Released on this day in May of 1995, Pulp‘s imperious ‘Common People’ was a seminal single of the 90s, lifted from their album Different Class, a somewhat exaggerated account of Jarvis Cocker’s time with a girl in St Martin’s college gave him a platform to vocalise his bristling attack on upper-middle class attempts to slum it with the proles. (“I said ‘Pretend you got no money’ – And she just laughed and said ‘Oh, you’re so funny.’ I said ‘Yeah… Well, I can’t see anyone else smiling in here.’“)
Jarvis grew up in Sheffield before going to study film at St Martin’s in 1988, he told the BBC: “It was [written] not that long after I had moved down to London and so the sensibility is definitely that of somebody moving from up north to down south.
“You just see more of society, there’s more extremes in London. For a start you see people with money.”
It’s delivered over a colossal tune: throbbing basslines and disco smudged beats, and the insistent keyboard notes of Candida Doyle, late guitarist Steve Mackey’s whip lash licks, rising to Russell Senior’s violin-driven crescendos, the band described it as a “runaway train” with a tempo that rose and fell and rose again, peaking with memorable Jarvis lines like“you’ll never know what its like to live your life without meaning or control” delivered with all the righteous rage of someone who has been poor and who had suffered the Thatcher years. It’s the collision of Jarvis’s personality, his sharp investigation of class, his vividly drawn imagery that you can identify with coupled with his masterclass delivery that he hinted at on their previous album His n Hers, that shifts effortlessly from wry to whispered to swooping, powered by a momental tune that sounds like it should fall apart but just gets bigger and bigger turning it into an unstoppable anthem, that makes ‘Common People’ great.
Scaling the charts to number two, only devastatingly being denied the top spot by Robson and Jerome, it became an anthem, and as they performed it at Glastonbury when they headlined in ’95 after replacing The Stone Roses, with all of Jarvis’ command of the Pyramid stage, their ascent was complete!
That day he urged the crowd to take Pulp’s success, after years largely spent in the background as a source of inspiration:
“If you want something to happen enough then it will actually happen. I believe that. That’s why we are stood on this stage today.
“If a lanky git like me can do it, then so can you.”
Drummer Nick Bands offered recently “To me it still sounds fresh, vibrant and immediate and a worthwhile social commentary.”
Reflecting on the song in 2004, Candid Doyle said: “I remember at one point thinking I wish we could write a song that would be fantastic for ever and ever and ever – and then I thought ‘oh, we have’.”
Whilst the mainstream pandered to the stereotypical idea of Blur as a bunch of southern arty ponces and Oasis as working-class northern heroes during their contrived chart battle, the utterly memorable ‘Common People’ was perhaps the definitive and most eloquent comment on the British obsession with class in the ’90s. All together now…
Orginally published as part of The Rise and Fall of Orchestral Pop in the 1990s.
