"Common People" | ||||||||
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Single by Pulp | ||||||||
from the album Different Class | ||||||||
B-side | "Underwear" | |||||||
Released | 22 May 1995 | |||||||
Format | 7", 12" vinyl, cassette, CD | |||||||
Recorded | 18–24 January 1995 at The Town House, London | |||||||
Genre | Britpop | |||||||
Length | 5:50 (album version) 4:07 (radio edit) |
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Label | Island | |||||||
Writer(s) | Nick Banks, Jarvis Cocker, Candida Doyle, Steve Mackey & Russell Senior | |||||||
Producer(s) | Chris Thomas | |||||||
Pulp singles chronology | ||||||||
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"Common People" is a song by English alternative rock band Pulp, released in May 1995 as the lead single of their fifth studio album Different Class. It reached number two on the UK Singles Chart, becoming a defining track of the Britpop movement and Pulp's signature song in the process.
The song is about those who were perceived by the songwriter as wanting to be "like common people" and who ascribe glamour to poverty. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as slumming or "class tourism". The song was written by the band members Nick Banks, Jarvis Cocker, Candida Doyle, Steve Mackey and Russell Senior. In 2004, a Ben Folds-produced William Shatner cover version brought "Common People" to new audiences outside Europe.
The idea for the song's lyrics came from a Greek art student whom Pulp singer/songwriter Jarvis Cocker met while he was studying at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Cocker had enrolled in a film studies course at the college in September 1988 while taking a break from Pulp. He spoke about the song's inspiration in NME in 2013:
I'd met the girl from the song many years before, when I was at St Martin's College. I'd met her on a sculpture course, but at St Martin's you had a thing called Crossover Fortnight, where you had to do another discipline for a couple of weeks. I was studying film, and she might've been doing painting, but we both decided to do sculpture for two weeks. I don't know her name. It would've been around 1988, so it was already ancient history when I wrote about her.