Jarvis Cocker's JARV IS Return With Single / Video 'Save The Whale'

A smokey-voiced Jarvis Cocker morphs into something akin to a modern day Serge Gainsbourg on 'Save The Whale', the latest single from his new band / "ongoing live experience" JARV IS... Sounding so close to his mic it's like he's whispering a lullaby into your ear, Cocker croons "While the world got technologically infatuated / I was busy getting saturated" accompanied by lush neo-exotica instrumentation, with an element of playful spookiness calling to mind of all things The Mighty Boosh. The song comes accompanied by a digitally treated collage of images from JARV IS... live events, edited together by Cocker during lockdown. Delayed by global peril, the former Pulp frontman's first album in over a decade Beyond the Pale will finally see the light of day in mid-July. Cocker opened up about the origins of 'Save The Whale'...

“The title popped into my head as I was leaving the cinema after having seen Nick Broomfield’s “Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love” documentary. The “Smooth World, Wrinkly World” section came from a childhood memory of being ill: I would hear the murmuring of a large crowd accompanied by a visual image of a line-drawing (rather like a Patrick Caulfield painting, I’ve since realised) in which all the objects switched rapidly between being smooth & bulbous & then thin & wrinkly. It used to absolutely terrify me. Weirdly enough, Jason (our electronics wizard) said he had a similar childhood experience except he used to see a teapot surrounded by psychedelic outlines of itself. Emma (our violinist & backing vocalist) found herself singing “Smooth World, Wrinkly World” as a lullaby to her 18 month-old daughter the other night. Pass it on.”

'Beyond the Pale' releases on Friday 17th July via Rough Trade Records / Rhythmethod.