Music

As rallying cries go, Jarvis Cocker’s recent download-only comeback single, ‘Running The World’ took some beating. With its wry but ever-escalating sense of disgust, and a chorus that stated the obvious with a glee and precision that few cultural observers have mustered in recent years (‘Cunts are still running the world’), it suggested a man re-entering the fray with his customary wit and vigour very much intact and boded extremely well for his debut solo album.

Worryingly, then, the opening trio of lightweight glam-pop stompers flirt dangerously with anti-climax. Servicable Pulp B-sides, perhaps, but not exactly grand statements of intent. However, once Jarvis hits his stride with the baleful ‘I Will Kill Again’, he never lets up. ‘Build yourself a castle’, he advises, ‘and keep your family safe inside.’

There’s no comfort here, just an indictment of anyone unwilling to acknowledge that the horrors of the world are often nurtured by the complicity of everyday people. As he points out in ‘From A To I’, the obligation to accept personal responsibility is ‘the same from Auschwitz to Ipswich’.

Jarvis being Jarvis, however, dark insights and mordant humour are balanced perfectly. In ‘Fat Children’, our hero’s tormentors ‘wobble menacingly beneath the yellow street lights’ while the police are elsewhere ‘putting bullets in some guy’s head for no particular reason’. Better still is ‘Big Julie’, a beautifully uplifting tale of an awkward teenager finding redemption, set to swelling strings and an ascending piano motif that wouldn’t be out of place on a late-period Beatles album.

Since 2001, when we last heard from him, plenty has happened in the world, hardly any of it good. In an era of illegal wars, bombs on buses, and divide-and-rule politics, pop stars prepared to put their heads above the parapet have been few and far between. But Jarvis, in his quirky, humane and empathetic way, is still fighting. And for that we should be truly thankful.