The true story of Pulp's Common People

23 May 2025, 12:44

The classic Britpop tune is 30 years old. Here's how Jarvis Cocker's tale of "class tourism" is based on a real event - and how it hit a nerve in the Cool Britannia of 1995.

Radio X Song Profile

• Artist: Pulp
• Title: Don't Look Back In Anger
• Written by: Jarvis Cocker, Russell Senior, Candida Doyle, Nick Banks, Steve Mackey.
• Produced by: Chris Thomas
• From the album: Different Class, released 30th October 1995
• Single release date: 22nd May 1995
• Highest chart position: 2
• Estimated copies sold in the UK: 1,200,000 (sales and streaming)

When Pulp were nominated as "Best New Act" at the MTV Video Music Awards in November 1996, it was not without some irony. The band had been operating in one form or another for the best part of 18 years by that point.

Common People may have been Pulp's fifteenth single, but it was the one which turned them from a well-regarded indie band into a household name. The lyrics, a satirical comment on "class tourism", confirmed frontman Jarvis Cocker as one of Britain's most incisive cultural commentators. It also changed the singer's life in ways he'd never expected, and made him a target for the tabloid press.

The lyrics of Common People tell of a rich girl "from Greece", who latches on to the working class narrator when the pair are both studying at St Martins College in London. She immediately declares that she "wants to live like common people like you", a statement that takes the singer by surprise. He quickly organises a trip around supermarkets and pubs to give the girl the full "working class" experience, but there's always the sobering fact that, unlike the so-called common people, she always has an escape route: "If you called your dad he could stop it all."

Pulp - Common People

Released on Monday 22nd May 1995, Common People crashed straight into the UK charts at Number 2. The song has since been certified double Platinum by the BPI in the UK and remains Pulp's biggest hit to date. In the digital era, the track has notched up 240 million Spotify streams and over 56 million YouTube views. Three decades later and Common People is still rightly regarded as one of the high points of the summer of Britpop.

But behind the wry lyrics and the quirky, stylised music video, a real event had inspired Common People, one which encapsulated the state of Britain in the mid-1990s. It was the era of Britpop, laddism and a new optimism - for some, that is. "Cool Britannia" and New Labour were just around the corner - but was everyone invited to the party?

On the back of the single sleeve, a statement read: "There is a war in progress, don't be a casualty. The time to decide whose side you're on is here. Choose wisely. Stay alive in '95." What did it all mean?

To understand the real meaning of Pulp's Common People, you had to understand where Jarvis Cocker had come from... and where he was heading.

Jarvis Cocker had founded Arabicus Pulp in 1978 with his friend, Peter Dalton, while the singer was still at school in Sheffield. The band - whose name was quickly shortened to just Pulp - played their first show two years later, when the frontman was still only 16 years old.

The first Pulp album, It, was issued on the indie label Red Rhino, with just 2,000 copies pressed up. For a number of years, it seemed that Jarvis Cocker would join the ranks of idiosyncratic artists who only appealed to a limited audience, much like his contemporary, Lawrence from Felt.

After a second Pulp album, Freaks, Cocker took a break from the band in 1998, enrolling in a film studies course at Central St Martins College in London. His fortunes were about to change.

"I was in my second year of film-making and you had to do another subject," Cocker explained to Vox in June 1995. "I chose sculpture, and met this girl who wanted to live in Hackney like common people. She said she wanted to suffer. I was saying: 'That's impossible. You can rent a shitty flat and go to rough pubs, but you've got a get-out clause. Your dad will send you some money. You're not trapped like they are.' Anyway, she wouldn't have it."

For Jarvis Cocker, who'd grown up in the Intake district of Sheffield, the encounter was eye-opening. "It was one of the things that I found quite strange when I moved to London," he told Melody Maker in May 1995, "because when I lived in Sheffield I was always getting flack off football fans. I was always considered a bit effete. Then suddenly I came down here and, because I spoke with this northern accent, I had this air of slight earthliness. I liked that, because I'd never had it before."

The sexual element of the lyric was entirely fabricated, however. "Sex was never really on the cards, to be honest," Cocker admitted. "That was just a bit of poetic license. I only knew her for a matter of weeks, and I only spoke to her a few times, but it stuck in my mind what she was saying." Despite several searches, the identity of the woman in the song has never been confirmed.

After a disappointing relationship with the indie label Fire, Pulp signed to the major label Island, who released the band's breakthrough LP His 'N' Hers in April 1994. With a Top 10 album and their first Top 40 single Do You Remember The First Time under their belt, Cocker found his group rubbing shoulders with the rest of the nascent "Britpop" scene, including Oasis and Blur.

It was the latter's Parklife album that sparked memories of the girl from St Martins. The 90s were quickly becoming the age where being working class was considered aspirational and "authentic", with songs like Girls & Boys and Bank Holiday revelling in the lives and loves of ordinary people.

"It seemed to be in the air," Cocker told Q magazine in March 1996, "that kind of patronising social voyeurism, slumming it. The idea that there's a glamour about low-rent, low-life.

"I felt that of 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."

This resentment digs deep into the lyrics of Common People, which get more biting as the music becomes more frenetic. On the album version - edited for the single release - an extra verse notes "Everybody hates a tourist" before climaxing with the acidic rant: "You will never understand / How it feels to live your life / With no meaning or control / And with nowhere left to go."

Common People was written a long time before the rest of the Different Class album, with Cocker recalling that he'd first conceived the song in June of 1994. The track was performed live for the first time at Reading Festival on 27th August with a set of unfinished lyrics.

"We forced Island to release Common People as a single before the rest of the album was done," Cocker told Q. "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."

In fact, Common People unlocked the themes behind the rest of the songs on Different Class. Cocker went on: "I was staying at my sister Saskia's, falling asleep on the settee, and suddenly it came to me, the idea of dealing with my experiences in London and the differences between Sheffield and London.

"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."

Common People entered the UK charts on Sunday 28th May 1995 at Number 2; it remained at that spot for a further week, still pinned behind TV duo Robson & Jerome's cover of Unchained Melody. In total, Common People spent 10 weeks in the Top 40, giving Jarvis and co their second appearance on the BBC's Top Of The Pops show.

But it was Pulp's Glastonbury headline set later that summer that gave Cocker the greatest feeling of vindication. When The Stone Roses had to drop out after guitarist John Squire broke his collarbone, the Sheffield band stepped in and enjoyed a rapturous response from the crowd. It confirmed everything that Cocker had been trying to do with Pulp for the previous 18 years.

"I've never experienced anything like that before," he told NME shortly afterwards. "With Common People, everyone was singing really loud. That's a lot of people who knew the words. That's when success seemed real. Undeniable. It did move me. Tears? I did feel a bit of a lump in my throat. But I toughed it out."

Thanks to the Pulp fan site Acrylic Afternoons.