Pulp at Glastonbury 2025: The performance the Pyramid Stage needed
The last time Pulp played the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury in 1998, the average pint cost £1.90. Common people could actually afford to get pissed. They could afford homes, too. They might have had wood-chip and cockroaches on the wall, but with prices at around 3.69x the average wage, you could actually buy one of these crumbling abodes.
Now, houses are an unattainable 7.91x the average salary. The times have changed, and they’ve changed for the worse for common people. The bottom 50% of people presently own less than 5% of the wealth in the UK, which means there are more of us than ever, too. So, it was nice that we could all get together – yes, there are working-class people at Glastonbury – for a bit of a dance at Worthy Farm.
But it felt like a pointed and poignant dance, too. To paraphrase Jarvis Cocker’s own assured words: Pulp were born for this. But they had to learn to walk first. 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. But it wasn’t until a hot August afternoon in 1994 that they would catch their first glimpse of that for themselves.
That day, they tentatively unleashed ‘Common People’ for the very first time. When the anthem was revealed to the sweaty public on that Reading Festival stage, 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 or the band for that matter. Nick Banks, for instance, had never been sold on the song or its chronic shortage of notes during the initial sessions.
But despite his misgivings, in 2014, it was crowned as the nation’s favourite Britpop song in a poll of Blighty’s public. In the years since then, it seems to have become one of the nation’s favourite songs, period. And Pulp may well be the nation’s favourite band. It’s easy to see why. They connect. There’s a potent mix of star power and humility among them. They’ve made it, they’re up, they’re living it. And they’re proving that working-class bliss is rarely ignorant.
After years of struggling to rise to the top, it seems that once they got there, they wanted to have a very important party. Then they laid it out in the blueprint of ‘Common People’. With the anthemic track, they captured their own journey and that of the entire proletariat. When they triumphantly unveiled it on a similar stage to the one they played today back in 1994, it wasn’t about escaping the past and gulping down the rarified air 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.
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 during the years when they were playing pubs and failing to get their singles heard, the band came to realise that they had only been a failure by virtue of the goalposts established by the status quo.
And the joy that they 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. That’s the story of ‘Common People’, that’s the story of Pulp, and that’s the story of their surprise comeback performance on the Pyramid Stage. The world is a tough place right now, but for an hour and a bit on a muggy Saturday in June, about 100,000 people in a field and legions watching back home got to have a rave in spite of that. And it was perfectly empowering bliss.
