REVIEW: Jarvis Cocker on Song

And what a great lecture it was. Studied, researched, informative, funny, engaging and at the end he tells the sell-out audience at Brighton Dome Concert Hall on May 23 it was the first time he had staged anything like it and he had been nervous.

If that's his first effort then perhaps he should make a career of it. If only my school music lessons had been like this.

Jarvis Cocker on Song: Saying the Unsayable was a Brighton Festival exclusive and one of the first shows to sell out.

Studying the role of lyrics in popular song, the former Pulp frontman and now solo artist quickly pointed out this was his own subjective opinion, although, he joked, "I am usually right".

His musical tour took us through the importance of lyrics, whether they should rhyme, if lyrics are poetry, "unsayable" lyrics and asked whether the art of lyric writing was dead.

Videos and accoustic songs from Jarvis on guitar illustrated his points and included a rendition of the first song he wrote in around 1978 about a girlfriend who quoted Shakespeare, Common People and Babies.

How important are lyrics? Not all great songs have great lyrics, says Jarvis.

Songs like I am the Walrus by The Beatles with its meaningless words were an "active rejection of meaning".

"Lyrics are an added extra... like a patio or a conservatory. They are not important but add to your quality of life."

The delivery of the song is important and to make it dynamite to Jarvis you need good music, lyrics and performance.

"A great song sticks with you and means different things at different times in your life," Jarvis said.

Lyrics should rhyme but bad rhymes were also among the "greatest crimes in song craft", he said, pointing the finger at songs by ABC and Desir'ee.

But lyrics, although they have a poetic quality, are not poetry as the words are subservient to the rhythm of the music.

Despite being unable to resist highlighting James Blunt's bad lyrics in You're Beautiful ("It's a lie. There's no plan and there never was"), Jarvis said the art of lyric writing was not dead and the words were becoming more important.

"Me" was the most common word in popular music. "If we do the job well, the M in me turns round to become the W in we and the personal becomes universal," he said.

Appropriately, we had all learned plenty about the speaker during the lecture.

But things are never quite what they seem with Jarvis. At the end of the question and answer session he revealed he didn't really know whether me was the most common word but it was a good end to his lecture.....

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