ReviewsReview: Pulp / Different Class 30
30th anniversary reviewed
“When you go home on Monday morning, you’re gonna go home to a different world,” says Jarvis Cocker from Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage to a chorus of whoops, whistles and screams of devotion. He’s holding court on the biggest stage of his career, warning his adoring crowd of the psychic comedown that awaits them upon leaving the Somerset countryside. Really, though, he could be talking to himself.
Following that Glastonbury 1995 headline set, things wouldn’t ever quite be the same for Cocker and his band Pulp. The entire show is included (the only extra) on this 4LP/2CD 30th anniversary edition of their finest album, Different Class. It’s the glorious sound of a band seizing their moment and emerging triumphant. But were it not for a painful twist of fate, they wouldn’t have been there at all.
In early June 1995, The Stone Roses’ guitarist John Squire broke his collarbone while mountain biking weeks before his band was due to headline Glastonbury, prompting a frantic search for a replacement. “We were way down the list,” says Pulp drummer Nick Banks in Laura Barton’s excellent Different Class 30 sleevenotes. “I think Rod Stewart was before us.”
Pulp might not have had Rod The Mod’s hits or voluminous hair, but they were emphatically the band of the moment (and they had much nicer trousers). After a decade of struggling to make an impact, 1994’s His ‘N’ Hers went Top 10 and ‘Babies’ reached No 19 in the singles chart, leading to a Top Of The Pops performance that showed Cocker’s instinct for making the most of his moment in the spotlight. The singer wriggled and preened around the stage, pulled underwear from his suit pocket to mop his brow and, at the song’s climactic moment, opened his suit jacket to reveal a note reading “I hate Wet Wet Wet” (then in the midst of their endless stint at No 1 with ‘Love Is All Around’). A star was born – that October, he was asked back to host the show.
But it was ‘Common People’ which really changed things, a near-six-minute electro-pop juggernaut which entered the chart at No 2 (kept off the top spot by Soldier Soldier actors Robson Green and Jerome Flynn’s limp cover of ‘Unchained Melody’) and was inescapable that summer. ‘Common People’ became synonymous with Britpop, but it’s light-years away from the stodgy fare many of their peers were peddling. Beneath Cocker’s vocals, its verses are the stuff of science fiction soundtracks – all throbbing bass, stinging guitar and Farfisa organ lines. When the chorus kicks in, waves of distortion crash from speaker to speaker. There’s an understanding of dynamics, of breakdowns and build-ups, that owes more to raves than classic rock.
Meanwhile, Cocker’s lyrics might begin as a bemused anecdote about a rich kid looking to slum it with the proles, but as the song grows in intensity, it becomes a cathartic diatribe against a rigged class system. The woman who fancies a bit of rough could call in some favours and escape as soon as “watching roaches climb the wall” loses its cachet, but that option is not available to the class she’s fetishising. “You will never understand, how it feels to live your life without meaning or control”, seethes Cocker, while celebrating people “who burn so bright”. It’s the greatest British pop moment of the 90s; a Mike Leigh film condensed into a song that still fills dancefloors in seconds. It’s outspoken, nuanced and furious, and what’s more, everybody knew the words – just listen to the mass singalong from the Glastonbury performance on his set.
The Glastonbury performance in June 1995 will always be the most significant concert of Pulp’s career.
Jarvis Cocker
Pulp first played ‘Common People’ at the previous year’s Reading Festival. It had been a regular on their setlist since then, but until they headlined Glastonbury, they hadn’t played it in front of a crowd eagerly anticipating it. The previous month they’d been holed up in Town House Studios, Shepherd’s Bush, West London, working on Different Class with producer Chris Thomas (Roxy Music, Sex Pistols). The sessions were a step up from anything the band had experienced before (“There was no messing about anymore. This was a grown-up enterprise,” says Banks) and the success of ‘Common People’ instilled them with a new confidence. For the first time, they knew there was an audience keenly anticipating their next album. Fortunately, Cocker had plenty to say for himself.
Opening track ‘Mis-Shapes’ is one of the great outsider anthems, a rabble-rousing glam stomper, with Cocker the self-appointed leader of an over-educated and sensitive insurgency. He takes aim at the kids who’d thump you “just for standing out”, the moneyed (“What’s the point in being rich, if you can’t think what to do with it, ’cos you’re so bleedin’ thick”) and the establishment (“the future that you’ve got mapped out, is nothing much to shout about”). The turbocharged John Barry chorus finds him rallying his army of sensitive souls and spotty herberts to take what’s rightfully theirs (“We want your homes, we want your jobs, we want the things you won’t allow us”). Cocker says it couldn’t have happened without the success of ‘Common People’, “That was very much a song that you couldn’t write unless you knew that you had an audience. It was trying to make a direct appeal to them, to cause a revolution, or whatever. And if you were still playing the Roadmender in Northampton then that would just sound a bit silly. I wouldn’t have dared to write a song like that if I hadn’t known that now was our moment to do so.”
Class is never far from Cocker’s mind, and nor is sex. The seductive egotist of the Bond-theme-gone-to-seed ‘I Spy’ is motivated as much by taking revenge on someone who has it all as he is by lust. ‘Pencil Skirt’ might fade in with the cosiness of a 70s sitcom, but before long, Cocker is threatening to seduce entire families (“Well you can tell some lies about the good times that you’ve had, but I’ve kissed your mother twice and now I’m working on your dad”). In the weirdly sexless world of British guitar pop, Cocker was a Yorkshire Gainsbourg. ‘Live Bed Show’ evokes late 60s Scott Walker while using a bed to track the decline of a relationship (“It didn’t get much rest at first, the headboard banging in the night”), while ‘Underwear’ is that unlikeliest of things, an indie anthem about performance anxiety.
There’s romance too, though the narrator of ‘F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E’ sounds utterly disgusted by the prospect of experiencing genuine emotion. More conventional is ‘Something Changed’, a flat-out gorgeous song that ponders the life-changing potential of a decision as banal as deciding to go to the pub. Meanwhile, ‘Disco 2000’ might be all irresistibly chunky glam riffs and nostalgia but at the heart of it is the story of an unobtainable crush.
Just as Cocker’s lyrics contained multitudes, Different Class was crammed with musical moments that set them apart from their peers. ‘F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E’ flits between claustrophobic and industrial verses and crashing, Frankie-big synth choruses. ‘Monday Morning’ flirts with dub and ska and ‘Sorted For E’s & Wizz’ is a blissed-out, proggy flashback to the temporary paradise of ecstasy-fuelled free parties.
Anyone familiar with the Glastonbury set as originally broadcast will immediately notice a huge improvement in the sound
But when they accepted Michael Eavis’ SOS, Different Class was unfinished and, other than ‘Common People’ and its B-side ‘Underwear’ unknown to the Pyramid Stage crowd. It dawned on them that they’d have to play some of their new songs live for the first time – not ideal for a Saturday night Glastonbury headline slot. But when those new songs were of the quality of ‘Sorted For E’s & Wizz’, ‘Disco 2000’ and ‘Mis-Shapes’, it was a risk worth taking.
The set begins with a robotic voice repeating ‘common people’ over a drone, whipping the crowd into a frenzy. A simple “Hello” from Cocker and the band launch into an ecstatically received ‘Do You Remember The First Time?’. Anyone familiar with the set as originally broadcast will immediately notice a huge improvement in the sound, with a powerful mix that captures the buzz of the moment while toning down some of the more jarring elements of the band’s live sound at the time (by which we really mean Russell Senior’s violin on ‘Common People’).
As the indie disco favourites (‘Razzmatazz’, ‘Joyriders’, ‘Babies’) and those new songs receive receptions usually reserved for beloved hits (especially a surging ‘Mis-Shapes’), Cocker has the crowd in the palm of his hand. “Listen, we’re in tents as well,” he insists, convincing the crowd he’s one of them, before adding “OK, they’re made out of gold lamé but…” As the set draws to a close, he offers inspiration, “The thing is, if you want something to happen enough, then it actually will happen. OK? And I believe that. In fact, that’s why we’re stood on this stage today after 15 years. Because we wanted to make it happen. Do you know what I mean? So, if a lanky get like me can do it, and us lot, yeah, you can do it too, alright?” Seconds later, the band launches into an obscenely exciting ‘Common People’ and all hell breaks loose.
Cocker reveals in the sleevenotes that, following the show, he found himself tailed by a security guard as he explored the festival, “He was a very nice guy, but it was like the seeds of the discontent that eventually happened with fame kind of became apparent immediately.” Different Class 30 allows us to hear him and Pulp burn so bright in that unrepeatable moment; brilliant, angry and hilarious working-class voices capturing the optimism and spirit of the times. With mega tunes. All these years later, it’s needed more than ever.
Review by Jamie Atkins for SDE. Different Class 30 is out now.
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Tracklisting
Different Class Pulp / 30th anniversary
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CD 1: Different Class (remastered)
- Mis-Shapes
- Pencil Skirt3) Common People
- I Spy
- Disco 2000
- Live Bed Show
- Something Changed
- Sorted For Es And Wizz
- F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.
- Underwear
- Monday Morning
- Bar Italia
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CD 2: Live from Glastonbury 1995
- Common People (Drone Intro)
- Do You Remember The First Time?
- Razzamatazz
- Monday Morning
- Underwear
- Sorted For Es And Wizz
- Disco 2000
- Joyriders
- Acrylic Afternoons
- Mis-Shapes
- Pink Glove
- Babies
- Common People
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CD 1: Different Class (remastered)
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