Michael Caine - Pulp - Jarvis Cocker - Split

Credit: Far Out / United Artists / Alamy

‘Pulp’: The Michael Caine movie that inspired Jarvis Cocker

Tue 29 April 2025 10:00, UK

Michael Caine and Jarvis Cocker may be two different sides of the same coin in terms of British masculinity. On the surface, you might think there are very few similarities. Caine, after all, is the figurehead of a certain kind of unrefined, yet stylish Cockney masculinity. Straight talking and down to earth, yet effortlessly charming enough to be one of the great James Bond what-ifs, having turned down an offer to play the iconic secret agent in 1967.

From a certain point of view, Jarvis Cocker was the complete opposite. An awkward, intellectual northerner who became a hero to outsiders everywhere when his band Pulp hit it big in the 1990s. For all that Michael Caine was an aspirational idea of British masculinity, Cocker was a more relatable figure, the Spider-Man to Caine’s Superman.

After all, Cocker sang eloquently and bravely of all the ways that British culture kept people in straitjackets. Of burning, unrelenting horniness with absolutely no release. Of being a bit too clever to be content with everything British life had to offer you, but being fascinated by it anyway, his very presence stood in opposition to what Caine represented.

Caine was, after all, a man who made a movie star persona out of looking like a Spitfire pilot and talking like a wide boy. He was the celluloid face of the British invasion, 1967’s Alfie breaking him in America to the tune of a ‘Best Actor’ nomination at the Academy Awards. He had the kind of cultural clout that meant to this day, where his visage is displayed, a union flag isn’t far behind.

So, how did Michael Caine inspire Pulp?

Some 30 years later, Cocker would have the same cultural impact by doing precisely the opposite. If Caine was about succeeding at everything society told you to do, Cocker was about how you could thrive without it. I mean, look at his stage presence. That is a man with absolutely no visible dancing ability, dancing anyway and making it work like gangbusters.

However, above all, there’s as much uniting the two as separating the two, and that’s not a coincidence. Michael Caine was a huge inspiration to Cocker, and it all comes down to one movie in particular. In 1972, Caine released a movie where even a cursory look at him might make you do a double-take.

This is a picture in which a newly 40-year-old Michael Caine plays a deadpan, seedy womaniser. He is a writer of trashy genre novels who spends the entire runtime dressed in slightly shabby yet eye-catching suits. Most notable of all are the enormous, thick-rimmed glasses that he wears throughout the film. If you know Cocker by sight, you’ve absolutely seen these looks before.

All of this might seem like a bit of a stretch. Sure, skirt-chasing ragamuffins are ten-a-penny in English culture, and Caine’s filmography is filled with them. The glasses are similar, but how can one be sure that a young Jarvis Cocker was watching this film and taking notes for his future pop star persona? Well, one needs to look no further than the very name of the film: Pulp.