Pulp – Common People
1995 · Directed by Pedro Romhanyi
295K Likes
Best comments
1.“Violently British.”
More comments
- 2.“I saw Jarvis in Sainsbury's yesterday. He was with someone, pushing a trolley. I was weirdly disappointed he wasn't inside the trolley.”
- 3.“He is so pretty – like if Winona Ryder was a man.”
The story
Around 1988, Jarvis Cocker met a rich Greek art student at Saint Martin's in London. Seven years later she was the target of the most famous class satire of the Britpop years. Common People is about wealthy people playing at being poor – slumming, class tourism, poverty as a costume – and Cocker admitted he flipped the real story: he was the one who fancied her. People have been trying to name her ever since. He hasn't helped.
He wrote it on a secondhand Casio keyboard from a Notting Hill record shop, and bassist Steve Mackey's crack that the chords sounded like Fanfare for the Common Man helped hand it a title. Cocker liked that common, back in Sheffield, also means coarse. Drummer Nick Banks called the demo a tuneless dirge. Keyboardist Candida Doyle heard a hit.
Pedro Romhanyi directed the video. Sadie Frost plays the posh girl, Cocker made up his dance on the day, and the club scenes were shot at Stepney's, an East End nightclub still rocking its 1970s dance floor. Ordinary people get stuck in tiny repeating loops, a nod to the Eleanor Rigby sequence in Yellow Submarine. Look closely and a young Keeley Hawes is dancing a little way down from Frost.
Released in May 1995, it stalled at number two in the UK behind Robson Green and Jerome Flynn's Unchained Melody, which is its own class joke. Then Pulp headlined Glastonbury that summer after the Stone Roses pulled out, and the song turned into the anthem of the era. BBC 6 Music listeners voted it the best Britpop song in 2014, and Rolling Stone readers did the same a year later.
