Jarvis Cocker

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Cocker is renowned for his wit and observations of the cultural scene. He was a frequent guest on TV shows in the 1990s, and hosted an art series for Channel 4 – "Journeys into the Outside". In the series, he took a trip across the globe, meeting so-called "outsider artists", people who create wacky and wonderful works of art, trying to understand what compelled them to do so.

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Soon after signing to Fire, in November 1985, Cocker fell out of a window while trying to impress a girl with a Spider-Man impression and ended up in hospital, temporarily requiring the use of a wheelchair, in which he appeared during concerts.

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Throughout the interview, he says things like, "Ugh, it's just me droning on, 'I think this, I think that...'"; when we don't have quite enough money to leave a good tip in the restaurant he makes a brief pantomime of guilt - "I feel bad. I am bad!" He would make a good Catholic, if he weren't an atheist. "Or a Humanist. I guess that's closest to what I believe in, really." Christmas would make more sense to him if, instead of not going to church he could go to "a big secular building that smelled nice".

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"I was always very nervous physically when I was younger," he tells me, in a traffic jam. "I never went rollerskating or went diving from the top board - couldn't ride a bike till I was in me twenties." Then, in 1985, he fell out of a window while trying to be Spiderman to impress a girl. "I broke a wrist and ankle and pelvis, but felt I'd survived. I actually became a bit more fearless." [...] The waitress comes back carrying a book, The Art of Blasphemy, a present sent over for him from an anonymous fan in the café. "I didn't set this up," he says. "Honest." Does he like practical jokes? "I do like to wind people up." And what about that alter-ego, the rancid, phlegmy band leader who looked a bit like Jarvis in make-up, sounded a bit like Jarvis through a voice distorter, but insisted he was Darren Spooner? "That was more like a Jekyll and Hyde thing, so I could give him all my negative attributes. At that time I was getting married and me wife was pregnant and I thought I could take all this shit and put it into a ball and call it Darren and that would make me a nicer person."

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"Success can really turn somebody into ... a monster," he says. "What a lot of people seem to want to do with success is buy a stately home and create their own universe, detach themselves and control every situation that they come into, you know? But the reason I wanted to be in it when I first started was really due to social ineptitude, I thought it would help me mix with people, act as an introduction so you never have that horrible thing of not knowing whether to talk to somebody or whatever. All I really wanted was for it to make me able to do normal things."

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Song titles like "I Will Kill Again" and "From Auschwitz to Ipswich" gave notice that Jarvis had not lost his acerbic wit, whereas "Running the World" gave additional notice that social class was still at the thematic core of his lyrical vision. "Now the working classes are obsolete/They are surplus to society's needs," sings Cocker, invoking the parody spirit of Jello Biafra. The song was a highlight hit of the 2006 Reading Festival where a karaoke-style video screen allowed the masses to sing along with its irreverent chorus line, "Cunts are still running the world."

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