Pulp, Common People, and the Class Politics of Sheffield

Cocker grew up in Intake, a council estate in the east of Sheffield. His father left when he was seven; he was raised by his mother and grandmother. The physical geography of his childhood – the estate, the nearby areas of Manor and Arbourthorne, the contrast with the wealthier suburbs to the west and south of the city – is the landscape of Pulp’s best work. “Sheffield Sex City”, “Common People”, “Mis-Shapes”, “Babies”: these songs are set in specific places that anyone from the east end of Sheffield recognises, even when the specific addresses are not named.

The Sheffield College of Art, which Cocker attended in the early 1980s, was the gateway out of Intake and into the cultural life of the city. The art school tradition in Sheffield – the same institution that produced members of the Human League, ABC, and other bands from the Sheffield electronic and post-punk scene – gave Cocker access to a world where his intelligence and his obsessive approach to image and performance were assets rather than oddities. He was not comfortable in the art school world either, being distinctly working class in an environment that was mostly not, but he used the discomfort. The tension between the council estate and the art school runs through everything he subsequently wrote.

“Common People” was written about a specific woman Cocker met at Saint Martin’s College of Art in London, where he had moved to study film. She told him she wanted to live like common people, to smoke cigarettes and see her boyfriend fight. Cocker understood what was being said – the romanticisation of working-class life by someone who could opt out of it at any moment, whose poverty would always be a choice rather than a condition. The fury in the song comes from that understanding.

The song reached number two in the UK charts. It was kept off the top by Robson and Jerome, which is one of the better jokes in pop history. Cocker performed it with Pulp at Glastonbury in 1995, headlining on short notice when the Stone Roses pulled out. The performance was one of the defining moments of Britpop, not because it celebrated Britpop’s assumptions but because it complicated them – the song is not triumphant, it is angry, and the anger was real in a way that most Britpop was not.

The reason “Common People” resonates specifically in Sheffield is that the class geography of the city is unusually stark and unusually self-conscious. The steel industry created a working-class culture that was politically articulate and proud of itself in a way that many comparable cities were not. The collapse of that industry created a post-industrial working class that was neither economically secure nor culturally invisible – it was very present and increasingly precarious. Cocker grew up in the space between those conditions and wrote about it with precision. Sheffield recognised itself in those songs in the way that cities only recognise themselves when someone gets the details exactly right.