The first time I heard Pulp’s “Common People” was at my brother’s wedding reception in the tiny English town of Tring. I had moved to America in the early ’90s and completely missed the Britpop anthem’s rise to #2 in the UK charts in June 1995. Since then, I’ve never been able to separate the sound of “Common People” from the memory tableau of those wedding revelers—all ages and levels of dancing ability, varying states of intoxication—flailing wildly as the song’s tempo accelerated from a canter to a gallop.
A wedding reception is exactly the kind of commonplace occasion or location—see also office parties, school discos, pub nights, and the sort of unhip nightclubs found in the center of provincial towns across Britain—that Pulp aimed to infiltrate in 1995. Jarvis Cocker and his group wanted to become pop in its most democratically widespread, accessible-to-all sense. Different Class and the four UK hit singles spawned off the album achieved that ambition mightily.
Amazingly Pulp had existed for seventeen years before their 1995 breakthrough, and for most of that time they'd barely qualified as a cult band. Across the ’80s, they’d released a string of oddball, mildly intriguing albums via little labels like Red Rhino, Fire, and Gift. In 1991, the gawky aspiring grandeur of “My Legendary Girlfriend” won them some fans. After a decade-plus scrabbling along in indie-land, Pulp finally got picked up by a major label, Island, who in ’93 released an anthology of their recent Gift singles titled Intro and then, two years later, the group’s proper big-league debut His ‘ N’ Hers. “Do You Remember the First Time?” glancingly brushed the UK Top 40; The Sisters EP fared slightly better, denting the charts thanks to its bouncy, bittersweet lead tune “Babies.” But Pulp were still barely hanging on to pop.
A sense of urgency—“this could be our last chance”—must surely have possessed Pulp as ’94 turned into ’95 and work started on the album that would become Different Class. Seventeen years after Cocker formed Pulp in post-punk Sheffield while still a schoolboy, the singer and his group rose to the make-or-break moment. Cocker wrote eight of the album’s 12 songs in a 48-hour burst of inspiration. Among them was “Common People,” which instantly stood out as a potential anthem.
The genius of “Common People” is the way its fist-punch chorus and frantic surge rouses unity and release even as its socially acerbic lyric speaks of division and tension. Jaunty and whimsical in tone at the start, “Common People” seems initially to be just a wry true-life anecdote: posh girl recruits fellow art student from a humble background (Jarvis) as a guide to how the other half lives. But as the pace quickens, the song escalates into an accusatory tirade, fueled by Cocker’s stinging awareness of how stacked social odds determine life outcomes. The slumming St Martin’s College sculpture student adopts the lifestyle of the less well-off. But not only will she “never get it right,” she’ll never really know the desperation that drives the live-for-now rapacity of working-class pleasure-taking: All it would take is one phone call to her father and she’ll be restored to her wealthy background. “You’ll never understand,” rails Cocker, “how it feels to live your life/With no meaning or control and with nowhere left to go/You are amazed that they exist/And they burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why.”