Album of the Month: Jarvis Cocker - Jarvis

A friend of mine described early Pulp records as sounding like driving at night on the motorway through the rough city outskirts. Since there’s only about ten kilometres of motorway in Romania , perhaps the analogy isn’t very appropriate. Imagine, instead, driving around Bucharest ’s Centura, round, and round, and round. There’s always some strange character lurking under the neon lights, glue-sniffing kids torturing cats, bad things going on under bridges. Listening to ‘His and Hers’, the LP that almost made Pulp famous, still makes me feel a little scared. It’s music about claustrophobic relationships, damaged people – as they put it in the title of one of their hits, Pulp were all about ‘misfits’.

“If you’ve got big feet, I think you should go about wearing even bigger shoes to draw attention to them.” I remember Jarvis Cocker, the Pulp front-man, saying something like that in an interview way back in the 90s. This was what Pulp were all about: it was the freaks of the world, the people who never quite fitted in, coming to the front and taking over. It was about being abnormal, about being a bit goofy, a bit clumsy, a bit of an oddball, and actually celebrating the fact.

At the height of their fame, Pulp were huge. Or rather, Jarvis was huge. He was everywhere: no TV show, including, rather confusingly, the worst kind of childrens' Saturday morning show, was too low for Jarvis to appear on. This was something that he obviously took a strange pleasure in. Part of it was him celebrating the fact that he’d got famous after being in a band that remained unknown for a staggeringly bleak fifteen years; part of it was him making fun of the idea of celebrity; and part of it was Jarvis just having fun. His spontaneous wit made him one of the few people who could go on appalling TV shows and still come across as entertaining and charismatic.

Pulp saw a sad ending. Their last two albums bombed commercially, and Jarvis went off on his own, recording under a variety of silly names.

Pulp were always an iconic band for me and my friends. The first time we saw them in concert, we had bruises on our hands for days from clapping so hard. So when I heard that Jarvis was making a solo album, I nearly did a wee with excitement.

If you buy one album this month, or even this year, please please let it be “Jarvis”. Like all good Pulp albums, this one is stuffed full of sad, funny, touching characters: the beautiful teenager who gets picked up by Sunday School teachers and local radio DJs; the unlikely serial killer; the deserted lover. But more importantly, it’s packed full of great tunes. “Black Magic” sounds like 70s Glam-Rock-Power-Pop, a huge stomp-along that T-Rex would have been proud of. The influence of singer-songwriter Richard Hawley is also plain to see, with Jarvis doing a great impression of Hawley’s unfathomably melancholic love songs on “Baby’s Coming Back to Me”. However, the most eye-wateringly wonderful track on the album doesn’t actually appear on the track-listing. You have to fast-forward the CD some 30 minutes after the last track has ended to hear the secret track entitled “Still Running the World”. This is probably something to do with the fact that Jarvis repeats the extremely obscene word ‘Cunt’ some 15 times in the song. It's probably the first time the word has ever been printed in any Elle magazine in the world, and I’m going to do it a second time to celebrate: “Cunts are still running the world” – that, in a nutshell, is Jarvis’ message: the world is run by fools. It’s a protest song, but one so powerful that it makes just about every other protest song ever written in the history of humankind look like whiney, studenty half-baked idealism by comparison. If ever there is a revolution – and I mean a proper one, not some pathetic semi-orchestrated smokescreen for the theft of a nation – then this will be its soundtrack. Glorious, glorious stuff.

Enough of Jarvis. I’ve decided to rate the rest of the CDs I received this month using a rather unusual system. Instead of using a star-system, or giving a mark out of ten, I’ve decided to allocate up to ten words to each CD, depending on their relative merits. Good CDs will thus get an enthusiastic though rather concise write-up, while reviews for bad CDs risk becoming incomprehensible due to the stringent word limit. It’s something of an experiment, but I like the idea. Ten words maximum. Here goes:

Ada Milea – Quijote (DVD): Theatre plus music– wish I’d seen the thing live. Wonderful.

The Killers – Sam’s Town: Las Vegas synth-rock. Second album, Less synth, more rock. Merita.

Spin – Natural: Inoffensive pop-rock. Bit like ‘Hansen’

Reamonn – Wish: Club A? Supergirl? Same.

Alb Negru – Hello: Rosu si Negru better.

The Buddhist Monks – Sakya Tashi Ling: Why Buddha so fat?

Yana – Yana : EtnonononoNO

Not only has my new ratings system saved you valuable reading time, it’s also made my job a lot easier. Why don’t all music journalists do this? Next month I could even cut it down to five words, and use the time I save to become a grand master chess champion, or write the great American novel, or become a professional alcoholic. I’m off to listen to the new Jarvis album for the fourth time…