(Credits: Far Out / Ole Christian Klamas)
Wed 28 January 2026 6:00, UK
There was a period in the late 1980s when it looked like Pulp’s story was going to end before it properly began, as the band went on an extended hiatus while singer Jarvis Cocker fled Sheffield to pursue the art school life in London.
Cocker would later compare this era of the band to a crocodile slowing down its heartbeat in order to conserve energy. “That was kind of like what we were doing,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 1998, “We weren’t actually dead, we just looked like we were”.
This idea of something coming back from the (virtual) dead was at the forefront of Cocker’s mind in 1998, as he’d also made the difficult decision that year to finally speak to his estranged father, in person, for the first time in nearly 30 years. Mac Cocker, who by then was a well-known radio DJ in Australia, had abandoned Jarvis, his mother, and his sister, Saskia, back in 1970, leaving them behind in Sheffield when Jarvis was just seven years old.
Ironically, Mac Cocker used to regularly joke with his Australian radio listeners about being related to the famous singer Joe Cocker, who also hailed from Yorkshire, a harmless fib. When Pulp emerged as one of the biggest British bands of the ‘90s, however, Mac suddenly became the relative of a rock star, for real this time, but it was a pride that came with no shortage of personal shame.
Inevitably, the Australian media soon caught on to the connection between Mac and Jarvis and tried to arrange a public meeting between them; a publicity stunt of some sort, typical of the ‘90s. Jarvis avoided that circus, but did arrange with his sister to travel to Australia to meet with their father in private and try to bury the hatchet.
“I only met my father face-to-face this year for the first time,” Jarvis said a few months later, “It’s a personal thing. Something that can only be worked out by the two of us. The papers only cloud the issue.”
Later, in a 2006 interview with the Independent, he would clarify that he didn’t see his father again after that, but that he’d come to peace with it. “I don’t feel any bitterness towards him at all,” Cocker said, “I feel sorry for him”.
Rather than go into too much detail with journalists, Cocker made his strongest statement about his relationship with his father by doing what he does best: writing a song loosely inspired by it. The track ‘A Little Soul’ from 1998’s This Is Hardcore isn’t necessarily biographical, but Jarvis plays the role of an estranged deadbeat dad in the song, speaking to his son and encouraging him to follow a better path and break the proverbial cycle.
“Everybody’s telling me / You look like me, but please don’t turn into me / You look like me, but you’re not like me, I hope / I have run away from the one thing that I ever made / Now, I only wish that I could show you / Wish I could show a little soul”.
The song is made extra poignant by the fact that Jarvis Cocker would later be challenged with rising above his father’s example once and for all in 2009, when his first marriage ended at a time when his own son, Albert, was just six. Jarvis, unlike Mac, made a point of sticking around, maintaining a home in Paris to be closer to Albert in the years that followed.
Related Topics