Interview

While it is widely accepted that rock stars are not like fine wines—they do not improve with age—Jarvis Cocker debunks that notion. Cocker first arrived on the music scene in 1978 as a dapper 15-year-old singer fronting a band from Sheffield, England, called Arabacus Pulp, which he named after a commodity he’d learned about in economics class. The name of the group was, of course, later shortened to Pulp, and they would go on to become a cornerstone of the ’90s Britpop movement with their seminal albums His ’N’ Hers (1994), Different Class (1995), and This Is Hardcore (1998)—threeswirling epics of romantic longing, outsiderinsecurity, and civil discontent.

The history of English music is populated by a parade of working-class heroes, but with Pulp, Cocker emerged as a new kind: part erudite dandy, part thrift-store lothario, and part Batman villain—a black comedian who, beneath the ornery veneer, is all heart. Since the band went on indefinite hiatus in 2002, he has quietly evolved into an introspective family man of sorts, moving to Paris, becoming a father, and enjoying a new kind of creative freedom. He has, by turns, served as a television host, a cultural critic, and an eco-explorer, and he has collaborated with the likes of Nancy Sinatra, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Beth Ditto, and Harry Potter (Cocker appeared in 2005’s The Goblet of Stone). He also released a well-received first solo album, Jarvis, in 2006, and now has followed it up with a second, Further Complications, which he unveils in June.

Recorded in Chicago with the notoriously Spartan production engineer Steve Albini (who previously oversaw the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and Nirvana’s In Utero,among other significant albums), Further Complications is Cocker at his most raw and revealing, as he croons about impossible loves, tattered libidos, and the -foibles of getting older. Director Wes Anderson, who is working with Cocker on the music for an -animated film adaptation of the Roald Dahl children’s book Fantastic Mr. Fox, spoke with the 45-year-old singer—who at press time was sporting a Sgt. Pepper–style insurrectionist beard—as he put the finishing touches on the album.

WES ANDERSON: Are you in Chicago, Jarv?

JARVIS COCKER: Yes, I am. Have you ever been to Chicago?

ANDERSON: Yes, I’ve been there. I used to take the train from New York to Los Angeles, and I would stay for a night in Chicago on the way.

COCKER: How long does it take to go from New York to L.A. on a train?

ANDERSON: Well, it’s overnight from New York to Chicago, and then it’s two more nights from Chicago to Los Angeles. So I would break it up a bit because you can sometimes have, like, a five-hour layover in Chicago. And you don’t even want to get on the train after that. Have you been to the Art Institute of Chicago? In the basement, they have the Thorne collection of miniature rooms.

COCKER: I went to the Art Institute the last time I was here, but I didn’t go into the basement.

ANDERSON: Some woman, maybe around 75 years ago or so, subsidized the creation of these little rooms that are representative of different periods of architecture.

COCKER: How small are these rooms? Could a cat live in one?

ANDERSON: No, absolutely not.

COCKER: So they’re like the size of the rooms in a doll’s house really.