The house I grew up in: Jarvis Cocker

The Britpop stalwart remembers his Sheffield family home, where he snuck listens to his grandparents’ records and started a little band called Pulp.

This interview originally featured in our twice-yearly donor magazine, ‘Here’. If you would like to receive your copies, with interviews, essays and artwork on the subject of home and what it means to us, all you need to do is make a small, regular gift to Shelter.

Donate here and receive your magazine: http://shltr.org.uk/566

Interview by Jude Rogers

Jarvis Cocker: ‘I was born in Sheffield and spent my first 18 years in the same house in an area called Intake. A very beautiful name. I never found out why it was called that. It sounds a bit technical, doesn’t it? The house had been a stable, made of stone, part of a farm at some point, put there before the area had become more built-up after the war. It wasn’t how some people think of Sheffield at all.

‘I shared a room with my sister. We had bunk beds. I was top bunk, she was bottom bunk. When we got towards puberty, my mum had an extension put on so we could all have a room of our own. We were quite lucky, really.

‘My grandma and granddad lived next door. My granddad had a DIY shop down the road, so my mum used to work there, and my grandma as well, a little bit. We shared a telephone too. Granddad had illegally wired up the phone to be in our house as well as his. If a call was for them, we just had to knock on the wall, really hard, so they’d hear and then they’d pick it up. We’d go round to theirs at the weekend – a big trip that was – and we’d eat with them on Friday night, and have a proper dinner on Sundays. They had a colour telly, and that was a big treat for me, because we only had a black and white one. They also had a music centre, with a cassette player in it and a radio, which seemed very posh. Sometimes I would go round there in the daytime, if nobody was around, and try and listen to records.

‘We had a garden out the back that we shared with them too, and there were apple trees, raspberry canes, a gooseberry bush and some rhubarb. I wouldn’t say you could live off the land, but you could, you know, go and get things. People used to come round to my house and play because there was room out the back, so that was good when I was young.

‘My dad disappeared when I was seven. I do vaguely remember him being around, but most of my memories are just of my sister and my mother. When I became a teenager, my favourite place in the house was my bedroom. I had my guitar up there, and a little amplifier. I would go there and try to write songs and record myself until it got to 10 o’clock – what my mother used to call my ‘plinky-plonking’ – then I’d turn the radio on and listen to John Peel and tape things off that. I used to go out and hang around with kids on the street corner when I was younger, but then I got more introverted, I suppose, more withdrawn.

‘I started Pulp when I was 14 or 15, and at some point we started rehearsing in the house. My mum would go out on a Friday, so we would be able to play in the living room, plugging the instruments through her very bad stereo, and drinking illegal alcohol. At first, we didn’t have a drum kit, so just used to hit a coal scuttle. My grandparents didn’t complain, although Granddad let us have one of the old garages in the yard a bit later, to practise in properly.

‘My Uncle Ralph lived just across the way. He used to sit in the window with a German helmet on, playing his accordion. He was very into Communism, and whenever the Bolshoi or any Russian entertainers came to Sheffield, he would go and meet them at the station. He had a claim to fame too: he became the interpreter for the German football team in the 1966 World Cup, because some of the games were played at Hillsborough, at the Sheffield Wednesday ground.

‘Intake also had the last privately owned cinema in Sheffield, run by two old ladies at the bottom of the road. The Rex Cinema, that was it. They didn’t have Dolby, so if there was a film in Surround Sound, they’d just turn the speakers up really loud. I remember going to see [’70s disaster film] ‘Earthquake’, and not being able to hear anyone on screen, because the sound was so distorted. The Rex got demolished in order to become a car park for a supermarket in the early ‘80s. That’s progress for you.

‘I left home at 18. My mother didn’t chuck me out of the house exactly, but she knew I was a withdrawn kind of person, so if I was going to develop into anything, she would have to kind of gently boot me out. She had to do that so I would become something. And she was right. She was right.’