T-shirts are the fun tokens that pay for everything we do. They come from the bottom, from the rave, and travel upwards. When I got my first studio on Seven Sisters Road, the previous tenants had just been shut down by SO15 counter-terrorist squad. I signed the contract flanked by portraits of Che Guevara and Tito. There was a brothel on the next floor, so it was quite awkward with people pressing the buzzer marked “BANGER”. In the book he describes trying to provide some kind of sex education for his own adolescent son, to the mortification of both parties. It worries him, the fact that sex and life have become so severed. “Because what you’re dealing with is you get those feelings, those instincts, at a certain age and they are strong feelings and you’ve got to deal with them in some way and if there are no clues except some kind of foul thing online where you start to think of people as objects, and why aren’t I getting my sex that I was promised – or whatever, I don’t know what those people think.”

JC: In your last collection you had a Lucozade dress and that really chimed with me. Lucozade used to be something you took to ill people in hospital and it wasn’t until I went to raves when I moved to London that I encountered people who drank it because they’d been up all night. Without them, Lucozade would have died as a product. We got Caro Howell, director of the Foundling Museum, to write the name of our last fashion show on all the invitations, because she’s got beautiful handwriting. So she came here and wrote “The People Deserve Beauty” loads of times and told us about Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty and the line of beauty while she did it. I didn’t know any of those references.It's been yet another good year for Jarvis, what with the Pulp gigs, the launch of his book of lyrics, Mother, Brother, Lover, and the continued success of his 6Music show. Not that you'd know it: good year or bad year, Jarvis himself doesn't really seem to change. He's still thoughtful, still funny, still more low-key than you might think. He still comes out with answers that you don't quite expect. No – people who work in their office have hit me up and said if I ever need stationery or USBs, to just ask. They’ve sent it over and I use it as record company merch. Re X Factor, Jarvis "took a position" after last year's series, where the contestants murdered David Bowie's "Heroes" on one show, the performance culminating with the stage opening up, "and all these soldiers walked on. Because it was for heroes. Like suddenly we're in a totalitarian state. I just thought, that's it, I'm out." Still, he does sneak a look now and then: "I do like Gary Barlow's 'It. Was. Absolutely. Fantastic. I am going to keep my head in this position because I have been told I look good on camera like this.'"

Yes, I say, they talk about the right to sex. “No, that’s a horrible thing. But for me, that couldn’t happen because of being brought up in a very feminine environment. So when I started to feel … urges, because I’d been brought up in a very female-dominated environment, there was no way I was going to start thinking of women as objects.” The only interesting thing about my dad is that he just wasn’t there If you're returning items from our Buy 3 Get 1 Free Multibuy range then you will be charged for any items that you are keeping. JC: That feeling is what makes things, especially activism, fun. You don’t want to walk around with a serious face, and it confuses people if you’ve having a laugh.Starting Pulp was a way too of alchemically transforming everyday existence into a more fantastic version. Several times in our conversation he touches on his persistent desire to live inside the TV, a zone of adventure populated by dinosaurs, Daleks and the Monkees. “I realise that image doesn’t work so much now because TVs are just flat screens. But when they were boxes you kind of thought – what’s in it? You could almost imagine fitting inside it.”