My Next Read: “Good Pop, Bad Pop” by Jarvis Cocker

What if the things we keep hidden say more about us than those we put on display?

We all have a random collection of the things that made us – photos, tickets, clothes, souvenirs, stuffed in a box, packed in a suitcase, crammed into a drawer. When Jarvis Cocker starts clearing out his loft, he finds a jumble of objects that catalogue his story and ask him some awkward questions:

Who do you think you are?

Are clothes important?

Why are there so many pairs of broken glasses up here?

From a Gold Star polycotton shirt to a pack of Wrigley’s Extra, from his teenage attempts to write songs to the Sexy Laughs Fantastic Dirty Joke Book, his upcoming book Good Pop, Bad Pop – released on May 26, 2022 – is the hard evidence of Jarvis’s unique life, Pulp, 20th century pop culture, the good times and the mistakes he’d rather forget. And this accumulated debris of a lifetime reveals his creative process – writing and musicianship, performance and ambition, style and stagecraft.

This is not a life story. It’s a loft story.