Jarvis Cocker takes a pop at 'evil' Margaret Thatcher

Sheffield's musical icon had been entertaining literary lovers with extracts and themes from his book 'Good Pop, Bad Pop.'

The tome focuses on items he discovered while clearing out the loft in his east London home, objects that he views as symbolic of different times in his life.

The Barcelona audience was enthralled hearing about his childhood in Sheffield, his time at school forming the band Pulp at age 15, working shifts in the city's fish market and hanging around The Limit nightspot before his explosion on the Britpop scene.

He told them he had never thought he'd author a book - but then disarmed the spectators by admitting he changed his mind partly because it would make "quite a lot of money."

Jarvis, aged 61, went on to explain that the random mementos represented interesting moments and anecdotes in his journey through life.

Asked if there had been any loft objects he had been shocked to recover, he offered to unveil the "scariest one" that he had brought to the Spanish stage along with other items, in a black plastic bin bag.

He pulled out a blue handbag saying its contents would make people's "blood run cold."

Inside the bag was a caricature face image of Mrs Thatcher (Prime Minister 1979-1990) which he held in front of his face, making a spooky noise.

"Do you know who that is?" he asked the largely Catalan audience.

"Margaret Thatcher, kind of like the most evil woman that ever has been."

Cocker, publicly stated 15 years ago that that a Conservative government was not "a good thing, far from it."

At the literary event, he said the only excuse he had for buying the Thatcher mask, probably somewhere around the 1980s, was that "it was cheap, for a start" and included a blue handbag like one she used to carry.

Oddly included inside the bag were paper cut-out drawings of clothes you "could dress her up in."

He said the objects represented extremely "Bad Pop" adding there was a difference between pop and populism.

Jarvis also admitted he lived his life at a slower-than-normal pace and had missed two deadlines to finish writing the book.

"I am a tortoise...I regret it in some ways because I wish I had made more records - and I wish it hadn't taken me so long to write this book...and clear all this rubbish out of my loft."

He had to accept that it took a "long time for information to go through my mind."

He cited an occasion when a girlfriend accidentally set her hair alight on a restaurant candle during a romantic dinner- but because he was distracted by the fact he'd just spotted comedian Ronnie Corbett and it took a diner from another table to pour water on flames.

"I saw it happen but for some reason, it didn't register that I should do something. It's dangerous - maybe I should be banned from driving or something."