“I credit this as the moment when my worldview changed profoundly.” When Jarvis fell out of a window.

On Division Street,  Sheffield, in a florist's window there is a blue plaque-like sticker that reads;
“Jarvis Cocker. Musician. Sustained a broken leg due to clambering out of a window above this site. 1985.

In his book Good Pop, Bad Pop, Jarvis' says that it was the moment that changed everything, calling it his "Road to Damascus’ moment.

“One night in early November 1985, I went to a girl’s flat in the centre of Sheffield and tried to impress her by going out onto her window ledge and then re-entering her living room via the next window along,” Cocker recalls. It was a move he’d been planning for a while having seen a guest at a different party perform the trick before and being, in his words, “very taken with it.”

Having severely overestimated his strength, Jarvis found himself hanging off the window ledge. Without the strength to pull himself back through the other window as he’d planned, he realised he would have to do what he considered would be "a controlled drop."

Cocker, sustained several broken bones in his leg, hip, arm and wrist when he fell 20 feet from the window,  onto the pavement below, and spent two months in hospital recuperating. But used this time to evaluate his songwriting and alter his approach. A time of inspiration that would lead to chart success in the next decade.

  “I credit this as the moment when my worldview changed profoundly. Life is elsewhere? No: life is occurring, in all its intensity, right now – and right under your nose,” he wrote. “I now realise that I’d been surrounded by inspiration all along. Only I’d been too intent on scaling the distant horizon to actually see it. Now that I was back at ground level and staring life fully in the face, I found myself eyeball to eyeball with what I’d always been searching for: something to write about."

The first song Jarvis Cocker wrote after falling out of a window, which was "This is Hardcore." He wrote it while intoxicated and initially didn't remember doing so, but upon later reflection, recognized it as a powerful expression, although at the time he attributed it to a moment of "not being very happy" and "not in a good place, psychologically,"
Songs like "Common People", "I Spy", and others from the album Different Class also emerged from this period of covelesence, as well as some ideas that would asked up songs for Pulps His N Hers album. His songs from this period in hospital onwards reflected his experiences and observations of Sheffield and its people