Jarvis Cocker tells how an attic full of junk unlocked his ‘superpower
haunts me as I read Jarvis Cocker’s book. The one where Harrison Ford recognises his own memories in photos belonging to a terminated humanoid. Disturbing. Could he be manufactured too? Not a unique being, but a mass-produced man/machine programmed with the same brain matter as every other individual of his generation?
“You’re blind to it when you’re a kid because you just think, Oh, life’s always been like this. You don’t realise that you’re entering the drama at one particular scene and that it will change.” The pleasure in writing came late in the process, he says, “and in that way it’s different to songwriting. With a song sometimes the very first moment that you hit a guitar … that’s as exciting as it gets. Then when you try and record a song, sometimes you might feel like you lose your way, or you’ve lost the spirit of it.“Obviously writing is not like that at all. Writing you have to think about. You can’t just bang your fingers on a keyboard and expect a sentence to have appeared.