Pulp’s ‘Different Class’ at 30 remains a masterpiece of misshapes, mistakes & misfits

Released on October 30, 1995, Pulp’s fifth album Different Class went straight to #1 on the UK album charts. They were invited to play the still-running BBC series Later With Jools Holland, and the host congratulated Jarvis on their success, asking if it could’ve come sooner. “Well yeah, a lot sooner, I guess,” Jarvis said. “Sixteen years sooner. But I don’t understand the universe and how it does things, so I don’t argue.”

Having led Pulp through years of critical and public indifference since the early ’80s, Jarvis Cocker had put the group on hold to study film at London’s Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, where his mind was expanded by raves and where he met Steve Mackey, who would help usher in a new, more formidable lineup. (He also met a girl from Greece with a thirst for knowledge who studied sculpture — memories of which would come in handy later.) With the ’90s, Cocker’s lyrical observations became sharper, his stage presence more assured, and Pulp’s glammy disco sound snapped into focus.

1994’s His N’ Hers was their best album yet by a mile, but it did not prepare the world for the record Pulp would release the next year — a massive leap forward that found Cocker and the band working at the height of their powers and perfectly aligned with Peak Britpop, a term Jarvis always hated. Cocker’s time at Saint Martins College was the inspiration for “Common People,” a tale of upper-class slumming that would quickly become Pulp’s signature anthem. His purchase of a cheap Casiotone MT-500 keyboard inspired the song’s riff, and it all came tumbling out. For the first time in his career, Cocker realized he might have a hit on his hands.

With a sense of urgency, Pulp tapped producer Chris Thomas, who had worked with Roxy Music, The Pretenders, and others, to help them bring out the most in “Common People.” They spent two weeks in the studio in spring 1995, layering instruments across two 48-track machines. Jarvis told Thomas he wanted it to have the size of ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky,” and the finished result definitely has that widescreen glory in a tale of haves and have-nots. Pulp didn’t want to wait for a full album and convinced Island Records to release the single immediately.

“Common People” was released on May 22, 1995, entering the charts at #2 — but it truly exploded when Pulp were asked, last-minute, to headline Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage on Saturday night, replacing The Stone Roses, who had to drop out after guitarist John Squire broke his collarbone in a biking accident. “That was the first time I’d ever heard an audience sing our words back to us,” Cocker says in the liner notes to the 30th-anniversary edition of Different Class. “And that was a really weird feeling.”

Glastonbury changed everything for Pulp. Now they had to make an album. Where His N’ Hers was mostly lurid tales of sex, a new theme emerged for Different Class with “Common People”: class itself. It was something Jarvis hadn’t truly confronted until he moved to London — Sheffield is as working class as it gets — and he now felt empowered to fight. “We want your homes, we want your lives, we want the things you don’t allow us,” he sings on “Mis-Shapes,” an anthem for the square pegs and weirdos of the world. “We won’t use guns, we won’t use knives, we’ll use the things that we’ve got more of. That’s our minds.”

There’s also “I Spy,” a revenge fantasy littered with sex that was a distinctly Pulp brand of Bond theme. “‘I Spy’ is probably one of the most savage songs that I’ve ever written,” Jarvis told Melody Maker in 1995. “It’s definitely the most vindictive. I wrote it about the time I was on the dole in Sheffield. Sometimes if you’re in a real cocky mood, you can walk down the street and kind of despise people from above. You know that kind of superior hate. There you are, walking down the street and everyone just thinks you’re this useless, jobless piece of crap. But inside, you feel really strong. Their hatred sort of helps you feel that way. You know what’s going on, you’ve got their number, and you know you’re gonna get your own back some day.”

Playing in front of 100,000 people at Glastonbury also influenced how Pulp approached songwriting for Different Class, with bigger hooks and bigger choruses. Chris Thomas returned to produce, and the music came first — Jarvis wrote nearly all the lyrics in a single night. “I had lots of bits of paper where I’d written things down, but I hadn’t made them into songs. I just tried things out with the instrumental demos we’d done,” he recalls in the Deluxe Edition’s liner notes. “The only thing to drink was this really bad Spanish brandy that was in the house, so I drank loads of that. I think you can only really do something like that once. I did try it again after that, and it never worked. Not a very healthy way to do it.”

Likewise, Different Class is one of those a once-in-a-lifetime records — an alchemical mix of everything that came before it: Jarvis’ pop star dreams, the band’s long road to success, and a perfect alignment with the cultural moment. It’s 12 brilliant tales of mis-shapes, mistakes, and misfits, including: “Disco 2000,” one of a few unrequited love songs here, set to a riff nicked from Laura Branigan’s “Gloria”; “Sorted for E’s and Wizz,” which found Jarvis out of his head at a rave; and “Monday Morning,” which lays out the drudgery of post-college partying against a ska-inflected backdrop.

The hooks are plentiful and the quotable lines endless. While the record, which won the 1996 Mercury Prize, is exceedingly British, it’s also universally relatable to anyone who’s ever felt out of place. It’s a perfect album. “Blur vs. Oasis” may have been the hot topic in the British press in 1995, but Different Class rendered the debate instantly moot.