FEATURE:
Groovelines
Pulp – Common People
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A classic song…
that reached number two in the U.K., I am looking ahead to the thirtieth anniversary of Pulp’s Common People. Released on 22nd May, 1995, I am looking to the thirtieth anniversary of a song often cited as the finest Britpop track ever. One of the defining tracks of that movement. It is one of the greatest songs ever in my view. In a Rolling Stone readers' poll in 2015, Common People was voted the greatest Britpop song. I am keen to get to features about the song. I am starting out with this feature from American Songwriter:
“Class consciousness was the beating heart of Britpop. Oasis were beloved—apart from the albums full of bangers—because they sang about the working class and they were working class. Blur, on the other hand, were thought to be suspiciously inauthentic.
“Common People” was the first single from Pulp’s 1995 album Different Class. The song is infectiously catchy. It’s here, where group founder and frontman Jarvis Cocker becomes an icon. But “Common People” is a class anthem. It is the soul of Britpop.
Sheffield’s Pulp formed in 1978. They struggled for many years to find success. At one point, Cocker folded the band and left to study film at St. Martin’s College.
Cocker—influenced by vocalists Serge Gainsbourg and Scott Walker— returned to the band. By the late ’80s, they were inspired by house music and rave culture. In 1991, “My Legendary Girlfriend” was NME’s single of the week—a pivotal moment in Pulp’s career.
What is Cocker talking about?
Jarvis Cocker, while studying at St. Martin’s College, met a wealthy girl who said she “wanted to move to Hackney and live like the common people.” Class tourism, or slumming, was popular at the time. People in upper classes found something noble in the lower classes, yet they had the privilege of leaving when they wanted.
She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge
She studied sculpture at Saint Martin’s College
That’s where I caught her eye
She told me that her dad was loaded
I said, in that case I’ll have rum and Coca-Cola
She said fine
Blur, at the time, were taking heat from critics for being a middle-class band writing songs about the working class. Their Parklife was a No. 1 album and was, according to a Q interview with Cocker, a “kind of patronizing social voyeurism.”
You’ll never live like common people
You’ll never do whatever common people do
You’ll never fail like common people
You’ll never watch your life slide out of view
And you dance and drink and screw
Because there’s nothing else to do
Britpop made a lot of money glamourizing the working class. Finally, Cocker has had enough. He exposes the tourist:
But still you’ll never get it right
Cause when you’re laid in bed at night
Watching roaches climb the wall
If you called your dad he could stop it all, yeah
Cocker wrote the song on a Casio keyboard. When he brought it to the band, they were not impressed. But keyboardist Candida Doyle thought it was great. Pulp booked a session at The Town House in London and recorded the single in two weeks.
It was produced by Chris Thomas, whose credits include The Sex Pistols, Pretenders, and INXS. “Common People” sounds very similar to “Los Amantes” by ’80s Spanish pop band Mecano.
The best Britpop song, ever
Pulp was coming off their breakthrough album His ’n’ Hers in 1994. The Mercury Prize-nominated album reached No. 9 on the UK Albums chart.
Different Class, the band’s fifth album, was released at the height of Britpop in 1995. It was Pulp’s first No. 1 album and won the Mercury Prize. Pulp headlined the Glastonbury Festival in 1995.
“Common People” was an anthem. It sounded like a synthesized version of The Sex Pistols’ Chris Thomas-produced “Anarchy in the UK.” It’s Pulp’s signature song and, at the time, topped many year-end lists. Pitchfork placed “Common People” at No. 2 on their Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s.
The song endures like the stubborn reality of class struggle. It speaks to any generation. Many art forms, including film and music, have a fascination with struggle. In some instances, the work is well-intentioned. In other cases, it exploits the powerless.
With “Common People,” Cocker exposed the façade of Britpop’s working-class chic. He wrote an anthem about the condescending way the privileged go sightseeing in the slums”.
It is worth reading the Wikipedia page about Common People. Information about its legacy and importance. Details about the music video and inspiration behind the song. I want to spotlight a 2015 feature from The Guardian. The feature was published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of a Britpop anthem. A masterpiece from one of the best bands of their generation:
“However, there is a wider issue here of – if you’ll forgive me – cultural focus. Common People is not a song about a spoiled condescending female, however vivid the character. The song – part poem, part manifesto – is about Cocker (back then) and people like Cocker (as he had been): the long-term disfranchised and perma-skint, who spend their lives feeling broke, scared and hopeless, without a safety net.
It’s about the scathing wit that gives them voice, and the wild anger that drives them. Crucially, it’s a story about a penniless working-class student rather than a rich slumming one, and in an increasingly polarised one-note cultural landscape, this sort of distinction seems ever more important.
It’s now widely accepted that, not just music but all branches of the arts are steadily becoming middle-class enclaves – affordable only to the privileged few. Which just never used to be the case. Some out there might not like the idea of the musicians of the past honing their craft on the dole and making scant effort to find a “real job”, the fact remains that that’s where a lot of great music came from.
Now these same creative types are doubtless being burned out on zero-hours’ contracts. And this is just one way that musicians, like actors, dancers, artists, writers and any other creative person, are being priced out – and subsequently hounded out – of the arts.
This is a disaster for everybody, including, paradoxically, the privileged few, who lose out on the kind of potent vibrant culture that’s only possible when everybody gets a fair crack at joining in. Instead it becomes the norm that cultural focus goes automatically to a certain brand of middle-class moneyed sensibility, as if this were the only type that matters or, worse still, exists.
The problem is that this can’t help but become one-dimensional and stifling. How could it not, when all art has to be viewed through one incredibly narrow filter before it’s deemed worthy of attention, never mind celebration?
Moreover, with this kind of constriction, it’s not just talent that’s lost, a tragedy in itself; it’s also different kinds of people, backgrounds, textures, viewpoints and stories.
Which is where Common People comes in. This is a song that belongs without question to the disempowered classes. It’s the narrator (Cocker) who counts, and how he wants to tell his story. It barely matters who the student is – she’s a mere cipher, and that’s how “she” should remain, now more than ever. That’s why I don’t care if the student was Stratou or some other. Increasingly, all we hear about (and from) are people like that, usually strumming on a guitar wailing about “finding themselves” on a beach in Goa. Common People is about hearing from someone like the young Jarvis Cocker, the sort now seldom heard – someone sardonic, angry and – above all – totally skint”.
I am going to finish off with a feature from 2023. Uncut spoke with Jarvis Cocker, Pulp bassist Steve Mackey and keyboardist Candida Doyle. It is a really fascinating piece that I would encourage people to read. I have selected a few segments. Interesting reading what the band say a song that has endured all of these years. A song regularly played on the radio. One that has reached new generations of listeners:
“I realised that we had written something that had pretensions to being anthemic,” says Jarvis Cocker. “It was an anthem. A class anthem.”
At the start of the 1990s, Pulp – the band Cocker had formed as a 15-year-old schoolboy in Sheffield in 1979 – were still languishing in relative obscurity. “One more year on the dole, then that would be that,” remembers keyboardist Candida Doyle. But their fortunes began to take a more positive turn when the band’s 1994 album, His ‘n’ Hers, received a Mercury Music Prize nomination and reached No 9 in the charts. The record that finally made them stars, though, was Cocker’s memoir about a fellow art student from his time at Central St Martins College of Art and Design: a rich girl who wanted to slum it with the “common people”.
“Around London, you met these southern toffs,” drummer Nick Banks explains. “You got that idea they were different. That they could muck around and do what they wanted for a few years, then call in the trust fund and bugger off to the south of France. For most people, that ain’t the case. You’re stuck with what you’ve got.”
“I don’t think he [Jarvis] liked southerners much,” believes producer Chris Thomas. “He was suspicious of me. I think he was uptight at not having ever made it.”
But then “Common People” hit No 2 in June, 1995.
“That song released him. Suddenly, while ‘Common People’ was in the charts, Jarvis blitzed eight songs in 48 hours for Different Class. Every one was a winner.”
Later that same month, Glastonbury headliners The Stone Roses were forced to pull out, with Pulp invited to take their place. “If you really want something to happen enough then it will,” Cocker told the crowd at the end of the band’s set, culminating with “Common People”.
“It seemed the perfect thing to say,” says Banks. “And from that moment, the audience always sang along with ‘Common People’; you could feel this tangible response, that they knew what the song was about, and agreed with it. The crescendo of ‘Common People’ at Glastonbury 1995 was the high-water mark of the band.”
JARVIS COCKER: It all started with me getting rid of a lot of albums at the Record And Tape Exchange in Notting Hill. With the store credit I went into the second-hand instrument bit and bought this Casio keyboard. When you buy an instrument, you run home and want to write a song straight away. So I went back to my flat and wrote the chord sequence for “Common People”, which isn’t such a great achievement because it’s only got three chords. I thought it might come in handy for our next rehearsal.
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STEVE MACKEY: We were just chuckling about how simple it sounded.
COCKER: Steve started laughing and said, “It sounds like [Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s version of] ‘Fanfare For The Common Man’.” I always thought the word “common” was an interesting thing. It would be used in “Fanfare For The Common Man” as this idea of the noble savage, whereas it was a real insult in Sheffield to call someone “common”. That set off memories of this girl that I met at college. She wanted to go and live in Hackney and be with the common people. She was from a well-to-do background, and there was me explaining that that would never work. I hated all that cobblers you got in films and magazines in which posh people would “slum it” for a while. Once I got that narrative in my head it was very easy to write, lyrically.
CANDIDA DOYLE: Jarvis’ neck would have to be on the line before he would write the words. And singing them would be a drunken affair, hiding behind a door. That went right up to our last LP. Scott Walker tried to talk him out of it. He just found it very personal.
COCKER: Part of the tension in that song is that I might have been repelled by what she was saying, but I was sexually attracted to her and wanted to cop off with her. I never did make a move. But I changed the song so she was attracted to me and wanted to sleep with me. Which was, you know, a lie. It was an anthem. We wanted to find someone to produce it who would give us a big sound but not make us sound like twats. Which is what brought us to Chris Thomas. He produced the Sex Pistols.
COCKER: I’m not ashamed of that song at all. I’m quite proud of it. I hear it on the radio and it still sounds all right!
DOYLE: Later in Pulp’s career I was thinking of groups that had written hit songs that never got forgotten, and I thought, ‘Oh, I wish we’d written one of those.’ Then I thought, ‘Oh, we have.’
COCKER: Was that girl real? Yes. On that BBC Three documentary [2006’s The Story Of… Pulp’s Common People], the researchers went through all the people who were contemporaries of mine at St Martins and they tried to track her down. They showed me a picture and it definitely wasn’t her. I dunno. Maybe she wasn’t Greek. Maybe I misheard her”.
I am going to end there. I am sure there are going to be anniversary features and interviews ahead of 22nd May. The album Common People is from, Different Class, turns thirty on 30th October. I wanted to spend time with its first single. One of the most acclaimed songs of the 1990s, this phenomenal anthem sounds essential and powerful…
IN 2025.