Pulp Jarvis Cocker Tribute Unbritpop Band Adults Kids T-Shirt

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Starting Pulp was a way too of alchemically transforming everyday existence into a more fantastic version. Several times in our conversation he touches on his persistent desire to live inside the TV, a zone of adventure populated by dinosaurs, Daleks and the Monkees. “I realise that image doesn’t work so much now because TVs are just flat screens. But when they were boxes you kind of thought – what’s in it? You could almost imagine fitting inside it.” In the UK, suddenly, I was crazily recognised, and I couldn’t go out any more. It tipped me into a level of celebrity I couldn’t ever have known existed and wasn’t equipped for. It had a massive, generally detrimental effect on my mental health,” he told The New York Times last July. I have written a book called Good Pop, Bad Pop, which is based around the objects I found in the loft of a house I used to live in. Objects I collected over the course of a lifetime & then left to gather dust in the dark. Why? Am I a hoarder? Or did I think I was laying things away “for a rainy day”? We get told stuff like, "You don't understand this thing, so just keep out of it." Well, for a start, we can't keep out of it, because we've had to bail everything out in the first place. I think it's good that people are saying that the system we're supposedly messing up is supposed to actually work for us as well, and it doesn't. And they think we've been through a boom? It weren't that good, were it? I don't think normal people really felt like, "Yeah, wow, I was there. We were lighting cigars with fivers." It's like, "Wow, I missed that one." How did he navigate it, the forcible switch from observer to observed? “I don’t know if I did navigate it. Fame in our times has taken the place of heaven in past belief systems. You think that your life’s a bit drab or it’s not really working, but if you’re famous you’d be at the front of the queue, you’d be at the best table, all this kind of paradise. So to experience this thing that’s got this weird belief system around it – and also this belief system you’ve constructed yourself – it’s never going to be what you thought. I didn’t end up in the telly.” He pauses to consider. “To turn your nose up at it doesn’t seem right because you do want people to engage with what you’re doing. But it’s the other bits. It’s the being observed part that wasn’t so good. I prefer to be furtive.”

T-shirts are the fun tokens that pay for everything we do. They come from the bottom, from the rave, and travel upwards. When I got my first studio on Seven Sisters Road, the previous tenants had just been shut down by SO15 counter-terrorist squad. I signed the contract flanked by portraits of Che Guevara and Tito. There was a brothel on the next floor, so it was quite awkward with people pressing the buzzer marked “BANGER”.In the book he describes trying to provide some kind of sex education for his own adolescent son, to the mortification of both parties. It worries him, the fact that sex and life have become so severed. “Because what you’re dealing with is you get those feelings, those instincts, at a certain age and they are strong feelings and you’ve got to deal with them in some way and if there are no clues except some kind of foul thing online where you start to think of people as objects, and why aren’t I getting my sex that I was promised – or whatever, I don’t know what those people think.” Is there a song of yours that you think should have received wider recognition? (Chris D Broughton, online)

Yes, I say, they talk about the right to sex. “No, that’s a horrible thing. But for me, that couldn’t happen because of being brought up in a very feminine environment. So when I started to feel … urges, because I’d been brought up in a very female-dominated environment, there was no way I was going to start thinking of women as objects.” The only interesting thing about my dad is that he just wasn’t there

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So there’s bad pop and good pop, hunger of all kinds and art as a consistent source of nourishment and pleasure. Several times he mentions that he’s trying to get better at relationships, rather than zoning out in front of the TV and putting all his feelings in a song instead. Clearing out the attic is part of a concerted effort to get to grips with old stuff, on an emotional as well as physical level: to change bad habits, to communicate more instead of escaping into fantasy. “Me ringing you this morning about the dog situation, that was a slight breakthrough,” he announces, surprisingly, “because a few years ago I would have just worried about it. The journey would have been an absolute nightmare. So then ringing, even though I wasn’t pleased about being late, at least I knew I’d dealt with it.” JC: That feeling is what makes things, especially activism, fun. You don’t want to walk around with a serious face, and it confuses people if you’ve having a laugh. That thing of people rolling over and going, "Oh, it looks like I'm making things a bit untidy. I'll get out of your way. Sorry"… It seems to have been accepted quite meekly that the art colleges, as they existed in this country, are just going to disappear. The lecturers aren't going to want to teach the people who are going to end up being the only ones who can afford to go there. Jeremy Deller: I think that’s what being an artist or a musician is: trying to make sense of things around you that you’re not happy about or that confuse you. You make art or music to deal with it, which is a very similar impulse.

No – people who work in their office have hit me up and said if I ever need stationery or USBs, to just ask. They’ve sent it over and I use it as record company merch. The original battle lines over capitalism were a bit simpler. It was that the people who make these things are getting paid peanuts and then the things are sold for a lot more and it was exploitation. But there's no actual product now, is there? Capitalism has gone very abstract – so it's harder to say who the enemy is. If you paid with a debit or credit card please be advised that this can take 3-5 working days to show on your account. We sent up daily food deliveries to ICU staff at six local hospitals and also set up a food bank at a primary school using money from the T-shirt sales. Honestly, if you can throw a rave, you can throw a food bank. JD: Rave in its widest sense infuses everything you do. Is that spirit of rave important to your work?

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It's been yet another good year for Jarvis, what with the Pulp gigs, the launch of his book of lyrics, Mother, Brother, Lover, and the continued success of his 6Music show. Not that you'd know it: good year or bad year, Jarvis himself doesn't really seem to change. He's still thoughtful, still funny, still more low-key than you might think. He still comes out with answers that you don't quite expect. The unfortunate side effect is [the authorities]can then bring in all these draconian things, like when there was a student march the other week. They let slip: "Oh, yeah – we might have some rubber bullets" or "We might get the water cannon out." When there is something that actually has an agenda, not just "Oh, I want some trainers", that's going to get stamped on. I went on that march and I was amazed, because there were as many police as there were people marching. It was crazy. Re X Factor, Jarvis "took a position" after last year's series, where the contestants murdered David Bowie's "Heroes" on one show, the performance culminating with the stage opening up, "and all these soldiers walked on. Because it was for heroes. Like suddenly we're in a totalitarian state. I just thought, that's it, I'm out." Still, he does sneak a look now and then: "I do like Gary Barlow's 'It. Was. Absolutely. Fantastic. I am going to keep my head in this position because I have been told I look good on camera like this.'" I grew up in Colchester. My mum was a psychiatric nurse and she got ill with leukaemia when I was 13 and died when I was 15. Then it was just me and my brother in the house. He was 18 and became my guardian.

There are certain things, like the way he stands, and I saw him on stage and he did this funny thing with his mouth, which I think I do. I don't think he's as shy as I was, which I'm glad about. I was ridiculous in the shyness stakes. I set myself a goal as a parent to make him mix with other kids as much as possible so he wouldn't have that. It hampers you if every social situation you're in causes you to panic. He does like his music, so that's like me. But then he's into drumming, which I never was. He chose that. If you're returning items from our Buy 3 Get 1 Free Multibuy range then you will be charged for any items that you are keeping. Well, no – because often the names will get changed. But I have had issues with people. One girlfriend used to punch me. I could see her point, because I do tend to be a bit closed off emotionally. You know when you get into that thing where people want to discuss the relationship? I'd rather discuss what was on telly, avoid the issue, discuss anything other than the relationship. And so this girl, quite rightly, found it a bit much that when she came to concerts you would get all this emotion splurged out on the stage. Her phrase was, "The only time I find out what's on your mind is if I come to one of your concerts." All I can say in my defence is that I wasn't really doing it in a snidey way. Yes – Lucozade sponsored my last show. The production costs were going up and up so I bootlegged a load of Energy T-shirts because I needed something to sell immediately after the show and I thought that would be a goer.The devastating pot shot when it came, however, was directed not at Tony Blair but at poor Michael Hutchence of INXS. He was looking characteristically dapper as he strode out to present Oasis with yet another award, this time for Best Video. Then Noel Gallagher grabbed the mic and said “Has-beens shouldn’t be presenting awards to gonna-bes”. I don't get up in the morning and think, "Oh, look at you, you national treasure, you! You're really shiny today!" But it's nice. Everybody wants to be loved, don't they? Especially in the career that I chose: slight emotional neediness is part of it. My route so far through life hasn't been particularly logical, or even thought out. So I think that's a good message to the kids: that you don't have to follow the normal paths, you can be haphazard. I'm not really explaining it very well because it seems a bit self-congratulatory. But if you get recognised for what you do, even if what you do might be a bit all over the place, then… I appreciate that. I didn't grow it to hide anything, I grew it out of neglect. I was at somebody's house and I had no access to shaving facilities for a couple of weeks. I got over the itchy bit, and I thought I'd give it a go. I was horrified to see that it had quite a lot of grey in it. But then you have to get used to the fact that you're getting to a certain age. I've had it for two and a bit years now. We also have a long talk about the press, and the Leveson inquiry. "Tabloids invoke freedom of speech, but they're not interested in that, they're just interested in who's shagging whom, who's got drunk. And if you take that pretend, faux moral standpoint, you end up with people in public life being completely boring. Like they've had their genitals removed." Jarvis isn't interested in who celebrities are shagging: "People might be a bit iffy, but that's between them and their conscience.