Ahead of his band's headline show at Montreux Jazz Festival, Pulp's Jarvis Cocker spoke about the creative freedom which comes from making music.
Cocker discussed this while hosting a talk on 'Outsider Art', where he met up with artists working beyond the mainstream, while also sharing details about making Pulp's sixth studio album, This Is Hardcore.
“I’ve often found that if you think about it too much, if you’ve got too much of a strong picture of what you’re trying to do, in some ways that can really restrict what you’re doing", Cocker said. "The trick is to try and do it with your mind semi-turned off, and that took me a long time to learn. In fact, I wish I’d learned it before starting this record… Pulp had made This Is Hardcore which took going on for a year. Mainly because during a lot of the time we were doing it, I was wondering why we were doing it".
Elsewhere, Cocker spoke about what he learned about making the 1999 docuseries on 'Outsider Arts', which was titled , Journeys Into The Outside with Jarvis Cocker.
“Another thing that comes across in Leonard’s interview [one of the artists featured in the show], there’s no why in his mind. That’s the thing I found with most people I spoke to when making this programme [Journeys Into The Outside], we’d always be wanting to know why they were making these things, why they were making a paint mountain, why they’d covered the whole of the outside of their house in broken plates", he said.
He added: "But it was like the question why never came into their mind because it they enjoyed it so much. So yeah, I wish I had known that before starting that record".
“We spent a long time making ‘This Is Hardcore’ and eventually got it finished and then two weeks after it come out when I was supposed to be promoting it, I said I’m going to go make this TV series and left the country. Which wasn’t very popular with the record company as you can imagine! But I don’t regret having kind of sabotaged my musical career, because having found this art, it did intrigue me".
That night saw Pulp perform at the festival's Lake Stage, treating fans to live performances from their UK No1 album, More, as well as, tracks 'Disco 2000', 'Babies', and of course the classic, 'Common People'.
