Pulp - Different Class
Updated: 6 hours ago
Written by: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 30.10.1995 UK / 27.2.1996 US
1995 was a hard year in the Israeli experience. Buses blew up on the streets of Israel, the squares filled with demonstrations, at the Arad festival the farewell show of "Mashina" ended in disaster, with three teenagers crushed to death, and a few gunshots at the end of a rally split the heart of the country in two.
Britain, too, saw friction, of a completely different kind. Britpop was gradually becoming the prominent genre of the era, and the heavyweight clash between "Blur" and "Oasis" was joined by a contender nobody had counted until a year earlier. "Pulp", a veteran band from Sheffield, active since 1978 and led by singer and songwriter Jarvis Cocker, popped up around the corner.
After many years of drifting through indie territory, the nerdy, rejected kids from Sheffield's working class also had something to say, and with Jarvis Cocker's direct, unpretentious writing "Pulp" found its place in the hearts of all ordinary people. Yes, just like the song "Common People", the first song written for their fifth studio album, "Different Class", released on October 30, 1995.
Cocker gently showers his listeners with his special humor, along with plenty of criticism that is sometimes accompanied by mockery. In addition, the album's songs deal cynically with relations between the sexes, and with great sympathy toward the working class.
When Cocker sings "The future's owned by you and me" in the album's opening song, "Mis-Shapes", he already knows that everything is about to change for his band thanks to the audience, who had found new cultural heroes.
Seven years earlier, the band was about to become yet another of the many bands that try until they give up. Cocker had already enrolled in film studies at college in 1988, but then an approach to their longtime friend from Sheffield, bassist Steve Mackey, brought the band back to playing together, though not before a chance encounter at the college between Jarvis Cocker and a Greek student gave Cocker the inspiration to write the single that, seven years later, would hit all of Britain with tremendous force, "Common People", an anthem mocking upper-class people who want to "live like common people".
Cocker drew inspiration from that student, who told him she wanted to move to the Hackney district of London in order to live like "the common folk".
Cocker mocks the premise, arguing, rightly, that once she gets fed up she can go back to her previous life, unlike the common folk, most of whom will be born and live their entire lives with no ability to improve their situation.
In recording the song, the band used all 48 tracks available to it, filling them with a variety of keyboard sounds and a Stylophone, with the overarching goal of creating an anthemic sound.
Despite a strong resemblance to the melody of "Los Amantes" from 1988 by the Spanish band "Mecano", the band was not sued over copyright.
Cocker dedicates "Mis-Shapes" as an anthem to outcasts wherever they are. "If you've ever been bullied, called a freak, beaten up or spat on, this song is meant to make you stronger," summed up drummer Nick Banks.
The title "Mis-Shapes" refers to chocolates in which something went wrong on the production line, so that they came out slightly different from the standard chocolates, chocolates that Jarvis Cocker's mother used to buy often.
In the third single, "Disco 2000", Jarvis Cocker fantasizes, in a Sliding Doors fashion, about what would have happened if he'd had more daring at a young age to make a move on his childhood friend Deborah Bone, if only he had met her by the fountain on the street where they lived in Sheffield.
The fourth single, "Something Changed", also conveys a message similar to "Disco 2000", accompanied by a dramatic guitar solo from guitarist Mark Webber.
Cocker's writing is direct, and this also leads to painful, not to say somewhat cruel, territory, as in the song "I Spy", a vengeful song by a bitter narrator who fantasizes about creating chaos in a wealthy London neighborhood. Cocker wrote the song while living in poverty in Sheffield.
And we can't go without the song that almost got Cocker and "Pulp" into trouble, "Sorted for E's & Wizz", a term Cocker took from a girl he met in Sheffield, who told him about a Stone Roses show she had attended, where people roamed through the crowd whose whole job was to shout at the audience whether everyone was sorted for "E's and Wizz", or in other words, sorted for a dose. Cocker, who liked the phrase, decided to base the song on it, and it was understood as a song about drugs, even though Cocker denied it.
The song that closes the album, "Bar Italia", refers to the café Cocker holds in such high regard, located in the heart of Soho.
As for the album cover, the groom, Dom O'Connor, who appears in the wedding photograph on the cover, tells: "When we got married, we organized the wedding ourselves and we were broke. We asked a photographer, a friend of my brother from art college in Edinburgh, to take our wedding pictures, but he said he had no free date, until a week before the wedding he called us and announced he'd agree to photograph us on condition that Pulp could use some of the photos for the album 'Different Class'. And so it was."
The album won the Mercury Prize in September 1996. Earlier, in February of that year, Cocker provoked a wave of reactions for and against after a publicity stunt at the Brit Awards, where he invaded the stage in protest during Michael Jackson's performance of "Earth Song" and wiggled his backside, to express his disgust at Michael's attempt to turn himself into a saint in the eyes of the audience. Cocker spent that night at the police station, but was later released without charges and earned admiration.
NME described Cocker's actions as "a huge publicity stunt that was creative, subversive and very funny".
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