Jarvis Cocker doesn’t really believe in doing things the conventional way. If he did, Beyond the Pale—his first solo album in over a decade—wouldn’t have included songs that were performed before they were even finished.
“Yeah,” Cocker says, almost sheepishly. “We accepted an invitation to play a festival in Iceland, and I thought, if I’m gonna finish these songs, something has to happen. So we just played them live—unfinished—in front of an audience.” No pressure.
That’s how this whole thing started: a batch of half-completed songs, a looming performance date, and the possibility of public failure. But as it turns out, “peril” was just the thing the songs needed. Cocker assembled a new band—including improvisational musicians like Emma Smith and Serafina Steer—and let the risk of live disaster push the music across the finish line. “It takes things onto the next level,” he says, “which is needed to make them actually become real songs.”
The record kicks off with “Save the Whale,” a low, brooding rumble that would make Leonard Cohen smirk with recognition. “That was the last song to be completed for the record,” Cocker explains. “I’d just seen the documentary Leonard and Marianne, and I think because those two things happened on the same day—watching that and writing the lyrics—it just felt right to drop my voice down into that netherworld.” It works, and while it teeters on the edge of mimicry, Cocker walks the tightrope gracefully. “You always have to be aware of that,” he admits. “You don’t want to impersonate. But if a song’s called Save the Whale… well, a whale is a big thing. Maybe I was trying to go for that big, heavy voice.”
Another standout track, “Sometimes I Am Pharaoh,” came from unexpected inspiration: human statues. The kind you see in city squares, covered in silver paint, completely still—until you get close. “I started thinking, what if that was a perfect cover for spying on people?” he says. “You could monitor the mood of a crowd. So the song is kind of written from the perspective of one of those people.” Not a metaphor. Not a dream. Just Jarvis imagining himself as a low-budget surveillance statue. You almost expect the song to come with a tip jar.
For an album rooted in ancient cave paintings and pre-verbal communication, Beyond the Pale ends up sounding remarkably current. Songs like “Must I Evolve?” land with accidental prescience—written before the pandemic but taking on new meaning in a world suddenly obsessed with communication and basic human contact. “It kind of goes back to the fundamentals,” he says. “What do I want? What’s missing? Often, it’s other people.”
That drive for connection shows up again on “House Music All Night Long,” an unintended lockdown anthem about dancing by yourself. “That’s something I rediscovered during lockdown,” he says. “I did these ‘domestic discos’ on Instagram… the idea that everybody’s dancing in their living rooms, kind of losing it. It was a release.” When told that the track now feels like it belongs in the same canon as “Dancing on My Own” and “Dancing With Myself,” Cocker laughs. “That’s a decent club to be in,” he says—before being informed that “Dancing With Myself” was allegedly about masturbation. “Really?” he asks. “Well, that’s news to me.”
And then there’s “Like a Friend”, Pulp’s most heartbreaking non-album track, originally written for Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations—a film where it plays like a romantic gut-punch just as Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow collide in doomed affection. The song’s rawness, all bruised vocals and tragic timing, has cemented it as one of the band’s most beloved tracks in the States—something that still surprises Cocker.
“It’s more popular in America than it is in the UK,” he says. “It was written for that film, and I guess it just kind of stuck with people here more.” It’s easy to see why. The lyric “Come on in / Wipe your feet on my dreams” hits with the kind of melodic cruelty that Pulp always did best, but without the wink. No satire. No safety net. Just devastation, set to strings.
And that’s the strange power of a Jarvis Cocker song: it can sound like a cynical sneer, an emotional plea, and a private joke all at once. Whether he’s channeling Paleolithic artists or park-bench performers in metallic paint, he’s still reminding us what music is supposed to do—connect us. Even if it takes eleven years to finish the sentence.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the tracks below.
