Good Pop, Bad Pop: The Sunday Times bestselling hit from Jarvis Cocker

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It also references “pop,” with its own complicated double, triple, quadruple, and quintuple entendres (you get the idea). Embarrassment is always rubbing and groaning up against glamour in their songs, threatening to topple it entirely. For example, toys or sticks of chewing gum or old packaging etc take him back to his childhood, old photos, flyers, tickets etc prompt memories of starting Pulp.

Old records and tickets display his teenage influences, the centrepiece of the collection is a notebook detailing Pulp’s manifesto which Jarvis Cocker planned out when he was 15 years old. This inventory takes the form of a coming of age memoir revisiting Sheffield in the1980s against the backdrop of the miners strikes and rising unemployment. Undeterred by this exercise in humiliation, they carried on performing around the city, slowly working out how to produce a listenable song and play it live too, ideally without the singer’s glasses flying into the drum kit as he flailed joyfully on stage. The way Jarvis Cocker centers his memories around objects he finds while cleaning out a small storage loft in his apartment, is so incredibly unique, funny and tells so much about his personality.

The show opened with a “distinctly underwhelming” light show by their chemistry teacher, which might have been more dramatic if they’d thought to close the curtains. But also there’s something really beautiful about using your life as raw material and making it into something that, if you do it right, it’s like a thing that’s there for ever and people can access it and it will do something for them. Just take your badge and car park ticket to the parking attendant office at the entrance to the car park for validation before you leave. Good pop is anything – not necessarily music related – that democratises culture, from jumble sales to Penguin paperbacks.

All except for the cheap blue spacemen sent by a relative who knew about Jarvis's fascination with outer space. If you like reading memoirs and are even slighty interested in music I can wholeheartily recommend this book to you. A ripped copy of The Fantastic Dirty Joke Book (keep) didn’t explain it, so he turned to the dictionary and learned it was “self-abuse”. All of these objects are rendered in nearly life-size form throughout the book, by the way, in full colour.After all, they were a band with plenty of intellect and intentionality behind them, but sometimes they were also just a nexus for the faintly rum. it's written conversationally and casually, and each item he pulls out is actually genuinely interesting (as someone who accumulates random old things as well it was great) it was easy to read and light hearted even in the more serious bits and interesting and definitely worth it for anyone who's even mildly interested.