“You've caught me at an exceptional time,” says Jarvis Cocker, on the phone from London earlier this month. The iconic frontman just wrapped up a day of lyric writing at his label Rough Trade’s offices and he’s feeling particularly inspired. “I think of myself as a volcano,” he muses, “most of the time, there is no real discernible sign of life as I sit on a couch or walk down the street. But underneath the surface, the magma is bubbling, and eventually, it produces a record, or a song, or whatever. I'm trying to make that happen now.”

He declines to elaborate on the in-progress material or how it will be released—“when it’s done, I'll decide what to do with it”—but as we wait for the lava, as it were, to flow, it’s a good time to look back on the 51-year-old’s legacy as the leader of Pulp. After breaking up in 2002, the band reconvened in 2011 for a host of ebullient gigs that showed little signs of the rust and desperation that commonly come along with such reunions. Thankfully, New Zealand director Florian Habicht decided to mark the occasion by filming their triumphant homecoming gig at Sheffield’s Motorpoint Arena on December 8, 2012. The resulting feature, Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets (which is now available digitally and playing in select theaters across America), is not merely a concert movie, but instead a chronicle of the group’s history as well as a brilliant character study of Sheffield itself.

Along with interviews with Pulp's five members, Life, Death and Supermarkets sees Habicht talking with fans from around town, who offer casual profundity on the band’s music and simple, everyday life. There’s a heavily-accented newsstand man who loves to sing “We Are the Champions”, a grey-haired, wheelchair-bound woman who prefers Pulp over Blur, a soft-spoken American mom who flew across an ocean to see her heroes in their hometown. These are the sorts of beautifully real people Cocker often sings about in his sly-yet-heartfelt songs, and Habicht captures their humble charm perfectly.

Though the Sheffield show provided a fine capper for Pulp’s career, Cocker doesn’t rule out more gigs down the line—at this point, he’s wise enough not to rule out anything, really. “There are no plans to play again for the foreseeable future,” he says, “but then again, I can't strictly say that it will never happen. I wouldn't advise people to hold their breath, though.”

Pitchfork: Even though Sheffield is Pulp’s hometown, I was surprised by the broad range of your fanbase there—everyone from grandmothers to little kids were familiar with the band and had something to say about it.

Jarvis Cocker: That was a pleasant surprise to me, too. You would expect it to be just hipsters, but it really wasn't. [laughs] When Pulp first started off [in the 1980s], we had this idea of being a pop band. In England, pop is rank now, but up until about 20 years ago, interesting things would happen within that arena—it was a pastime that a lot of the population participated in. You would get things like Laurie Anderson going to #1 with "O Superman", and then the next week it would be ABBA. It was a really mixed thing. So we always wanted our music to connect with a wide body of people, just because that's what pop music meant to me. I was quite into the fact that everybody could participate. It wasn't an elitist thing. Now, there's more stuff, but it's also spread-out more. There's lots of little scenes that operate really intensely in their own world, but aren't that visible to the mainstream. Maybe that's better. I'm still trying to work that one out.

Pitchfork: Do you still feel a responsibility to speak for the everyday sorts of folks who were interviewed as part of this film?

JC: I've never thought, “Oh, I've got to write songs about normal people or real life.” When people set out to write a song aimed at the common man—I mean, I don't even believe that that person exists—that's when you get really horrible, preachy, vague, waffly songs. I hate those songs. If you want to be a creative person, the big thing is to locate your own creative voice, which can be quite difficult. When I went to art college, I would read books about famous artists of years gone by and think, “Oh, well, if I went and lived in Marrakech and ate only oatmeal and bananas for a year, I'd become really artistic,” as if there's some kind of recipe. But instead of looking off into the distance, try and concentrate on your immediate surroundings and you will find that you already have a unique take on the world. It's just that you might not recognize it. The key to locating it is by being specific and writing about the details of situations, because a detail proves that you were actually there and lends authenticity to what you're writing. And the weird thing is that, by being more specific, it opens things up and makes it universal.

Watch a scene from Pulp: Life, Death and Supermarkets:

Pitchfork: How would you describe the general character of Sheffield?

JC: Sheffield is not as outgoing as other northern England cities, like Manchester and Liverpool. If you go up and try to start a conversation with someone in Sheffield, they'll probably hate you or they'll just not talk to you. They're not the friendliest people in the world, so I was quite amazed that [director Florian Habicht] actually managed to get people to trust him and open up and say a little bit about themselves, because in my experience that's quite difficult. I was born there and I'm still waiting for some of the people I know to open up. They probably never ever will.

I have not lived in Sheffield for 25 years so, for me, one of the joys of the film was to see that it still had the same kind of personalities that I remember from when I was there. Like those two old women who were going on about, "I like dancing,” “She can't dance." Just funny. There's a certain attitude of just getting on with life. If you're in a band or think of yourself as a slightly creative person, you can get quite self-indulgent, so sometimes it's nice to have those people who bring you down to earth, but in a pleasant way.

And musically, Sheffield has always punched above its weight, from the Human League to Def Leppard—though they were from a posh part of town, so please don't blame us for them.

Pitchfork: The film features interviews with some young fans from Sheffield, which made me wonder what you were like as a kid growing up in the city.

JC: I was a very shy kid, which is the reason my mother got me a job at a fish market, which they show in the film, because she thought it would make me more sociable and toughen me up a little bit. In a way, she was right. I never would've chosen that job at all. It was smelly and pretty unpleasant, but the people who worked there were funny. That experience did have quite a formative effect on me, because it just showed me a different side to life. And my shyness was probably one of the reasons why I wanted to be in a band. I thought it would help me mix with people. I've got better with social situations as I've got older, but even now, if I know I've got to go out to a place where there's gonna be quite a few people and have to make conversation, I'll start getting nervous.

Pitchfork: Your own son is 11 now, does he have any interest in music yet?

JC: He's been playing the drums since he was about 5, though I never encouraged him to be a drummer. I always told him that was a bad idea because you're at the back and the girls can't see you, and the other members of the band always tell you that you're playing too loud or speeding up all the time. But he didn't seem to be bothered about that.

You just gotta let people decide what they wanna do. That's the main thing that I'm grateful to my own mother about. When it came to the end of school and all my friends went off to university, I said that I wanted to stay behind and try to make music my life, and she allowed me to do that. The best thing you can give someone is the freedom to make their own mind up—and then, if it's not working out 5 years later, you can give your opinion. I would love for my son to do something useful, like be a scientist or a doctor, but in the end it's gonna be up to him to decide what he wants.

Pitchfork: But you of all people should know that musicians can sometimes be as useful to people as scientists.

JC: I don't know about that. It can be entertaining, hopefully. I'm happy with what I decided to do with my life, but I know it's not significant.

Pitchfork: You recently said that the sentiment behind "Common People"—upper-class people envying working-class life—doesn't resonate the way it did when the song came out in the mid-‘90s, because ideas of class have shifted.

JC: Yeah, a more appropriate song now would be "Royals" by Lorde, because the working class isn't the same as it used to be in England and America, as far as people actually making things in factories—all that happens in other countries now. It's more like a consuming class, or just people without much money. In the olden days, there was such a thing as working-class culture and things like music came from that, because it was entertainment made by people in a different sector of society. And that had a vitality to it. Sometimes, people from the upper class or middle class would be jealous of that vitality and want to live in that world a bit. But now, certain sectors of cities in the UK are just very rough places. I can't imagine anybody going, "Wow, I'd really like to live like that." So that thing which existed the '50s, '60s, and '70s, where people would search for this energy in lower class things, is maybe gone.

Pitchfork: Do you lament how it seems like less and less bands are coming from working-class backgrounds?

JC: I don't really care what someone's background is; creativity can come from any background. But there have been certain things that have happened within UK society over the last few years—for instance, art colleges used to be a place where people with not-so-good grades could go, and historically a lot of bands in the UK came from art colleges because you had a bit of freedom to create there. But that's gone now because it's quite expensive to go to art college. No one would ever go just to hang out and vaguely see whether they could form a band. Stuff like that is keeping that sector of society a bit out of the conversation, which I resent because, if that had been the story 30 years ago, then I wouldn't have been able to do what I did with my life. My basic position is that the more mixed the society and the more mobility there is in it, the better. That's what makes things interesting. When you get a homogenous society, it's very, very dull, whether that's all working class or all upper class, because everybody thinks the same, everybody looks the same.

Pitchfork: As someone who’s maintained a creative lifestyle for about 30 years now, what advice would you give to someone who’s considering that path now?

JC: One of the problems of our modern world is that there's a lot of things to work through, but, at some point, everybody should take a pause from that and make something, so that it's not just all one-way traffic. Human beings aren't meant to be solely consumers—eventually, something has to come out. Otherwise, I don't really see what the point of all that consumption is. The idea behind watching things and listening to things is that it stirs something within you, and hopefully that will stimulate you to then create your own thing.

I love the Internet, but it's hard not to get lost in it. It's not like a book where you start and get to the end. It’s like we’ve found a way to encapsulate all of human knowledge within one thing only to learn that you can’t do that. It's an overabundance of information. Ultimately, it must be quite tough to be confronted with that. If you wanted to be a creative person and you are confronted with the sum product of mankind's creativity up to this moment in history, that's pretty daunting, like, “Where can I fit my voice in amongst all that?”

Pitchfork: Yeah, the idea of making something new can seem pointless because you know it's going to be thrown on top of this endless pile of stuff.

JC: What people have to make sure of is that they're not replicating something that already exists. You really have to ask yourself: “Is there a point in me doing this? Has this already been said before? Is this moving things along or is this just adding to the giant pile of junk that's already there?” Social commentators give this kind of idea names like “cultural gridlock,” where things like music don’t seem to be developing so much. It's not like the music of 1994 is that different than the music of 2014—and that's 20 years worth.

But I believe that humans adapt to circumstance. The Internet is quite an unprecedented circumstance, so it's going to take people a while to get their heads around it. You read things about writers, for instance, who get computer programs so that they can't surf the Internet when they're supposed to be writing. People are learning that you've got to find some way of shutting things off in order to give your own mind a chance to produce something. It's interesting that most gadgets are called “iPhone” and “iPod,” with that "i" prefix, which is ego. But most creativity is not ego-led—a lot of it comes from the unconscious. So if you’re always checking your email or updating your Instagram profile, you're not just looking out the window, daydreaming. You've got to let the subconscious in—that's my main message to the world. I sound like I've been reading too many self-help books, don't I?

Pitchfork: How would you gauge the importance the Internet has had on culture in general in the last 20 years?

JC: The Internet and mobile phones are probably the most significant cultural changes that I'll witness in my lifetime. I was born between formats, so I can remember life before and after. In some ways, it's positive. Say you're traveling on the Underground here in London, late at night—before, you would always be pretty nervous that you might get beaten up by somebody. A lot of violence just stems from boredom. People would get on a train and think, "I've got 20 minutes. What should I do? Oh look, there's somebody over there that looks weird. I'll go beat them up." But now, people are just on their phones. They're not bothered about you. They don't even really know that you're there. They'll just check through some emails and play Candy Crush. In a way, it's probably a big reason why there's less violence now. Having said that, the next time I go on the tube, I'll probably get beaten up.