In this song, finds Pulp lead singer Jarvis Cocker meets a Greek girl whose family is rich. They get to know each other, and she asks him to show her how the "common people." Cocker takes her to the supermarket and explains what it's like to live in the working class.
It's a semi-true story about a girl Cocker encountered at Saint Martin's School of Art on the sculpture course. They met at a bar, and she started talking about how she wanted to live in the East End of London (the poor area). "She was from a well-to-do background, and there was me explaining that that would never work," he told Uncut magazine. "I hated all that cobblers you got in films and magazines in which posh people would 'slum it' for a while. Once I got that narrative in my head it was very easy to write, lyrically."
He fancied her, but Cocker didn't leave with the girl - he made up the part about them having a romp.
Cocker decided on the title when he played some chords during a band rehearsal and bass player Steve Mackey told him it sounded like "
Fanfare for the Common Man" by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. This got him thinking about the word "common," which in Sheffield, England, where he's from, it has another layer of meaning.
"In Sheffield, if you say someone's common, then you're saying they're vulgar, coarse, rough-arsed. The kind of person who has corned-beef legs from being too close to the gas fire," he told
Q magazine. "So that's what attracted me to calling it 'Common People,' the double meaning, 'Oh, you're common as muck.'"
"Common People" was Pulp's breakthrough, and it remains their most popular song. They were formed by the then 15-year-old Jarvis Cocker in 1978 and had released four albums with little success until "Common People" was issued as the first single from their fifth album, Different Class, in May 1995.
In Q magazine, Cocker said: "It was clear 'Common People' was a significant song. Eight other songs on the album were written while it was in the charts. Knowing that you had a mass audience for once in your life gave me the confidence to bring certain things out of myself."
The female lead in the video is Sadie Frost, known for her roles in Dracula, Love, Honour and Obey, Shopping and other films. The indoor scenes were shot at Stepney's Nightclub in East London.
The song started with a trip to a music store called Record And Tape Exchange in Notting Hill, where Jarvis Cocker sold some albums for store credit, which he used to buy a second-hand Casio keyboard.
"When you buy an instrument, you run home and want to write a song straight away," he told Uncut magazine August 2010. "So I went back to my flat and wrote the chord sequence for 'Common People,' which isn't such a great achievement because it's only got three chords. I thought it might come in handy for our next rehearsal."
Fans and publications have tried to track down the Greek girl who inspired the song. The BBC thought they had her pegged in 2006, but Cocker said the woman they identified wasn't her.
In April 2015 the Greek newspaper The Athens Voice said they found her, claiming the mystery girl is Danae Stratou, the wife of the Greek finance minister. Stratou studied at St. Martins College of Art and Design between 1983-1988, the same period that Cocker enrolled in a film studies course at the London university.
Pulp debuted "Common People" on August 27, 1994 at the Reading Festival about eight months before it was released. Jarvis Cocker recalled in the book
Isle of Noises: "I was up trying to finish the words the night before. If a song doesn't work you know after about 20 seconds but you've got to finish it, five minutes or whatever, then feel really embarrassed."
"Common People" was voted the top Britpop anthem by listeners of BBC Radio 6 Music in a 2014 poll to mark the 20th birthday of Britpop. The Verve's "
Bittersweet Symphony" came second and Oasis' "
Don't Look Back In Anger" third.
The song is quite famous and extremely popular in the UK, but it only made it to #2 on the Singles Chart, denied the top spot by Robson Green and Jerome Flynn's version of "
Unchained Melody."
Jarvis Cocker told a funny story of the day it was revealed at #2: "The Sunday they announced the charts it was presented live in Birmingham, and all the chart acts had to mime to their songs. We didn't know what position we were, so we waited in this back room for them to call us. So time went on, it got to 6 p.m. and everyone was getting shaky. I went to the toilet to put my contact lenses in, but I hadn't rinsed them properly, so my eye went bright red. Anyway, we had to go on, and I was still in quite extreme physical pain, and my eye was streaming, so people obviously thought I was crying because we were #2! And, of course, by that time my makeup was running and looked like non-set cement... It'd been raining, so there were big puddles in front of the stage, and just as 'Common People' reached its, erm, climactic chorus, I jumped off the monitor quite spectacularly, as you do, landed in a puddle, slipped and fell flat on me arse! So I'm left thinking, 'F--k me, this is meant to be your ultimate triumph, and you're flat on your back in a puddle, your eye killing you, face falling off, on a wet Sunday afternoon in Birmingham!' Not quite what I'd been dreaming of for 20 years."
The song didn't go down very well with Jarvis Cocker's bandmates when he presented it to them - drummer Nick Banks admitted during an appearance on BBC 5 live Breakfast that when he first heard Cocker's initial demo, he thought it was "a tuneless dirge." He only began to appreciate the song when the band started recording in a studio.
However, keyboardist Candida Doyle saw the potential in the song from the start: "I just thought it was great straight away. It must have been the simplicity of it, and you could just tell it was a really powerful song then."
In an April 1996 interview with Q magazine, Jarvis Cocker went further into the genesis of the theme behind "Common People": "I really felt - especially after being out of step for so long - if you had a song that was in the right place at the right time then you'd be an idiot to let that moment pass. It seemed to be in the air, that kind of patronizing social voyeurism, slumming it, the idea that there's a glamour about low-rent, low-life. I felt that off Parklife, for example, or Natural Born Killers - there is that noble savage notion. But if you walk round a council estate, there's plenty of savagery and not much nobility going on."
The song was released before the rest of the Different Class album was completed - a rarity in today's music world. There was a good reason for that, as Cocker explained to Q magazine in 1996: "It was written in about June of '94 and the first time we played it it became clear to me it was a significant song. But then we had trouble writing the rest of the album. If you think, 'Oh God, my livelihood depends on this chord sequence!,' it can come out a bit stilted. In the end we forced Island to release 'Common People' as a single before the rest of the album was done. The other eight songs were done while 'Common People' was in the Top 10. That state of excitement, knowing for once in your life you had a mass audience, gave us the confidence, certainly gave me the confidence, to bring certain things out of myself."
Many bands come to resent the song they're most known for, but Pulp have never had that problem with "Common People." At their comeback show at Reading Festival 2011, Cocker noted before they performed the song that "if Pulp are only ever remembered for this song, I don't care, it's a good song. Black Lace are only ever remembered for 'Agadoo,' could be a lot worse!"
Did you spot a pre-famous Keeley Hawes (
Line of Duty,
Bodyguard,
The Durrells) in the video? She's one of the girls dancing her heart out in the nightclub scenes. "I'm the one doing a little dance a bit further along from Sadie Frost," she recalled to
The Independent. "Jarvis Cocker came up afterwards and said [she affects a northern accent], 'That was really cool.'"
Pulp were foisted into the headline spot at the Glastonbury Festival on June 24, 1995 because Stone Roses guitarist John Squire was injured in a mountain bike accident and the band had to cancel. "Common People" had been a hit for just a few weeks; most of the audience knew Pulp only for that song, but they embraced the band, which was clearly gobsmacked by the turn of events. "Success was a very recent thing for us, and that was the first time we'd ever played a song and could hear people singing it back,"
Jarvis Cocker said. "It was a crazy feeling."
