Jarvis Windows 7 Sounds Pack Free Download
Melisa Niederhaus
From Sheffield to London, Jarvis Cocker has always been something of an urban legend. So how come he's started singing about birds and trees, and decided the best place to play gigs is a forest clearing? Is Pulp's frontman a tree-hugger in disguise?
I'm a country boy. As a rule I have never been drawn to cities, but coming from the North, I know Sheffield, vaguely. From the steps of the Crucible Theatre, I can see the Roxy, formerly the Top Rank where I saw the Stranglers in 1977, Silver Jubilee year. "Yeah, I saw them there too," says Jarvis Cocker in his south Yorkshire guttural. I glow. I feel cool and old at the same time.
Unlikely as it sounds, Jarvis and I are going for a walk. Right now, we are trying not to get run over, looking for a break in the humming traffic as we cross Arundel Gate, one of the busiest roads in the city. He doesn't so much walk as lope. He covers the ground like a giraffe, taking long purposeful strides. From the raised eyebrows, grins and sideways glances he draws from drivers and pedestrians, I sense that he is often clocked on his home turf where, 23 years ago, he formed Pulp.
I became a Pulp fan in 1995 when they released the mega-hit single Common People from their fifth album, Different Class. I also bought the dark and scary follow-up, This Is Hardcore, but it is their most recent album, We Love Life, that begs the most questions. The songs empathise with the natural world - animals, birds, grass, trees, weeds, sunrises - and, as usual, Cocker's love affairs. I wanted to know what has got into the mercurial Jarvis. Considering only a few years ago he was writing about being 'sorted out for Es and wizz', I felt the lush woodland metaphors needed an explanation. Why does Jarvis now sound as if he's itching to get his knees dirty? Has he become a tree-hugger? Does he like gardening? Will he be buying a pile in the country?
A walk in the sticks, I thought, might shed some light. It might help explain why Pulp have chosen to play this summer's gigs in Forestry Commission clearings; why their record sales - in conjunction with Future Forests, an environmental group that plants trees to offset carbon dioxide emissions - are funding the planting of an entire new forest of native trees in the north-east; and why Jarvis feels that the time is right for him to connect with nature after more than a decade living in London.
When I meet him, I'm slightly disappointed with his choice of walking wear. Given his obsession with retro clothing (his mum sent him to infant school in lederhosen), I expected him to turn up in something nostalgic, possibly a handknitted bobble hat circa 1932. Instead he looks like an unreconstructed pop star. Tall and whippet-thin, he's wearing a grey corduroy jacket - picked up in a second-hand shop in Sweden - a thin roll-neck sweater and black brushed-cotton flares.
He claims to own a pair of old walking boots but they are in his much-loved, temporarily disabled Toyota that features in the artwork on We Love Life, which explains why he is wearing Kickers. "They're new. The company sent them to me, actually. They just thought I'd like 'em and they were right." He looks younger than 38. As pale as the dead, there is no colour in his delicate features shaded by a tousled wedge of dark hair. I hope it doesn't rain because he hasn't brought a mac.
The choice of walk was his. It was to be a journey through his boyhood, taking in some of the sights, sounds and places that he evokes in Wickerman, a track on the album. Jarvis frowns then nimbly vaults a barrier into the road and, hugging the railing, walks with the traffic as cars pass dangerously close. If he distracts an admirer at the wheel, this could become a tragic news story.
Safe on a pavement again, he points out the half-demolished Sheaf Market. As a teenager, he worked part-time in the fish market near here. "It was a plan by my mother to toughen me up. It worked. If you walk around smelling of fish, everyone takes the piss out of you," he says as we cross the slow-moving Don at Lady's Bridge. Did you ever swim in it, I ask, fishing for early nature-boy credentials. "Urgh, no. I wouldn't swim in that."There is a footpath on the south bank. "This is where the walk starts properly," he says, looking slightly relieved. To his surprise, there is even an arched wrought-iron sign marking the beginning of the Five Weirs Walk, a five-mile route which should take us along the banks of the river as far as Meadowhall on the outskirts of Sheffield. But there is soon a hitch; a 6ft-high fence prevents us from taking the walkway that will carry pedestrians under Wicker Viaduct. It is, as yet, unfinished, and extends into thin air beneath the arches.
The walk that Jarvis is trying to recollect, he confesses, "was more of a float" but he swears it was possible to walk the bank in several sections. He was in his early 20s when he and a girlfriend launched an Avon inflatable boat and drifted downstream. Now he tells me. Had I known, I could have brought mine and we would now be paddling instead of walking.
Jarvis leans over the bank's chainlink fence and disturbs a pair of birds. OK, so what are they, I quiz. Jarvis smiles and needs no time to answer. "That's a mallard - I can do a mallard - and a Canada goose," he shrugs, with confidence. The bank is skirted with scuzzy washed-up plastics soon to be lost amid the advancing dock leaves and cow parsley. "It's not so nice but the river itself doesn't look that dirty, does it?" he assesses. "I was always fascinated by this part of town." He gestures to the far bank and the Royal Victoria Hotel, or Holiday Inn as it is now also known. "I was always told they found lots of silver cutlery in this part of the river. I think staff couldn't be arsed to do the washing-up and would just lob it out the windows."
When he left home at the age of 18 he shared a 'very bohemian' caretaker's flat in the old Capital Steel Works in Sheldon Row, a now-demolished building a stone's throw away. Before that he had lived with his mother and sister in Intake, an insalubrious district on the outskirts of the city. However, despite the fact that Jarvis's songwriting is preoccupied with class and background, his family were not 'common people', certainly not by northern standards - they even had holidays in Ibiza and Majorca. They lived next door to his maternal grandparents (his grandfather was a joiner-undertaker and also ran a DIY shop).
"My grandparents' house was quite grand, actually. It was the sort of manor house in the area before other houses were built. We lived in what had been the stables or something next door which had an orchard in the back garden." His grandmother, now 86, lives with his mother in Nottinghamshire. "She's like all grandmas; she says I don't shave often enough 'n' stuff," he says as we try to pick up the path further along the river bank.
Moments later, with the route still evading us, a motorist recognises Jarvis, pulls over, leaps out and asks for his autograph. Jarvis scribbles in the delighted man's chequebook. 'What are you doing here?' the man asks. I wonder too. I need this stranger. To be precise, I need his car. 'Get in, Jarvis,' I urge. I ask the driver, a marketing director who does not look like a kidnapper, to whiz us back into town as walking much further looks futile. He agrees and, with the pop star in the front seat, we've made his day.
I turn off the tape-recorder and think, 'Lordy, what to do next?' And then I think of Stanage Edge, the four miles of gritstone crags 20 minutes' drive away in the Derbyshire Dales. It's arrestingly beautiful countryside. If there's a genuinely rustic Jarvis waiting to burst forth, this is where I'll find him. "Yeah, I like it there, been there many times," he says. Phew.
Jarvis is a sensible grown-up with a driver's licence so, this being his neck of the woods, I suggest he drives me. Although he would rather use his beaten-up bicycle or the Tube than drive when in London, his hired Fiat is soon nosing into swirling afternoon traffic and heading east for the hills. I can't boast about my own driving, but Jarvis's style at the wheel is idiosyncratic; at 6ft 4in, he crouches low over the dashboard with his eyes pressed close to the windscreen, peering through the heavy black frames of his Cutler & Gross specs.
"I had a friend who worked there so I got a discount," he says. "I'm really short-sighted so I have to wear them all the time. I've two identical pairs, just in case I tread on them. I can't see without 'em. I wear contacts on stage because I got fed up with losing my glasses. At one concert in Sheffield I spent 10 minutes looking for them. They'd gone in the bass drum kit. After that, I thought it was high time I got some contacts, it was undermining the performance."
Feeling guilty, I stop distracting him as, mapless, we try to find our way out of a town that has changed beyond all recognition since Jarvis last found his way around it. We go twice round a roundabout, just to be sure. He sounds more certain when he points out the children's hospital where as a five-year-old he had meningitis. "You had to be in isolation. I was in a whole row of glass-walled rooms. You could see other kids but couldn't talk to them. It was quite strange. I'd been to the swimming baths and remember eating a packet of crisps - the ones that had a clear star on the front - and starting to feel really ill." He remembers the needles which 'they stuck in wrong first time so did it twice' and the lie 'you can see mum if you don't cry'. He didn't cry but when he asked they said, 'Oh, your mum's gone home.'
Two years later, when Jarvis was seven, his father left home and emigrated to Australia. It was his mother, a former art student, who held the family together. "Because of my parents' marriage splitting up and other marriages around me going wrong I never thought I'd get married," he says. But it seems he has had a change of heart. In July he is marrying the chic Parisienne, Camille Bidault-Waddington - and they may even settle in France. The lithe 32-year-old stylist is in demand from the likes of Marc Jacobs, Pucci and Emanuel Ungaro.
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