Chronic insomniac Jarvis Cocker is going on a musical odyssey into sleeplessness. He tells Alfred Hickling why he hopes audiences will nod off to his Wireless Nights

For many years, the only orchestral work Jarvis Cocker cared for was a lilting piece of light music called Sailing By, written in 1963 by the English composer Ronald Binge to precede the BBC’s late-night shipping forecast. Cocker nominated it on Desert Island Discs in 2005 because, he explained, “If I were to be stuck on an island for the rest of my life I’d need something to help me get to sleep.”

A chronic insomniac, Cocker frequently puts on music to help him relax, though his 4am listening choices have become more discerning of late. “My taste in classical music tends towards slow, drifty, out-of-focus stuff,” he says. “The last movement of Mahler’s 9th symphony – that’s good for sending you off. And I’m very partial to a bit of Erik Satie, particularly the recordings made by the Dutch pianist Reinbert de Leeuw because he plays them at half the speed of everyone else.”

In the past couple of years, Cocker’s nocturnal musings have formed the basis of his occasional Radio 4 series Wireless Nights, in which the singer has sat up watching badger colonies, met on-call transplant surgeons and interviewed night-shift workers at the National Grid. His next show – recorded live with the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester – explores his fascination with classical music as a means of making it through the night.

It’s certainly one of the BBC Philharmonic’s strangest gigs. The Wireless Nights transmission forms part of the BBC Philharmonic Presents... series of alternative events, which so far this season has included concerts with Clean Bandit and Bollywood legend RD Burman. But Cocker’s concept initially left the orchestra in the dark.

“I wanted to record the programme with all the lights out, but in the end we had to settle for it being very dim in the studio so the players could see the music,” Cocker says. “But they were very good sports and agreed to do a little improvisation in total blackness.”

The programme presents a potted history of musical insomnia, narrated by Cocker in a subdued, red-eye monotone: “It’s deliberately low-key as I’d regard it as quite a success if people were to nod off during the broadcast,” he says. The musical illustrations include an extract from the Goldberg Variations, commissioned by a Russian nobleman to help him sleep, which Cocker describes as “Bach’s biggest overnight hit”. There’s a spooky account of how the whereabouts of Robert Schumann’s lost violin concerto was revealed during a seance; and a compilation of Richard Nixon’s late-night voice memoranda, in which the president’s favourite Rachmaninov recordings can be heard at belting volume in the background.

Cocker gives an erudite and informative account of these pieces, but does not claim to be an expert. “I’m very ignorant about classical music really,” he admits. “I think, like a lot of people, I always aspired to develop an appreciation of classical music, but didn’t know where to start. It’s like going round and round this magnificent edifice without being able to find the way in.”

The Damascene moment occurred when he found himself narrating Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf at a family concert with the Philharmonia Orchestra at London’s Southbank Centre in 2010. “It was an extraordinary privilege to be right in the middle of the orchestra, listening to the blend of instruments that usually only the conductor gets to hear,” he says. “What astonished me was the dynamic range you can achieve with purely acoustic instruments. And it’s not too loud. I know that makes me sound like an old person, but it’s so refreshing after years of playing in rock bands where everyone controls their own volume knob.”

Cocker is entirely self-taught as a musician, though he took his first steps towards becoming a classical composer earlier this year when the Kronos Quartet approached him to write a piece for its 40th anniversary concert at the Barbican. Cocker contributed a short work entitled Kerf for string quartet, electric organ and musical saw. “Kerf is a term used to describe the width of a blade,” he explains. “Saws – like string quartets – can play all the gaps between the conventional notes of the scale because there’s no keyboard or frets. I wanted to see how many different versions of a tone you could generate before it ceases to be the same note and starts to become another.”

Cocker wrote the piece in collaboration with virtuoso saw-player David Coulter, and played the single-note organ part himself. “That was because it was the only functional instrument in my basement when David came round to work on the piece,” Cocker explains. “It’s a bit cranky and unstable, though we used its quirks to determine the sound of the composition.”

Having got the taste, would Cocker now consider writing for a full orchestra? “I’d need some help because I don’t read music,” he replies. “But the BBC Philharmonic have been great at making a musical ignoramus like me feel welcome, so who knows – maybe my symphony is on the horizon.”

• Jarvis Cocker’s Wireless Nights is on Radio 4 at 11pm on 13 October.