A biography for Jarvis Cockerhasn’t been written yet.
“Every woman I've had a relationship with has found this maddening; the fact that I will talk about anything on the stage, and reveal all this stuff, and yet when I'm at home, I clam up and won't discuss anything intimate or personal.”
“You get to a certain age and you just want to prove that you can still rock - that you've still got it.”
“I'm always nervous when I perform anyway.”
“Well, once you've resigned yourself to the fact that you are the more mature pop performer and you're past the age you ever thought you would do it, you might as well do it as long as you can. As long as I can still lift a microphone, then I'll do it, you know.”
“The thing about radio is that it's got an intimate feel. What I like is that you don't have to give it your full attention - you can still do something else that the same time, whereas TV is all-enveloping: you have to sit there and pay attention to it, and give yourself over to it. You have to surrender to it, but you don't with radio.”
“If you get involved in music expecting to make a living out of it, then you've picked the wrong thing to do. That shouldn't really be in your mind.”
“The most entertaining songs don't always come from a nice place. In songs where I think I'm being really sensitive, they seem quite boring actually. I've found that the songs that come out of nastier, more misanthropic places are better.”
“Will you see Pulp again? Who knows. I'm not stoking those particular rumours.”
“To look for some kind of insight or meaning in pop songs is not really - well there's plenty of other places where you should probably look first before you start looking for it in a pop song. I guess it was just because I was really into music as a child, and I wanted it to say more. It was the thing, wasn't it? And now it isn't.”
“I've always had an eye for nature, but it's the sort of thing to keep quiet about, because I don't want to come across as a mad hippy. But it makes sense to appreciate those things.”
“In no way am I supporting or suggesting that a Conservative government is a good thing, far from it.”
“It's weird: The leader of the Conservative Party in England is two years younger than me, and I still don't really feel like a responsible adult.”
“Words are important to me, but a song can work and function and be a good song with words that are fairly standard. But really great lyrics can't rescue a dog of a song.”
“Hawkwind are one of those bands that people introduce you to because you don't see them on the covers of magazines. I'd heard 'Silver Machine' but Russell Senior, who was in Pulp, got me into them. They had a song called 'Master Of The Universe' and we nicked the title in 1985 for one of our songs.”
“When I was in Pulp, I actively did more TV stuff because that was during the Great Britpop Wars, and it seemed important to prove that indie people could speak. That war doesn't exist anymore.”
“I'm sure Sting's a lovely guy. It's just that nobody wants to be seen as that holier-than-thou thing. That over-earnestness is a bit of a problem with people in bands and celebrities or whatever.”
“I got a pair of red, synthetic satin women's pants through the post the other day with a phone number on. That was quite strange. I haven't tried the phone number. In times of stress I may.”
“I always thought that I might retire from any form of sexuality by the age of 40 and just become a dignified older person.”
“I would like to believe in an afterlife; it makes things more palatable. But I'm not banking on it.”
“There's the famous thing that the A&R man from the record company is supposed to do: He's supposed to come into the studio and listen to the songs you've been recording and then say, 'Guys, I don't hear any singles.' And then everybody falls into a terrible depression because you have to write one.”