COMMON PEOPLE

I was thrilled to meet one of my musical heroes, Jarvis Cocker, in April this year.

He wanted to 'live like common people' and famously sang about the girl who studied at St Martin's College. I always thought that song was autobiographical and it turns out it was. Jarvis was himself a student at that art and design school in London, graduating with a 2:2 in fine art, before he went on to great success as the lead singer of Pulp and as a figurehead for 90s Britpop. Now he wants to see more children engaged with art and is encouraging them to visit museums.

He’s launched Culture Connect, a partnership of 15 galleries and museums in London, Paris and Brussels.  Artists, students from St Martins College of Art and Design and local school children marked the event by creating a modern mural at St Pancras International station depicting world famous works of art from the galleries - including the TATE and Les Galeries Nationales in Paris.

Jarvis hosted an arts series for Channel 4 - "Journeys into the Outside”, which I haven’t seen but it involved following him while he took a trip across the globe, meeting so-called "outsider artists", people who create wacky and wonderful works of art; trying to understand what compelled them to do so. What a great job!  But it turns out Jarvis doesn’t actually like going to art galleries, so he understands kids’ reluctance to do so.

In an interview with the Independent in 1999, he said: "They remind me of going to church - the formal atmosphere, people looking at things on the wall, attempting to get some kind of mystical revelation from them."

So he thinks they should be less formal and more creative.  In a later interview, for Pitchfork, he: "I want to have as many events that involve some level of participation from the audience as possible. Because I do want to have that feeling that people are actively involved in something, rather than just consuming something. I suppose because it's such a dominant capitalist society now, everything becomes a consumer product. And I don't think that's really appropriate to the creative arts, really."

That explains why, in 2009, ahead of the release his new album, Further Complications, Jarvis and his band installed themselves in an art gallery in Paris for five days.  Each day, Cocker and his musicians performed a variety of different tasks. These included soundtracking a relaxation class, inviting local musicians to join them in a jam, and arranging activities with local school-children. The events were organised around Jarvis's public rehearsals for his forthcoming live dates. This was all to explore what would happen if he invited an audience to interact with him and the music.  Now something like that, even me and my anti-cultural kids might go and see.

In his interview for BBC Breakfast, he said: "TV, films and the internet may be great at showing you what something looks like, but they're no substitute for seeing them with your own eyes. Some of the world's greatest treasures are housed in museums and galleries in Paris, London and Brussels and I want to encourage people to explore these rich collections."

He has a seven-year-old son, Albert, with his french ex-wife. He's also talked in the past about feeling guilty about just sticking his son in front of a Walt Disney film, when he needed some peace and quiet, because he doesn't think that's how film, art etc, should be consumed. We’re all guilty of that, I’m sure. But we can't always be out at cultural museums and art galleries. For one thing, it's tough to tempt a child to venture there. While many are free to visit, they do need to do something about their ‘stuffy’ reputation and I think they’re starting to get that message. My friend worked for the V&A for years and devised educational backpacks for kids to walk round the exhibitions with, laden with quizzes and things to find. They’ve definitely taken off elsewhere too. So in this era of digital media, it’s worth us all taking the time to visit real relics you can see, sometimes touch, and walk round occasionally. It inspires future creativity and was build to last in the olden days, not like todays disposable 'stuff’.  

TOUGH CALL

Five soldiers were killed by a 'rogue' Afghan police officer they were training in 2009.  The soldier opened fire while they were all on a break at a checkpoint in the Nad-e'Ali District of Helmand Province. The divided loyalty he must have felt and their deaths called into question NATO's strategy of working with Afghans to help them run their own country.

BBC Breakfast interviewed Christina Lamb, the Sunday Times' foreign correspondent, because she had had a change of heart over the issue, having previously thought the strategy was justified .

She said: "I've been going there, back and forth, for years and I've changed my mind.
The worse the situation has got, the more successful the Taliban has been in invading the occupying army. The strategy of local mentoring has become a recruiting tool for the Taliban rather than the opposite. A credible Government needs to be able to sit back and try to find another way out of this, no matter how difficult all of this is.

"There was never much trust but now no British soldiers are going to want to work with Afghan soldiers.  Where Afghan police have been trained and they go on to hold some territory, there have been cases where they've been raping the young boys of people in the village so local people have had to turn against the very people they thought they could trust.
There's been 30 years of war there so many local people haven't had an education - it's difficult to find the quality of people to recruit {to the ANP} and take on the job.

President Obama has been talking about sending more troops but if people don't believe the Government is doing anything for them, and the local police might be more of a threat to them than the Taliban, you're never going to be successful in containing insurgents.”

For anyone close to the British military, as my local community is, the thought that serving soldiers might be killed by someone they thought was on their side is just terrifying.  Here’s hoping our involvement in this very complex war is over soon.