“Well, it’s about dogs in society, male and female. As far as I can work out, man is nearer to dog than ape. The way they shit on your carpet, that sort of thing. Sometimes you feel like a dog, it’s like low mindedness, brute instinct over higher values. It’s a bit of a dilemma. You get the nobility of lions but dogs are stuck with walking down the pavements being dirty. There’s no more pathetic sight in the world than a faithful dog.”Jarvis Cocker (785)

“Yeah, it is a horrible feeling [going home at 4am with someone and then realizing that it wasn’t such a good idea – Ed]. It makes you feel something less than human, like you can get carried away with this need… I don’t know… See, sometimes it seems like a great thing to do, to shag someone you don’t know well or care about. It’s a mental thing. Your body’s saying, ‘Go on, do it. Offload that!’ Just get it done. And in a way, I think there is something enticing about impersonal sex. The only similar thing is having a kebab. Everybody knows that kebabs are a bad idea. They do, really. You can’t excuse them on any grounds of nutrition or otherwise, but somehow, when you’re really pissed, really fucking hammered, you get into that perverse frame of mind where you think, ‘Right, I’m hammered. I’m a mess. How can I take it further?’ And the answer is: ‘I’ll have a kebab.’ Somehow it rounds the experience off and you get some kind of perverse satisfaction from the knowledge that you were low, and yet you thought of a way of taking it lower. And there is something you can learn from that — not necessarily something that you’ll want etched on your gravestone, but it’s good to acknowledge that sometimes you get those unwise impulses. Somehow, from taking it that far, you get something out of it.”Jarvis Cocker (786)

“It’s about the idea that you might meet someone who’s going to be important in your life, when you’d been debating whether to go out at all that night, and your life took a different path.”Jarvis Cocker (787)

“It was originally written about 12 years ago. My sister sang an early version, but it had different words. It never got used, and then I just remembered it. Because it had been written such a long time ago it made me wonder what I was doing then. And I worked out that it must have been written quite near to me meeting this girl. It’s just wondering, really. If I hadn’t gone out and met this particular person in this particular nightclub, and formed a relationship with her, how different would my life have been? So it’s not really about fate, it’s more about the randomness of things. Which I like. As I’ve said before, that’s the main thing I feel is missing from my life. The worst thing about having a schedule and a timetable is that there’s less chance for unexpected things to happen.”Jarvis Cocker (788)

“It should be perfectly clear that it’s saying, ‘I don’t like intolerant people.'”Jarvis Cocker (783)

“I’ve always had a problem with songs that tried to tackle social issues. I’m thinking of ‘Another Day In Paradise’. I’m thinking of ‘Belfast Child’. ‘Mis-Shapes’ is probably the nearest I’ve got to a sloganeering song for the sake of it. I think I just scraped through because it’s based on the feeling of a Saturday night in Sheffield when the beer monsters are out, wanting to smack you because you’re wearing funny glasses, a funny haircut and orange trousers – and you have to run away. The word comes from my mum buying mis-shaped chocolates. They were cheap because they wouldn’t fit in a box of Milk Tray. I don’t object to townies really, but the trouble is, they can’t just get on with being ignorant in isolation. They want to take it out on other people.”Jarvis Cocker (784)

“That song was written more about the system that’s allowing the free market to be the dominant moral force in the world, rather than specific leaders. Because that has been discredited in the past couple of years with what’s happened. So I feel vindicated there — just call me Nostradamus. In terms of leaders… I get the feeling that there’s a lot of people who don’t feel represented by any of the major political parties. In fact you’ve got a spectrum of different shades of, let’s say brown, given that Gordon Brown is in charge. David Cameron is beige, and whoever it is who runs the Liberal Democrats…Clegg, he’s chocolate brown. Well there’s a whole spectrum of other things that aren’t even being addressed. I’d like to see some kind of… it throws up a lot of very difficult things, because I’ve always felt that the right to vote is a very important right to have, but then when there’s this next election, I find it very difficult to know who to vote for. I think it’d be better if everybody decided not to vote as a protest. Because there’s a minimum turn out that you can have for an election to be considered valid. And if nobody voted, that would be a very strong message that this is a load of crap and you’re going to have to try a little bit harder.”Jarvis Cocker (789)

“No. That surprised me [the hatred and vengeful feelings in his lyrics – Ed]. I suppose ‘I-Spy’ is the most extreme example, where revenge is taken on a middle-class person by sleeping with his wife – which attacks the very centre of his being, beyond the material advantages that can’t be overcome. But I don’t agree with the idea of revenge really.”Jarvis Cocker (784)