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Jarvis Cocker: ‘I looked like an extra off The Sound of Music’

Musician and actor Jarvis Cocker tells 5 Live’s Nihal Arthanayake why going to school in the “suburbs of Sheffield” wearing lederhosen “just wasn’t the look”.

Jarvis was gifted a pair of lederhosen from his relatives in Germany; “I’m sure if you were in the right environment like some Alpine village, [you’d be seen as] looking sharp”.

He described his outfit like “an extra out of The Sound of Music or Heidi” and insisted it was inappropriate for “an inner-city school”.

“I was already self-conscious anyway as I was quite tall, I had glasses and long hair etc. but this just took it to a new level.”

“It went even further because somebody noticed on the front of the shorts, instead of having one normal zip, it had two zips side-by-side which let down a flap”- leading to a nickname that “I can’t repeat”.

This clip is originally from Nihal Arthanayake on Thursday 26 May 2022.

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3 minutes

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