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Married and expecting his first son, he talks about the changes in his life, fame ("now I can travel by subway") and the uncertain future of his ex? band, which is about to publish a Greatest Hits.

Year 2002 was one of great changes for the lead singer of Pulp, Jarvis Cocker, who's already 38. In April he married fashion designer Camille Bidault -Waddington, 32-, and soon after he learned he was going to be father to a son.

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"The two things I had sworn I would never do have just happened", he tells me later, as if he still can't believe it. "I never saw happy marriages as a boy, so I decided never to get marry. When you made a decision like that at the age of seven or eight, that tends to become fix".

He was seven when his father disappeared from his life. He and his sister, Saskia, were left with their mother. He met him again in recent years.

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Now Jarvis considers his decision to have a career as a pop musician may have had to do with the decision he made as a young boy not to build any relationship with the "normal" world. "Not getting married, not having children, not having an ordinary job; that's what being in a band was about. That was what I used to think, anyway. I thought normal life could only end up like shit. I believe only now I realize that, whether I like it or not, I belong to the human kind". There was a time when it was impossible not to find him in any celebrity's party. All of the sudden, the songs he wrote began to sound darker, more introspective. The record This is Hardcore (98) is one example. That cost Pulp a large portion of the fans it had seduced after the hit Common People (95). "I wasn't surprised at all", he says now. "The songs about panic attacks, pornography, the fear to die and get old will never make it to the top of the charts. I wrote about my life. Before, I would collect data from everywhere. Then I became very introspective. I don't think introspection is a very healthy thing. Experience shows me that, the greater my anguish was, the worse my music resulted".

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He thinks Pulp will go on after that pause "if when the time comes we still have something to say".

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Jarvis considers he had to undergo what he calls a "complete disintegration of his personality" to be able to "eliminate all the things he was carrying since his childhood and carry on". Now he seems to be very peaceful, especially if one takes into account that he's about to suffer uprooting for the second time in his life (his moving to Paris) and to have his first child.

"It's awful to hear that people are happy. It makes you feel like being sick, but, anyway... I'm happy now."