“I suppose it’s a recurring theme on the record, achieving some kind of acceptance of the darker side of yourself which I think is necessary. It’s always the same in the papers, isn’t it? “He seemed like a nice bloke, an upstanding member of society, six years of marriage, bludgeons people to death…” If you repress that thing – don’t somehow accept or give voice to the dodgy aspects of your character – it builds up and comes out in some kind of explosive, destructive action.”Jarvis Cocker (499)

“As far as I can make out, quite a few of the things the G8 promised to do they haven’t actually done… It’s that idea that you can change the system from within. They made a big thing of getting people like Bill Gates on board. It was very much saying, “We can make caring capitalism” Well, like it says in the song, “Fuck the morals, does it make any money?” That is the thing with capitalism. If it makes a profit, it’s good. If it doesn’t it’s not good.”Jarvis Cocker (499)

“It’s more about political leaders and the heads of multinational corporations. Live8 let them off the hook, cos it makes people think that something’s being addressed, and those leaders did agree to certain measures, which a lot of them haven’t fulfilled. It’s like they’re saying, have your protest, get it off your chest – however, we aren’t actually going to do anything to help.”Jarvis Cocker (500)

“I’ve tried to write about that [music being a vocation – Ed] on the new record with that song Black Magic. The way music works is mysterious and intangible, because one song with guitar, bass and drums is “God, that’s great!” and another song with guitar, bass and drums is just a pile of dog-wank, isn’t it? It’s a bit of a curse in a way, because it gives you this window into this other way of being. Music is a difficult thing to get over, if you’ve done it. It can fuck your life up. It’s the unreasonable people who really believe in it that produce the best stuff. You get your sensible musicians like James Blunt – seems like a nice guy, bit posh or whatever – they keep it at arms’ length and they’ll never make anything as vital or interesting as the people who get too close to it. I may well make a knobhead of myself, but I can’t do anything else, really.”Jarvis Cocker (501)

“I haven’t got much of a sense of imagination so a lot of our songs are just straight true stories – there was a girl called Deborah – she was born in the same hospital as me – not within an hour – I think it was like three hours – but you can’t fit three hours into the song without having to really rush the singing! (“We were born within-three-hours of each other”) It don’t work! So I took poetic licence and cut it down to an hour. But basically you know the whole thing was the same – I fancied her for ages and then she started to become a woman and her breasts began to sprout so then all the boys fancied her then – I didn’t stand a ‘cat-in-hell’s chance’ – but then I did use to sometimes hang around outside her house and stuff like that. The only bit that isn’t true is the woodchip wallpaper.”Jarvis Cocker (502)

“I did write a song about it [becoming a father – Ed], ‘Little Soul’, which is about a father abandoning a kid, then the kid bumping into him in the pub and the dad being too hammered to talk, the dad just saying ‘go away’. I’ve nothing to base my father act on. I’m going to have to make it all up as I go along.”Jarvis Cocker (503)

“I’ve always been fascinated by plants growing in places where they shouldn’t really be, like weeds growing in cracks in the paving stones. For some reason I thought, ‘That’s a bit like humans in a city – you’re a natural thing but you’re growing in this slightly hostile, crappy environment but somehow managing to survive’. I started thinking about how most good music comes from people who are in shitty circumstances and then the Svengali comes along and makes all the money and the artist gets fucked off. Then there was the drugs connotation. There’s a slumming-it mentality in our society which is going back to a ‘Common People’ theme – people getting a buzz from scoring drugs off a council estate. ‘It’s so authentic, I was in a real council house, and these people had tattoos and everything. It’s like they’ve got real contempt for these people and they’ll spit on them, but when they want some drugs or they wanna shag a prostitute they’re OK.”Jarvis Cocker (514)

“Because a lot of ideas seemed to come out in ‘Weeds’, I wanted to expand on it. My favourite line in the song is “Come on, do your funny little dance”. You create your own world in a band and, in a way, when it becomes popular it gets taken away from you. The things that you did naturally somehow make you feel like a performing monkey: ‘Go on, do that pointing thing’. For a while I toyed with the idea of standing still onstage because it was expected of me. But then I thought to myself, ‘I invented that stupid dance. No-one forced me to do it. Don’t worry about whether it’s a cliché’. So I’m still doing my funny little dance.”Jarvis Cocker (514)