Moment of impact: how Jarvis Cocker falling out of a window made Pulp
On Division Street in Sheffield, in the window of what is now a florist, there is a blue sign. It reads, “Jarvis Cocker. Musician. A broken window was sustained due to clambering out of a window above this site. 1985.” In the Pulp song, ‘I Spy’, Cocker imagines a day when there will be a plaque where he “first-ever touched a girl’s chest”, so this is decidedly less glamorous. But in the singer’s own words, that day and that moment changed everything, calling it his “‘Road to Damascus’ moment”.
For those less well-versed in religious references, a road to Damascus moment is one that marks a sharp and sudden turning point in someone’s life. It’s a moment of insight that hits all of a sudden and reveals a path that a person must follow. That insight hit Jarvis Cocker right at the moment he landed on the pavement.
“One night in early November 1985, I went to a girl’s flat in the centre of Sheffield and tried to impress her by going out onto her window ledge and then re-entering her living room via the next window along,” Cocker recalls in his book Good Pop Bad Pop. It was a move he’d been planning for a while having seen a guest at a different party perform the trick before and being, in his words, “very taken with it.”
That alone could perfectly sum up Cocker’s position before the fateful window moment. While it was the 1994 album His N Hers that finally allowed Pulp to break through, people forget how long they’ve been together. The band formed back in 1978 with this gaggle of musicians who had known each other for a long time. In Cocker’s case, he’d been sketching out plans for the band since school, always having a clear idea of what kind of rock star he wanted to be and the music he wanted to make. This window trick seems to sum that up: slick, suave, rebellious, easy. It’s precisely the sort of stuff you would see a rock star do. But just as how that mission was planned to truly work for Pulp as they grafted and grafted, building slowly with no real breakout moment. This move, too, was “doomed to failure from the off.”
So there he is. Suddenly, Jarvis Cocker finds himself handing off the window ledge, having overestimated his strength. There’s no way to pull himself back into the building, no way to get around to the other window like he’d planned. He realised he must do what he thought would be a “controlled drop”—it was not.
“Cocker, who is now in the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, suffered a number of broken bones in his leg, hip, arm and wrist when he fell 20 foot from the pavement,” is what a local newspaper wrote about the incident. But it is not really about the injuries. The impact this moment had on Pulp comes twofold in two moments.
“I credit this as the moment when my worldview changed profoundly.”
Jarvis Cocker
The first is Jarvis Cocker, 22, smashed on the pavement after the fall. “I credit this as the moment when my worldview changed profoundly. Life is elsewhere? No: life is occurring, in all its intensity, right now – and right under your nose,” he writes of the moment. Laid on the floor in a Sheffield street, the characters came out to help him. Like the 1980s equivalent of Oscar Wilde saying, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” Cocker’s view from the floor, in pain but thankful to have survived, seemed to wake him up to what was around him. “The scales had fallen from my eyes,” he said, “I now realised that I’d been surrounded by inspiration all along. Only I’d been too intent on scaling the distant horizon to actually see it. Now that I was back at ground level and staring life fully in the face, I found myself eyeball to eyeball with what I’d always been searching for: something to write about.”
The second vital moment in the making of Pulp comes right after this as Jarvis Cocker lay in a hospital bed, recovering. If the fall told him what to write about, which was the world directly around him, the men he shared his hospital room told him who to write about; the people.
“I was hanging out with men from a different generation and with very different backgrounds to mine,” Cocker recalled, stating, “Talking to them was an education.” Crucially, he remembered that “most of them were there due to work-related incidents.” A year out from the end of the miners’ strike, some of the men around him were from that industry and had fought that conflict. Up until then, Jarvis Cocker, a kid of the counterculture, had never really considered much about these men who seemed a world away from him and his life. But stuck in that shared room, talking about life and their injuries and music and everything – this seemed to be a radicalising moment for Cocker and the direct impetus for songs like ‘Common People’, ‘I Spy’ and countless other of the band’s rock tuned ladened with class commentary.
So Jarvis Cocker fell out of a window, and everything changed. Though luckily his bones healed up, by the time he was out of the hospital and back to the band, they were a very different one. Having been trying and failing to make it work off the back of their songs before, described by Cocker as a merge of “immature jokiness and excruciating attempts at profundity”, his post-window world, few took the pen. From that moment on, Pulp songs were about Pulp’s world, Sheffield and its people, and the working class and characters like the ones in the hospital ward. Now, the sticker marks the spot on Division Street, but it’s so much more than simply where Cocker took a tumble.
