The Cover Uncovered: The wedding picture on Pulp’s ‘Different Class’
It turned out that the gawky frontman for Pulp would shove aside the leading faces of Britpop as the day’s most enduring emblem of the UK’s mid-1990s cool.
He’d been slogging it for years longer than is remembered. With Pulp’s roots as early as the late 1970s, singer Jarvis Cocker’s indie venture had soldiered through as a footnote of Sheffield’s music history, eking out a fringe run of records largely ignored by the critics and the charts. Just as grunge was entering its final throes, a British cultural awakening fuelled by an economic boom and a nostalgia for its rock and pop heritage witnessed an explosion of bands celebrating British life over the darker introspections dominating the airwaves from Seattle.
In this swaggering maelstrom appeared the unlikely Cocker. Where the day’s NME and Melody Maker were plastered by the likes of Oasis and Blur furiously out-braggering each other amid the beered-up lad-theatre, Cocker’s gangly misfit spoke to most people, presenting a character far removed from the cartoon-machismo obsessed upon by the press and offering the pop world a sharper, wittier, and infinitely more relatable view of the UK landscape as it really was underneath the hedonistic escapism seizing Top of the Pops every week.
The pop world was now ready for Pulp. Gaining momentum with a string of singles leading up to 1994’s His ‘n’ Hers, Cocker’s passionate blasts of sugary indie and biting social observations found a moment that finally understood his strikingly witty lyrical worldview. Just as Britpop was reaching its fever peak, ‘Common People’ would thrust Pulp as one of the towering icons of the 1990s UK pop landscape, dropping an anthem powered by karaoke legs and chant-along soundtrack on a deeper level than ‘Girls & Boys’ or ‘Roll With It’ would muster long-term.
The title of their upcoming fifth album had already been decided. Dancing one night in London’s Eve’s Club, a chance remark of “different class” to describe something of high quality struck Cocker with a pleasing double meaning on the UK’s social hierarchies. For the planned cover, various degrees of separation between a groom-to-be and his younger art-student brother’s photography mate, Donald Milne, managed to bizarrely pull in team Pulp to hijack their wedding for their imminent record’s artwork. After initially requesting Milne to handle the special day’s photos, a hectic schedule packed with Pulp promo shoots forced a happy marriage of the two.
“He phoned us about a week before and said Pulp were thinking about using some photos with real people in them, including a wedding photo, and if we would do some joke shots where he’d bring some life-size cut-outs of the band down, he would do some proper wedding shots for us as well,” Dom O’Connor revealed on BBC Radio 6 Music in 2014, the groom tying the knot that day. Sure enough, Mile and the team arrived at Surrey’s St Barnabas Church in East Molesey with a cardboard Pulp to pose with. “They rocked up on the wedding day with the life-size cut-outs of the band and took the photos, and I suppose the rest is history.”
Dropped in October 1995, Different Class initially was released with a “Choose your own front cover” angle, graphic design firm Blue Source packing the first CD and vinyl issues with six double-sided inserts honouring Cocker’s conceptual direction of their grey cardboard cut-outs detailing snapshots of everyday UK life. Later editions would abandon the idea, defaulting to O’Connor’s wedding picture as the definitive cover.
Different Class would shoot to number one, and Pulp’s national pop treasure status was cemented there and then. Reportedly, the newlyweds never heard any news on whether their marriage snaps had made the final cut until O’Connor’s mother, who appears on the cover, saw their group photo plastered all over the local HMV. Island Records never made any payments, but by all accounts, Rough Trade saw to it that the O’Conners received free tickets to Pulp’s reunion show in 2011.
“Rough Trade very kindly sent us a signed copy of the photo that Jarvis had signed last year,” O’Connor revealed. “Just saying ‘Thank you very much, Dom and Sharon, for letting us crash your wedding,’ which I thought was a really nice touch actually.”
