Common PEOPLE

Forget Blur and Oasis, when it came to Britpop only one band mattered.

- Nigel Williamson

It’s early 1995 and Britpop is about to enter its imperial phase. Oasis have just scored their first number one with Some Might Say while Blur have enjoyed a run of hit singles from their Parklife album. The two big beasts of Britpop will shortly go head-to-head when Roll With It and Country House are simultaneously released as singles on the same day in a battle for chart supremacy not seen since the heady days of The Beatles and Stones.

And then along comes a speccy, lanky bloke from Sheffi eld already well into in his thirties named Jarvis Cocker to trump them both with a song called Common People that is destined to become the ultimate Britpop anthem.

Cocker had first performed the song with Pulp at the Reading Festival the previous year and then again in the autumn of 1994 for a John Peel radio session. Somehow, its sly, mordant wit seemed to define the zeitgeist with a lyric about a Britain still divided by class, but in which public school boys affect barrow-boy accents and posh girls develop a penchant for slumming and trying to: “live like common people”.

After years as outsiders in the indie wilderness, in 1994 Pulp had released their first truly successful album with His ’N’ Hers. Cocker hadn’t started writing the next album but had this one song which was so now and immediate that it demanded to be heard. Common People, he told his record label, had to be released as a single even though at that point there was no album for it trail.

“I was used to being completely out of step so having written this song – this kind of freakish occurrence where it seemed to be in tune with the mood, I felt really strongly that it would be stupid to let this moment pass and to release it eight months later when it was kind of irrelevant,” he recalled.