Pulp Jarvis Cocker Tribute Unbritpop Band Adults Kids T-Shirt

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From doing work experience at a record shop in Colchester I saw from the older kids how to build my escape route: college, get a student loan, go to uni. I did a music production HND at Sussex uni. I didn’t finish, but I put on my own parties in Brighton, started a record label and worked in pirate radio. That’s where the name Jonny Banger comes from. That thing of people rolling over and going, "Oh, it looks like I'm making things a bit untidy. I'll get out of your way. Sorry"… It seems to have been accepted quite meekly that the art colleges, as they existed in this country, are just going to disappear. The lecturers aren't going to want to teach the people who are going to end up being the only ones who can afford to go there.

In the book he describes trying to provide some kind of sex education for his own adolescent son, to the mortification of both parties. It worries him, the fact that sex and life have become so severed. “Because what you’re dealing with is you get those feelings, those instincts, at a certain age and they are strong feelings and you’ve got to deal with them in some way and if there are no clues except some kind of foul thing online where you start to think of people as objects, and why aren’t I getting my sex that I was promised – or whatever, I don’t know what those people think.”I grew up in Colchester. My mum was a psychiatric nurse and she got ill with leukaemia when I was 13 and died when I was 15. Then it was just me and my brother in the house. He was 18 and became my guardian. The unfortunate side effect is [the authorities]can then bring in all these draconian things, like when there was a student march the other week. They let slip: "Oh, yeah – we might have some rubber bullets" or "We might get the water cannon out." When there is something that actually has an agenda, not just "Oh, I want some trainers", that's going to get stamped on. I went on that march and I was amazed, because there were as many police as there were people marching. It was crazy. I would have loved " Cunts Are Still Running the World" to have been an international No 1, but radio play was quite difficult for that one…

We got Caro Howell, director of the Foundling Museum, to write the name of our last fashion show on all the invitations, because she’s got beautiful handwriting. So she came here and wrote “The People Deserve Beauty” loads of times and told us about Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty and the line of beauty while she did it. I didn’t know any of those references. What was the last song you heard that made you think, "Wow. What's that song called?" (JonnyMac99, online)JC: That feeling is what makes things, especially activism, fun. You don’t want to walk around with a serious face, and it confuses people if you’ve having a laugh. In the UK, suddenly, I was crazily recognised, and I couldn’t go out any more. It tipped me into a level of celebrity I couldn’t ever have known existed and wasn’t equipped for. It had a massive, generally detrimental effect on my mental health,” he told The New York Times last July. Do the subjects of your songs know they've been written about? And if so, how do they feel about it? I'm thinking about Susan (" Inside Susan") and Deborah (" Disco 2000 "). (Child of the Nineties, online)

I have written a book called Good Pop, Bad Pop, which is based around the objects I found in the loft of a house I used to live in. Objects I collected over the course of a lifetime & then left to gather dust in the dark. Why? Am I a hoarder? Or did I think I was laying things away “for a rainy day”? I didn't grow it to hide anything, I grew it out of neglect. I was at somebody's house and I had no access to shaving facilities for a couple of weeks. I got over the itchy bit, and I thought I'd give it a go. I was horrified to see that it had quite a lot of grey in it. But then you have to get used to the fact that you're getting to a certain age. I've had it for two and a bit years now. Starting Pulp was a way too of alchemically transforming everyday existence into a more fantastic version. Several times in our conversation he touches on his persistent desire to live inside the TV, a zone of adventure populated by dinosaurs, Daleks and the Monkees. “I realise that image doesn’t work so much now because TVs are just flat screens. But when they were boxes you kind of thought – what’s in it? You could almost imagine fitting inside it.” Does the phrase "national treasure" make you gag or feel proud? (Screwdriver Cat, online at theguardian.com) The devastating pot shot when it came, however, was directed not at Tony Blair but at poor Michael Hutchence of INXS. He was looking characteristically dapper as he strode out to present Oasis with yet another award, this time for Best Video. Then Noel Gallagher grabbed the mic and said “Has-beens shouldn’t be presenting awards to gonna-bes”.I'm always thinking the revolution could still happen, though. At the moment there's a feeling – I got that when I was on that student march the other day… it's just getting more interesting. So there’s bad pop and good pop, hunger of all kinds and art as a consistent source of nourishment and pleasure. Several times he mentions that he’s trying to get better at relationships, rather than zoning out in front of the TV and putting all his feelings in a song instead. Clearing out the attic is part of a concerted effort to get to grips with old stuff, on an emotional as well as physical level: to change bad habits, to communicate more instead of escaping into fantasy. “Me ringing you this morning about the dog situation, that was a slight breakthrough,” he announces, surprisingly, “because a few years ago I would have just worried about it. The journey would have been an absolute nightmare. So then ringing, even though I wasn’t pleased about being late, at least I knew I’d dealt with it.” Is there a song of yours that you think should have received wider recognition? (Chris D Broughton, online)

No – people who work in their office have hit me up and said if I ever need stationery or USBs, to just ask. They’ve sent it over and I use it as record company merch.This is quite an unusual vision of creative success for a teenage boy, I suggest. “I wasn’t just saying I wanted a yacht and loads of money. I was saying: ‘Yes, we’re going to change the structure of society.’” He laughs ruefully. “Nice idea.” He’d always aimed high. As a child, his career goal was astronaut, superseded post-puberty by pop star. For a shy, lanky kid with glasses and bad teeth, forming a band was a way of being in a gang. “And I really wanted to have friends.” T-shirts are the fun tokens that pay for everything we do. They come from the bottom, from the rave, and travel upwards. When I got my first studio on Seven Sisters Road, the previous tenants had just been shut down by SO15 counter-terrorist squad. I signed the contract flanked by portraits of Che Guevara and Tito. There was a brothel on the next floor, so it was quite awkward with people pressing the buzzer marked “BANGER”. I don't get up in the morning and think, "Oh, look at you, you national treasure, you! You're really shiny today!" But it's nice. Everybody wants to be loved, don't they? Especially in the career that I chose: slight emotional neediness is part of it. My route so far through life hasn't been particularly logical, or even thought out. So I think that's a good message to the kids: that you don't have to follow the normal paths, you can be haphazard. I'm not really explaining it very well because it seems a bit self-congratulatory. But if you get recognised for what you do, even if what you do might be a bit all over the place, then… I appreciate that. When we came to do the shows, a lot of people seemed to think it was very important that I got rid of the beard. There were forum discussions. I thought about it, but I did have a slight fear that I may have developed a double chin in the interim. There could be a jowl under there. So the answer to that question is that I don't think I'm hiding anything. If you're returning items from our Buy 3 Get 1 Free Multibuy range then you will be charged for any items that you are keeping.