The first memoir from the former lead singer of Pulp would have been better titled A History of Jarvis in 100 Objects. That’s what it is: an illustrated guide to the things that make Cocker who he is. He doesn’t appear in many of the photos; the great majority show his collection of ephemera: a 20-year-old pack of Wrigley’s Extra gum, a fragment of Imperial Leather soap with its old-style label still attached. That’s him in a nutshell: driven by a lifelong love of the everyday, perceiving romance and poignance in items that others chuck out. It isn’t wrong to say that without this sensibility, there would have been no Pulp, whom he led until 2013, no many-tentacled solo career and consequently no national treasure status.
This isn’t the story of his time at the top. The penultimate object in the book is an acceptance letter, dated 1988, from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design in London. It was while studying film and video there that he “ran slap bang into the subject matter of The Song That Made My Name”, which is the book’s only reference to Common Pe(Please let there be a sequel covering those years.)ople and the starry decade that followed.
