Page 95 - Flaunt 171 - Summer of Our Discontent - PS

been received as somehow weirdly prescient of the global situation at the time of print, with the second single from the album “House Music All Night Long” describing housebound frustration and containing the refrain: “One nation under a roof, ain’t that the truth...” It seems bizarrely on-point, given it was recorded months ago. “I’m definitely not Nostra–Jarvis or any- thing like that, but the lyrics do kind of describe the situation that we’re in now—that sort of cabin fever feeling,” says Cocker by way of explanation. “The weird thing is that that song was written about a period a couple of years ago, where I was stuck in London one weekend. It was nice weather and pretty much everyone I knew was at a rave in Wales. I was stuck in the house on my own, feeling sorry for myself, and I got myself out of it by writing a song. Now, through some weird, crazy coincidence, it has ended up describing something that everybody’s feeling.
I guess that is kind of the beauty of creativity. You never know what the results might be.”
Most chaos theorists would also postulate that we can never know the cause-and-effect of the magical ‘butterfly effect’ coined by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz–you all know the one: a butterfly flaps its wings in Wuhan, China causing Donald Trump Jr. to shoot
up bleach on the other side of the planet; that kind of thing. The process and random sequential potentialities of creativity are something that fascinate Cocker, who has a book coming out on the subject of the creative mind in the fall–and it’s interesting that even lockdown in a global pandemic is something he sees vast cre-
ative potential in. “I’m looking at the lockdown in the respect that creative people have got an alternative state in which they can actually make something,” he says. “And the joy of that is that when you’re in the creative moment, and you are making something, then time just seems to slip away, and you get lost in that moment. I think that’s why we create...” He pauses. It’s not done for dramatic effect, but it’s kind of perfect. Cocker is
a master of the pause, as anyone who has followed his freeform late-night forays into the human condition –Wireless Nights on the aforementioned Radio 4, or his excellently shambolic lockdown show Domestic Disco, will surely attest. “Years ago, I did a series for Channel
4, called Journeys Into The Outside,” he continues. “I was looking at outsider art, and, of course, the question
that I asked the artists every time was why–why are you making this? Why have you built this big psychedelic mountain in the middle of the desert, or whatever? And that was the one question that none of them could ever answer. The penny finally dropped to me that the reason they couldn’t answer that question was because it was something they never asked themselves–they got so much pleasure out of making things that why wouldn’t they do it?”
It’s an ode to joy approach to creating that has underlined the aforementioned album, which was recorded in a live spirit of innovation and experimen- tation—captured on the move, in a sense, and thusly described as an alive album not a live album. “I had some ideas for songs that hadn’t really come to fruition, and I got offered the chance to play them at this festival Sigur Ros were putting together in Iceland at the end of 2017,” he says, describing how the whole thing came together. “I was just at the point of turning it down because I didn’t have a band or anything, as such, and then I just thought, ‘Fuck it, I’ll do it.’ I got a band together quite quickly. Serafina Steer plays the harp and sings—I had worked with her before–and she kind of came with Emma [Smith] who sings and plays violin. I thought Adam [Betts] and Andrew [McKinney] would be a great rhythm section, and I had worked with them when I
did this thing of singing Scott Walker at The Proms. And then there is my friend Jason [Buckle], who I had been in a band with called Relaxed Muscle. That one performance went well, so we decided to carry on. The songs were skeletal ideas, but flesh got put on the bones by playing them to people, so the next stage was a very small tour of the UK, and we just recorded the concerts as we went along, so I could kind of monitor how the songs were developing.”
These live desk recordings came to form the foundation of the record, with in-studio overdubs, and it’s perhaps an ironic flip in that while the record has a vibrant organic feel, it’s not something that will be likely to have a live audience any time soon, at least in the UK. The band is still busy, nonetheless, and their creative process continues to be innovative. “I’ve been trying this technique in lockdown, which is a real revolution-
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