Page 97 - Flaunt 171 - Summer of Our Discontent - Lili

ary breakthrough for me,” says Cocker. “What we have been doing is a bit like that game where somebody draws a head on
a piece of paper and then they fold the paper and they pass it
to somebody else, and then they draw the body, then someone else draws the legs.... We’ve been trying a musical version of that, sending ideas to each other. I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day, but that’s not really the point. It’s more just that we’re having fun doing it.”
The album is great, encompassing elements of the emotive Scott Walker-esque narrative style Cocker is celebrated for,
but also feeling a little like a throwback to the early Pulp of Separations, an album recorded a good while before fame came knocking. It’s first single, which tackles the challenges of the relentless march of time “Must I Evolve” has already been nom- inated for track of the year in this years Q Awards. But music industry accolades are an aside. It’s the in-the-moment joy of the creative process that drives Cocker, who, to be fair, has always seemed pretty un-phased by fame and celebrity, and he thinks society might just be on the cusp of a return to making art for personal fulfillment rather than financial gain, recognition or global money laundering. “You have to realize that it’s enough to make stuff, and that’s the point of it,” he says. “I think that’s why people are more interested in outsider art now, because the art-world has spiralled out of anybody’s comprehension and become kind of an investment opportunity, which goes so far away from that primal impulse to just to make something and get pleasure from it. We’re back to creativity in a kind of natural state right now, because everything’s on pause.”
But isn’t it hard to find motivation or inspiration without the input of external stimuli, sat alone in your space with the world outside ticking along in a seemingly perpetual limbo? “Well, I always quote this thing that Quentin Crisp once said in a TV interview,” says Cocker, when I pose this to him. “He said, rather than looking outside and thinking, is there something I haven’t experienced, or haven’t seen yet? Why not look inside yourself and ask the question, is there something that I haven’t unpacked yet? We’ve got as much of a universe inside as we have outside. I feel like we’re coming to the conclusion now that this is a time for people to discover that. You can’t go out into the outside world right now, so why not explore the inner world—you know, look at this stuff and see just how much
you contain. Who said, I contain multitudes? Is that William Blake?” I agree it is Blake, entirely unsure as to whether it is, but it definitely sounds like it could be. Upon checking for this article, I find out it was actually Walt Whtiman who said that, so props to us both for being so literary. The point seems salient enough, though—that we can all undertake some kind of met- aphorical journey into the cocoon of our being and come out again all fluttery and multi-coloured. But is it really likely there will be lasting cultural changes, or when all this is over will we return to our usual mindless consumerism and the horrors of Celebrity Love Island and Instagram Influenzas?
“I think it’s an interesting point in time, and some people have said that maybe the world will be divided into before the virus and after the virus,” says Cocker. “I don’t if that’s true, but
I do think we’ve never had a situation like this in our lifetime, where the whole world hits the pause button. It’s kind of enforced time for contemplation, and I don’t think it’s facile to say that it could be a positive thing in some ways—not positive if you’ve got it, obviously, but positive in that its a time to take
a breath and just think about things. It’s like everyone has to have a very close encounter with themselves, and you can use that to find out something—what do you want to do with your time, how do you entertain yourself? It reminds me a little bit of flying...” And at this point, Cocker drops perhaps the best anal- ogy I’ve heard so far for the mass quarantine that has defined the first half of 2020: “There’s always a point in a long trans-
atlantic flight where you’ve watched maybe one or two films
on the in-flight entertainment system, you can’t face watching another one and you are just sat there with yourself and your own thoughts. And that’s really what’s happening now. There’s no shortage of entertainment options that you can access but there’s a fatigue that comes with it, and I think everybody is now realizing that it’s just not enough, and that it’s actually pretty boring what we crave—in fact, what we’re really feeling is the lack of interaction with other people.”
It’s a fairly ironic truth-bomb given the way society has raced forwards in the last 20 years towards us all becoming ever-more isolated units of one-click consumption. “It’s been interesting, because of that the movement in society towards a kind of self isolation,” says Cocker. “You know, you don’t go to the cine-
ma; you just stream the film into your house. You don’t go to a restaurant; you just get food delivered. And it’s like that kind of atomization thing, where I guess people thought: ‘Oh... This is great. I can just do my own thing and I don’t have to worry about anybody else.’ Then you find that if you get into that state of splendid isolation, it’s actually really, really dull and boring, and that what actually makes life interesting is other people.”
The realization that isolation sucks has been a tough mo- ment for most of us, and you’ve got to hand it to Cocker for put- ting some heart and soul in helping people get through it—the Bedtime Stories he shares on his Instagram, being no exception. It’s a pretty relaxing experience to drift off to Cocker reading authors as disparate as Richard Brautigan and Tove Jansonn. “They’re just great books, you know?” he says, when asked why he was keen to get them out there. “When this thing started, I found that I wasn’t sleeping so well—you know, you’re worried about stuff, and you just pick up on the general weird atmo- sphere within society. So, I thought this could be a good time
to put these stories out again [many originally aired on his BBC Radio 6 show Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service], and maybe they’d be helpful for people, because whenever I read a story to my girlfriend, within two minutes she is fast asleep. I think I’ve just got a voice that can send people to sleep, so if it helps people through when they’re having trouble, then I’m happy to do it.”
Well, what can you say to that but thanks. I can tell you, as a long-time sufferer of insomnia that Jarvis Cocker’s Bedtime Stories are something of a godsend. I wonder, as we draw our tortuous conversation to a close, whether the process of cre- ativity on all levels is cathartic for him. “I guess what I’ve done all my lifetime in writing songs is, in a weird way, fulfil a sense of missing something,” he says. “If you imagine a jigsaw puzzle, and there’s a piece missing, which is really irritating—well, if you feel that in yourself, songs can sometimes plug that gap. And the thing is that unfortunately they probably never quite fit that hole—they do it for a while and then eventually you have to create a new one. It’s like you’ve got this stuff going on in your head and it’s driving you mad, but if you turn it into something, you externalize it, and, in a way, you neutralize it as well, so it can’t have a toxic effect on you anymore...” Cue another pause from the king of an-ti-ci-pation... “That said, it’s an on-going process, and you just have to keep hoping that you’re headed in the right direction—and that’s the best you can hope for, really. There’s no such thing as eternal, perfect happiness, but there are moments of pure joy and happiness we can access. I believe in them and I’ve experienced them, so I know that they’re
there. And sometimes you can really despair of those moments ever happening again and you think, ‘Oh well, I wish I’d never been up here, because then I wouldn’t realize how miserable
I am.’ That’s a bad way to think. You’ve just got to keep going.” And with that little gem, I suggest that no matter how beyond the pale the world may seem right now, you had also better get out of bed and put the pedal to the proverbial metal, brothers and sisters...
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PHOTOGRAPHER: DOUGLAS BOOTH. STYLIST: CHER COULTER.
PHOTOGRAPHER: CHRIS SCHOONOVER. PHOTOS HAND COLORED BY: LINDA SCHOONOVER. GROOMER: NATHAN ROSENKRANZ AT HONEY ARTISTS. PHOTO ASSISTANT: JONATHAN SCHOONOVER.