60 Songs That Explain the '90s - Pulp—“Common People”

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

Rob explores Britpop band Pulp’s signature anthem “Common People” by discussing the layers of class criticism in its lyrics and the exciting but combative Britpop moment of the ’90s. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Dorian Lynskey Producers: Isaac Lee and Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to a music and talk episode where full songs and talk segments play together only on Spotify. Best of all, you can create your own music and talk show for free with Anchor Spotify's podcasting platform. Get started at anchor.fm-fm-m-f-M-C-H-O-R-F-M-U-S-I-S-I-S-M-U-S-I-S-I-C-A-L-L-K. A lot of spelling there, but just do it. You will never understand. how it feels to live your life with no meaning or control and with nowhere left to go.

You are amazed that they exist and they burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why. If this hits you right, if the sunlight or the black light has a certain swooning quality, if you've consumed exactly 3.5 alcoholic beverages, if you're sorted for ease and whiz, If you're listening to a mixtape or a playlist made by your possibly requited crush, if you're standing in a field with tens of thousands of fellow beautiful obliterated young people, if you just bought like a really nice scarf, if you just read an intellectually invigorating article about democratic socialism, if you are primed to receive it, then that is quite possibly the single greatest collection of words generated in the last decade of the 20th century. century. This verse is brought to you, of course, by common people, by the rock band Pulp, the Brit pop band Pulp, the pride of Sheffield, England, the scourge of clueless class tourists the world over. Many fine artists have aspired to the scabrous, loquacious majesty of common people. Did you know My Chemical Romance covered this song?

Those lines are a perfect fit for the violent punk rock mindset. Are they not? Yes, my chemical romance are punk rock. relax or you could swing totally the other way toward intimate emotional violence lots of spare solo acoustic youtube covers of common people here's a really good one by a singer named alice banks in the description she talks about moving to leads for uni the accent helps the accent always helps did you know william shatner covered this song ben fold was involved joe jacson's the 80s pop star stepping out and so forth the pride of Staffordshire England Joe sings the parts of the song that William Shatner cannot effectively sing which is all of them

I haven't the foggiest idea what's going on here really this was 2004 I think irony was still dead at this point which is a blessing really I'm glad irony didn't live to hear this Shatner won't even say whilst. It doesn't work if you don't say whilst. You got to commit. My name is Rob Horvilla. This is 60 songs that explain the 90s. Common People is the crown jewel,

the thesis statement, the breathless apex of Pulp's 1995 album, different class. irony was very much alive in 1995, but you can call common people all sorts of things. It is erudite, it is blunt, it is suave, it is seabreve, it is seething. It is carefully observed. It is carelessly cruel. It is droll. It is electrifying.

But it is not ironic. Pulp mean this shit. Pulp commit. Because above all else, common people is anthemic in the not at all ironic sense. This is a misused word anthemic. This is also the only appropriate word here. Jarvis Cocker, Pulps frontman and principal songwriter and the lacerating wit and generational icon. Jarvis once said, I realized that we had written something that had pretensions to being anthemic. It was an anthem, a class anthem.

Common People in Brief is a song about a posh, sheltered young woman, attempting to slum it with a working class because she thinks working class people are cooler and nobler and more vibrant. And she is right about a lot of that, but she is wrong in believing that this coolness and nobility and vibrance

will rub off on her if she slums it with a working class long enough. She will never understand how it feels to live your life with no meaning or control, so on and so forth. Pulp's drummer, Nick Banks, once explained it like this. Quote, around London, you met these southern toffs. You got that idea they were different, that they could muck around and do what they wanted for a few years, then call in the trust fund and bugger off to the south of France.

For most people, that ain't the case. You're stuck with what you've got. Did I debate reading that in an exaggerated South Yorkshire accent? No, not really. You're welcome. So anyway, in common people, this condescending woman is disabused of her notions about the benefits of pretending to be poor by one Jarvis Cocker. Though as the song begins, he's willing to humor her for a little while for fairly obvious reasons. So war is hell.

Class warfare even is hell. And if you don't have any experience with actual war, then sure, love is war, and sex often is especially war. And sex is a form of class warfare is perhaps the most hellish of all. That's the thesis. That's the damn anthem. Jarvis Cocker's exaggerated dialogue voices. I'll see what I could do. That's part of what makes him a generational icon.

Jarvis Cocker. Okay. Picture an English professor, a professor from England who teaches the academic discipline known as English. Got it. Okay, you got it. That's Jarvis Cocker. He is tall and lanky and dignified and yet visibly luscious. Got the giant glasses, got the vaguely pornographic beard often. Got the extremely pornographic rock star cheekbones going in his younger years. He is much smarter than you, or anyway much wittier than you, which also makes it much gloomier and more amusingly cynical than you, which funny how that works. He looks like the guy who invented right there in the mid-90s,

private browsing tab. Jarvis is far from the only important member of Pulp, but he is the band's avatar and spokesman and sole constant member. Pult formed in Sheffield, England in 1978. Really? The cure formed in 1978. Depending on what you read at 78 or 79, what happened here? Why did it take so long to happen? Pult took quite the winding route to maturity, which is maybe not the word. Their first album, It's, came out in 1983. Pulp It's Pulpit, you get it. Unfortunately, on the official Jarvis Cocker timeline, the most significant thing that happened to him in the 1980s

might have been in 1985 when he fell out a window while trying to impress a girl with his Spider-Man impression and spent a month in the hospital. Everyone is entitled to their own origin story. If we're being poppice and a little bitchy, and I would argue that the band glorifies, if not outright encourages, pompous, bitchiness. The first decent pulp album is their third, 1992's separations, and the first

successful pulp album, in any larger commercial or critical sense, was their fourth. 1994's His and Hers. Their lineup has mostly solidified at this point, Jarvis, Nick Banks on drums, Steve Mackey on bass, Candida Doyle on keyboards, and Russell Sr. on guitar and violin. Different class would add Mark Weber on guitars and stuff. Also, their sound has solidified. What kills those first few 80s records is how slight and wobbly and thin they sound. Pulp at their triumphant height are a rock band with dance floor aspirations and also high literary aspirations. Quite verbose, quite theatrical, quite melodramatic, quite amorous and yet riddled with anxiety. So like, panic at the disco.

Different class was the band's fifth album. 1995, it's the best pulp album by orders of magnitude, and despite its many other fine songs, Common People is the best song on it by orders of magnitude. Whether you know this band's whole agonized prehistory or not, it's hilarious, honestly, how much agonized prehistory a song this perfect and this historical requires. So I find myself fascinated by the Brit pop she, the she to whom many fine Brit pop songs refer. I like to imagine the woman being addressed or described or sainted or excoriated. I like to imagine that woman getting the hell out of town.

Brit pop here defied briefly as the distinctly 90s phenomenon of British alt-rocker types leaning as far into their Britishness as possible in terms of megalomaniacal scale and wanton jangliness and catchy lasciviousness, gleeful and defiant in their regional specificity. Everyone just talking shit in the press constantly. Beetle-esque, fine, sure, but also kinks-esque, and that it was quite mordant and often quite hostile internally and externally, a decade's early Brexit of the soul, or at least the bedroom. Jarvis Cocker, for the record, would later say that Britpop was a shitty-sounding word,

like somebody trying to appropriate some kind of alternative culture, stick a union jack on it, and take the credit for it. As the Brit pop she goes, nothing new in theory here. A disconcerting percentage of pop music globally, historically, is dudes writing horny and or mean-spirited songs about ladies who did not ask for this. You come to praise her, you come to bury her, you put her on a pedestal, you throw stones at her when she's on the pedestal, you push her out on an ice flow, you yearningly serenade her from the opposite shore, the usual shit. But the specific she conjured forth by viciously cheek-boned English gentlemen playing jangly guitars in the early 90s, I find this she nearly as fascinating as these fellas did. This she is so vapid and yet so irresistible. There appears to be no end to the depth of the shallowness of this particular she.

A foundational text here, of course, is there she goes by the laws, released in 88, big hit in 1990, perennial candidate for the most perfect pop. song ever born. But that song's about heroin. So, 1991, the first blur record, Leisure, is released by some people's strict definition Brit Pop as a concept. Hasn't been clearly defined yet, but the sound is getting there, and so is the attitude. Track one, She's So High. Yeah, I bet you do. 1993, the first Swade record, Swade is released. There's a song called She's Not Dead. She's Dead. Sorry. to spoil the song. But no, what really grabbed me was a song called Metal Mickey. I saw the video for Metal Mickey on MTV exactly once in 1993,

and the chorus has been stuck in a deep recess of my brain for 28 years. But I didn't know the words at all, and I certainly didn't think the words were, she sells heart, she sells meat, oh, dad, she's driving me mad. Sheesh. 1995, the first supergrass record I Should Coco comes out.

There's a song called She's So Loose. Oh, well. Also, 1995, the second Oasis record. What's the Story? Morning Glory comes out. We'll discuss Oasis at great length. Some other time, I suspect. But yeah, skulking around deep on side too, there's a song called She's Electric.

I find this song terrifically endearing, and I don't quite know why. Maybe it's in contrast to the usual oasis, smugness, and grandeur. There's a very specific stammering sort of sweetness to it. If they'd made a video for She's Electric, there wouldn't have been a fucking helicopter in it. Maybe it's that simple. Maybe what's endearing is the simplicity.

Or maybe I just enjoy the spectacle of Liam Gallagher pining after a pregnant lady whose pregnancy was not, according to Liam Gallagher, caused by Liam Gallagher. I don't believe anything, Liam says. generally, but here I might. Your buddies in Swade, by the way, would return to 1990 to tie a bow on it with an album called Head Music, it's a double entendre, and a song called She's in Fashion. This feels sweeter, at least, superficially, sweet adjacent, but folks, she's still selling

heart and she's still selling meat. So basically a ton of she fixated songs about crass consumerism that came themselves, the songs did, to exemplify crass consumerism. How droll. How very British. Praise this universal she to the skies, but also drag her down to your level, so you can, you know, crawl all over her. So Pulp got in on this too, of course. Pulp's third album, Separations, 92, the decent one. There's actually a song called She's Dead. and she's not dead. She's just walking away.

What's the difference between dying and walking away, really? His and hers, 94, The Breakthrough, the first great album. There's a song called She's a Lady. I am having a really intense moment right now with She's a Lady. This song rules. It's like I will survive climbing all over the Knight Rider theme. If you see a blue minivan driving around, obviously the guy's just running stupid errands.

Like he's clearly driving toward or away from, target and he's just blasting she's a lady that's me this is lurid by a thread and down at home sign pictures of the self to german businessmen this is where you want jarvis cocker panting and declaiming and agonizing you want lurid detail you want pretensions to anthemia the moon has gone down on the sun now that's a double and Tandra. You want him confessing to sweaty illicit affairs or hiding in a closet, even sweatier, while he's observing the illicit affairs of others. He sells meat. He rents heart by the hour. You want him using the proceeds from the meat he sells to fund the class war. There's a song on

different class called I Spy. Jarvis is for sure conducting the illicit affair. In this one, specifically, he's been sleeping with your wife for 16 weeks, drinking your brandy, etc., because that's the best way to hurt you, you posh, asshole. The she this time is not so much a casualty of war as the bomb that will end it. What the haveans have that the haves themselves often do not have is spine and charisma and galvanizing fury and also libido. What you hear in riveting abundance in the best pulp songs is meaning and control. What makes common people the best pulp song, and the best Britpop song, is the maddening but also humanizing

specificity of this particular she and the pointedness of Jarvis' dialogue with her. The song is building up. The anthemia is supercharging, but that keyboard melody do do do do do do do do do is the constant.

It's dinky, but it's durable. It's bulletproof. It reminds me of Bruce Springsteen keyboard riffs in that way. A comparison I will not further explore, or belabor, you're welcome. When Common People lifts off, when Jarvis starts reeling off, sweatily, furiously, all the things condescending rich people can only pretend to do, as they're pretty much the only things poor people can do. Common People immediately achieves interstellar orbit.

It's all anthemia and no pretensions. The miracle of common people is that it makes the common extraordinary. It makes the mundane miraculous. It makes a debtor's prison feel like a palace. It makes despair feel triumphant. It makes a brutal lack of options feel like total freedom. Because for the space of five minutes and 51 seconds, it is. We're stuck with what we've got, and you can't have it, even if you pretend it's all you've got. Is this song really careless and cruel to the woman Jarvis is addressing and undressing and dressing down? There are meaner, Pulp songs, certainly, which is not an answer, though it is a fact. What heightens the impact of common people, of course, beyond it being, Pulp's biggest song by a huge margin, is that in this

case, the she in common people is a real person, or it is at least based on a real person, which explains why British tabloids have historically been quite interested in any super-rich Greek women who studied at St. Martin's College around the same time as our pal Jarvis. Look into it, if you're into it. I don't find this really. real-world aspect of common people that interesting, which is odd, because what I want, more than anything, is to hear from the she's and all these songs. Maybe it's just a different class as at least one much better option in terms of a Jarvis character becoming a real woman, or really it was the other way around. The second best song on this album is called Disco 2000. The guitar riff

is stupendous, and Jarvis reminisces at great length and in lurid detail about the childhood neighbor he had a huge crush on. The horniness aside, it's all quite endearing. Trust me. And maybe that's because the word she does not appear in Disco 2000. She has a name. Jarvis tells us her name. Okay, so technically Jarvis tells her what her name is,

and also tells her he doesn't like her name, but it's progress. Deborah is a real person. The Guardian, sadly, will inform you that Deborah died in 2015 of bone marrow cancer. She was a mental health worker. She worked with children. She had a non-rockstar husband and two kids of her own. Atop this article, there's a photo of her with Jarvis. And Jarvis has this goofy, non-committal rock star look on his face, whereas Deborah just has this enormous, radiant smile. This photo bums me out now, but it also, inexplicably, makes me happy because this is what I want. To know that these various sainted and or excoriated women do exist can in fact escape from and thrive outside the pop songs, well-meaning and otherwise, that non-committal rock stars built to imprison them. She's electric, she's fashionably out of fashion, and she's so high that she got all the way away. Pulp's next album, This Is Hardcore, came out in 1998, and it's bleak as hell, and it's ass, and for brevity's sake, I will limit my remarks to the observation that this, unfortunately,

is the best sex writing of the 1990s. And then what, Jarvis? Let's end on a more cheerful note, shall we? The 1995 Glastonbury Music Festival. Coachella before Coachella, still bigger than Coachella today, really, depending on where you went to uni. If you were privileged enough to go to uni at all, Pulp were a last-minute replacement for the stone roses, if you're into symbolism. As I referred to earlier, there's a song on

different class called Sorted for E's and Whiz, in which Jarvis shares his thoughts on rave culture, festival culture, mass market youth culture, and all that sort of thing. He goes on, spoiler alert, it's all meaningless. Jarvis isn't much for romance. The fake crowd noise in that song is a nice touch, but now, here we find Pulp, on stage at Glastonbury, attendance 80,000, having finally made it as Brit pop stars, as rock stars, after a decade and a half of trying. It was enough to put Jarvis in a disarmingly sincere mood. If you want something to happen enough, then it actually will happen. Okay. And I believe that. In fact, that's why we stood on this stage today after 15 years. And that got a huge cheer, of course. The crowd noise this time was very real,

because everybody knew what was coming. They knew that the best part of Pulp's best song was coming. No offense to my chemical romance or all those YouTubers or Shatner, I guess, but it just sounds better when Jarvis says it, doesn't it? Nowadays, per various interviews for his various solo schemes, Jarvis Cocker lives at least part of the year in France, which is not quite the same as buggering off to the south of France, though if he has, or if in the future he ever does bugger off to the south of France,

I think you'd agree he's earned the right. Because I bet even now, you'd still see him burning bright, even from there. Our guest today is Dorian Linsky, a critic and author and podcaster who's written for The Guardian, the Observer, tons of other places. His latest book is The Ministry of Truth, the biography of George Orwell's 1984. Dorian, thank you so much for being here. Thanks, real pleasure. I think the myth now is that Pulp just transformed into these huge stars on, stage at the 1995, Glassonbury Festival, they played common people and suddenly they were huge

stars. But they'd been around for 15 plus years prior. Was this song like a total shock to everyone? Did you think they had it in them? I think if you've been following them in the music press, it'd been building since about 1990. They had a kind of series of singles and EPs that people were really into. And then 94, you had his and hers, which had songs like, Do You Remember the first time and babies and both of those, I think, were top 40 hits. So there was already a feeling like they've been around for a long time and this is their chance and everybody was kind of like really happy for them. Common people was colossal and came out in May, June 95, just a few weeks before Glastonbury where they fill in the Stone Roses because I think one of the stone roses

is broken a limb. And it was a genuinely, I mean, that was one of the few Glastonby's I haven't been to, but it was this, it's like a coronation moment. It was like, here is the new band, what he's going to love, in the climate where we'd already had kind of blur breaking through in a huge way, Oasis, breaking through in a huge way. There was such a kind of frothing excitement in the sort of British music industry. And I think there was something quite appealing about this quite odd guy who all kind of, like, charity shop clothes and had a bit of, you know, that kind of Serge Gansvorgie aspect to him and then almost like a kind of camp 70s sitcom character.

because he had to try so hard. It wasn't like Oasis, first time of asking. I think there was a real warmth towards them. The phenomenon that common people describes, like rich people, cosplaying as poor people, is that to your mind an especially British concept? Was it already a prominent thing,

or did this song sort of make it a prominent thing? I mean, it did happen. It did happen in the 90s, and I suppose you were looking at kind of perhaps early stages of gentrification of places like, shoreditch and working-class areas getting a lot more kind of like middle-class leslie artists coming in but there's kind of a tradition i mean weirdly i think of it's conscious but i mean there was a tradition of the kind of sneering at rich girls rolling stones did it all the time in the mid-60s you know and it was

kind of like aristocrats trying to hang out with rock bands and there was a weird kind of like with the stones there's a real kind of misogyny to it i don't think i don't detect sort of misogyny in common people. But it's certainly a British theme, and it was definitely part of the 90s story, and I think this was in the context of Blurred, just had park life, and they had greyhounds on the cover, and they had girls and boys,

and they're this like mockney accent that Damon Olben was adopting, even though he was like, he wasn't like a rich kid, but he was middle class. And I think there was a lot of suspicion of that, and obviously Oasis played against that, and Manick Street preachers pushed back against that.

And so, it seems like in no way as common people. I don't think common people is necessarily meant to be like a digger blur in particular. But that was the context. And I think there was a huge appetite for, I mean, maybe songs that were really about something. That was the thing. A lot of Brit pop songs, they weren't really, you know, they're about love and ambition and fun and the things that pop music is often about. But there was a real craving,

I think, that if we were going to have this cultural phenomenon, you had to have songs that were really about Britain today. Right. For an American fan, even if you devoured the albums and read everything you could and just listen to common people over and over. Is there a fundamental aspect of Brit pop that you just couldn't get if you didn't live in Britain?

Like a culturally dense album like Park Life or a different class. Like to what degree did you have to be there for it to make any sense to you? Well, I think on the one level you need the... Okay, you might miss the references, particular British cultural things like, you know, the rave scene

and pulp sorted freeze and whiz. A little kind of cultural details. Then again, you know, as a British hip-hop fan, it fascinates rather than kind of alienates me when there's like a hip-hop record, which is just full of loads of stuff that I don't quite get.

You don't know, yeah. I think bits of New York or certain kind of lifestyle things. So that, I don't think, is an issue. I think probably the thing which is almost illegible to an American might be the kind of small but absolutely

vital differences in class and wealth and status. and the way that people would be at each other's throats over, you know, and it still happens to this day, you know, in sort of British discourse and pop culture discourse. It's like, you know, are you properly working class, or are you upper working class or are you lower middle class? And this just goes back decades.

Of course. Because, yeah, from Ohio, you know, I knew that Oasis and Blur hated each other, but I would not have thought, like, oh, part of the reason they hate each other is these class differences. You know, I didn't have that information, but I still got it anyway, or enough of it, I guess, to enjoy it. Yes. And there was also caricaturing, you know.

Blur were made out to be a lot more posh than they were because they were antithesis to oasis, you know, and they were fighting over the number one spot. And the sort of the cartooning of people, cartoonizing of people, is sort of a bit of a problem around common people because it's slightly misrepe, somewhat rist represents the song. Yeah. What shocked me from Ohio just reading about all this was just how bitchy UK pop stars were. Like Oasis and Blur really seemed to hate each other. You know, Magwai is selling shirts that say Blur, colon, R. Shites. Like, I guess my question actually is, why did everyone hate Blur?

Like, that's the through line for all of these bands, all of these songs. It's like everyone's mad at Blur all the time. Everyone seems to have a different reason. I think Damon Oben is kind of a genius and has proved himself to be there. But there's something that just gets people's backs up and he'd feud with Oasis on one level. But then Pulp apparently, the tension between pulp and blur, apparently behind the scenes was worse

than the tension between Oasis. Really? Yeah. Like Alex James said, oh, Polp were just horrible to us, you know. And then there was the tension with Swade because Justine Frischman has left Brett Anderson for Damon Olben. So there was that. There was a real kind of like soap opera quality

to Brit Pop at its peak. We're really talking about anyway, like two or three or three. three years. But it became like a huge tabloid phenomenon as well. And the music press liked combat. And they liked stoking. They loved getting people to slag off other people. And bands were quite happy to do that. It's a culture that is just, it's really just gone from the music press. And you can understand why, because of online culture. And if you just say something like Adam Levine gets this huge hailstorm of abuse for saying there, there aren't. so many bands around anymore. There aren't any bands, right, right, right. But the kind of stuff that

you could say, you could literally, I mean, I do mean literally wish death on another musician, or compare another musician literally to Hitler. To Hitler, right. That was just kind of like fun. It was like, knock about fun. I mean, is that just for the publicity, or is there some quality to the culture of the 90s that just fuels that vitriol to that extent? No, I think it was largely a kind music press thing and everybody was just very kind of just crammed in too close together but you didn't get that and obviously you had your dance culture going on at the same time i don't remember the same kind of vitual surrounding like the chemical brothers right right not fighting with the crystal method or yeah yeah so like it was yeah it was definitely like a brit pop thing like they loved

drama sure and they loved characters you know which is great like i said as a fan it's great Yeah. How did Jarvis Cocker fit into that as a rock star? Is there a fundamental quality that he had that, like, Liam or Damon or Tom York didn't have? Well, he was so odd and he was unplaceable. There were other people that you could compare him to, but they weren't famous people. They weren't rock stars. You'd almost sort of seeing him sort of comedians or writers, you know, like Alan Bennett or, you know, observer. of kind of English culture, but they weren't kind of people that you were used to seeing on top of the pops or headline in Glastonbury or whatever. And he really came out of this sort of mixture of kind of art school and a kind of thrift shop aesthetic.

You know, they had deliberately kind of cheap-sounding synthesizers. Right, right, right. And dressed in kind of like artificial fabrics. And there was this whole kind of like grubby glamour that they were into. And then he's also his particular kind of, position where we sort of between classes, and obviously that's where you get into common people, because of the sense of not settling anywhere. Right, right.

Jarvis talks now about the moment when he crashed the stage at Michael Jackson's Brit Awards performance at 96. Jarvis talks about it like this traumatizing thing, where he became like a super celebrity, but also a pariah. And like, that's a very difficult scene to unpack 25 years later. But just the effect it had on him in his career and has. perception in the press. Like, where did that fall in sort of the arc of Jarvis as a rock star now?

Well, there was this incredible kind of velocity. Like, everything was happening very, very fast. It's just like everything's happening. There's entire career arcs, you know, rising and falling in that space of time. And what overheated that was that you had the music press, obviously, but then you had the tabloid press getting very excited and trying to appeal to younger people and going like, oh my God, there are these kind of really sort of glamorous, exciting, young, combative new stars. This is very exciting. Let's sort of celebrate them.

But then also if you sort of step out of line, then the old tabloid controversy magnet kind of kicks in. And they're like, oh, okay. So pulp had put out sorted freeze and whiz on the CD sleeve could be folded to make like a wrap of speed or MDMA powder or whatever. And that was on, that was like literally on the cover of a. tabloid newspaper. So there was also this sense that, like, they would just turn on you if there was controversy. And the Michael Jackson thing was a huge, big news story. I remember, like, hearing it on the radio. And initially, and it turned out he hadn't, but initially there was allegations that he'd, like, he'd pushed a kid. So there was a kind of police moment there for a few hours.

Right. And then, like, David Bowie had to save him. Yeah. Yeah, because the Bowie's team were the only people that his video cameras had caught what actually happened. And then, Pretty soon, that kind of settled down, and people were generally like, oh, good for him. You know, because there was a real kind of, it played into kind of Michael Jackson allegations aside. It represented a certain kind of like American excess. Yes, and just megalomania, yeah. Yeah, this symbolic thing of like, look at this bloated, maniacal kind of American stardom. And here's this sort of plucky, drunk Brit waggling his bum at him.

It was like this perfect sort of moment. But I think it just gave him a whole other kind of celebrity that on top of the celebrity you already get when you become very successful in a space of a few months just became rather kind of oppressive. The next pulp album, this is hardcore in 98. Like I read some, a book that said that like that is the end of Britpop. That album is the end of Britpop

because it's so bleak and so disgusted with itself and so hung over that everyone was like, okay, forget it, this is over? Like, is that true? Like, did it feel like that at the time? Or when did this all end for you? For us, there was a real kind of, and I felt this at the time,

it's not just hindsight. There was a real kind of narrative drama to sort of Britpot from the beginning to the end and almost the sense that had been plotted out with these kind of like beats. And so what you had in the late spring to late summer

of 97 was you get Tony Blair coming into office, which is kind of like associated alternative music, but then also almost the glamour of opposition had gone, and now he's in power, and then obviously then you start complaining about him. You also had, I think literally days after they won the election, you had OK computer, which is suddenly like a whole different sound and a whole different set of priorities. And blur make their sort of more American-influenced,

Britpop is dead kind of self-type. album. And then in the end of that summer, at the weird moment, which didn't have anything to do with music, it kind of seemed to, whereas the Princess Diana died around the same time, at the song of that period was Drugs Don't Work by

The Verve. And again, like I said, everything was just sort of too narratively neat. It's like we've literally got a song day. The drugs don't work, you know, the party's over. And then there was this weird kind of the whole Diana, the weird sort of national morning thing. And it was almost like, it was

like, oh, the fun has stopped and everything's getting dark. And that was while, this is the period while Pulp were working on, this is hardcore. By the time it comes out, it was almost like, oh, we get the point. Like, it's, yeah, we know. Yeah. Like, we know it's over there. And I think it's really striking that on different class, the party and the come down are on the same record.

They're simultaneous, right. You get that and sort of reason whiz. You get that in Bar-Italia. You get the sense of like, when normally I think you get the kind of fun album. and then the come-down album. But there was already in there with different class. And I think that is because, you know, he was so bright, because I was so smart, and just older.

There was a part of him that knew that even as he was kind of enjoying himself, that there was a price, which you're less likely to be aware of if you're like 23. Right. I have to say that living through all this sounds exhausting. You know, like my impulse always is to be jealous of people who, like, lived in Seattle when it was all happening in 91, or whatever, but this just sounds, I would just want to lie down if I was living,

you know, in London in the midst of all this. Like, did it feel overwhelming? And did it feel like, you know, the era that you're going to be talking about to some degree for the rest of your life? I did, what's just incredibly exciting. It was really, really fun. I mean, like being in university

and working on the university paper, and we were listening to, and the new albums, Dummy by Porta's Head, and definitely maybe. It's almost the same week. And we're like, well, this is good. And you have the whole Britpop story, but at the same time, you had, like, the Chemical Brothers,

and you had The Prodigy, and you had Porte's Head, a massive attack, and you had drum and bass. And, like, it maybe spoiled me in the sense that I just thought that there was always, it was always going to be like this. Obviously, I was the right age, but it was almost like, there's always something happening. And for the first time, also, like I said, you had the tabloids and, like, the BBC really interested in,

in, like, alternative culture. So something that happened in our world, enemy world was also happening in the real world. So it was really exciting, but also you're really aware of the psychic damage done to the artists. Yeah. Finally, is common people a song that you enjoy as a song, or is it more that common people is important? And it sums up this era, and it's a mile marker for so many things. Do you feel the history of it when you're listening to it, or can you enjoy it as just a piece of music?

Well, it's an everything song, and I remember hearing it for the first time. And I think that like, if I can just rhapsodize about the common people, is that I think on the one level, it's just this kind of dance floor banger. There's a certain kind of record, I think Mr. Brightside is another one where from the first second, you're on the dance floor and then you can't stop because it's like a kind of train. For six minutes. Yeah. And it's just kind of like, dunna, dan, da, da, da da.

And it just gets more and more kind of emotionally fraught as well. So it's like an anthem. Wow. but also then it's really complicated and if you just want to dig into the lyrics and this kind of weird two-part lyric that it has where you've got the first bit

which is in keeping with kind of maybe cartoon Jarvis MTV Jarvis which is just this sort of funny story about meeting a rich girl from Greece at Martin's College having a bit of fun and it's a bit yeah he's obviously having sex but you know he's also making fun of her

and then halfway through the song she's like flipped a switch in him And because he had this very weird relationship with class, it just sends him off into this kind of, or really sort of a flailing rage. She disappears on the song. He's not angry at her. He's angry about himself,

or he's angry about the class system, or he's angry about this sense that he can't fit in anywhere. So working class Sheffield, which he's left behind, which he sings about like in miss shapes, where he's like the townies, you know, and he doesn't feel like them because he's kind of nerdy. freaky intellectual fop. And yeah, he thinks, okay,

well, I'm going to go find my people and they're going to be at art college in London. And then he gets there and they're looking at him like, he's like oh, he's like this northern working class guy. And they're not necessarily looking down at him, but they're kind of exoticising him. And he's aware that this allows him,

this makes him fascinating, probably allows him to get laid more. But it's also kind of condescending. And he's aware of this kind of idea, having failed with pulp for like quite a few years by the point he's at Sir Martins. He's also a way that he cannot afford to fail. And with the girl from Greece, if she doesn't make it as an artist, it's like her dad's got money. If she's got a shitty flat, she can call her dad. And with him, it's like all he has is his sort of wits.

And if he doesn't make it, he's screwed and he has to go back to this place that he never wants to go back to. And so I think that the kind of the weird rage and desperation of the song, particularly in its like six-minute non-radio-edit version, comes from all these complicated feelings which he can't quite process. And even in interviews when he's talked about the song, and even when you really try and unpack the lyric, there's something that's not quite resolved about it. And that's why it's exciting.

If it was just a song about, oh, isn't it awful, when rich kids slum it. Do you know what I mean? That's like, oh, that might be okay. But that's like a one-liner song. Whereas to me, it's the way it starts off in the realm of sort of slightly camp character comedy, like maybe a Ray Davis song.

And then you just end up with this kind of like hysterical rage and panic. And yet for that to be presented in the, the form of a song which sounds great in Glastonbury or on a dance floor. The fact that it's culturally important is one of the reasons I love it because you can be standing a dance floor, bellowing it out,

and having a really good time, even while it's writhing with all these, like, horrible emotions. Thank you so much for talking, Dorian. This has been awesome. Thanks, well. Thanks very much to my guest, Dorian Linsky. Thanks to our producers, Justin Sales,

and Isaac Lee, and thanks very much to you, of course, for listening. And now, without further ado, here is Pulp with Common People. We'll see you next week.