The classic anthem Pulp nearly scrapped: “A load of rubbish”
What is it that makes a work of art a masterpiece?
In a world of subjectivity, what crowns certain cultural artefacts worthy of reverence while others barely differing efforts flounder around in the doldrums, failing to catch the public’s attention? This tricky predicament is rendered even more vague when acts like Pulp recall that they once struggled to see the timeless creative monument in their musical midst as it made its way out into the world, much like Albert Einstein’s dismissive school reports.
There’s no easy answer to the origins of artistic greatness, and the Britpop band embody that more than most. The band themselves almost never made it, let alone their signature song that people will still be singing a century from now.
It was a hot August night in 1994, and the Sheffield group were finally breathing the rarified air of a measure of success. They had begun way back in 1978 when Jarvis Cocker and his buddies were still at school, setting their lofty sights on the Christ-like adulation heroes like David Bowie were being afforded. Jarvis would admit he saw no real difference between Ziggy Stardust and Superman. That appealed to him in his emboldened youth.
However, dreams of rock ‘n’ roll stardom soon found themselves bludgeoned by the hard knocks of reality. By 1983, five years into their pipedream, Pulp had failed to budge the dial of public interest. Their first single, ‘My Lighthouse’, was so overlooked it was as though it had never been released at all.
That is the fate that most art is met with. Even in the analogue age of recording technology, most excisions of the soul end up disappearing into the ether. For the fittingly named Pulp, determination to escape the ash heap of history was dying down to an ember among the members of the beleaguered band.
But being in a band was also fun. It helped Cocker escape the maudlin mindset of drab days at the factory where he earned his living. After all, why do we really engage in artistic exploits? For fame and fortune, or a measure of exultancy? To rise above the humdrum of drudgery or fling ourselves into the horrid stare of the public gaze?
Though fame and fortune might have been what Cocker had his eye on in a mouldy English classroom back in ’78, such an outlook was a thing of the past on the eve of it finally arriving that fateful summer night in ’94. The band were due to perform at Reading Festival the next day, the biggest show in their 16-year history. Cocker was casting his eye back over his life to date. One pivotal incident sprung to mind that seemed to tie everything together. One encounter encapsulated the juvenile dreams of escape, the acceptance of reality, the presentiment of fate.
He set his pen scribbling, crafting the bulk of the lyrics to a track that he now planned to add to their set the next day. Prior to that snap of inspiration, the musical melody his heartfelt words met with had been dull, but what could possibly be more apt?
The bland backstory to ‘Common People’ was as perfectly orchestrated as the song would soon become, seemingly woven into place by the fickle fingers of fate. But oddly enough, drummer Nick Banks was still hug up on its initial tuneless melody. The demo had filled him with doubt and uncertainty.
How ‘Common People’ went from “rubbish” to iconic
When the anthem was first unveiled to the public on a sun-soaked Reading Festival stage as pints of piss hurled through the air, almost a year before it would be polished up and released as part of their fifth studio album, Different Class, there was no telling what lay ahead of the track.
In 2014, when it was crowned as the nation’s favourite Britpop song by a poll of the British public, Banks reflected that he was never sold on the would-be anthem in the early sessions.
“It sounded like a bit of a tuneless dirge at first, to be honest,” Banks opined. Following the grand festival performace, a lo-fi demo was made, but the drummer dismissed it as “a load of rubbish”. The classic could’ve been killed off then and there, but one highly understandable miscalculation had been made: this wasn’t a lo-fi dirge at all. It was, in fact, an anthem, and it had to be treated as such. Eventually, they would amend the formula.
It was easy to see why a band that had been largely glossed over for well over a decade were doubtful that they had just uncovered something gargantuan. But with ‘Common People’, they had captured their own journey and that of the entire proletariat. It required every ounce of oomph that a hard knocks existence reaching a grand, reconciling crescendo was worthy of.
This wasn’t about escaping the past and gulping down the rarified fizz of fame and ego that lingers backstage at daft festivals. It was about honouring and understanding what being in a band had become for Pulp.
What inspired ‘Common People’?
A chance encounter at St Martin’s College had, indeed, helped Cocker to get to this point. He saw that rich folks didn’t just have a financial safety net; they had a proverbial trampoline to success. Pulp’s chances of achieving the same were hindered from the start. But the last 16 years of the band had only been a failure by virtue of the goalposts established by the status quo. We live in a world of ‘achievement culture’ not ‘experience culture’.
And the joy that Pulp had brought to pubs where cockroaches climbed the walls and, in turn, the buzz they had experienced themselves was every bit as big of a triumph as anything else they would go on to achieve.
Hell, Russell Senior even left the band in 1997, just as his long journey to the top was approaching completion, proving that success is a pedestal of perception. Capitalism can create a sense of life dysmorphia among the working classes, dangling the carrot of ‘the good life’, but Senior – a musician who had once partaken in the miner’s strike – had preferred the fun days that came before fame, and he soon saw that as the purpose of art. His tale is one of many grand brushstrokes in ‘Common People’ that give the track transcendent depth.
‘Common People’ captures Senoir’s working-class triumph of finding a fun, creative outlet just as much as it laments the unfair hand millions are dealt. In this sense, the fact that it began life as dismissed and drab only adds to its poetry – mirroring the many lives that remain overlooked and underinvested but brimming with unrecognised potential.
Sometimes, you just need of the right push. Pulp’s own battle with obscurity gives the song its bold heart. It’s not about escape or striving for fame but facing unfair facts and finding poetry in the mundane all the same. That’s why its words might show shades of frustration, but the melody that eventually matched it was exultant. Even the perseverance of striving to turn a “load of rubbish” into a work of art presents a fitting poetic flourish.
When the humble band unveiled the song under the hot sun in 1994, it was a reckoning more so than a song, and the band barely even knew that themselves for the few months they spent reeling in its wake. Much like the working-class battle it embodies, ‘Common People’ trudged towards the anthemic through persistence, transfiguring from a “tuneless dirge” into an anthem that demanded recognition as a worthy masterpiece that refused to be ignored.
This was Britpop’s uprising, and if it hadn’t taken some 17 years and a shaky start to get there, it would never have had the necessary depth to shoulder its way out of the doldrums where most songs live and die and endure as a timeless triumph. It’s an artistic fist of solidarity rising from the dirges of the deep. And Banks certainly owes Cocker a pint for trying to cast it to the ash heap of history.
