“Songs contain stored energy from your past life,” Jarvis Cocker says, “that is released when you perform them again.” Some of that energy that is released in Garth Jennings’ documentary, What Do You Do for an Encore? (MUBI, 2026). The film is based on Cocker’s scrapbook-memoir, Good Pop Bad Pop (2022), and maps the development of the electro-pop group, Pulp, intercut with their June 2025 performance at the O2 Arena in London. “A night you will remember for the rest of your life,” he tells the audience as the show opens.
In Good Pop Bad Pop, Jarvis Cocker takes objects he found hoarded in his attic as a springboard into his preoccupations and obsessions:
Good Pop Bad Pop, p. 25; 29“the idea that a culture could reveal more of itself through its throwaway items than through its supposedly revered artifacts was fascinating to me,” He says. “This was the beginning of the real Pulp aesthetic. Sifting through the debris to find an alternative to the official narrative”
He describes his childhood myopia, and a desire to become famous so he could live inside the television set when he grew up. We learn that he came up with the band’s name in a school exercise book as an adolescent in 1978 before having any bandmates and with only limited musical ability. Other formative moments include meeting the BBC radio DJ, John Peel, and his hospitalisation after falling from a window trying to impress a girl he liked; his ‘road to Damascus’ moment, part-jolted as he was from his fantasy life. Jarvis Cocker’s revelation whilst convalescing was that “Eurodisco + Gritty Northern Realism = The Future” (p. 347).
I’ve long been interested in the apparent echoes in the song writing of Jarvis Cocker and the poetry of Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985). These parallels only seem to increase when examined more closely, despite the cultural and political differences between them: leftist versus conservative for one thing. Firstly, there are the surface similarities: the thick-rimmed glasses, the apparently awkward personae, the Northern suburban setting (Sheffield, Hull). Then, on a deeper frequency, a certain tension between social realism and fantasy – the preoccupation with sex; the wry humour and social satire. There seems to be, if not exactly a kindred sensibility, then more a kind of doubling between them.
Jarvis Cocker was born on 19th September 1963 in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. The Beatles were in the charts at the time, he observes. In his 1970’s poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, Philip Larkin famously half-jokes that sex was invented that year. When Pulp’s break-through album, Different Class, came out in 1995, the front cover seemed to echo Larkin’s 1964 collection, The Whitsun Weddings, showing members of a wedding party with life-sized cut-outs of the band. In 2011, Larkin’s publisher, Faber & Faber, released Jarvis Cocker’s selected lyrics, Mother, Brother, Lover. Although he rejects the notion that songs are poems, “Lyrics are not poetry: they are words to a song.” Nevertheless, he also agrees with Leonard Cohen that “‘art is the ash left if your life is burning well'” (MBL, Introduction, p. 3; 4). Both Larkin and Jarvis Cocker seemed to burn slowly but steadily in their work. It was 14 years after handing his demo-tape to John Peel that Pulp achieved chart success in the mid-1990s.
Jarvis Cocker, fulfilling his childhood ambition of living inside the television
“The boy’s all loved you but I was a mess”: Disco 2000 / Wild Oats
Pulp’s ‘Disco 2000’ and Larkin’s ‘Wild Oats’ present a retrospective view of unobtainable women and unrequited desire. Both use vernacular language and a confessional tone. ‘Disco 2000’ opens with a direct address to the lost love-object, Deborah:
“We were born within an hour of each other,
Our mothers said we could be sister and brother…
And they said that when we grew up, we’d get married and
never split up,
Oh, we never did it,
although I often thought of it.”
Disco 2000, Different Class (1995), reproduced in Mother, Brother, Lover, p. 58
The song seems to blur things imagined and spoken out loud. As Cocker says of song-writing, “No one needs to know where reality ends and wishful thinking takes over,” MBL, p. 4. It is also unclear exactly who Larkin is addressing when he tells us:
“About twenty years ago,
Two girls came in where I worked,
A bosomy English Rose,
And here friend in specs I could talk to.”
'Wild Oats', The Whitsun Weddings (1964), Collected Poems, p. 112
Perhaps an imagined male reader, a sympathetic friend?
Both writers fixate on young women’s physical appearance. Jarvis Cocker states that as a teenager, he was “desperate to find out about sex from a male perspective” (Good Pop Bad Pop, p. 35). In ‘Disco 2000’, he switches voice to that of an adolescent boy in the lines, “You were the first girl at school to get breasts,/ And Martyn said that you were the best.” Some critics have pointed out that much of Pulp’s music concerns the strangeness, alienation, the thrill of adolescence and early adulthood. Whereas Larkin’s is an older voice, more resigned: “But it was the friend I took out.” For Larkin, you sense that his teenage years and early manhood are something he’d sooner forget.
Both contrast the lonely male observer with the desired young woman: “I never thought that you’d get married,/ I would be living down here on my own,” Cocker sings in the chorus of ‘Disco 2000’. (Although in the live O2 Arena show he flashes a wedding ring – it’s the first anniversary of his second marriage). In ‘Wild Oats’, Larkin observes dryly: “And in seven years after that/…Gave a ten-guinea ring/ I got back in the end.” It is this theme of emotional failure that conjoins the next two works.
Pulp, Different Class album cover: Sgt Pepper for the 1990s, but was Jarvis Cocker also alluding to The Whitsun Weddings?
“Something beautiful left town”: Live Bed Show / Talking in Bed
Pulp’s song ‘Live Bed Show’ fast-forwards into the adult world of relationships and takes the object of the bed as its central symbol. He uses his characteristic rhyming couplets (and slight tilt of the internal rhyme) to describe how,
"This bed has seen it all - from the first time to the last,
The silences of now and the good times of the past.
And it only costs ten pounds from a shop just down the road.
Mind you, that was seven years ago, and things were very
different then"
Live Bed Show, Different Class; Mother, Brother, Lover, p. 61
Like ‘Wild Oats’, another seven-year relationship. In ‘Talking in Bed’, Larkin describes struggling to make pillow talk:
"Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together their goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently..."
'Talking in Bed', The Whitsun Weddings, Collected Poems, p. 100
There’s a striking phrase in the middle of the poem, the wind’s “incomplete unrest.” He connects the couple’s emotional distance to a wider social loneliness in a way that can seem proleptic of our own times in the image: “dark towns heap up on the horizon.” In ‘Live Bed Show’, Jarvis Cocker seems to predict the explosion of Reality TV that was just beginning in the mid-to-late 90s, “Oh, but she knows if this show was televised/ no one would watch it./ Not tonight-/ but seven years ago…”. Both poems end on a failure of communication:
"It becomes still more difficult to find,
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind."
Talking in Bed
Larkin employs these brilliantly slippery double negatives to mirror the kind of equivocation of the couple ‘lying together’. Jarvis Cocker uses a cyclical structure to end the song the way it began. In counter-point to the veneer of irony and humour that makes his song-writing so memorable, he instead ends on a kind of vulnerable falsetto:
"She doesn't have to go to work but she doesn't want to stay
in bed 'cos it changed from something comfortable to
something else instead."
Live Bed Show
So, both writers explore the failed relationships or obsessions of young men in ‘Disco 2000’ and ‘Wild Oats’. ‘Live Bed Show’ and ‘Talking in Bed’ follow these into adulthood, exploring how some relationships will inevitably collapse (the perspective of both shifting to the third person). Where Jarvis Cocker’s teenage years are very much alive to him, Larkin was a writer much more comfortable in his middle-age. The question is, where can meaning be located in adult life? I will be addressing this in Part Two of this post in which I will consider satire, social class and politics. Coming very soon…
References:
Garth Jennings, What Do You Do for an Encore? (MUBI, 2026), streaming now
Pulp, Different Class (Island Records, 1995)
Jarvis Cocker, Good Pop Bad Pop (Vintage, 2022; 2023)
Jarvis Cocker, Mother, Brother, Lover: Selected Lyrics (Faber, 2011; 2012)
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (Faber, 1988; 2003)
I previously wrote about Philip Larkin here:
