Sam Stevens takes a trawl through Pulp’s 1995 classic, which means slithering through the murky echelons of Jarvis Cocker’s sex-addled subconscious. Bring the goggles…
Doctor Who was in abeyance for much of the 90s, but in the absence of the familiar timelord, Jarvis Cocker was probably the next closest thing. Pulp’s early-90s records Intro and His ‘N’ Hers play as though Cocker is an alien who’s crash-landed in a Sheffield housing estate, gleaned as much as he can about human sexuality, and quickly realised that he’s better at it than any of the denizens. Candida Doyle’s synths whirl and bleep like the machinations of a malfunctioning spacecraft, and with wide-eyed guitarist-violinist Russell Senior in tow, the band boasted another distinctly alien presence. The likes of ‘Lipgloss’ and ‘She’s a Lady’ hit sticky disco dancefloors as though they’d been beamed in from a distant galaxy through a hole in the club roof.
But it was on 1995’s Different Class that Pulp staked their claim for world domination— or at least, for the “the right to be different”— with wryly insinuating songs about sex and social class. The merciless, Blur-baiting ‘Common People’ steamrollered its way to number two in the charts and Cocker was canonised, a modern-day saint in the eyes of Melody Maker readers. Now, you, dear reader, can relive it all, in glorious HD, because Pulp have opted to mark its anniversary with a deluxe remaster. The new addition of Different Class, on vinyl and CD, contains a disc of Pulp’s iconic Glastonbury headline performance, presented with a proper mix for the first time.
And of course, it includes the full version of ‘Common People’, Cocker’s famous tirade as an upper-class slummer. Entire biblical testaments of words have been written about ‘Common People’, and there’s little to be added to the conversation (at least by someone as sheltered as me), save to remark that thirty years later, it’s still a shattering, staggering monolith of a song. An irresistible force.
Likewise, narrative often distracts from substance, and the circumstances behind Different Class have often drawn attention away from just how strong the record itself actually is, and how much it demands a proper, sit-down listen: how, four songs in, ‘I Spy’ unite the Bond-theme insurgence of ‘Mis-Shapes’, the sheer seductive nastiness of ‘Pencil Skirt’, and the class rage of ‘Common People’ — respectively, the three tracks that have come before it. But what ‘I Spy’ does is extraordinary. It sounds naughtily illicit, like a contraband — it turns you into a co-conspirator, tension building with Jarvis’s whispered vocal until its glorious climax, the symbolic emasculation of the professional-managerial class, as Jarvis has had his way with one such brandy-swilling mediocrity and can’t help but hide his glee: “Take your Year in Provence and shove it up your asssssss!”
All of this venom is immediately followed by the band’s most straightforwardly poppy moment in a whole sea of them. ‘Disco 2000’ is the other Pulp hit that’s really crossed through into the mainstream. It is a staple of pub karaoke and club Britpop nights but it might be one of the saddest disco-bangers around, as well as one of the best-constructed. Hammering out a thumping groove courtesy of the much-missed Steve Mackey, a riff that sideswipes Laura Brannigan’s ‘Gloria’, and, like ABBA’s best, a latent sorrow as the song surges. The relatability of its unrequited romance imbuing the whole thing with mythologising melancholy despite its matter-of-fact lyrics. And on the flipside, the melodic ‘Something Changed’ is special precisely because of its refusal to mythologise love: rather, its narrative of chance meetings chimes with so many people because it reflects how love actually tends to happen in real life.
But not every track accords to such a chart-friendly framework, and it says a lot of Pulp’s musical ambitions— in making a twelve-track album where, Mackey said, “every one could be a single”, that they still make you listen to one and a half minutes of clanging jungle-ish percussion and throbbing bass. ‘F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.’, like ‘I Spy’, feels conspiratorial, like Cocker is slipping it to you from the breast pocket of a spiv’s trenchcoat, a song you can only stream with your phone wrapped in brown paper. Cocker gasps, moans, screeches, whispers, whimpers, licking his lips over “the curve of your belly”. Then the song explodes, sideways, like a cart full of dynamite in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. It’s magnificent, one of the album’s hidden treasures, yet the same can be said of the tartly poignant, empathetic ‘Underwear’ and the raucous ‘Monday Morning’. These tracks bolstered, again, by Pulp’s refusal to platitudinise society and their desire to actually unpack what might happen to you when you have an uncomfortable sexual experience, or when you discover drinking for the first time and discover you can do it all the time. Is there anyone else who “just can’t seem to spend a night at home”?
In these, and many other ways, the record has barely aged, with only one song, ‘Sorted for E’s and Wizz’, sounding more like an echo of a past time than a report from a present one. Which begs the question: where do the intellectual youth of Different Class wind up? Well, like Wilde said, in the gutter, but looking up at the stars. The album starts with the galvanising, geeks-unite anthem ‘Mis-Shapes’, but ends with wearied club-go-home closer ‘Bar Italia’, where what it means to be a ‘mis-shape’ is clarified: it’s to go “where other broken people go”. That’s a slightly harder epithet to swallow.
So, viewed in this light, perhaps Different Class of the title is ultimately self-selecting. There’s plenty in the album to resonate with, but Gen Z seems particularly anxious about class and sexuality, building both into their social and moral mainframe. In that vein, I propose that copies of Different Class should be handed out to everyone who starts at uni. That way, all the mis-shapes can find each other early doors, and maybe they’ll create something like this again. As Jarvis Cocker said of that song: “You might think it’s from a brighter time or whatever, but maybe it can make another bright time.” Over to you, readers! No pressure.
“Jarvis Cocker @ Primavera Sound 2009” by Quique López is licensed under CC BY 2.0.