The first song Jarvis Cocker ever wrote was inspired by Shakespeare
The immortal Bard has been inspiring British creatives for hundreds of years. Even Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker has found inspiration in Hamlet, Macbeth and the like. For better and for worse, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets are an essential aspect of the nation’s cultural DNA, shaping its sense of itself as somehow exceptional. This is all to the detriment of British schoolchildren, almost all of whom come to regard Shakespeare with the suspicion of those commanded to appreciate something against their will. What is it Mark Twain said? Ah yes, “a classic is something everybody wants to have read, but nobody wants to read.”
Born in Sheffield in 1963, Cocker attended City School on Stradbroke Road. In 2011, he returned to his former school to talk to students, play a short acoustic set and, uh, return a library book. “It was this school hall that saw the first performance of Pulp in March 1980,” he explained, “The tickets costing 20p promised 30 minutes of live Pulp, which was pretty good value really.”
By this point, Cocker had been introduced to the wonders of punk. He was 13 when he first caught wind of the movement, and it taught him that you didn’t need to be technically gifted to be a musician. “It was such a relief,” he told the BBC. “The message was ‘Here’s one chord and here’s another. Now go and form a band.’ There was nothing about having too much musical ability.”
He went on to discuss how his upbringing in Sheffield shaped his songwriting with Pulp. “It was only when I moved away to London years later that I realised the normal things I’d experienced in Sheffield weren’t actually normal at all – they were interesting and I wanted to write about them because I was scared of forgetting where I’d come from.” Cocker was one of the innumerable British schoolchildren who learnt about Shakespeare in his high school English class. Though many students develop a distaste for Shakespearian verse on account of having been forced to recite it for no obvious reason, Cocker was rather more enthusiastic.
During his interview for the BBC’s This Cultural Life podcast, the musician revealed that the first song he ever wrote was inspired by Shakespeare. Discussing the origins of ‘Shakespeare Rock’, Cocker recalled “, We were studying Shakespeare in English and everyone thought it was a bit boring. So I just wrote something with some words about Shakespeare.” Jarvis was even able to recite the lyrics: “Got a baby, only one thing’s wrong. Quotes Shakespeare all day long. Said baby, why you ignoring me? To be or not to be.”
