“Common People” by Pulp

"Common People" was the first single from Different Class, Pulp's fifth album, released on Island in 1995, and it's the song that turned Jarvis Cocker's sharp eye and even sharper tongue into a Britpop anthem. Cocker got the idea after meeting a Greek art student while he was studying at Central Saint Martins in London, and he picked out the tune on a Casiotone keyboard he'd bought in Notting Hill.

The song takes aim at the rich kids who fancy dressing down and playing at poverty, the sort of class tourism some call slumming, and Cocker delivers it with relish, all withering scorn and gleeful mockery. The music, credited to Cocker, Nick Banks, Candida Doyle, Steve Mackey and Russell Senior, starts small and keeps building, piling on momentum until the whole band is charging headlong. Chris Thomas produced it and David Nicholas engineered. Pedro Romhanyi directed the video, with Sadie Frost playing the posh girl.

The band first played it in public at Reading in August 1994 and a year later performed it as Glastonbury headliners. It reached number two in the UK and became Pulp's signature song and a defining moment of Britpop: an online poll of BBC Radio 6 Music's audience put it top of the Britpop pile in 2014, and in 2015 Rolling Stone's readers named it the greatest.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.