Jarvis Cocker

Three years in the gestation and 13 days in the making, Jarvis Cocker stops writing songs for other people to deliver the first solo album of his 25 year career. Along the way he ropes in Richard Hawley, Steve Mackey (ex-Pulp) and Fat Trucker Ross Orton to be his band, quits table tennis, "masters" the piano and learns to stop worrying and love the bomb or maybe not quite.

Jarvis is a both a thoughtful and thought-provoking record, shot through with lavish beauty, dark humour, satire - both subtle and savage - and a genuine and much-missed sense of Northern conviction. The songs seem to exist on a sometimes-delicately-balanced-sometimes- swinging scale between sentiment and cold-eyed analysis, each distinguished by the unmistakeable (and never better) voice of our lanky protagonist.

Unease and disquiet permeate Jarvis. And whatever else we may speculate about the effects of marriage, family and the laying to rest of Pulp on Jarvis's constitution, it seems safe to say they've not mellowed him. At the heart of the record an extraordinary cache of songs display a writer of unparalleled deftness of touch, even by his own previous standards.

Jarvis is a record with a distinct beginning, middle and end. Fronting the set we have "Don't Let Him Waste Your Time", "Black Magic" and "Heavy Weather". Loosely speaking this would be the pop portion of the album. But first there's the brief prelude "Loss Adjuster (Excerpt Pt.1)". Jarvis: "I thought it would be funny, cos everyone's always saying how good I am at writing lyrics, to start with something instrumental. Also it's a trick to make people turn the record up by making it really quiet at the start - I nicked that idea off Gwen Stefani."

When it kicks in with a bang, "Don't Let Him Waste Your Time" takes an idea of grand musical scale and fits it within the swaggering frame of a memorable instant anthem. A cautionary tale about men's intransigence within relationships, Jarvis struts through it all telling it like it is: "Some skinny bitch walks by in some hotpants / And he's running out the door".

Written for Nancy Sinatra as "[his] blow for feminism", the most surprising thing for Jarvis was that the first song on his solo album should feature a saxophone break, something his previous self would have sworn blind would never happen. "But it is very quiet and in the background," he adds, not entirely convincingly.

"As a father and husband I don't have time to sit around strumming an acoustic guitar," he says. "So I write things in my head and then if they're still there two or three days later I assume they have some worth and hum them into a tape recorder."

In this way, the record was written from a period beginning with Jarvis's move to Paris two-and-a-half-years ago. "Something I've learned is that it's good to ruminate for a long time, but then once you're ready to act quickly and decisively without too much time to reflect. It's a bit like pregnancy, once it's gone full-term, it's got to come out."

Jarvis was recorded with Steve Mackey (bass), Richard Hawley (guitar) and Ross Orton (drums) over 13 days in Sheffield, with Jarvis himself playing piano and guitar. And while there might be a little "lipstick on the gorilla" (to quote Hawley) it's pretty much as they laid it down live, with Graham Sutton pressing record. Most of the songs are first or second takes with Hawley having only been shown the song for the first time that day (his own career making rehearsals something of a no-no).

"I quite liked taking more responsibility," says Jarvis of his co- producer-cum-auteur role. "Normally I spend most of my time in a studio playing pool or table tennis, but this time I didn't play any - largely 'cos you look like a nerk playing them on your own."