Further adventures

Cocker's new album has some of his best songs since 1995's Different Class with Pulp. Photo / Supplied by Rob Jefferson

He's got a reputation as an intelligent chap with a wry and sometimes savage wit, yet Jarvis Cocker is the first to admits he's anything but deep.

"I am profoundly shallow," he sings gleefully on I Never Said I Was Deep, a song from his latest solo album Further Complications.

And in real life, or at least down the phone from his home in Paris, the former frontman for Brit pop veterans Pulp is dead set on backing that clever little lyric up.

"There's a weird thing in our society that people want to appear to be deep," he says in his droll, slightly cheeky Yorkshire lilt. "So they invent problems for themselves, go and become drug addicts, stuff like that, because this message has got round that by suffering you become deep. But there is enough suffering in the world anyway and don't worry, it will come to you. It seems sad that you would artificially induce suffering. You will suffer," he chuckles.

Welcome to the unique, odd, and quite often hilarious world of Jarvis Cocker, who plays the Powerstation in Auckland on December 4.

Over the course of the interview he mentions how he likes groping (be it for words, emotions or girls' bottoms); he randomly brings up his dislike of Phil Collins (for no apparent reason); and how recording Further Complications was quick with "no sitting round eating a pizza while someone tried to make a snare drum sound like a pterodactyl".

With this sort of turn of phrase it's no wonder he came up with posturing pop gems about love, lust and revelry among the working classes in Pulp songs like Common People, Sorted For Es and Wizz and Disco 2000.

He's also brutally honest - and always has been. Analyse Cocker's lyrics and he's not scared to reveal all about himself, his lovers, friends and acquaintances. Even if the tales are a little rambling and twisted at times.

"I will never get to touch you so I wrote this song instead/So let it penetrate your consciousness/Oh oh oh oh yes", he sings on a song that will remain nameless from Further Complications.

Then there's the naughty pill-popping anthem Sorted For Es and Wizz - "We're all sorted out for E's and wizz ... tell me when the spaceship lands." - that created a stink in Britain upon release in 1995.

He's no stranger to controversy, and for many Cocker is best known as the guy who invaded the stage in protest during Michael Jackson's performance at the 1996 Brit Awards. You see Cocker didn't like the way Jackson saw himself as a "Christ-like" figure.

But, he confesses, as he gets older it becomes harder to be open and honest. "Because we all have to get on in society and have friends and function as human beings. And as you get older, it's a downhill slope towards death, so I suppose there is a temptation to pull a light veil over everything because no one wants to confront their immortality 24/7.