There is a long, noisy moment when popular music is written just for you, a time that begins when you’re nine or ten and ends some time in your mid-thirties. This is when the soundtrack to your life is written: the beat that will always pull you onto a dancefloor, long after you’ve lost the body and moves; the anthem to which they’ll play you out in the crem. The time of my tunes is from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1980s. I’m not complaining: I’m the same age as the charts, and pop music has happened in my lifetime. If there is a golden age, it’s in there somewhere.
One of my favourite songs, however, is way out of my time: Pulp’s Common People. It will always be in my top 10 — and it wasn’t sung until 1995, when I was 41, well out of the Britpop demographic. In fact, I thought the whole Union-Jack-“sorted”-tea-with-the-Blairs moment didn’t amount to a lot more than a plagiarised 1960s revival without the thought or commitment.
But Common People spoke just to me, in that personal, mildly schizophrenic way that pop does when you’re in its groove. It grabbed me with the second line: “She studied sculpture at St Martins College.” I went to St Martins, and the lyrics precisely skewer the insecurity and proletarian aspirations of a lot of middle-class kids from nice schools, in Soho for the first time, all mumbling in My Fair Lady cockney. I saw the Sex Pistols’ first gig there. They emptied the room. None of us knew what to think or how to be until we were shown. I was like a gullible, apologetic sponge.
Even though Jarvis Cocker’s words are good and resonate, that’s not really why Common People stuck. There is that indefinable blend of noise and beat — that unsubtle but mercurial mixing of elements that makes five minutes of pop as profoundly part of your life as your own skin. This is dangerous ground to examine. It’s best left wordlessly felt. With Common People, it’s in the rising beat and the tone that changes from whispered irony to shouted anger; it simply picks you up and hurtles you along. You couldn’t turn it off halfway through. On one level, it’s a great social-protest song; on another, it’s an air-punching sing-along anthem. Yet mostly, for me, it’s the Indian summer of my music, the last pop song that was written for me — and I’m grateful for that.
“Sing along with the common people/Sing along and it might just get you through/Laugh along with the common people/Laugh along even though they’re laughing at you/And the stupid things that you do/Because you think that poor is cool.”
Advertisement
Different Class, from which this song is taken, is rereleased tomorrow on Island