Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker explains the origins of classic His ‘n’ Hers track performed more than 300 times

Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker has finally explained the origins of a line featured in the band’s hit track, Babies.

The live show staple has been performed by the band more than 300 times and will likely feature in Pulp‘s upcoming shows across South America. Cocker, in an interview with Ultimate Record Collector Magazine, confirmed that the song, which features on Intro: The Gift Recordings and His ‘n’ Hers, had been inspired by a holiday to Majorca. The Disco 2000 and Spike Island songwriter says he got “lots of funny looks” for what he was doing with the wardrobe in the hotel room, though it served its purpose as inspiration for one of Pulp’s best songs, decades later.

Cocker said: “My main interaction with the wardrobe was when I was a lot younger, when my mum took me and my sister to Majorca for a holiday for the first time. The hotel had very impressive-sized wardrobes and Saskia, my sister, said, ‘You could sleep in here’, so I thought, ‘Oh yeah, I’m gonna do that.’

“We both got in but she got scared apparently and went back to bed, but I slept on. Then my mother came to check we were OK and there was only one child in the bed, so she panicked and there was a big search. They eventually woke Saskia up and asked if she knew where I was and she said, ‘He’s sleeping in the wardrobe at the end of the bed.’ I got lots of funny looks from all the people who’d been searching for me, all these hotel staff.

“That’s probably where the idea of the wardrobe came from. I didn’t think of this at the time, but it was a good thing to put in a song. My way of finding out about love and sex was really through spying on what my mum was talking about with her friends in the kitchen at our house.

“All of their husbands had left, so my mum and these other women were dating and they would talk about their experiences with that and I would spy by listening through a crack in the door. That thing of being hidden and seeing something happen, and the other person doesn’t know that you’re there, that’s a voyeuristic way of learning about those things. That idea came from that.”

Another hit song from the band, Razzmatazz, had been inspired by Cocker getting thrown out of a party.

Cocker told Record Collector in 1994: “[It] was inspired by a party I’d been to the weekend before. We were thrown out by an architect but I got my own back by writing a song about the event. It was a really crap ‘right on’ party – there were children there.

“You don’t take your children to a party in my book. I sent a copy of the CD to 59 Lyndhurst Grove, the lady of the house, because she was in a bad situation, married to this prick, but she never wrote back. A Japanese fan went there and stood outside, and asked if she was Susan!”

The real 59 Lyndhurst Grove, it was revealed, is based in Camberwell, south London. Liner notes would also suggest Susan as being from Rotherham. The story was told through three songs on Intro: The Gift Recordings.

59 Lyndhurst Grove marks the final song of Intro: The Gift Recordings, and the conclusion to a trilogy featuring Stacks and Inside Susan.