Common People

Imagine a song that sounds like a party and plays like an accusation. It begins with a small, wobbling keyboard figure, climbs through three chords, and keeps building until a whole room is shouting along, often without noticing who the song is aimed at. That tension is the secret of this single. It is a euphoric pop anthem about the exact moment someone's romantic idea of poverty collides with the real thing.

Released in May 1995 as the lead single from Different Class, it reached number two on the UK chart^[1] and became the track that turned a long-overlooked Sheffield band into national figures.

A Sheffield band, seventeen years in

Pulp were not a Britpop newcomer. The group was formed in Sheffield in 1978 by schoolboy Jarvis Cocker and Peter Dalton^[6], and spent the 1980s and early 1990s releasing records to little commercial reward. By the middle of 1995 they were a band with an enormous back catalogue of observation and very little mainstream attention to show for it.

That long apprenticeship matters. The singer who delivers this song is not a pop star flirting with the working class from a distance. He spent years on the wrong side of the money, the glamour and the door list, and the song carries the stored-up irritation of someone who has watched a certain kind of visitor pass through his world.

The student at Saint Martins

The story behind the song is unusually concrete. In September 1988 Cocker enrolled on a film course at Central Saint Martins in London, taking a break from the band^[1]. There he met a wealthy Greek art student who told him she wanted to move to a rough part of the city and live like ordinary people. In later interviews he said he built the song from that remark^[1].

Cocker has said he found the notion of rich people "slumming it" irritating, and the song is widely read as a rebuke to that kind of class tourism^[1]. He also changed one detail for dramatic effect. In real life he was the one who fancied her, and she was not interested^[1].

The woman's identity has become a minor parlour game. A Greek newspaper floated the name of a sculptor who later married a future finance minister, but Cocker said that could not be her, since the hair colour did not match^[2]. A second artist has claimed the role since 2012, and Cocker has not commented^[1]. He has said he never knew her name^[1], which suits the song. She is less a person than a type.

Three chords and a toy keyboard

The music is almost comically modest at its core. Cocker found the melody on a small Casio keyboard he had bought in London, and he has described the chord sequence as only three chords^[2]. Much of the band was unconvinced at first. One member thought it sounded like a famous orchestral fanfare, and only keyboardist Candida Doyle saw its promise straight away^[1].

What rescued it was patience and production. Chris Thomas produced the recording at The Town House in London, and the band filled all 48 available tracks with keyboards and extra sounds, including a Stylophone, to give the song its swelling, anthemic push^[1]. Russell Senior's violin gives it a wiry, slightly desperate edge that keeps it from turning into mere celebration^[1].

The structure is a slow burn. The opening is quiet and conversational, almost a seduction, and then it expands outward step by step. The full album version runs nearly six minutes^[1], long enough to feel like a night that gets out of hand.

The argument underneath the tune

The lyrics work as a story told to someone who is not listening. The narrator addresses a young woman from a privileged background who has decided to play at being poor. She wants experience, a new flat, the texture of an unglamorous life, and the narrator watches her treat all of it as a stage set.

Three ideas run through the verses.

Poverty as an aesthetic. The woman admires the surfaces of working-class life, the cheap pubs, the shabby supermarket, the rough edges, because for her they are novelties. Cocker said the idea of slumming seemed to be everywhere in mid-nineties culture, and that the "noble savage" notion was patronising, since council estates held plenty of savagery and little nobility^[1].

The safety net she cannot see. Whatever she does, she can leave. The narrator knows that what looks like adventure to her is a daily constraint to people who cannot step away, and the song becomes more pointed as it moves from teasing to something close to anger.

Class as a one-way mirror. She can look at the narrator's world, but he cannot look back into hers, and the song delights in refusing to flatter her. It is not a plea for her sympathy. It is a statement of how the situation looks from the other side of the counter.

Envy, snobbery and the double edge

The most interesting thing about the song is that it does not treat its narrator as a saint. A contemporary reviewer in Melody Maker praised how it captured the interplay of envy and snobbery in class conflict^[1]. The narrator wants this woman, resents her, and mocks her, sometimes within the same breath. Some of his scorn is righteous and some of it is wounded pride.

That is why the record has not aged into a slogan. A pure protest song would have been easier to write and far less durable. Here, the speaker's desire and his contempt are tangled together, which makes the song feel like human behaviour rather than a position paper.

The song also reflects an argument inside the band. Wikipedia notes that the lyrics were partly a reply to more politically minded bandmates such as Russell Senior^[1], which fits a narrator who is angry but who would rather be witty than righteous.

A Britpop record that isn't quite Britpop

Different Class arrived in October 1995, in the summer when the rivalry between Blur and Oasis dominated the music press. One retrospective describes Pulp as making the record that did more than perhaps any other to chronicle the reality of life in England in the mid nineties^[4]. A 1996 Spin review took a similar view, urging readers to forget the Blur against Oasis debate and calling Pulp the only Britpop band routinely capable of sharp lyrics^[5].

The title itself plays on the class system. It came from a phrase a friend of Cocker's used at a London club night to mean "in a class of its own", and Cocker liked the double meaning^[3]. The record went to number one in the UK and won the 1996 Mercury Prize^[3].

Where many of their contemporaries celebrated a rosy idea of working-class Britain, Pulp wrote from inside its awkward corners, with all the humour, shame and longing that involves. This single was the clearest statement of that stance.

Why it keeps landing

The song has outlived its moment because the situation it describes never went away. Every era has its version of the visitor who admires hardship from a comfortable distance. Britain in particular has a long tradition of treating deprivation as colour for someone else's story.

It has also been remade in ways that stretch its reach. A 2004 cover by William Shatner, produced by Ben Folds, introduced the song to audiences outside the British Isles^[1]. Critics later placed the original high on lists of the best songs of its decade and of all time, with Pitchfork ranking it second among 1990s tracks^[1]. A 6 Music poll in 2014 named it the favourite Britpop song^[1].

There is also the matter of what happens when a crowd sings it. The first time Cocker played it publicly, at Reading in 1994, he wrote most of the words the night before and struggled to remember them on stage^[1]. A few years later, whole fields were singing along. Something in the melody lets people take the side of the narrator, whether or not they have ever stood on his side of the divide.

Other ways to hear it

Some listeners hear the song as a straightforward revenge fantasy against privilege. Others hear a love song disguised as a quarrel, with a narrator who cannot decide whether he wants to win the argument or the girl.

A third reading is more uncomfortable. The song may implicate everyone who enjoys it. Anyone who has romanticised a neighbourhood they did not have to live in, or sung along to a song about struggle from a safe seat, is a little closer to the woman in the story than they would like to be.

The last word

The remarkable thing about this single is how much it manages to do in a few minutes of pop. It is funny, furious, tender and a little cruel. It takes a conversation from a London art school and turns it into a national argument about who gets to treat hardship as an adventure.

It also refuses the easy comfort of a moral. The tune keeps climbing, the crowd keeps cheering, and the question underneath stays open: what do you owe to the people whose lives you borrow?