Common People - Full Length Version

In this song, finds Pulp lead singer Jarvis Cocker meets a Greek girl whose family is rich. They get to know each other, and she asks him to show her how the "common people." Cocker takes her to the supermarket and explains what it's like to live in the working class. It's a semi-true story about a girl Cocker encountered at Saint Martin's School of Art on the sculpture course. They met at a bar, and she started talking about how she wanted to live in the East End of London (the poor area). "She was from a well-to-do background, and there was me explaining that that would never work," he told Uncut magazine. "I hated all that cobblers you got in films and magazines in which posh people would 'slum it' for a while. Once I got that narrative in my head it was very easy to write, lyrically." He fancied her, but Cocker didn't leave with the girl - he made up the part about them having a romp.

Cocker decided on the title when he played some chords during a band rehearsal and bass player Steve Mackey told him it sounded like "Fanfare for the Common Man" by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. This got him thinking about the word "common," which in Sheffield, England, where he's from, it has another layer of meaning. "In Sheffield, if you say someone's common, then you're saying they're vulgar, coarse, rough-arsed. The kind of person who has corned-beef legs from being too close to the gas fire," he told Q magazine. "So that's what attracted me to calling it 'Common People,' the double meaning, 'Oh, you're common as muck.'"

"Common People" was Pulp's breakthrough, and it remains their most popular song. They were formed by the then 15-year-old Jarvis Cocker in 1978 and had released four albums with little success until "Common People" was issued as the first single from their fifth album, Different Class, in May 1995. In Q magazine, Cocker said: "It was clear 'Common People' was a significant song. Eight other songs on the album were written while it was in the charts. Knowing that you had a mass audience for once in your life gave me the confidence to bring certain things out of myself."