The “most savage” song Jarvis Cocker has ever written
At the time of writing, it’s the day before Pulp are set to headline Tramlines Festival in Sheffield.
For those who don’t know, Tramlines started out as a local festival, where bands from Sheffield would gather in different venues dotted around the city and perform. From those humble beginnings, the festival has grown to the extent that it’s now one of the most sought-after indie festivals in the UK.
As the festival has gotten bigger, the local Sheffield element has ever so slightly faded out. The roots are still there; for instance, one stage is called the T’other Stage, which still has an affinity towards Sheffield artists, and it takes place at Hillsborough Park. However, as you can expect, when a festival gets bigger, it needs to expand beyond just the city it originated in, which means the headliners for the past few years of festivals haven’t had much of a connection to the city.
When Pulp were announced as headliners, it was arguably the biggest day in the festival’s history. It seems like a huge full-circle moment, as what started as a local festival now gets to celebrate how much it’s grown with one of the biggest bands to come from Sheffield. Not only that, but the music that said band skyrocketed to fame with is the direct result of Sheffield.
Pulp had had some success prior to the release of Different Class and their hit single ‘Common People’; however, it was this record that really took them to the mainstream. The real change in the band was when Jarvis Cocker started writing about real people, telling the stories of his home town and those who make it. This all began down Division Street, one of the places in Sheffield where Tramlines Festival originally started.
“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,” wrote Cocker in his book Good Pop Bad Pop. Suffice it to say, this didn’t go to plan, and Cocker ended up falling out the window and landing on the pavement.
He spent some time in hospital, but the injury, those who helped him, and those who surrounded him in hospital, he realised, were enough inspiration for him to write all along. “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,” he wrote. “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 result was the songs he wrote for the album Different Class. Some of these speak for themselves: ‘Common People’ and ‘Disco 2000’ speak of crushes, being working class, and growing up quicker than you’d like. Other songs also had real-world themes, but were a lot more sinister than those they shared an album with. The one that Jarvis Cocker picked out was the track ‘I Spy’, which goes into detail about him sleeping with someone else’s wife.
“‘I Spy’ is probably one of the most savage songs that I’ve ever written,” Cocker said. “It’s definitely the most vindictive. I wrote it about the time I was on the dole in Sheffield. Sometimes, if you’re in a real cocky mood, you can walk down the street and kind of despise people from above. You know that kind of superior hate.”
In the track, Cocker says he would like there to be a blue plaque on the building where he first ever touched a girl’s chest. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen; however, if you walk down Division Street in Sheffield today, you will see, “Jarvis Cocker. Musician. A broken window was sustained due to clambering out of a window above this site. 1985.”
