Do you remember the first time you heard Different Class? I don’t, though I do remember the first time I heard ‘Common People’: it came on the radio while my mum was making fish fingers. As a thirteen-year-old boy, I just thought it was a nice song to hum along to. As a forty-three-year-old and not-that-much-wiser man, I now realise that ‘Common People’ is a seething, funny, defiant epic that lies somewhere between ‘God Save The Queen’ and Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’.
The 30th anniversary edition of Different Class comes as a ‘deluxe’ 4LP set or double CD, each comprising the remastered album and the band’s 1995 Glastonbury Festival set. So far, so posh, though nothing a bit of cognitive dissonance won’t sort out. Buying Different Class again is supporting working-class art, and how else can you do that? What does working-class art even mean these days? A Sam Fender album? A St. George’s flag with a face drawn on? All the flags are soggy and limp these days, aren’t they?
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock and listening to jazz for the past 30 years, you won’t need to read any more about the substitution for the Stone Roses, the subsequent festival appearance, or the Jacko-annoying bum wiggle, even though you just did. Let’s just dive straight back into the songs…
‘Misshapes’ is a revenge-of-the-nerds mission statement: less raging and more arrogant than ‘Common People’. The line “raised on a diet of broken biscuits” is surely not a literal description of Jarvis Cocker’s childhood nutritional intake, though as pithy descriptions of English working-class life go, it’s perfect, and no one does it better than Cocker. ‘Pencil Skirt’ begins like a band warming up on The Old Grey Whistle Test and soon descends into a pit of mischievous lust: “Oh, well, I know that you’re engaged to him / Oh, but I know that you want something to play with baby…’
What can be said about ‘Common People’ that hasn’t already been said here and a million times elsewhere? “Sing along with the common people / And it might just get you through” sums up the condescending fakery of one person and possibly the Labour Party’s election strategy for the past three decades or more. On ‘I Spy’, Cocker reimagines pre-fame dosser days as a thrilling period of master planning and debauched revenge. “It may look to the untrained eye / I’m sitting on my arse all day / I’m biding time until I take you all on.” In his world wit and sex are enough to escape predestined drudgery. Regardless of your politics or finances, no one can deny that ‘I Spy’ is as ominous as a James Bond theme and as quotable as Withnail and I.
‘Disco 2000’ is a much more sedate fantasy, in which Cocker pines for a meeting with the girl he fancied at school “when we’re all fully grown.” In total contrast to its catchy optimism, ‘Live Bed Show’ portrays the depression and inertia of a woman trying to cope with the loss of youthful promiscuity: “Now every night she plays a sad game / Called pretending nothing’s going wrong.” With its sweeping strings and softly ecstatic wonder at falling in love, ‘Something Changed’ sounds like something Pulp bonus guitarist Richard Hawley would write.
It’s reassuring to know that, a year after the criminal passing of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, bands were still releasing songs about drugs. Stick that in your authoritarian pipe and smoke it! Sex, drugs, and on the dole! wrote the Daily Star. Probably. To anyone with ears, eyes, and a mind, ‘Sorted For E’s & Wizz’ is very obviously about the comedown. Similarly, the brooding, Dark Side of the Moon-era Pink Floyd-like ‘F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.’ recalls a sickness, except that the cause is love.
Years before Brandon Flowers started whipping wedding parties into a frenzy with his deranged jealousy, Cocker sang “I’d give my whole life to see it” on ‘Underwear’ with the desperation of a shrivelled desert explorer in need of an, er, oasis. Years before Mike Skinner observed “street level, real people saying repeated sequel,” Cocker bemoaned the low expectations, rinse and repeat of the working-class week on ‘Monday Morning’. “There’s only one place we can go / It’s around the corner in Soho / Where other broken people go,” he sings on album closer ‘Bar Italia’ – a rendezvous to beat the comedown, and a sort of ‘Disco 2000’/‘Sorted For E’s & Wizz’ hybrid.
Cocker is the wittiest person in the class, but as with all the best things, Different Class is a product of the collective. So, we also give eternal thanks to Candida Doyle, Russell Senior, Mark Webber, Nick Banks, and the late Steve Mackey, who very sadly passed away a couple of years ago. Maybe thirteen-year-old me wasn’t so far off the mark: Pulp were, and still are, extremely good at tunes. But it’s the anger, and the hope, and the humour of a working-class lad done good that I’ll cherish most of all. I can’t help it. I was dragged up.
Different Class (30th Anniversary Edition) is out now via Universal Music Recordings on behalf of Island Records
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Review by Neil Laurenson
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