Mar 5: Jarvis and Sheffield

Jarvis Cocker has a close connection with the city of Sheffield, as we discovered on the 1st of March.

He has talked and written at length about this connection.

Carl Lee will also share a blog on Jarvis and his Sheffield connections from his own perspective as someone who has lived in the city for a great deal longer than me.

Image: Alan Parkinson - Fat Cat, Kelham Island

An interesting tipoff from a Joanne Lee post.

This track starts with a list of familiar Sheffield locations:

Intake, Manor Park, The Wicker, Norton, Freshville Hackenthorpe, Shalesmoor, Wombwell, Catcliffe Brincliffe, Attercliffe, Ecclesall, Woodhouse, Wybourn, Pitsmoor, Badger, Wincobank, Crookes, Walkley Broomhill

Sheffield Sex City's lyrics continue, later on in the song, describing sitting on a hill overlooking the city:

And listen, I wandered the streets the whole night crying, trying to pick up your scent
Writing messages on walls and the puddles of rain reflected your face in my eyes.
We finally made it on a hill-top at four a.m.
The whole city is your jewellery-box; a million twinkling yellow street lights.

Here's the track in question:

More musical urbanism also comes from this story from a few years ago which has featured on LivingGeography.

Jarvis Cocker got a mention on the recent AQA 'A' level Geography exam.

When Jarvis Cocker wrote his lyrics for the Pulp song Wickerman, he was inspired by a real-life journey he undertook through the subterranean rivers in the middle of his home city of Sheffield.

And now the evocative verses’ local references – from mentions of Sheffield places The Wicker, Forge Dam, The Moor, Broomhall and The Leadmill to ‘Little Mesters coughing their lungs up’ and ‘the old Trebor factory that burned down in the early seventies’ – mean the composition has been deemed worthy of academic study.

Wickerman formed the basis of a question posed to students sitting exam board AQA’s Geography A-level Paper 2, on Human Geography.

Candidates were shown 13 lines from the song – an eight-minute, part-spoken word epic which featured on We Love Life, Pulp’s final studio album to date, released in 2001 – before being asked to compose a response to a specific brief.

Stacey Hill, head of curriculum for geography at AQA, said: 

“The question was on how external factors such as art can influence a person’s perception of a place, as opposed to how a local person – in this case someone from Sheffield – might feel about their surroundings. The reason we chose the Pulp lyrics was because they fit the purpose for this type of question very well.”