking up your guitar and trying to sing louder than it when you were in the process of songwriting and that's kind of a useful thing to do or it was for you and maybe for other people i don't know if you were doing it because you were diffident about your voice or whatever, but maybe it ended up feeding into the way that you sing and the very distinctive

kind of delivery that you have. Yeah, I mean, I think I wanted to write songs and stuff. And I knew I had to sing because songs aren't really going to be great unless they're sung you know so you've got to do it but i'm naturally quite a shy person so i was wary of doing that and um i remember when i was doing the six music show you know i used to get quite a lot of records sent to me and i just kind of noticed a lot of of the records had singing that was like and and um and at one point i thought maybe all these records have just been made by people on their laptops in the bedroom and they just try not to disturb the people in the next flat yeah because it's you know it's and also it's just not as embarrassing

if you're going but i think if you want to put emotion into what you're singing, then you have to kind of break through that barrier. And I'm not going to do it now because it's an expensive microphone and I wouldn't want to harm it. But, you know, you have to. Oh, yeah. You've got to kind of project. And to do that without it sounding silly like it does now, then you need to have some.

So you have to turn whatever you play in a keyboard or the guitar up. So you have to make a bit of a strain to get over it. And somehow by doing that, maybe some rogue emotion or something is going to happen. Yes. You're being forced to commit, which is really a massive piece of the puzzle, isn't it? Yeah. That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. Because you're right. I hadn't thought about that before but of course that makes total sense that billy eilish style the very breathy close mic singing which she does brilliantly and and many people like that do brilliantly because you can get an awful lot of nuance in when you're when you're that close but what you do lose is

is that more declamatory style yeah well it doesn't have to be either or i mean that's what i like about and that's why the microphone was such a fantastic invention because until then it was opera and who wants to listen to that you know i mean i hate it it's horrible isn't it i mean it really is horrible and so you know a microphone meant that people could kind of sing almost in the way that they spoke. You didn't have to do it so much louder than speaking to somebody. So that opened up, like you say, a lot more possibilities and a fact for people to be nuanced in what they're doing. There's no nuance in opera. It's just like an orbital sander going for three hours that's what it is for me horrible um but there are moments and like you

know again like in real life in a conversation you might get agitated and you might want to get your point across and there then you'll sing out more and so then you're getting more, it just gives you a bit chair and a fancy camera so I could sit and take pictures from my chair of the river of time, of the river of time. I also made sure I had my laptop there so I could use my photo manipulation software and tweak the river of time. Time, time, time, time. river of time now I have an object from my loft that I brought along. You can have this if you want. I've got one of them. Have you? Okay, good.

I'm glad because I didn't really want to part with it. So can you describe what I'm holding? What you are holding, Adam, is like a... I can't say it's a blow-up doll because it's not big enough, is it? So it's an inflatable me, but it's got a very large head and then a small body. It says Select on the back. I remember these. It wasn't just me.

There were a number of other pop performers, but it was given away with Select magazine. It was given away with Select magazine, which was one of my favorite music mags towards the end of the 90s. And it's, as you say, a little inflatable thing, sort of in the shape of a club, really. And maybe it's a caricature, quite a good caricature, wouldn't you say? Yeah, it's not too bad. It's not offensive, I don't think. I wonder if it's even an Andrew Collins caricature because he's a very talented artist. Anyway, I don't know

but there was you there was the gallagher's i think there was damon albran and all the giants of what you refer to in your book as br star t p star p because you can't bear to say the word no i can't bear to say that word sounds No, I can't bear to say that word. Sounds like Bridport. Thatcher in your book gets the star treatment. Yeah, I can't bear to see her as well. When I say the star treatment, I mean the vowels replaced by stars so as not to spell out her name in its entirety. And the B word gets the star treatment as well.

But you've kept your select blow-up caricature. It's somewhere in the house, yeah. I've seen it, not recently, but I'm sure it still exists, yeah. So it's not like you are trying to erase all evidence of that period from your life? No, that would be silly, you know. It was just that name. It's just the movement that you kind of didn't feel. No, I mean, even to people in other bands and stuff,

I got on with All Right. It's more just, it's the first part, the B-R-I-T bit. Right, right. Which kind of had unfortunate kind of jingoistic union jack-waving connotations, which I don't think anybody involved in it intended it to have you know yeah and it was it was very contrived idea of a scene and it was clear that a lot of these bands were very different and didn't have that much in common and yet they were just

smooshed together in a way that was guaranteed to sell music mags and but felt fun as a fan at the time felt like oh yeah this is we're in a thing we're living through a thing it was sort of exciting i mean there were a lot of good bands around yeah it was exciting it definitely was exciting when you could feel that it was starting to happen yeah Yeah. So I formed the band at school in, like, 1979 or something. So we'd already been going, like, over 10 years. So with very, you know, absolutely no success. So to suddenly feel like this indie backwater was getting gentrified or people were taking notice of it was exciting.

Yeah, it was. It was the fact that you were going to be allowed in the mainstream in some way was intoxicating. Because, you know, like many kids of my generation, I'd grown up with that fantasy of being a pop star. So that had always been something at the back of my mind. But I suppose as the years passed, I kind of thought, well, that's not really going to happen. And then lo and behold, weirdly, it seemed like it could happen. And then indeed it did happen. So it was.

Yeah, that was exciting. And not many people get to realize those kind of fantasies. I mean, firemen do, I suppose. But that's about it. Firemen and spacemen. Spac spaceman there's not that many of them no but you also like me thought about being a spaceman a lot or did you think about being a spaceman or did you just like all the world of sci-fi and and the tv shows because you one of the objects in the book is a lunar landing module i'm going to come back to the music in a second

because i do want to ask a little bit more about that time but i did um the stuff you were saying about star trek and tv shows and what was the magazine that you used to love oh yeah there was a comic called countdown right you know i was very young when i got the you know because the moon landing happened when i was almost six so space was really happening you know space they really did land on the moon but then at the same time star trek was on the telly and there was this comic that was laid out like a newspaper and it had like articles like saying you want to be an astronaut or ufos do they really exist you know so it was all at that age,

I couldn't really discern between what was really happening and what was, they were just saying was going to happen in the comics. So I kind of just assumed, because all this stuff was going on, that by the time I was growing up, it would just be quite a commonplace thing to be living in space. You know, there would be big space stations orbiting the Earth and maybe it would be a choice. There would be big space stations orbiting the Earth and maybe it would be a choice.

It would be like moving to a posh neighborhood, moving to space. So I think that had an effect on how seriously I took life on Earth. Not very. Now if I think about going to space, I don't think I'd like it. I really don't. I think about going to space I don't think I'd like it I mean I really don't I think that I think that like uh being weightless would probably make me feel really nauseous it was

like over a terrible upset stomach after that you know nothing would stay down it was just floating around all over the place you know and uh I think you know 2001 I mentioned that in the book and I think I watched that again not that long ago and I think that gets a bit of that the kind of dread of space of being so alone you know there's that bit where one of the it's where they first kind of realize that Hal's gone a bit rogue and it kind of something goes wrong he's supposed to be uh fixing something and then suddenly he's just being cut and he's just floating off in space. And that idea of being a single living being just out in that kind of vast vacuum emptiness of space,

I don't think I would like that loneliness now. I think when I was a kid I thought, yeah, it'd be great, but now it would scare me to death, I think. Yeah, I know I had that real realization not that long ago as well, that the absolute terror of doing a spacewalk and being confronted with the possibility that you could, if something went wrong, just drift off into nothingness and then run out of air and, oh, absolutely terrifying.

It's not worth it. You know, like there was all this stuff quite recently, wasn't it, about people going to Mars? And there there was some rumor i don't know if it was ever really true but saying they were looking for volunteers who would go on a mars mission but you couldn't come back right but the thing of you know you had to just go there and then that's it you're living on mars and you can't come back i wouldn't do that no i wouldn't do that. No, I wouldn't do that either. So what I was getting to before was, oh, yes. So we were talking about the excitement of suddenly finding yourself a sort of pop star. Well, an actual pop star in the mid 90s and being lumped in with this movement.

mid 90s and being lumped in with this movement i liked you because you seem to be above it all in a certain way not snooty or superior but separate from it and operating it was definitely much more uh relatable and exciting because your references seem to be more arty and more left field than a lot of the other stuff that was going on so i like that and then of course there was the look and the shapes you were throwing and the fact that you weren't you didn't seem to be tribal in the way that a lot of other bands just were by default and the way that a lot of pop musicians end up being you know it ends up it's weird how people in movements that you would think are kind of counter-cultural or anti-establishment end up being very tribal like you mentioned going to uh a fall gig were you actually at the fall gig when someone shouted out or when markie smith

shouted out all right yeah it was a fall concert and um it was at sheffield polytechnic and at some point he just went hello suzy sue how are you doing like there was a because there was a girl there with the proper you know kind of punk look very spiky hair, leather jacket. So he was kind of taking the piss out of that. And yeah, he was a big influence on me, Marky Smith, in that way. He used to just look like a normal guy that you'd see in a betting shop or something. He just used to wear those kind of clothes. It was quite exciting, especially because I was buying clothes from jumble sales at the time. So Marky Smith was quite a good inspiration

because he showed how you could take things and kind of alter them just by the way that you wore them or the fact that the music you made didn't go with like a 70s shirt or whatever, you know. So that was good news for me because that's all I could afford to do was to buy clothes from a jumble sale. So I couldn't afford a leather jacket.

So it was I wouldn't have worn one anyway, I don't think. Then the other distinctive thing, of course, certainly towards the end of the 90s, was the way you moved and your dancing. And you talk about dancing in the book, trips to the Limit Club. And is that where you suddenly realized what the point of dancing was well the limit club was like it was a nightclub in sheffield very poor hygiene but it was like it was the only place that played like alternative music and even though sheffield is quite a big city i think a lot of things about sheffield are a bit like a small town or whatever. So, for instance, in the Limit Club, like I say,

it was the only place for alternative music, but it had to kind of cater for everybody there. So you would get like a section where they would play like three Psycho Billy songs. And so all these guys with plaid shirts, but with the sleeves cut off. So you had a bit of a kind of cap sleeve look. And they would all get on and kind of chuck each other around while there was a psycho billy track on and then then it'd go to goth and then it'd do new romantic it would give everybody a fair crack of the whip very very nice for that it was just because music was playing and people were dancing and sometimes you would run out of things to say

i suppose that maybe that's why i first started dancing. And then when I did it, I got into it because I'd always been into music, but it was more like you listened to it and you like a tune and it's something that's happening inside your head. You know, especially nowadays, music is something that's happening really inside your head because most people listen to it on headphones.

And then you were suddenly in this place where it was really loud and there was bass, you know, and you could actually feel, if you stood really near the speakers at the back you could feel it like making your trousers flap about so it was like wow you know this is like a whole new dimension to music it's kind of like a physical force you can actually feel the floor moving and stuff so that was great because then you were feeling music in your body not just in your head you could actually feel it moving through you.

And everybody's self-conscious when they first try to dance. They think people are looking at them, but then you suddenly realize everybody's not bothered about you at all. And anyway, it's quite dark and there's some lights that are flashing on and off. And then you can kind of really, it's great because if you keep going after maybe one or two songs, then your brain will just start to kind of turn off a bit and then you kind of just react to it physically. And to discover that music had this other side to it was, again, yeah, like you say, a bit of an epiphany, really. You call it ego death on the dance floor.

Yeah. Regression back to an older, more primitive way of being, a state of bliss and non-being. Yeah. I mean, for someone like me who is quite self-conscious, that is hard to do. And it's only, I've only successfully done it a few times. But a lot of the time I find myself imitating other people. And I imagine a lot of people over the years have thrown what we can now call Jarvis Cocker-like moves. Were you aware of anyone else dancing and throwing those kinds of shapes before you? Were you thinking of anyone when you were doing those things?

I mean, I used to watch Top of the Pops and stuff. And so that was the first time I saw bands performing. You know, I think before I ever saw a band on a stage, I would have seen them on the TV screen. So obviously people on Top of the Pops would be acting up to the camera a bit and maybe moving more than they would in a normal concert. Also because they were miming, so they didn't have to worry about missing a note. So they could really give it that one or whatever. So it probably evolved from the thing that you mentioned from

dancing in the limit so i realized i could dance and that it was you know you could react to music and then so then you could react to your own music as you were performing it it's like as it kind of passes through your body on its way to come out of your mouth and it kind of sets off these kind of things you know and it's a nice feeling because nice feeling because it's like you're riding it or something, you know, as it's happening and it's pleasurable. Yeah. I suppose you could trace a line either consciously or unconsciously between things like Bowie pointing at the camera

on that Top of the Pops performance of Starman and a similar sort of move you used to do but you embellished it a little bit and turned it into something a bit more saucy you know what i mean like moving your finger twist twisty thing yeah and then chris morris imitated that very well all right with his blouse thing yeah yeah well that's the trouble i mean that's the other because yeah i didn't mind chris morris doing this thing but then the thing that made me really reconsider my move or get to a bit over self-conscious about them was stars in their eyes somebody did me on stars in their eyes

this kid called gareth from leeds i got to know him actually he'd gone to the audition to do freddie mercury but was told that they already had like three freddie mercurys or whatever so they said can you do anybody else and he said oh yeah i can do jarvis so then he did me and he got picked and so somebody alerted me to the fact that sunday was going to be on stars in their eyes doing me so i watched it and and that was very, very... That was profoundly disturbing. It really was. I'm sure.

It was because, as I say, I think that whatever moves I had hadn't... Yeah, they'd obviously come from watching the telly or dancing, but they hadn't been self-consciously worked out i hadn't worked with someone down at pineapple dance studios you know like uh arlene phillips and you know like oh yeah nice i think like a little bit of a shoulder shake here yeah lots of very sexy nothing you know so i hadn't done that yeah i was aware that i moved on stage but i wasn't like doing it in front of a mirror or anything like that so i didn't know exactly what it looked like then suddenly there's this bloke from Leeds which he'd made it even more

painful doing it and and I could kind of recognize it obviously I'd seen myself in videos and stuff like that and then suddenly I thought oh god you know it's like somehow it meant that it wasn't mine anymore then because I could be done by somebody else i didn't stop moving but it made me kind of think about that if you'll allow me to go off on another tangent for this was please so the reason i know his name and stuff like that was maybe in an attempt to uh heal after this trauma of seeing somebody do me and making it making me feel weird was we actually took him out on tour with us. We did a tour after, we did a record called This Is Hardcore,

which is like Pulp's dark album. Yeah, man. And we started with this song called The Fear, which is a dark song. And the stage was all backlit. The band was just silhouettes. And then Gareth was with us. And he came on with my best suit on

and walked to the front of the stage doing the Jarvis shape. But I was singing from behind a speaker. So everybody thought it was him and they were all cheering. And then I actually walked on as well. And so then there were two Jarvises. And the crowd, it was quite good actually it did work quite well it was a bit like being at wimbledon people were like looking from one jarvis to the other thinking who was the real one yeah and um and then eventually we kind of you

know revealed the trick but then he got thrown out well no we didn't throw him off the tour but he ruined my suit mate how did you do that well he was slightly fatter than me and he did like a an extravagant leg move and and just ripped the whole ass out of the trousers so that was the end of that suit and it was a really nice suit so the whole thing was coming apart at the seams oh yes great segue i mean when i heard that album that so so that was at the end uh of a turbulent decade exciting decade all sorts of shenanigans ups and downs but um the track this is hardcore was was a real favorite of mine but it really did seem to be tapping into something quite apocalyptic. I've seen this storyline played out so many times before. And that, you know, superficially, it was about kind

of just someone in the throes of an excessive, decadent lifestyle or something and feeling like they might get sucked down the plug hole at any moment. But was there also a sense at that point of, well, today, as we speak, Russia has just invaded the Ukraine? Yeah, we should mention that because that's like a cloud hanging over this whole podcast, isn't it? Yes, I guess so. Yeah. I mean, both of us, I think, had the same thought when we woke up this morning and looked at the news of feeling odd about going off to do a podcast where we're just sort of chatting about pop culture, about sort of essentially

ephemeral things, especially when they're compared to the misery that's going to be unleashed by this invasion. Were you beginning to feel or did you ever feel as a pop star just sort of overwhelmed by like, what am I i doing does the universe need this did you ever have any any of those kind of existential crises yeah i think well because it as i say i i'd wanted to be one since the age of six or seven you know as a kind of you know on the same order saying i want to be an astronaut when i grow up or whatever and then it happened and so um but i was quite old when it happened i was like 32 i think which is quite old like a tennis player you know you're old at 32 aren't you and in pop star things you know 32 is quite

old to first become one yeah i think it was just maybe just like it just didn't live up to what i thought because it was like when when i'd thought about it as a kid it was i think you know getting famous it's a common thing that people want to do and i think it's almost taken over from that thing that used to exist in the olden days of you know live a good life and you'll go to heaven you know so things may be shit but you know be good and you're going to have this fantastic life afterwards and i think people think of becoming famous in it's the same order of thing it's like okay i'm i'm fed up i'm not saying but if i was famous you know if i was prince people would just open every door for and my every wish would be their command and all this. So I got that. I went to heaven, but I wasn't dead. And so that was the problem. If I'd have been dead, it would have been okay. That's what heaven is supposed to be, another dimension. and it was hard to square the expectation of it

with the fact that I still was Jarvis with all his hang-ups that I thought were magically going to dissolve as soon as we got a record in the top ten, you know. I would never have a problem again. Well, that's not what happens, is it, in life? You're always stuck with yourself no matter where or what you do but did you ever reach a crisis point where you thought i'm going to jack it in completely and just go off and build wells in africa i should have done something useful like that yeah i i didn't maybe

i didn't have the imagination to do that i don't know i'm glad you didn't because the thing is that underlying this is the fact that, obviously, you could say, I have to say this, because a lot of what I do is monumentally trivial. But, you know, you need the light and the shade, right? You can't just have Putin invading Ukraine. If there was no music and silliness to offset that then there wouldn't be any point no i can't imagine a life without humor but that's why i think really that's why we invented those things

to give us a respite from that i think so because you know and you know we're forgetting about the pandemic now because we're into another disaster oh Oh, it's like pandemic, so over that, you know. Now we're into a... That was the good old days. Yeah, world conflict now. But that was a thing that happened there. You know, I think a lot of people who I spoke to seem to really rediscover music in a way,

as a way of, you know, like, listen to an album that you really like, maybe close your eyes as well or whatever, and just float off and forget about the kind of things that were going on. And I think music has always done that, not just music, any art form allows you to kind of step out

of your actual physical situation and go off into another world for a while. And so, yeah, i think you cling to it more when things get tough because i feel the same way that you do about pop music right as an art form and the book is called good pop bad pop which originally i thought meant that it was a book about parenting i thought oh he's going to talk about his kids and all the struggles he's had as a dad. Well, you know what? I mean, it isn't that.

No. But I did like the fact that, yeah, pop is another word for dad. And I think in the absence of my dad, because my father left when I was seven, that's probably why I took a lot more notice of, like, the TV and stuff, because you're just looking for clues on how the world works and how adults behave and because i didn't have a father figure to look at for that i cast around in other places i've always thought that maybe that's why i wanted to write songs that

i listened to songs for clues about how relationships worked but that was a terrible place to listen for it because love songs you know are always going yeah everything's good baby love you all the time and relationships aren't that easy so that's what made me want to write my own songs to kind of say no it's not like that it's like this people fall out and sometimes you think you're going to get off with somebody and then it doesn't work. But then they get off with your friend or whatever, you know. And I wanted to put what I thought was the reality of love relationships rather than this idealized version that you heard on the radio. Yes.

The thing, though, to come back to Chris Morris's parody of Pulp, which was in Brass Eye. And he called the band Blouse. And the lead singer was called Purvis Grundy. And the track was Mio Myra. And he kind of characterized you as fixated on things that were outré and verboten. fixated on things that were outre and verboten and uh so it was you kind of writing a pervy song about myra hindley and and did you how did you feel about what you did being characterized that way because the subject matter in the way you sang about relationships the way you've just described did seem quite weirdly out of step with what people expected from pop it seemed much more sort of cd but it had this lovely pop sound

but the actual lyrics were evoking something more downbeat and uh cd but the way that chris saw it and i guess the way that a lot of people saw it was he totally fixated on you as this uber perv well that's ok, I didn't know Chris Morris at the time, I've got to know him a bit since then I had nobody but myself to blame there I suppose

maybe I played that thing up a bit I don't know, I just wanted I didn't want to be boring you know what i mean i having loved pop music from an early age i was always sometimes dispirited you know when you would get somebody who seemed so exotic on stage and then you would see an interview with them and they'd be going yeah well we were in la and you know uh we're in this fantastic 24 track studio and we just got like a good sound going and they're just saying please you're

making this music that seems to be like from another world and then you you talk like you're mending a car or something so i i just thought i wanted to kind of live it out, you know, and as long as it wasn't boring, then it was okay. So maybe I overdid some things. I don't know. Sorry. You have another object there, and it's your, it's the final object in the book, in fact. Oh, yeah, this plastic apple.

Tell us about the apple and why it's important to you. You can hear. So it's a plastic apple, and I'll now remove the lid. There we go. And then there are various little things in here. I don't know where I picked this apple up from. It's just a green plastic apple. For some reason, I've always had a kind of obsession

with small things from when I was a kid. And obviously, small things are really easy to lose so it's good to put them in a container so um well you could have a look this have a look at this adam i want you and if you know what that is wow what is that is that an, this is like a little badge, like a pin badge with a dangly plastic thing hanging. It looks like an earring. That's the teletower that's in Berlin. It's like the equivalent of our post office tower. And it used to be in East Berlin when the city was divided.

And there's a revolving restaurant at the top okay which i did actually go to i went to berlin about six months before the wall came down and i remember having a cup of coffee in that revolving restaurant and looking down into east berlin and it's the tidiest traffic i've ever seen because at that time, the only car you could get was a Trabant. Yes. And they were only available in three colors, like yellow, blue and beige, I think. So all the traffic was that, you know, there was no other color. And it really made an impression on me.

Like Lego traffic. Yeah. It was nice. Did you do a kind of bowie sightseeing mission on that trip not on that trip i have done that since i've been not in the house but i've been to the apartment building that where he shared a flat with iggy yeah and i was impressed there is like a bit of a plaque there now. Yeah. Were you into all that stuff, the history of those albums and the Eno records? Yeah, I like low.

I always used to think that David Bowie's albums weren't as exciting as his singles. Oh, yeah. I think in your book you say, you know, you write, obviously I know you've got a big love of David. Yes. Obviously, I know you've got a big love of David. Yes. And you mentioned the Changes Womboey album, which that was the first album I ever bought, actually.

But that was like a collection of his singles. And I don't know his albums as well, except Low, because I think that's kind of a... I know you didn't like that record when you first heard it. No, it took me a while to get into it. I just thought, what the hell is this? This is totally unlistenable. Pretentious, I thought it was. Well, I remember John Peel playing it a lot and taping bits.

And then I really like that record because it's like you can listen to the first side and it's all kind of spiky and everything. And then you put the other side on and then you're just like, ooh, you don't know where you are do you it's just like you're floating in some strange forest or something so obviously that's old that record now but every time i listen to it i i never feel like i really have heard every single part of it somehow it seems to retain some mystery i don't know some records can do that um i don't know how it does it but somehow it seems to manage to distract you so you'll always miss one bit and then the next time

you listen you hear a new bit so yeah that's that's probably my favorite bowie album i think it is mine too that and hunky dory yeah hunky dory is like, that reminds me, people always used to put that on when a party was starting to wind down. And so it's that kind of thing of when people have been intoxicated and they're still kind of a bit intoxicated. It's not hangover music, but it's like everything's starting to dry up a bit now and something about the sound of it

really works in that environment, I think. It's like to dry up a bit now, and something about the sound of it really works in that environment, I think. It's like a pillow. It's sort of soft and warm. It has a golden glow around it, you know what I mean? I guess that's Ken Scott who recorded that record. Yeah, it's definitely something to do with the sound of it. It sounds like it's not in a very big space, almost like you might be in a bedroom.

I'm sure they didn't record it in a bedroom, but, you know, it sounds, it's not a big, expansive record, is it? It's more domestic. Yeah, it's lovely. What else is in your apple? There's a little, that's not that big, patch. There's a badge. Do you remember there was a magazine called Looking?

Yeah, sure. Yeah, and Looking Good. There's some examples of plastic craft. Oh, yeah. Remind people what plastic craft was. It was a hobby that kids could do. It's like setting things in clear acrylic resin. It was quite common, but very, very toxic fumes you got from the resin as it cured.

You had to kind of put it in, leave it for a day or so. Oh, this is a half penny coin? So somebody's gone to the trouble of mounting a half P coin in clear plastic, which would have been a cuff link at one point. I don't know, that intrigued me because I don't think it's so common now but people did used to have like sovereign cufflinks, you know, like gold sovereigns

and a gold sovereign is worth about 400 pounds, I think, a solid gold one. So they're obviously a status symbol. So that makes a half pence not a status symbol or like a lack of status symbol or a negative status symbol. So the fact that somebody had gone to the trouble of doing that. Low status symbol. I liked that.

So I think that's why I hung on to that. Well, you say in the book early on, you're into the idea that a culture could reveal more of itself through its throwaway items than through its supposedly revered artifacts. And you say that's an idea that still fascinates you. Yeah, it does. I think there is some truth in that. Yeah, definitely. I think it's the stuff in between and also the culture. All this stuff that you're hoovering up, all the TV.

stuff that you're hoovering up all the tv is you know history tends to be focused on big world events wars etc and crises of that kind but in the meantime you've got all this social history bubbling away that is mainly made up for most people in their ordinary day-to-day lives of all this tiny ephemeral stuff and these plastic knickknacks and songs and TV shows. Yeah, but we spend our time on them, don't we? We fill our time with them and they do also tend to stay with you. And that's the thing that I thought was interesting. Like people considered pop music to be that at one time, didn't they? I mean, they thought it was just throwaway crap, you know,

and yet people are still listening to Phil Spector records now. But at the time, I think they used to call pop music like chewing gum for the ears or whatever, you know, it was just supposed to be something that you listen to, you spit it out. But that hasn't happened. It stayed around, you know. And so that says something about us. There's something that we like about that.

So now at its best, Pop can kind of distill something about us that we're maybe not even that aware of ourselves, but we like it and we want to, we're like Teletubbies. We want it to happen again and again. Yeah, some of us are more like telly tubbies than others this is an advert for squarespace every time i visit your website i see success yes success the way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional. I love browsing your videos and pics and I don't want to stop.

And I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop. These are the kinds of comments people will say about your website if you build it with Squarespace. Just visit squarespace.com slash buxton for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch, use the offer code BUXTON to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Great.

Continue. continue Rosie come on let's head back a little jog see if we get a flypast good flypast from the hairy bullet welcome back

podcats. How are you doing? That was Jarvis Cocker, of course, talking to me there. One of the all-time great voices, I would say. And really enjoyed reading his book, which I recommend, Good Pop, Bad Pop. Link in the description. There's also links to a couple of Jarvis videos there a lovely animated video for the song that Jarvis did for the French dispatch movie Wes Anderson movie Aileen was the track that Jarvis did

there is that Brass Eye Pulp parody that we mentioned there, Mio Myra by Purvis Grundy there's also a link to a thing I saw the other day on YouTube which I thought was quite good by a bloke called Pat Finity

American guy. And he is one of several people on YouTube. When I say several, I mean hundreds or maybe even thousands. Mainly kind of nerdy white guys, music fans. And they do these analyses well there's a lot of people on youtube doing sort of video essays i would call them and some are better than others but this one i saw was quite good and pat finity's series is called what makes this song stink so there's a lot of people doing videos that analyze music and try and summarize what is brilliant about the way a certain song

or artist works there's a bloke called rick beato who is quite well known in that field an older musician pat finity is a little younger and he's doing a kind of antidote to that superficially but he does it really well and i picked one by weezer i think it's beverly hills by weezer so not a song that I ever had strong feelings about one way or another but Pat Finity is coming at the song from the point of view of a disappointed Weezer mega fan he liked their early albums especially liked Pinkerton which I did like as well actually when that came out I thought that was pretty good I remember we were making the Adam and Joe show in those days towards the end of the 90s and I listened to Pinkerton a lot when I was editing toy movies but anyway that was the high water

mark for Weezer as far as Pat Finity was concerned and then Pinkerton famously didn't do so well and they changed tack and went more mainstream as a band thereafter and found quite a lot of success and Pat was disappointed by that so he does a whole essay which is about his relationship with the band essentially and it's um kind of about growing up and becoming a bit disillusioned and wanting to connect with the things that meant a lot to you when you were younger and moving on and also the expectations sometimes unreasonable expectations that you have of your heroes. And the difficulty that fans feel as far as letting their heroes just live their lives and do what they want and develop at their own pace.

So it's quite good. I enjoyed it. There was a lot there, I thought, and it was well put together. Um, that's my recommendation for you this week. Another music thing and a link in the description. Thanks very much to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his hard work on this episode. Much appreciated. Thanks once again to Jarvis Cocker and the Cockernorts the people he works with I don't suppose they call themselves the Cockernorts thanks very much to Helen Green she does the artwork for the podcast

thanks to the people at ACAST that help support the podcast, much appreciated but thanks most of all to you the hardcore, who make it to the absolute end of the podcast. You made it through the whole conversation with the famous person,

and now you made it through all this waffle as well. Thanks. I appreciate it so much that I'm going to hug you come here come here eee ok until next time

go carefully I love you bye Go carefully. I love you. Bye! Bye. Give me like a smile and a thumbs up. It's nice to have fun with everyone. If you like it, subscribe. Like and subscribe. If you like it, subscribe. Like and subscribe. Give me like a smile and a thumbs up. It's nice to have fun with everyone.

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