Speaking in the latest issue of MOJO, on sale now, Jarvis Cocker has spoken about his infamous stage invasion during Michael Jackson’s performance of Earth Song at the 1996 Brit Awards, and how the tabloid intrusion that followed sent him into a dark spiral that ultimately spawned the post-Britpop hangover of Pulp's sixth album, This Is Hardcore.
After over a decade operating on indie rock’s artier fringes, by 1996, the stars had finally aligned for the group Cocker formed as a 15-year-old in Sheffield. Coming off the back of the success of Common People, the band had headlined the previous year’s Glastonbury Festival, deputising for The Stone Roses after Roses’ guitarist John Squire broke his collarbone mountain biking. Different Class, their fifth album, topped the UK charts and would go on to win the Mercury Music Prize.
Buoyed by the barricade-storming surge of Britpop, spearheaded by the likes of Blur, Suede, and Oasis, Cocker and Pulp had left the toils of perpetual outsiderdom behind to become unlikely pop stars.
After that year’s Brit Awards, however, Pulp's frontman found himself the recipient of a new, entirely unwanted level of fame.
Pulp were up for Best Album, Best Band, and Best Single at that year's awards, and had performed Different Class’ Sorted For E’s And Whizz earlier that evening. However, taking umbrage at Michael Jackson’s performance of his hit Earth Song, in which the singer appeared to be portraying himself as a messianic, Christ-like figure, Cocker jumped on stage and wiggled his bottom into infamy.
While the Jackson organisation accused Cocker of endangering onstage child actors, Cocker merely ran on stage, gave a questioning look, waggled his behind and lifted up his jacket before exiting, pursued by security. After being held by Jackson's security, he spent the night in the cells, getting unlikely legal representation by comedian and former solicitor, Bob Mortimer.
Pulp’s keyboard player Candida Doyle says Cocker had seen Jackson’s rehearsal the day before and declared it “awful”. On the night, his act prompted more consternation on Pulp’s table. “I don’t know if I said to Jarvis, 'Well, do something...'” Doyle tells MOJO’s Ian Harrison. “I didn’t see Jarvis again that night. I think the next day we started an arena tour, and I said sorry. We’ve never spoken about it since. It feels a bit taboo.”
Though no charges were brought, it was the event, Cocker tells MOJO, that “sent it all into weirdness”.
“At first it looked bad: they accused me of cobbing kids off stage and stuff, and a bare bottom as well, which wasn’t true. After that, everybody knew who I was. I’d always wanted to be famous, but you can’t decide on the level of fame that you’re going to get, and that sent me into an overload of it. It wasn’t for music, it was for one quite out-of-character thing I’d done…” says the singer. “That’s when it became really difficult to handle because I just couldn’t go out anymore. So, yeah, life became dark.”
The British public, however, were roundly behind the Pulp frontman over the incident, with The Daily Mirror even organising a 'Justice For Jarvis' campaign with t-shirts bearing the Pulp Frontman’s face.
“That was nice of them,” he says. “But it sent me into a space that took me a long time to get out of, over 10 years for sure. But I did it, so I can’t complain.”
Peace in our time: Cocker at a press conference following the incident, February, 1996
Elsewhere in the interview, available in UK shops now, the singer admits that a certain level of partying had crept in with the group’s belated success, and following the headline-grabbing incident with Jackson, the newly interested tabloids were now portraying a litany of minor celebrity encounters. There were chemical indulgences and a News Of The World tell-all about a romantic indiscretion. “Well, cocaine was the drug of Britpop and it’s a horrible drug for people’s personalities,” he tells MOJO. “And it didn’t have a good effect on mine either.”
Such experiences would feed into Different Class’ more jaundiced follow-up, 1998’s This Is Hardcore.
“It took such a long time to do it,” recalls Cocker of the album’s protracted gestation. “I was trying to hide from the world and saw the studio as a safe place to be.”
“Eight months in a subterranean set of rooms covered in grey carpet, with no windows and the smell of wet mattresses,” is how drummer Nick Banks describes the sessions. “Not conducive to making the life-affirming tunes that we’d been doing before. Up to that point, a lot of what Jarvis was writing about was observing the minutiae of ordinary lives. The Michael Jackson thing flipped that, and he became the observed. It was pretty grim at times.”
Though This Is Hardcore reached Number 1 and features some of Pulp’s most memorable songs – the fame as pornography-equating title track, Help The Aged, Party Hard, and A Little Soul, in which Cocker addressed the father who abandoned him as a child - it soon slipped out of the charts, and none of the band feel particularly warm towards it today.
The Scott Walker-produced We Love Life arrived in 2001, before Pulp called it a day and Cocker pursued other musical outlets.
Though he brought the group back together for two successful live reunion tours in 2011 and 2023, many assumed that that was it when it came to any new music from the the band.
That was, of course, until Pulp announced last week that a new album – More. – was arriving in June...
“Pulp has always mutated and now it’s mutated again…”
Get the latest issue of MOJO to read Pulp’s first interview in 23 years and find out the full story behind the band’s first album in over two decades. Plus! Get your hands on an exclusive CD of unreleased Pulp songs curated especially for MOJO by Pulp themselves. More info HERE!
Main photo: Tom Jackson