This month, the beloved British pop band Pulp will release “More,” its first new album in twenty-four years. Jarvis Cocker, the band’s founder, lyricist, and front man, has engaged in innumerable interesting projects in the meantime—an album with his band Jarv Is, collaborations with Wes Anderson and Chilly Gonzales, a BBC radio program, an excellent memoir, “Good Pop Bad Pop”—but the new Pulp record feels like a significant return, triumphant and humble at once. Its first song, “Spike Island,” establishes a friendly, self-deprecating tone (“I exist / To do this: / Shouting & pointing,” Cocker sings) and the rest is full of Cocker’s signature motifs—half-serious spoken-word amusement, playful imagery—warmly suited to life in 2025. (“Please stay in touch with me / In this contactless society.”) On “Grown Ups,” he mentions life being about the journey, not the destination, and asks, “But what if you get travel sick / Before you’ve even left the station?” Elsewhere, he sings, “Instead of having us this Slow Death / We should be having us a Slow Jam.” At their best, Cocker’s songs can feel like a shared groove, with dancing as good an answer as any to life’s joys and befuddlements.
Cocker grew up in Sheffield, in north-central England, with his mother and sister; his father left when Jarvis was seven. He formed the first incarnation of Pulp at fifteen. He gave a demo tape to John Peel, the legendary British broadcaster and tastemaker, at a local event; Peel’s producer called two weeks later, and Pulp was off to the races. After releasing a couple of albums in the eighties, the band became hugely popular in the nineties, amid Britpop, owing to its catchy melodies, danceable rhythms, and Cocker’s sly, funny, sharply observant lyrics, with themes of class consciousness, sex, and the gentle absurdities of the human condition—all of which reached an apotheosis in the song “Common People,” which turned into an anthem. Pulp’s celebrity became uncomfortable for Cocker in the late nineties, and the band went on hiatus in 2002. They’ve toured occasionally since, notably in 2012, when a farewell show in Sheffield was documented in the 2014 movie “Pulp: A Film About Life, Death, and Supermarkets.”
Cocker’s book “Good Pop Bad Pop,” from 2022, is structured around anecdotes prompted by various objects he’d stored in a crawl space. A notebook from his youth, in which he described how Pulp would change music as we know it. (“The group shall work its way into the public eye by producing fairly conventional, yet slightly off-beat, pop songs. After gaining a well-known and commercially successful status the group can then begin to subvert and restructure both the music-business and music itself.”) A news clipping from 1985 (“Cocker Comes a Cropper”) about the time he fell out of a window while trying to impress a woman with a party trick, which led to injury and artistic breakthrough. A Polaroid of his first electric guitar, given to him when he was thirteen, by his mother’s boyfriend, a German scuba instructor they’d met on vacation in Ibiza. The memoir is not comprehensive or chronological; it’s made up of bursts of inspiration, thoughtfully threaded together.
In a similar spirit, perhaps, Cocker and I recently visited MOMA, where we took in two exhibits composed of bits of things—“Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage” and “The Clock,” Christian Marclay’s magisterial film collage—and then proceeded to the National Arts Club, where we talked about life, art, the new Pulp album, and the passage of time. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
[Cocker begins.] Have you heard the record?
Yeah. It’s great. I listened at the Rough Trade offices.
I did too—the Rough Trade offices played it for everybody there and I went.
So when you listened to it for the first time you were with them?
Well, I set it going and I went downstairs. It’s an open-plan office, so I could hear it and I didn’t have to look at people whilst they listened. At one point, I poked my head in and said, “That’s the end of side one.” Because I still think of it as two sides. A side of a record is a good length of time to listen to something. CDs are always too long.
And then there’s the formlessness of the digital era, where you just listen to everything in any order—
And there’s no order in anything. Maybe that’s the future. I saw a picture taken inside an Amazon warehouse and it’s just a mess, all jumbled up. Things aren’t put in particular places because it’s not necessarily a human who will go and say, “Oh, I need to go to where the books are” or “I need to go to where the records are.” It’s got location tracking so you say “I want this” and a robot—bzz—might go to find it. There’s no need to file things neatly or put things together. So that’s quite a new way of . . . The world is kind of becoming like that.
Have you seen any of “The Clock” before?
I’ve not seen the whole thing. It’s very long. I’ve been watching the Chris Marker film “Sans Soleil.” That’s a bit similar—like it’s mostly things that he shot, and he put commentary over it to have it make some kind of sense. It’s a lot to take in, so I watch in ten-minute chunks. Let’s have a look at “The Clock.” [We watch from 11:20 A.M. to 11:50 A.M., then head downtown.]
Sorry to bring this up, but in “The Clock,” there’s that horrible scene [from Don Sharp’s “The Thirty Nine Steps” (1978)] where a man dangles from the giant clock hand of Big Ben. It made me think of the part in your book about—
Ah, falling from the window.
I’m so sorry that happened.
Well, it was my own fault. But as I said in the book, it was kind of a turning point. I wasn’t happy that it happened, but it made me stop for a minute and look at what I was doing, and I decided to do things differently.
You decided to make art out of what was in your life as it existed, right? Not trying to think of a different place or time or—
Yeah. Inspiration not being something that’s beamed in from the cosmos. To look at exactly what is around you. That’s the trick. You have to let yourself appreciate things all the time.
I love that lyric in “Grown Ups,” about a dream of looking at another planet through a telescope, seeing the people there having fun, going to the other planet, and then looking back at the Earth and seeing that it looks like a pretty good time back there, too. But now you’re stuck.
That was a real dream I had.
Really?
Yeah. I had it a few years ago and I wrote it down. That song is the oldest song on the record. The music was demoed when we did the Pulp album “This Is Hardcore” (1998), a long time ago. I knew I wanted to call it “Grown Ups” but I couldn’t think of any words beyond that. I lost confidence in it. And then when we were trying to get songs together for this record, I thought, This is it. This is its last chance.
You started writing “Grown Ups” around “This Is Hardcore”?
Yeah. Maybe thirty years ago. Now I am grown up.
It also makes me think of your Jarv Is song “Must I Evolve?” Some of these songs are about embracing being wherever you are in life.
Yes, I suppose accepting it and trying to do something with it, not pretending. Because that’s the thing that gives me pain. You don’t want to be aging, but you are.
Can you tell me how the new album came about?
Well, practically the way it came about was when we were touring in the U.K. in 2023, there was a song, “The Hymn of the North,” that had been written for a play called “Light Falls” (2019), written by Simon Stephens, a quite well-known playwright in the U.K. He gave me the script and said, “Can you write a song that keeps coming into the play?” So I’d done that.
And what was that song meant to do?
The play was about a mother who dies and then can go back and see what her kids are doing. My son was sixteen, and I started to become aware of the fact that school would end in a couple of years, and then he would go and live his life. And that slightly petrified me. Just wondering about whether I would see him, thinking about my own relationship with my mother, where I would go months without seeing her. And so that kind of got the ball rolling. Also, Steve [Mackey], the bass player in Pulp, he passed away before that tour started. And my mother died at the beginning of last year. So it was a bit of what we were talking about—when someone close to you passes away, one of the ways to deal with it is to think, O.K., well, I better make the most of my life now, or what’s left of it. I just thought it would be good for us to see whether we could get enough songs together for a record.
