“I used to watch a lot of telly as a kid,” says Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, relaxing on a sofa in the meeting room at Rough Trade Records HQ in Notting Hill.
“It would give me a representation of the world that wasn’t real. I would see a giraffe and think, ‘Right, now I know what a giraffe is like,’ But I didn’t really. The first time I saw a giraffe in real life I was like: ‘Oh fuck, it’s massive and it’s got a blue tongue!”
Cocker is talking to the Big Issue about the importance of boredom in the creative process.
But technology has now outlawed boredom, so will we ever see creativity like that again? “There is a risk of ennui, where we all feel as if we’ve seen everything and know everything already,” says Cocker. “But you don’t know anything. It’s a different kind of boredom, you know, it’s like a kind of overstuffed feeling and it doesn’t leave much room within you to create things, because you’re stuffed with other people’s ideas.”
Cocker has become a permanent fixture at the forefront of British popular culture, releasing solo records and collaborations and serving as a radio host, a curator, an author and occasional actor. He has now returned to the project that first endeared him to us: Pulp are set to release their first new album in 24 years.
Buy this week’s Big Issue to read all about it.
