Forget Oasis – we should celebrate Pulp's legacy

Spectator

3 days ago

It begins with an electric swish sound that makes you feel like you are falling backwards, followed by an arresting synthesiser da-da-dum drumbeat. Then we get the voice, in double-time: 'She came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge. She studied sculpture at St Martin's College…'
With those words, singer Jarvis Cocker and his fellow members of Pulp caught the attention of a nation. And chances are, three decades on from the release of 'Common People', this musical intro will still send a tingle down your spine, particularly if you're aged anywhere between 40 and 70.
Forget the record-marketing buzz of 'Blur vs Oasis' (always less entertaining than the Blair vs Brown story anyway), or the extraordinary hype surrounding this summer's Oasis reunion tour (Pulp have been there, done that already) – the fact is that nothing and no one defines the enormously fecund musical era of Britpop quite like Pulp.
And at the pulsating bullseye of the band's creative output is 'Common People', a song so rageful and bitter and yet so joyous and beguiling that you can't help but love it. Steeped in more gallows humour than a Pierrepont family funeral and offering a wealth of cynicism over the destitution in our society, the song put the 'Brit' at the heart of Britpop too.
Yet for all its sublime anger on behalf of those whom we would now call the left-behind, 'Common People', released in May 1995, was a song that strangely unified the nation. From the sweaty, smoke-filled nightclubs and student unions of Sheffield, Manchester or Newcastle to trendy London nightspots, this was a song that got everyone dancing. Reaching number two in the charts, it had toffs and Sloanes in their red jeans and loafers strutting their stuff on the dancefloor, even if they only mouthed along ironically with the bitter incantation of the economically disenfranchised. And they loved it.
'Common People' was the demotic anthem of the decade, one that chimed with the unintended social legacy of Margaret Thatcher's economic policies – namely three million unemployed (10.6 per cent of workers were on the dole in 1993) and the unfathomable social cost that scores of pit and factory closures brought on the communities relying on them. This lurks at the core of the song's critique of rich people slumming it for fun or 'class tourism'. 'You will never understand,' Cocker sings, 'How it feels to live your life/ With no meaning or control/ And with nowhere left to go/ You are amazed that they exist.'
He was talking of the woman from Greece (who may or may not, apparently, have been inspired by Danae Stratou – daughter of a Greek industrialist and now wife of left-wing economist Yanis Varoufakis – who studied sculpture at St Martin's at the same time as Cocker was there), but he could easily have been referring to anybody from one of southern England's prosperous districts in the mid-1990s.
Looking back you can see that 'Common People' – and the accompanying album Different Class – signalled the cultural and political reset of the 1990s, when Britain consciously threw off the stricter social mores of the 1980s and 1970s and also turned its back on the harder edges of that Thatcherite settlement, if not the settlement altogether. Whichever it was, as well as dropping their aitches on breakfast television, they let themselves be seen kicking footballs towards nets, something no political heavyweight would have countenanced before. 'Sing along with the common people/ Sing along and it might just get you through,' Pulp said in 'Mis-Shapes', the opening track on Different Class, another song which embraced the language of class war and promised that the revenge would be sweet. 'What's the point in being rich,' sings Cocker with delicious rage, 'If you can't think what to do with it?/ Cause you're so bleeding thick.'
You may recall that it was as if overnight – well, from 1997, anyway – that politicians could suddenly be openly gay, while the last vestiges of deference – declining fast since Virginia Woolf's cook asked to borrow her newspaper in 1910 – were stripped back. 'Call me Tony,' said Blair, who was among the first of a generation of politicians who really started to either be passionate about or pretend to be passionate about football in order to appeal to the footie-loving masses.
But it wasn't just Pulp's anger in 1995, it was the anger of a generation and society which felt that the promise of our social contract had been unfulfilled or broken, one in which too many were excluded from the wealth of the nation. 'Now we can't help but see / That the future that you've got mapped out / Is nothing much to shout about.' The worry is they really could be singing about our own times, couldn't they?
Pulp, of course, was not the agent of change, but along with other cultural pointers – think 1996's Trainspotting or 1994's Parklife – it was a herald of the coming times, and it stands out from the crowd. Which why, 30 years on, 'Common People' and Different Class are truly in a class of their own. If you don't believe me, dig out one of your old CDs and give it a listen, or find it online. And once you've done that, listen to the William Shatner version of 'Common People'. It really will make you like the song all the more.