This is quite an unusual vision of creative success for a teenage boy, I suggest. “I wasn’t just saying I wanted a yacht and loads of money. I was saying: ‘Yes, we’re going to change the structure of society.’” He laughs ruefully. “Nice idea.” He’d always aimed high. As a child, his career goal was astronaut, superseded post-puberty by pop star. For a shy, lanky kid with glasses and bad teeth, forming a band was a way of being in a gang. “And I really wanted to have friends.”

At the same time, he was formulating what he called The Pulp Master Plan. A school exercise book (keep) contains the blueprint for the band he wanted to form. They would wear Oxfam blazers and “rancid ties”, the music would be “fairly conventional but slightly off-beat pop songs”, and they would “[learn] about the world by looking at what it threw away. By what it deemed ‘worthless’”. In the book he describes trying to provide some kind of sex education for his own adolescent son, to the mortification of both parties. It worries him, the fact that sex and life have become so severed. “Because what you’re dealing with is you get those feelings, those instincts, at a certain age and they are strong feelings and you’ve got to deal with them in some way and if there are no clues except some kind of foul thing online where you start to think of people as objects, and why aren’t I getting my sex that I was promised – or whatever, I don’t know what those people think.” he writes books like he writes songs - conversational, narrating everyday events and emotions - the way you'd narrate what going on in front of you to yourself in your head.

Select a format:

Yes, I say, they talk about the right to sex. “No, that’s a horrible thing. But for me, that couldn’t happen because of being brought up in a very feminine environment. So when I started to feel … urges, because I’d been brought up in a very female-dominated environment, there was no way I was going to start thinking of women as objects.” The only interesting thing about my dad is that he just wasn’t there

How did he navigate it, the forcible switch from observer to observed? “I don’t know if I did navigate it. Fame in our times has taken the place of heaven in past belief systems. You think that your life’s a bit drab or it’s not really working, but if you’re famous you’d be at the front of the queue, you’d be at the best table, all this kind of paradise. So to experience this thing that’s got this weird belief system around it – and also this belief system you’ve constructed yourself – it’s never going to be what you thought. I didn’t end up in the telly.” He pauses to consider. “To turn your nose up at it doesn’t seem right because you do want people to engage with what you’re doing. But it’s the other bits. It’s the being observed part that wasn’t so good. I prefer to be furtive.” It all ends with Pulp still yet to achieve any kind of breakthrough so all the signs are that there will be another instalment before too long. It can’t happen soon enough. What is in part a trip down the memory lane of another is also the much needed gutting of a loft owned by a procrastinating musician.Good Pop, Bad Pop is that autobiography and in typical Jarvis fashion he takes a different approach. I listened to Jarvis narrate the audiobook complete with PDF containing photos of all the items. I loved every second. This is the way Jarvis tells chunks of his life story. It's ridiculously entertaining and enjoyable. Such a brilliant book! Not the usual memoir, essentially it’s Jarvis clearing out his loft, a storage space full of stuff he has hoarded over the years and he uses pictures of the various items to tell stories from his life from his childhood to his acceptance into art college (there has to be a sequel!). Some parts are just laugh out loud and there’s great photographs too.