Jarvis Cocker Song Quotations

The thing with Disney songs is they're very manipulative, very sentimental, but they do get you, you know - there's a kind of sadness to them and that kind of music doesn't really exist any more.

The things in my songs are the edited highlights of my life. I don't go seeking out strange sexual experiences every day of the week.

Words are important to me, but a song can work and function and be a good song with words that are fairly standard. But really great lyrics can't rescue a dog of a song.

There's the famous thing that the A&R man from the record company is supposed to do: He's supposed to come into the studio and listen to the songs you've been recording and then say, 'Guys, I don't hear any singles.' And then everybody falls into a terrible depression because you have to write one.

Hawkwind are one of those bands that people introduce you to because you don't see them on the covers of magazines. I'd heard 'Silver Machine' but Russell Senior, who was in Pulp, got me into them. They had a song called 'Master Of The Universe' and we nicked the title in 1985 for one of our songs.

If you perform on a stage or you sing a song, it's like you sing your song, and then the words go into the air, and then they go into somebody's body through their ears, so it's kind of like penetrating somebody. It's kind of like having sex with somebody - but, obviously, from a great distance.

In a song you can kind of stage-manage everything so that it puts you in a good light. And once a song is recorded, it always performs well.

I love the Beatles. I haven't named any kids after them but I still really love them. They were the first group that I was ever properly aware of. In my early teens I would sometimes stay in and listen to the radio all day in the hope that I would catch a song by them that I'd never heard before and be able to tape it on my radio-cassette player.

I do write songs with a political dimension to them sometimes, but I'm always slightly appalled by it when I do.

The most entertaining songs don't always come from a nice place. In songs where I think I'm being really sensitive, they seem quite boring actually. I've found that the songs that come out of nastier, more misanthropic places are better.

I speak onstage to try to establish some method of communication. The songs are supposed to be a way of communicating. But speech and drinks and sometimes chocolates are also a way of communicating.