Jarvis Cocker’s favourite album by The Beatles
It’s challenging to find a prominent musician from the past five decades that wasn’t, in some way, influenced by The Beatles. With such a heavyweight countercultural presence, their dominion wasn’t confined solely to music. Consequentially, even those uninterested in the band have been affected by the domino-pushing ripple of the four lads from Liverpool. As for Jarvis Cocker, the zany frontman for Britpop era group Pulp, he was a huge fan of The Beatles in his youth. While his songwriting style doesn’t directly descend from a Lennon-McCartney blueprint, he was heavily influenced by their impressive knack for edgy hit-making.
Born in Sheffield in 1963, Cocker grew up listening to British invasion-era music. Spearheaded by The Beatles, the era triggered a surge of musical inspiration in the northern counties of England. The Liverpool group’s unprecedented appeal gave fellow British youngsters from modest backgrounds license to entertain a previously unfathomable dream.
In 2019, Cocker was invited to discuss some of his favourite albums with Luke Turner of The Quietus. For his first selection of 13, the Pulp frontman picked out The Beatles’ penultimate album, 1969’s Abbey Road.
“We didn’t have a big record collection in our house when I was growing up, but my mum had three Beatles albums, Sgt Pepper, Revolver and Abbey Road,” Cocker told Turner. “Even though I was a kid, I could tell that Sgt Pepper and Revolver sounded like music that had happened a while ago, but Abbey Road sounded more modern. It still does sound quite modern because on the second side, where all the songs run into each other, that’s quite a thing, not many people had done that before, and not many have since.”
Cocker parenthetically outlined what he sees as the model for a perfect album. “There’s an art to an album,” he pondered. “If you’ve got an album that’s got a shit song on it, especially if it’s in the middle of a side, you’re not going to play it as much because you know you’re going to have to get up and skip that track. That’s what I’ve tried to do with [my selections], it’s records that I don’t mind putting on, then you can relax or talk to people or whatever, but you know you’re not going to get some kind of fucking horrible shitty stinker of a song on it.”
“Abbey Road…” Cocker said, returning to the subject of the Beatles record. “I was young at the time, 10, 11, 12, whatever, and the track that ends side one, ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ that was mind-blowing to me, the way it went on and on and on at the end, with this big synthy whooshy noise. I’ve since found out its Ringo playing this machine that sounds like wind that you get in classical orchestras”.
Adding: “It was a psychedelic experience in a living room in a normal part of Sheffield in the early ’70s, where, you know, psychedelic experiences weren’t that common. I’ll always remember it; that song, in particular, took me somewhere. And that’s the end of that side – if you had Abbey Road on CD it wouldn’t be right; it only really works as a statement if you listen to it for ages and then it suddenly stops and then you’re left in silence for a while until you can be bothered to get up and start again. I started with this because it plays with what an album can be. It’s great.”
Listen to the brilliant Abbey Road medley from side two below.
Never Miss A Beat
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