Chairman of the hoard
JARVIS COCKER IS LATE. The dog walker didn’t turn up on time and he arrives at the London Library looking worried, even though he already rang to apologise. “I’m flustered,” he announces, pulling off his beanie and unwinding an elegant scarf.
We’re here to talk about his memoir, Good Pop, Bad Pop. Don’t expect tales of Britpop debauchery. It’s an account of his upbringing in Sheffield, his protracted, passionate apprenticeship in the foothills of pop, and it ends in 1985, years before Pulp exploded into mainstream visibility. He chose the library because the book hinges around his own collection, which is substantial, though far stranger than these venerable rooms of leather-bound volumes. The Jarvis Cocker archive – as I’m sure he wouldn’t call it, being temperamentally averse to pomposity – has spent two decades in a moth-infested London attic.
What was up there: precious relics or a load of unwanted, mysteriously un-discardable crap? “It’s like that phrase ‘brushing things under the carpet’, isn’t it? I love doing that. But it did prey on my mind, realising I was in some way not dealing with things.” During lockdown he began the gargantuan task of dragging it out into the light.
He’d been planning on writing a memoir anyway, and the ensuing game of “Keep or Cob” (cob being Sheffield slang for chuck, as in “I cobbed
