Jarvis Cocker Quotes

When I go onstage, I'm going to work ...I feel like my performance is about an emotional connection. I want to connect with people, whether it's like a romantic song or a happy song.

Once I'm performing the show, I think that hour show has a certain intimacy with our audience. And that intimacy is through the lens and the live audience is a witness to that, whereas the audience at home is actually the object of my efforts.

Only in the theatre was it possible to see the performers and to be warmed by their personal charm, to respond to their efforts and to feel their response to the applause and appreciative laughter of the audience. It had an intimate quality; audience and actors conspired to make a little oasis of happiness and mirth within the walls of the theatre. Try as we will, we cannot be intimate with a shadow on a screen, nor a voice from a box.

I always thought that it was every performer's dream. That's the epitome of being an artist, being able to express song, dance and acting in a live theatre setting and really connecting with an audience on that level.

What is a good performance? It lies in the hands and head of a performer... the shortest way between two people is not a straight line.

You know, we're not on stage, we're not doing a play, so we don't have a relationship with the audience but going through that process and also just hearing how much people love the film, you feel like you do have a relationship with the audience.

From the stage, I can reach a large audience, and you learn from being on stage how much a song reaches, what extent of the crowd a song can reach. I write in a way that can reach most of the audience, but I also wanted to have truly intimate moments as well, many intimate moments, more so than the big moments.

I have to visualise my jokes, live my jokes, feel the audience because every audience is different. It's like having a different dancing partner every night.

I love the immediacy of an audience being there and reacting. I'm spoiled, having grown up in theater.

Intimacy comes from being yourself on the stage and making the audience feel, without trying, that you're sittin' down there with 'em, playing, and that can happen in a big hall, if you have a good audience that want to listen.

I joined a drama group when I was eight. It was the first time I'd made the connection with an audience.

The greatest feeling in the world is performing and connecting with the audience.

We spent night after night out there learning the art of entertaining a crowd.

I love Broadway. I love live performing. It's really spiritual when you can get to interact with people, and they actually affect how your show goes.

It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art. There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.

When I started out in this business, I was a performer before I was a songwriter, I was a performer before I was recording. Performing is the roots. That's where it all came from. You didn't start out doing it because you wanted to make an album.

My live performance, it just comes from feeling an energy and emotion from the crowd. Just going out there and doing my own stuff and being in front of my own people. I love it.

For me, it’s like playing the same instrument but in a different context. TV work – it’s really about getting it just right. You have a chance to try again if it’s not. Theatre is like playing a rock show. It doesn’t really matter if you make a tiny mistake. It’s the whole vibe and getting people to feel you. It’s about carrying the moment through all the way with you in an hour and 20 minutes of the narrative.

I miss live audiences, because it's like no other form of entertainment, where the audience is a major part of the production every night.

I always think that the difference between film and theater is like the difference between masturbation and making love. Because, in film, you just have to get one moment right; you're practically by yourself. And in theater, you actually have to have a relationship with the audience.

When I started reciting my own poems in public, I worried that it would seem too theatrical, but now I find recitation very natural, because it allows me to address audiences directly.

I actually always try to have a moment in my show where I can just lay down on stage and talk to people for a little while.

I love the theater because the theater is alive. The audience is right there.

I was in the back of the car with my girlfriend, the Rascals came on the radio and I realized their song was sexier than the sex I was trying to have.

Live audiences love me because I'm singing and actually am able to f**k with people live over the mic.