Pulp - Different Class

Pitchfork 93

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.

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.”

Different Class identifies its primary subject in its title: The social antagonisms that rankle as raw in Britain today as they did 20 years ago. Class division and regional antipathy contributed as much to the upset of Brexit—in which Pulp’s traditionally left-wing hometown Sheffield, in the formerly industrial North, surprisingly voted to leave the European Union—as xenophobia and nativism did.

In addition to pouring salt on the perennial wounds of class that mark anybody who grows up British, “Common People” had further resonance in ’95 as a skirmish in the battle of Britpop. The rivalry between Oasis and Blur was structured in terms of class and region: Northern lads celebrated as the genuine working-class article contrasted with Southerners seen as the bourgeois unreal-thing by their detractors. Damon Albarn’s Mockney-accented character studies on Parklife—which Cocker described as “slumming”—were a spur for the writing of “Common People.”

Pulp pointed to a third path that cut across the Oasis-vs-Blur binary. Cocker and other members of the group such as Steve Mackey and Russell Senior represented a different tradition of British proletarian pop than the Gallagher brothers: stolidly working class in background, solidly socialist in their ingrained allegiances (Senior, for instance, had picketed during the 1984 Miner’s Strike), yet arty and intellectual, in an autodidact or art school-influenced way, at odds with that background.

Those tensions—loyalty to origins versus the desire to escape their self-limiting horizons—fed into “Mis-Shapes,” the opening track on Different Class. It attempts to repeat the populist power of “Common People” but is less successful simply because it speaks for a smaller fraction of the populace. Cocker sings as spokesman for those who “learnt too much at school” and “now can’t help see” too clearly, right through the lies that every segment of society tells itself. The title “Mis-Shapes” comes from an old-fashioned word for a broken product—often a foodstuff, like a cookie—that is rejected for damage or defects, and sometimes sold at a cheaper price. “You could end up with a smack in the mouth, just for standing out,” Cocker sings, the memories still vivid of being persecuted as a weakling weirdo.

The liner notes of the CD booklet pick up this theme: “Please understand. We don’t want no trouble. We just want the right to be different. That’s all.” The tone of “Mis-Shapes,” though, is not plaintive and pleading but strident and defiant, ascending through superiority complex (“We'll use the one thing we've got more of, that's our minds”) to a triumphant fantasy of vindication and victory: “Brothers, sisters, can't you see?/The future's owned by you and me...They think they've got us beat/But revenge is going to be so sweet.”

Cocker’s ambivalence about the masses also informs “Sorted For E’s & Wizz,” which—with “Mis-Shapes” as its double A-side—became Pulp’s second UK No. 2 hit of 1995. A wistful flashback to the illegal outdoor raves of the late ’80s and early ’90s, “Sorted” sees Cocker swept up in the collective celebration yet remaining deep down a doubtful bystander. “Is this the way they say the future's meant to feel?” he muses disconsolately, “or just twenty-thousand people standing in a field?” As the Ecstasy wears off and dawn peeks grimly over the horizon, Cocker finds the sensations of unity and bonhomie to have been ersatz and ephemeral: not one of the ultra-friendly strangers he’d bonded with earlier in the night will give him a lift back to the city. Still, he can’t quite shake the lingering utopian feeling that divisions of all kinds really were magically dissolved for a few hours. In the CD single booklet, a four-word statement of perfect ambiguity spells out his sense of rave’s fugitive promise: “IT DIDN'T MEAN NOTHING.”

Class is far from the only theme bubbling away in this album, though. At least half the songs continue the love ‘n’ sex preoccupations of His ‘N’ Hers, tinged sometimes with the yearning nostalgia of earlier songs like “Babies.” The treatment on Different Class ranges from saucy (“Underwear”) to seedy (“Pencil Skirt,” the hoarsely panting confessional of a creepy lech who preys on his friend’s fiancé) to the sombre (“Live Bed Show” imagines the desolation of a bed that is not seeing any amorous action). “Something’s Changed,” conversely, is a straightforwardly romantic and gorgeously touching song about the unknown and unknowable turning points in anyone’s life: those trivial-on-the-surface decisions (to go out or stay in tonight, this pub or that club) that led to meetings and sometimes momentous transformations. Falling somewhere in between sublime and sordid, the epic “F.E.E.L.I.N.G. C.A.L.L.E.D. L.O.V.E” exalts romance as a messy interruption in business-as-usual: “it’s not convenient...it doesn’t fit my plans,” gasps Cocker, hilariously characterizing Desire as “like some small animal that only comes out at night.”

Sex and class converge in “I Spy”—a grandiose fantasy of Cocker as social saboteur whose covert (to the point of being unnoticed, perhaps existing only in his own head) campaign against the ruling classes involves literally sleeping with the enemy. “It’s not a case of woman v. man/It’s more a case of haves against haven’ts,” he offers, by way of explanation for one of his recent raids (“I’ve been sleeping with your wife for the past 16 weeks... Drinking your brandy/Messing up the bed that you chose together”). Looking back at Different Class many years later, Cocker recalled that in those days he thought “I was actually working undercover, trying to observe the world, taking notes for future reference, secretly subverting society.”

“I Spy” is probably the only song on Different Class that requires annotation, and even then, only barely. Crucial to Cocker’s democratic approach is that his lyrics are smart but accessible: He doesn’t go in for flowery or fussy wordplay, for poetically encrypted opacities posing as mystical depths. He belongs to that school of pop writing—which I find superior, by and large—where you say what you have to say as clearly and directly as possible. Not the lineage of Dylan/Costello/Stipe, in other words, but the tradition of Ray Davies, Ian Dury, the young Morrissey (as opposed to the willfully oblique later Morrissey).

Cocker’s songs on Different Class are such a rich text that you can go quite a long way into a review of the album before realizing you’ve barely mentioned how it sounds. Pulp aren’t an obviously innovative band, but on Different Class they almost never lapse into the overt retro-stylings of so many of their Britpop peers: Blur’s Kinks and new wave homages, Oasis’ flagrant Beatles-isms, Elastica’s Wire and Stranglers recycling. On Pulp’s ’90s records, there are usually a couple of examples of full-blown pastiche per album, like the Moroder-esque Eurodisco of “She’s a Lady” on His ‘N’ Hers. Here, “Disco 2000” bears an uncomfortable chorus resemblance to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” while “Live Bed Show” and “I Spy” hint at the Scott Walker admiration and aspiration that would blossom with We Love Life, which the venerable avant-balladeer produced.

Mostly though, it’s an original and ’90s-contemporary sound that Pulp work up on Different Class, characterized by a sort of shabby sumptuousness, a meagre maximalism. “Common People,” for instance, used all 48 studio tracks available, working in odd cheapo synth textures like the Stylophone and a last-minute overlay of acoustic guitar that, according to producer Chris Thomas, was “compressing so much, it just sunk it into the track.... glued the whole thing together. That was the whip on the horse that made it go.”

I started this review with my brother’s wedding reception and, strangely, only later remembered that Different Class’ front cover is a wedding photo. A real-life wedding too: at the request of a Pulp associate who knew the bride and groom, the happy couple and their families agreed to pose for some extra shots with life-size, black-and-white cut-out figures of the band members inveigled into the midst of the full-color scene. That seems like an apt symbol of what Pulp were doing with Different Class and its hit singles: Arty outsiders worming their way into the lives of ordinary folk.

Cocker, operating solo, repeated this feat in a more surrealist prankster way the following year at the Brit Awards ceremony: he vaulted into the midst of a Michael Jackson performance, waggling his bony arse subversively and alarming some of the small children dancing onstage with his goofy moves. But in this instance Cocker represented not the freaks of the world but the regular people: it was an impulsive gesture intended to deflate the fantasy bubble-world of deluded superstars. “My actions were a form of protest at the way Michael Jackson saw himself as some Christ-like figure with the power of healing,” Cocker recalled years later. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision brought on by boredom and frustration. When someone appears onstage and wants to be Jesus, I think it’s a bit off.... I’ve always thought that when you get into a position of privilege, you should abuse it rather than toady along with what’s going on.”

After Different Class, Pulp made great—or partially great—records like 1998’s This Is Hardcore and We Love Life, the group’s 2001 swansong. But songs like “Weeds II” and “Wickerman”— inventive and majestic as they are—have, I’d wager, rarely ignited a wedding celebration or been repeat-played on a pub jukebox. Never again would Pulp command pop’s center stage—be common property—like they did in 1995.