Pulp always was and always will be Jarvis Cocker's band. Pulp will always revolve around Jarvis. As the band's only surviving original member, it is jarvis who fronts the band, jarvis who features in all the interviews, and jarvis who is the focus on stage.
Jarvis' parents were both artistic. His mother studied art, but despite some promise, she took up a 'proper job' emptying fruit machines as soon as Jarvis was born. His jovial trombone playing dad was less responsible. He was a small time musician and actor, who enjoyed most of his fame through a tenuous friendship with sheffield's only rock hero Joe Cocker, who was no relation of the family what so ever. When Jarvis was seven his father left home and headed for Australia, where he secured a job as a DJ on the pretence he was joe cocker's brother. (Jarvis wrote a song about his childhood "Little girl (with blue eyes) Life Down Under enabled him to avoid paying maintenance to Jarvis' mum.
Jarvis was not exactly a childhood heartthrod. He found it difficult to relate to girls in the same way other boys did. This wasn't helped by his geeky looks and his mother's frightening fashion sense. After a grave bout of meningitis had left his eyesight severely impaired at the age of five, he had to wear the thick-framed NHS spectacles which were the bane of every short-sighted Seventies school kid. This illness was probably the peak of his popularity, with all the school sending him Get Well cards and presents, all of which were later incinerated for fear of contamination. There thoughtful cards were rare - after this, he never once received a single Valentine card during his svhool years, a ritual humiliation for him. To make matters wores, his loving mother dressed him in ridiculous leather shorts bought by a relative. With his long hair, bad teeth and angular bottle top glasses, Jarvis was an obvious target for school bullies. His lanky stature offered no physical protection, and in fact served to accentuate his oddness. He was the only boy at school who looked like an ugly girl. On top of all that his first name was a bully magnet, and his middle name, Branson, offered no respite. still, it could have been wores - his younger sister was called Saskia, after Rembrandt's wife.
When The clarion call for society's misfits arrived, in the shape of punk, Jarvis was captivated, and he turned in to John Peel's show to keep up with the latest. His copy The Stranglers' 'Rattus Norvegicus' was only dusted down to play when his mother was out. When he heard The Stranglers were playing the Sheffield Top Rank he had to go, but even here he was an outcast "Believing in the punk spirit of individuality and self expression, I went along in a jumble sale jacket and a blue tie that my mother had crocheted for me" Jarvis later told Melody Maker. "All these people in mohicans just took the piss out of me and called me mod."In a room full of identi-kit punks, jarvis was once more the outsider.
Name - Jarvis Cocker
Date of birth - September 19th 1963
Place of birth - Sheffield
First job - Scrubbing crabs at the fish market
Starsign - Virgo
Instrument - Vocals & guitar
Weight - 10 1/2 st.
height - 6'2
Chest - 37"
Waist - 29"
Inside leg - 34"
Shoes - 9
eyes - green
hair - Glints poppy
hobbies - mending electrical items and shoe collecting
best things in life - The things that hide in unexpected places.
favourite smell - new vinyl holdall
favourite city - Countryside
What annoys him - People who steal the plugs from public washbasins
favourite word - more
If he was some one else would he fancy the person he is today - Today no tonight yes
What he does before he goes on stage - suck a vocalzone 5 mins before
catchphrase - "It's the ice of fashion"
What did he want to be - Astronaut
saying - "To thine own self be ture"
Three words to describe himself - Jarvis, Branson, cocker
