Story Behind The Song: Pulp’s generational anthem ‘Common People’
When thinking of the most iconic Pulp track, it’s difficult to look beyond 1995’s ‘Common People’, the lead single off their excellent fifth studio album Different Class. ‘Common People’ is widely regarded as the best song to ever come out of the Britpop movement, although Pulp have occasionally been averse to having the tag applied to them.
As for the song’s narrative, it closely critiques the gentrification of London as early back as the 1980s. The track is startingly accurate even today, as it portrays the wealthy who moves to London in search of a life with the romance of being a ‘common person’, living in accommodation far cheaper than they can afford, and trying to live a working-class life by “smoking fags” and “playing pool”.
Jarvis Cocker wrote the song while studying film at Central Saint Martin’s College in London. The song opens with the truly memorable line, “She came from Greece; she had a thirst for knowledge.” In fact, the woman in question in the song is actually based on a real person that Cocker met during his time at the university.
Cocker had traded several of his records one day at the Notting Hill Record & Tape Exchange so that he could buy a Casio keyboard. He noted, “I went back to my flat and wrote the chord sequence for ‘Common People,’ which isn’t such a great achievement because it’s only got three chords. I thought it might come in handy for our next rehearsal.”
Then one evening, Cocker was out at a pub with his mates and met a young woman from Greece who had also been studying at Central Saint Martin’s. He added, “It turned out she was from quite a well-to-do background and somehow thought it would be interesting to go and live in a kind of scummy area, as she found that exotic.”
“I was studying film, and she might’ve been doing painting, but we both did sculpture for two weeks,” Cocker continued. “I don’t know her name. It would’ve been around 1988, so it was already ancient history when I wrote about her.” Some have claimed that the woman was Danae Stratou, who had been the wife of a Greek finance minister. However, Cocker denied these claims, having said, “it wasn’t her because she had blonde hair and the girl had dark hair.”
Further addressing the identity of the mysterious woman of substance, Cocker said, “We went to the pub, and she just came out with that she wanted to live in Hackney with common people. In 2011, we played at St Martin’s, and someone showed me a picture on their phone and said, ‘Is that the girl you wrote the song about?’ I went, ‘Yeah, I think it is’. Unfortunately, I didn’t ask them for the picture, and I can’t remember who showed it to me, so it’s still a mystery.”
Regardless of who the actual woman is, ‘Common People’ remains a brilliant critique of those who go in search of a poor romantic life because they can. The reason for its brilliance is that those same people that the wealthy are trying to emulate have no choice but to live in the circumstances they do.
