“I TAKE LOTS OF THINGS SERIOUSLY”
IN a shabby suburb of northwest London, down the street next to the derelict fish market, past the shopfront frescos of marine life and through a door in the corrugated shutter marked WE DO NOT SELL FISH, you find Jarvis Cocker and his band. You feel a bit like Mr Benn, stepping through a side street portal into this parallel universe recording studio, complete with harp, Damien Hirst artwork and a blue plaque commemorating Sigmund Freud. “It’s great, that fish market,” Cocker enthuses. “They have types of fish I’ve never heard of. Milkfish, croaker… Of course it’s shut now, and like a lot of things, you wonder if it will ever open again.”
In a funny way, it’s a return to his roots. Cocker began his strange adventure in public life back in the early 1980s, when his mother got him a job scrubbing crabs in Sheffield’s Castle Market in an attempt to bring him out of his shy and dreamy shell. The 40 intervening years have seen Cocker grow – like one of those diagrams of the ascent of man – from scuffling schoolboy to eternal indie outsider into implausible pop star, through brief and sensational notoriety and damned disillusion, before somehow winding up a genuine, beloved 21st-century national treasure.
But 2020 might turn out to be one of the most challenging years in this long and strange journey. On the verge of releasing his first album in over a decade, under the moniker Jarv Is, at a point where many people might now think of him primarily as DJ, broadcaster, author or simply evergreen cultural icon – the lockdown put all his carefully laid plans on hold.
In many ways, is a record about Cocker returning to his musical calling, willing himself to evolve and remain relevant. It’s been fascinating watching this quintessentially
