"It came down like a guillotine!" That time an angry Britpop icon nearly accidentally killed one of heavy metal's most-famous superstars on a live British TV show

On November 10, 1997 Pulp released Help The Aged as the first single from their sixth album, the UK chart-topping This Is Hardcore. To promote it, frontman Jarvis Cocker was invited to appear as a guest on TFI Friday, the popular Friday evening entertainment programme presented by Chris Evans for Channel 4.

Cocker wasn't a huge fan of either Evans or his TV show, which was very much a reflection of the loud and lairy 'New Lad' attitude which went hand-in-glove with the emergence of Britpop in the mid '90s. He was particularly irritated by the fact that there was a life-size cardboard cut -out of him behind Evans' desk on the programme, which was in the camera shot every time the presenter conducted an interview. So when he was asked to appear as a guest on the show on November 14, 1997, the singer saw this as the perfect opportunity to re-arrange the set at Hammersmith's Riverside Studios, and remove his cardboard lookalike from the equation. On the night, after being introduced, Cocker shook hands with Evans then promply walked over behind his desk, lifted the cut out, and dumped it out of a window.

"It was surprising how heavy it was," Cocker recalled in an interview published in author Daniel Rachel's 2019 book Don't Look Back In Anger: The rise and fall of Cool Britannia, told by those who were there.

"I've been dying to do that for years," Cocker told Evans.

When Evans asked if the cut-out annoyed the singer, Cocker replied, "Well, I'ver seen him there with football shirts on and various things. You know Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the picture gets more twisted and horrible and the person stays looking great? Well that.. it's the other way around with me. So I thought I'd get rid of it. The future starts now."

Unbeknown to Cocker, however, his act of liberation almost ensured that a certain heavy metal superstar, whose band were booked to play the same episode of the show, almost had his future extinguished.

"After the interview," he told Rachel, "I went downstairs, and Lars Ulrich, the drummer in Metallica, runs up to me and says, 'What the fuck you doing man?'

"Apparently, he'd gone outside to have a fag, and just as he stood on the front step, this cut-out came down like a fucking guillotine, an inch in front of his nose. Luckily it was raining a bit, so he was sheltering. If he’d been outside and it had fallen on his head that would have been it. Lars Ulrich killed by a wooden Jarvis Cocker! It was a close shave."

Watch Cocker's interview below, and Metallica's performance of The Memory Remains on the same episode, with Lars Ulrich's head still attached to his body.