Cosmo Jarvis: 'My generation is the worst'

Two albums in, singer-songwriter Cosmo Jarvis is shaping up to be the spokesperson for his age group – even if Radio 1 won't play his records
Cosmo Jarvis
Cosmo Jarvis. Photograph: Elina Kansikas Elina Kansikas/Elina Kansikas

It's almost like people have forgotten that they have the right to communicate with each other," says Cosmo Jarvis, explaining why he's written a song – We Just Wanna Talk – about the lengths people go to avoid speaking to one another on the London Underground. "There used to be more ways of starting a conversation in a polite way. Now, people worry a lot more about offending each other and ... It's kind of ... Overall, I think it's just ... Hang on a minute."

And the 21-year-old singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, actor, director, producer and screenwriter pauses to gather his thoughts. Ignoring the man playing pool behind him and the snatches of conversation wafting up from the saloon bar of the London pub downstairs, he seems to lose himself in thought.

After 10 seconds of silence, he raises his right hand, signalling that he doesn't want to be interrupted. Five more seconds pass – no time at all, really, but it feels like an eternity in the middle of a two-hour conversation during which he is garrulous and forthright. But communication is what Jarvis is all about, and he takes pains to express himself clearly.

"I just think that my generation is gonna be the worst," he says, finally emerging from his thicket of contemplation with the idea he has been chasing. "I know the current generation is unlike the one before, and there'll never be anything like it, but I just think that it's gotten further than it's ever progressed before."

He slumps again.

"I dunno," he sighs. "I wish I could explain this better, but I can't, really. I'm not very good at piecing things together off the hook – I need to think about them sometimes. In a song you get to do that a little bit better."

Harrison Cosmo Krikoryan Jarvis – raised in Totnes, Devon, with an Armenian-American mother and English father – has already written more than 300 songs and is close to finishing his first feature film. He tackles weighty topics in a conversational style, treating the listener like a trusted friend. His music switches between acoustic ballads, rambunctious punk-folk, MOR rock and agitatedly introspective, scabrous rap, sometimes within a single song. These are all reasons why he should be accorded the status of national treasure, but they also explain why he has yet to become a household name.

Jarvis released his first LP in 2009. A double album, Humasyouhitch Sonofabitch underlined his already refined talents, and showed why he might be difficult to market. The first disc was mainly a collection of love songs, albeit with a singular, reliably dark humour, but the second was a concept album about a teenager struggling through his parents' protracted, bruising separation. It served as his autobiography.

"There was always problems at home – always," he says. "It was more than a divorce. It went on for ages. Still going on, 10 years later. I guess they actually split when I was nine years old. Mum took me and my brother, fucked off, left the country. She would say things about dad, he would say things about her, and you don't know what's true. And you get to the point where you don't hate them, but you just no longer see them as parents. I did, anyway."

As he relates in songs such as Sort Yourself Out ("I'm getting too old for this young man's game/ As soon as I settle, people change") and Clean My Room ("Some dreams are meant for chasing/Some dreams are meant for living"), Jarvis quickly learned the art of self-reliance. But he also had the self-awareness to realise he had to take responsibility for his own life. So he tried to look at his situation from the outside, hoping to discover how it could be overcome.

"I took it upon myself to look objectively," he says, "to not look at them as my parents. I quickly got to see them as just regular fucked-up people. And they're not supposed to be – they're supposed to be, like, these pillars of example for you to model your life on. This sounds really horrible, but I didn't wanna have anything to do with either of their examples. Parents have this position of authority just because they shit out a kid, basically, and it's just not good enough – because, sometimes, you do know better than your parents. I still love 'em, obviously, but that shouldn't be more important than what they really are, and what you really are as a new person in the world."

It's testament to Jarvis's skills as a writer that listening to the Sonofabitch songs never feels voyeuristic. There is an urgency to the stories, a conviction in the telling, yet the humour never gets lost. Putting all this into a form other people can enjoy and then understand is something he seems to regard as a duty.

"The reason the world repeats itself is because everything gets passed down," he says. "All the flaws in one generation get passed to the next. At least if you go out there and you try and build your own head from scratch then you'd be much more responsible for yourself – and if you did make mistakes along the way, then you'd know what you did wrong."

Despite its excellence and importance, Humasyouhitch Sonofabitch was a commercial flop. Jarvis parted company with the Wall of Sound imprint that released it, and the follow-up, Is the World Strange or Am I Strange?, arrives this autumn on his own label. The first single, Gay Pirates – a folksy stomp designed to tackle homophobia by getting beered-up lads to sing along before they realise what it's about – was released in January. Stephen Fry tweeted his approval, and Jarvis's self-directed video became a YouTube hit.

"I needed something that was closed off from everything else so that the story could take place," he says, explaining why a heterosexual man used to mining his own life for material would choose to write a gay love story set on an 18th-century pirate ship. "I needed something where everyone else could be against them – where it was more than a gay person in a homophobic society, where the whole thing was amplified. By setting it in the days of pirates, and using the mandolin, which is the sort of instrument you could've taken to sea with you, I thought that might give it a kind of folklore thing, and that would add to the idea of it being firmly embedded in human history."

But Radio 1 refused to play it. "The reason they gave was because I said 'gang rape'," Jarvis tuts. "We could've given them an edited version." Momentum was lost and the record failed to chart. It's still bothering him.

"I'm nervous because I think that one was the most relatable tune-wise, melody-wise, subject-matter wise, video-wise," he says. "I'm worried that people who like Gay Pirates might hear other songs and they'll just fuckin' think I'm a dick! I always worry about that, because I don't have a set genre that I try and keep within. I grew up with LimeWire. I'd download a drum'n'bass song and play it after a Beatles song, and the only opinion I had was if it was a good piece of music. I would get bored writing one kind of music, because sometimes that style of presenting an idea as a song wouldn't suit another idea. I see a piece of music like I would a painting, and they're all individual. The fact that you're discouraged to do lots of different things really pisses me off."

He seems incapable of making things easy for himself. Another single, Sure As Hell Not Jesus, arrived accompanied by a video that attempted to humorously examine child abuse and hypocrisy in the Catholic church. The next one – My Day – is a Prufrock-like exercise, Cosmo imagining himself as an old man looking back on his youth, criticising his generation's self-absorption and apathy. The reggae-fuelled She Doesn't Mind is another obvious single: witty, emotive and summery, but Jarvis has said, when introducing it on stage, that its catchy singalong hook is a reference to anal sex.

His parents have reconciled themselves to his songs, though his mum thinks he should stop rapping – perhaps not coincidentally, she seems to get the worst of the lyrics when he does, as in Sonofabitch's Problems, or the unflinching Mummy's Been Drinking ("I know you had your fair share of abuse/ But that's in the past so you got no excuse"). "She just goes: 'You're not from the hood!'" he says. "But sometimes it's just a much better way of explaining something really articulately. Mummy's Been Drinking did fuck her off a lot, though."

And this seems to be where we came in, and where Jarvis is perhaps most different and potentially important: he is willing to risk ridicule, incomprehension or hostility as he tries to communicate. It can be liberating.

"I like to hitchhike," he says. "You meet pretty cool people. I can be whoever I want when I get in their car, and they'll never know any different. And that's great, even though it's kinda bogus, because you're sharing something. A family means fuck all, because people are so much bigger than that, but it's very hard because of all these establishments – the idea of a family and religion, and class and education. Those are walls and the more of them that are in place, and the longer they continue to be seen as just the way it is now, the more insignificant the idea of talking to somebody else will be."

My Day is released on Monday. Is the World Strange or Am I Strange? is due out on 19 September. Both are on 25th Frame. A UK tour begins 14 September at the Musician in Leicester.