Jarvis Cocker

I'm not a religious person but I do like the idea of Sunday as a day set apart from the rest of the week. It's nice to have a period of reflection and have time to think about things.

I always thought that I might retire from any form of sexuality by the age of 40 and just become a dignified older person.

I would like to believe in an afterlife; it makes things more palatable. But I'm not banking on it.

Unless you're living on the street and surviving on a diet of discarded turkey drumsticks, there's no point in being gloomy. We've spent too long trying to cheer ourselves up by spending money on brightly coloured things we don't really need. We've stopped using our imaginations.

Pulp existed for 12 years before we got famous. Now, you could say that was just lack of imagination, but it's some kind of quality isn't it? Tenacity. You could also say it was sloth.

I am proud, and more than a little excited, to be asked to work with Faber in an editorial capacity. It is my dearest hope that we will produce some fantastic books together.

Words are important to me, but a song can work and function and be a good song with words that are fairly standard. But really great lyrics can't rescue a dog of a song.

Silver Machine still sounds really modern with all the white noise. It's a bit punky in a way. They were ahead of their time.

Hawkwind are one of those bands that people introduce you to because you don't see them on the covers of magazines. I'd heard 'Silver Machine' but Russell Senior, who was in Pulp, got me into them. They had a song called 'Master Of The Universe' and we nicked the title in 1985 for one of our songs.