“A bunch of people in secondhand clothes getting wasted”: Jarvis Cocker’s favourite song from the 1990s
Sandwiched between the industrial action of the 1980s and the economic downturn of the 2000s, the 1990s was a rare moment where it felt ‘cool’ to be British. Harking back to the culturally rich era of the 1960s, the decade saw a vibrant explosion of British music, with groups like Oasis, Blur, and Pulp leading the way. The age of Britpop ushered in some of the nation’s most beloved songwriters and groundbreaking anthems, as well as making a pop star out of Jarvis Cocker, who had been trying to get Pulp into the charts for upwards of a decade by that point.
Cocker first formed the future Britpop giants while at school in Sheffield in the late 1970s. In the age of punk rock, where subversion of the mainstream was the ultimate goal, the budding songwriter always understood the power of a truly great pop song. As such, Cocker rigorously debated everything about Pulp, from the clothes they would wear to the band’s praying mantis logo. He clearly had a vision for the group, but it would take quite a few years for anybody outside of Sheffield to notice.
Despite early successes, making a name for themselves in the South Yorkshire indie scene and even securing a session with John Peel way back in 1981, it would not be until the release of His ‘n’ Hers in 1994 that mainstream audiences started to pay attention.
The album hit the airwaves at the perfect moment, capitalising on the early success of Britpop and cementing Pulp as a key part of that scene, even if – like most other groups in the scene – Cocker viewed the ‘Britpop’ tag with a healthy amount of disdain.
The Pulp frontman would go on to become one of the defining figures in British music during the 1990s, thanks in part to the band’s iconic appearance at the Glastonbury Festival in 1995 and the genius of records like Different Class and This Is Hardcore, which followed. It was a revolutionary period for Cocker, so much so that it was probably quite difficult to keep updated on things that were happening outside of the Pulp bubble.
As such, when the songwriter was asked to select some of his favourite records for Pitchfork, only one was released during the 1990s. Reflecting on the period, just before Pulp had their breakthrough, Cocker shared, “I’d gone to college because it seemed the group wasn’t going to do anything. But as I left college in ’91, it felt like we were allowed to have fun again. Bands like Stereolab and Suede had started, and we played some concerts with them and got to meet some of the bands that were around in London at that time.”
“By ’93, it was all turning into something interesting—I don’t think they’d come up with that horrible word ‘Britpop’ yet, but there was a new movement of bands,” the songwriter recalled. “It was before it really broke and got spoiled by getting too commercialised. It still was really just a bunch of people in secondhand clothes getting wasted in Camden, which was fun.”
Fittingly, therefore, Cocker selected Suede’s defining anthem, ‘Animal Nitrate’ as a particular favourite from the era. Released in 1993, one month before the London band unveiled their eponymous debut album, ‘Animal Nitrate’ had much more in common with grunge and glam rock than anything that would later be tagged with the Britpop moniker.
Nevertheless, it exudes a sense of youthful rebellion, excitement, and sexiness that came to typify the attitude of the period, so it is no surprise that it earned the adoration of Jarvis Cocker.
