CLASSY
common person
What happens when your wildest dreams become a reality? This week Jonathan talks with one of his teenage heroes, Jarvis Cocker of the band Pulp, about how fantasy drove his journey from working-class kid to famous pop star. And how he funneled all of his class frustration into the anthem “Common People.”
Jarvis is currently on tour with Pulp, you can find more information at https://linktr.ee/welovepulp. His book is Good Pop, Bad Pop.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION
JONATHAN MENJIVAR: I used to go out dancing every Thursday night. This was decades ago. I must’ve been about twenty at the time. My friends and I would drive out to this club in West Hollywood that was all 60s soul music and Britpop … this music that was big in the UK at the time. It was a whole scene … full of people who were trying to escape. People who were pretending to be somewhere else or someone else. Some guys wore mod suits and parkas on the dancefloor even though it was 80 degrees outside. At the time I was feeling really stuck. I was still working the same job I’d had in high school at a movie theater and I was living with my mom … sharing a bedroom in our apartment with my little brother … who was in middle school. I’d stayed at home to try and save money while I went to college, but now, I was at the point where I needed out. It was getting a little pathetic. I wanted to move to LA … which is you know, just like … half an hour away from where I grew up in Whittier. But I couldn’t figure out how to make it happen. I could barely get around the city. My car was old and it would overheat. The brakes had gone out on me … twice. Sometimes when you made a turn, the horn would engage … and that fucker was loud. I’d have to hop out, open the hood, and pull on a wire to disconnect it. I’ll say it because I know you’re thinking it … I was kind of a loser … But every Thursday night when I was out dancing I got to escape all of that. Certain songs would bring everyone out on the dance floor. And there was one in particular that took everything that made me feel like a loser and turned it into a virtue.
She came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge.
She studied sculpture at St. Martins College.
That’s where I, caught her eye.
This is “Common People,” a song by the band Pulp. In the song, Pulp’s lead singer Jarvis Cocker tells a story about this woman, this art student from Greece … she’s rich, but she wants to try slumming it for a bit. To live like she’s poor.
She said, I wanna live like common people
I wanna do whatever common people do
Wanna sleep with common people
I wanna sleep with common people
Like you
Oh what else could I do
I said I'll, I'll see what I can do
JONATHAN: The song is funny, it’s acerbic … it’s one of the first songs I heard that took all the suffering of the working class and made it feel like a badge of honor. In the end, Jarvis tells the woman she’s never going to understand what it’s like to struggle because she’s got a safety net. She can just call her dad to bail her out … But mostly what I like about “Common People” is that you can dance to it. It can transport you. On a full, sweaty dance floor I didn’t live in Whittier. I didn’t share a bedroom with my kid brother. I didn’t need a car or a job … I could move. And from this new vantage point, I could see that the world was bigger than I thought it was. Like the fantasies I’d had about escaping the suburbs and building a different life were only the start of what was possible … I’m Jonathan Menjivar and this is Classy … a show about the chasms between us that are really hard to talk about, but too big to ignore … Today … we reach across the chasm of the Atlantic and talk to my working-class hero Jarvis Cocker … because I thought he might have something to say about how you move beyond the borders of your class, when you can’t see over the walls. Jarvis built an entire career by writing songs about the deep class issues he was trying to outrun growing up in the working-class city of Sheffield. But how’d he actually do it? His very long path to “Common People” is a story about a guy who needs a lucky break, but can’t figure out how to make it happen. Along the way, he makes some super bad decisions … nearly dies … until he finally does get the break he was looking for… and of course … finds out that success is more confusing and complicated than he’d imagined.
[MUSIC]
JONATHAN: Last year Jarvis Cocker released a memoir called Good Pop, Bad Pop. And in the book, it’s clear that he spent a good portion of his life lost in a kind of fantasy world. It started with television. Jarvis says as a kid he wanted to live inside the TV … to actually crawl in there somehow.
JARVIS: Yeah, I never tried it, but I mean, TVs were boxes rather than just screens in those days. So it seemed possible as a kid. You know, having something actually in your house that would show you pictures of the world or give you ideas about the world, then you just have to then compare your life to that. And so I would kind of sometimes imagine, you know, if somebody was watching my life on TV, would they turn over to another channel because it was so boring? It, it makes you look for some kind of plot line or excitement.
JONATHAN: And what was the thing you were seeing on TV that you wanted?
JARVIS: Anything really, I didn't really have any taste. I yeah, they used to be a program called Time Tunnel, do you remember that one, it was like a thing. It was an American show that was put onto a UK T.V. and each week they would go into this tunnel and it would either take them back in time or into the future, but they never really knew until they walked into the tunnel where they were going to go.
[ARCHIVAL CLIP, TIME TUNNEL TV SHOW THEME SONG]
JONATHAN: Come with me now further into the past. It’s the early 70s … we’re in northern England. In the suburb of Sheffield where Jarvis grew up, called Intake. It’s got this industrial name, but it’s also kind of rural.
JARVIS: And that's one of the things they say about Sheffield, although it was an incredibly industrial city and incredibly polluted with all the stuff that went on in the steel factories. It had the nickname of the dirty picture in a golden frame because it's got amazing countryside around it. Uh, it seemed just like a normal kind of place to me.
[MUSIC]
JONATHAN: Sheffield in the 70s and 80s, when Jarvis is growing up, is kind of the crucible of working-class struggle in the same way Detroit might be here in America. That time in England is defined by class conflict and Sheffield was right at the center of it. The city had relied on jobs from the steel industry, but then the factories were nationalized. Then a recession hit.
JARVIS: It was a pretty grim time. It was the beginning of Margaret Thatcher's tenure as the prime minister of the country. So everything, you know, Sheffield basically got closed down. Not that I would have gone into a job in a steel factory because I wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes because I've really got the physical capabilities to do that. But, you know, that was why the city was there.
JONATHAN: One day when he’s seven, Jarvis’s dad picks up and leaves. He doesn’t say anything, he just goes … all the way to Australia Jarvis doesn’t talk to him for decades. His immediate family then is mostly women – his mom, grandma, his sister, two aunts. And like lots of shy, skinny kids with glasses growing up working class … there are people in Jarvis’s life who think he needs some toughening up. One of them gets him a job in a fish market.
JARVIS: My mum, kind of, after my dad had left, my mum had various relationships. And I remember one was with a guy who was like a scrap metal merchant. He tried to toughen me up a bit. And I think it was a friend of his, a kind of gangster kind of guy who was involved in the market, who got me the job on this fish stall. Maybe as a joke or something. It just ended up that I stunk of fish every Saturday. But it wasn’t very good if I wanted to go to a party because I was trying to overcome my shyness and talk to a girl, I was I was very self-conscious about the fact that I probably either smell of fish or bleach, which I used to kind of hold my hands in to try and get rid of the smell of fish.
[MUSIC]
JONATHAN: Shy, stinky Jarvis spends a lot of time in his head … fantasizing about a different kind of life. He wants to be famous, wants to make music that can change the world. And then punk rock happens just as he’s becoming a teen which makes it seem possible. But instead of forming a band, he makes up a pretend one. In a school notebook, he actually writes a manifesto for his new band that doesn’t exist yet. He says they’re going to write quote, “fairly conventional, yet slightly off-beat pop songs.” He’s 15 when he does this and the manifesto has all the bravado of a teenager. It’s so clear he’s still a kid … there are descriptions and drawings of the clothes the band is supposed to wear – duffle coats and pointy boots and garish t-shirts. Jarvis even draws album covers before he’s written a single song. From the beginning, the band is called Pulp … after throwaway culture like dime store novels and comic books.
JARVIS: And you’ve gotta think, you know, I came up with the idea for the band when I was very young. So I was still reading comics and things like that. You’re still allowed to read comics at 15 aren’t you?
JONATHAN: You are.
JONATHAN: After living in this fantasy world for a bit, Jarvis invites some friends in. They go over to his grandparents house and drink beer in their sitting room. Jarvis plays guitar, one friend plays the organ. Another friend bangs on a coal bucket. Jarvis looks around the room … and it’s actually happening.
JONATHAN: At some point the band becomes a real band. You write a bunch of songs, you start playing shows, you record a demo, and you kind of have a big break. You have a chance to give your demo tape to John Peel, which I should just explain for people. John Peel is like a legendary BBC DJ, often broke bands on his show.
JARVIS: Yeah, I mean, I'd been listening to the John Peel show because that was the only show on national radio that would play punk music or any kind of alternative music, really. And um, the good thing with the John Peel sessions, you would often get bands, that would be the first time they'd ever been recorded. You know, you would discover things before they’d ever released anything. So that was like the real thing to aspire to.
JONATHAN: Pulp had recorded a demo in a local Sheffield studio in some guy’s house. And then, by happenstance … a couple weeks later it turned out that John Peel was coming to Sheffield to do a live DJ set. So Jarvis went and brought along a copy of the demo in a little homemade sleeve.
JARVIS: I gave it to him at the end of the performance that he'd been doing when he kind of took it off me and said, Oh, I'll listen to that on my way home in the car. I didn't know whether to believe that or not because I knew that countless people gave him tapes. Then about a week later, there was a phone call while I was at school that my grandmother answered with John Peel's producer saying, You know, we'd like you to come and record a session for us. And my grandmother said, Oh, I think you must mean my grandson, not me. And she told me about it when I came back from school. So, yeah, I was I was about two weeks away from my 18th birthday. So when that happened, I thought, ‘Well, this is it’. You know, I'm going to be famous. I'm going to be a pop star. So there's no need to go to college.
JONATHAN: Jarvis and the band show up to do their Peel session … they’re finally in a real studio. But they’re young. The drummer is 15. In the recording from that session, you can hear how scrappy they are.
JARVIS: It was a real mess, really, because we had to borrow lots of equipment because we didn't really have very much equipment of our own. Somebody had made us a synth drum from reading some kind of Home Electronics magazine, but it was made out of the trigger was like a pad that you would use in a burglar alarm. And it was pressure sensitive, but it was really insensitive. You had to really whack it.
[MUSIC]
JONATHAN: So that's in 1981. You think you're going to be a big pop star,you decide not to go to college? And then what happens?
JARVIS: Yeah, then the dark years began.
JONATHAN: The John Peel session plays on the BBC a couple of times … and then nothing. Band members decide they need to move on with their lives and they go on to college. Jarvis keeps writing songs, gets new band members. Then they decide they need to move on with their lives too. Jarvis is living in an old factory in Sheffield rent free because a friend is looking after the building. People are not supposed to live there. There’s no heat, it’s cold, and Jarvis makes it worse when he tears down a wall. If you look up at the ceiling, you can see the sky. He’s getting government assistance … about £30 a week. And other than the occasional Pulp show and nights out at the disco … things are bleak. Even though Jarvis has spent his whole life in this working class city, he isn’t sure where he fits in. On the one hand, there’s a lot of college kids in Sheffield … but they’re mostly middle class students from other parts of the UK.
JARVIS: And you could go to their parties, but they were a bit kind of, um, I don't know, they just got on our nerves, really. Then you would have people who were working in factories and stuff like that, who we used to call them townies. They were just really violent. I mean, if you walked through a certain part of town and you were wearing some kind of alternative clothing, they would just jump on you and beat you up.
JONATHAN: At the time there’s a coal miner’s strike that lasts a year. All across the country people are protesting … trying to stop mines from being shut down.
JARVIS: I sympathized with the miners and I found it difficult to totally go along with it because although I agreed with their struggle, I didn't like getting beaten up. So it was, I had a slightly ambivalent attitude to, to it.
[MUSIC]
JARVIS: The city was going through this massive kind of nervous breakdown because everything had closed. There were no jobs. And especially I was very well aware of it where we were living because it was an old factory and there were just lots of other buildings around there, massive, massive buildings that would have had thousands of people going in and working them. And they were just all empty and falling into disrepair, you know? So it was a dark time. Yeah, it was. I mean, you know, I had fun, but it just seemed like nothing was happening. Sheffield was just going down and down and down. And I didn't want to go down with the ship, you know?
JONATHAN: But before Jarvis can leave, this thing he’s been doing … imagining himself to be the hero of his fantasy life … it gets him in trouble … and it also leads to this life altering experience. One night in 1985, he’s hanging out with a girl at her flat. He’s trying to impress her and he decides he’s going to try something he’d seen a guy do at a party a few days before. The guy had opened a window in the kitchen … walked out on the window ledge and then climbed back into another window about three feet away.
JONATHAN: So Jarvis he’s with this girl. But the windows in her flat are a little different … there’s not really a ledge he can walk on.
JARVIS: So I came up with this bad idea that because I couldn't stand on the window ledge, I would hang from the window by my fingers and then swing to the next ledge and then pull myself back into the room.
[MUSIC]
JARVIS: And I ended it with me hanging from the window, realizing that I couldn't do it. Realizing that I didn't even have the strength to get myself back up into the room, her not being able to pull me up. No one else being around. And so I could feel that I was losing my grip. And so I just said, Look, I'm going to count to three and I'm going to let go. And I hit the ground and then realized that I’d done something bad. And I kind of looked at and forlornly said, Can you call an ambulance, please?
[MUSIC]
JONATHAN: Jarvis has fallen twenty feet, down to the pavement. His wrist and foot are fractured and so is his pelvis.
JONATHAN: It's like the thing that happens in the movies when someone's hanging off the cliff, you know, and the fingers are going.
JARVIS: Well, yeah, but then that's the thing, because it felt, you know, it would be a dramatic incident in a movie, but in real life it wasn't. It was really banal and it was so kind of…it wasn't dramatic. There was no dramatic music playing. I didn't find the extra ounce of strength, which it definitely would have happened if it had been in the movies, you know? Life isn't scripted.
JONATHAN: Jarvis would spend more than a month in a hospital bed. More stuck in Sheffield than he’d ever been before … When we come back, how this fall leads to a creative breakthrough.
[AD BREAK]
JONATHAN: It’s me, Jonathan Menjivar, your very classy host welcoming you back. So Jarvis has all these broken bones. He’s getting around in a wheelchair when he’s moving at all. Mostly, he’s lying in bed… in a hospital. But he still wants to work on songs. So a friend stops by with a keyboard.
JARVIS: Yeah, it was just like one of those kind of Casio keyboards I could play with headphones so that I could try and write things because it was like an old fashioned kind of hospital. They don't really have them anymore now, like a convalescent hospital. So. So there were like 20 guys all in the same room, and there's no way I was going to be there, like strumming an acoustic guitar while they could all listen, they would have thrown things at me, anyway. So I just tried with this keyboard, which had a disco setting on it, and I kind of maybe because I couldn't dance anymore and had been going to night clubs and dancing. So I started trying to write dance music, I suppose using this disco setting that was on the keyboard.
JONATHAN: And I mean, I have to say, like a disco rhythm button on a little Casio keyboard like that. It's kind of cheap sounding, you know, It is not the like thumping bass …
JARVIS: Well, if you got the headphones and turned them up a bit, it was not bad. But also it you know, it would do it for as long as it took you to come up with an idea. You could just make it go on. Da dum dum dum, dum, dum, dum. I mean, I haven't got it here. I've got an omnichord here. I can make a noise with that. Unfortunately, this hasn't got a disco setting, but it's gotta.
JONATHAN: Bring it up to the mic so we can hear it when you start playing. Oh, we'll.
JARVIS: Oh yeah, don’t you worry. Here we go. Okay, so let's get this. And also the chord sequences aren’t that great on this, but. So, you know, I could get that going. There you are. Hours of pleasure.
JONATHAN: So with this cheap disco rhythm running, Jarvis realizes something else. He’d spent all this time imagining some fantasy future for himself that television viewers would applaud. He’d been inside his head … pretending to be famous … pretending he wasn’t stuck in Sheffield getting beaten up by townies. But falling and crashing into the ground … it’s literally grounding. And while he’s healing, he looks around at his life in Sheffield and realizes that it’s interesting. He realizes he has something he can write songs about.
JARVIS: So I just tried to put that into practice immediately. So I wrote little character studies of the people who were on the ward with me, and they were just like the notes that you would get in a detective novel, you know, like a suspect was wearing black raincoat, slight limp, whatever, you know, just things like that.
JONATHAN: The notes detail the injuries of other patients. “Doug #1 – about fifty – hit by a taxi – teeth removed to fix skull.” There are notes about a man who’s constantly farting. Another about a man named Ernest who groans all night, but gets quieter and quieter until one morning … when he dies. A couple of the men are miners recovering from accidents … and Jarvis gets to know them a bit and thinks … hey these townies are alright. He’d been making class judgements about people, but up close, it turned out there was more nuance than he’d allowed himself to see before. But mostly, he’s just scribbling. Trying to take note of everything.
JARVIS: Cause I didn't know exactly what I was looking for, but I thought if I could take everything down in enough detail, somehow that would make something happen. I didn't know what the actual clue would be that would solve the case or the riddle of life. But it was a big thing to move my focus from looking at the sky to looking at the ground, basically looking at what was surrounding me.
[MUSIC]
JONATHAN: With this new vision of the world … healed and walking to a four on the floor beat, Jarvis writes new Pulp songs … and they release a new record. If this were a movie, they’d have a hit. But you know, we’ve already established … this is not a movie. Or if it is, it’s one of those frustrating ones, where the main character can’t catch a break. So in 1988, two and a half years after falling out of the window, Jarvis moves to London to go to art school. And here in London he’s looking around … and things are different. For the first time, he’s seeing people with money.
JARVIS: Not long after I arrived, I was walking up from Leicester Square tube to the college and there was a guy in quite a posh suit with a woman and he stopped and then he vomited quite violently into a litter bin. And he obviously had money, but he'd gone out, he’d got drunk in the daytime and now was throwing up in a litter bin and it wasn't very classy. And the woman looked really embarrassed as she was waiting for him to tidy himself up. So I don't know. It's really stuck with me, that image. Like um, it sounds a bit trite to say it but, money doesn’t make you happy.
JONATHAN: All this time Jarvis had been stuck in dying Sheffield, he’d imagined being rescued by fame and money. But here was someone with all the comforts in the world who was obviously and embarrassingly … uncomfortable. Jarvis also noticed that people seemed to be much more individually focused. Running around pursuing whatever they’d come to London to make happen for themselves. He’d see it just getting around the city.
JARVIS: If you're on a bus and it's packed and it's raining outside, the windows steam up. And um, I realized that people in London didn't clean the window, you know, so they could see the world outside. They would just leave it steamed up.
JONATHAN: What did it do for your class identity?
JARVIS: Well, the first thing I did was to start speaking in a much broader Sheffield accent than I had done when I was in Sheffield, because I just thought, I don't want to start talking. Okay. How's it going? Like talking in a kind of like, student accent. So, cause I'd had this kind of problem with students, you know, when I was in Sheffield. So I got all these very unfounded prejudices, which I have tried to get rid of as I've moved through life. So, yeah, I probably put it on a bit.
JONATHAN: He’s still writing songs, still trying to make sense of the place he’d come from which he can see a little better now … now that he’s got some distance from it. Pulp starts to get a little more attention and they sign to a major label. Then in 1995… thirteen years after that John Peel session that went nowhere, Pulp finally gets a hit.
[MUSIC]
JONATHAN: So Common People. I know it's a big fun pop record, but it is also very dark and angry.
JARVIS: That's. That's just like me.
JONATHAN:Yeah. Were you feeling that way about, like, the class ideas that are in that song? Were you feeling that that sentiment?
JARVIS: Yeah. I mean, it was just this girl, you know, we’d gone to the pub after a day at college, and we were just chatting about stuff, and she was just saying that she wanted to move to Hackney and live with the common people. And, you know, the thing is, in Sheffield, if you say someone's common, that's a real insult. It's like, Oh, they're really common them lot. They eat beans out of the tin. People are always trying to make these kind of judgments about class, even within, you know, I mean, that’s something we should say actually, you know, that in the place that I was brought up, there was quite a lot of variation within that. You would walk, if you drove through the area, you'd say, Oh, yeah, okay, this is a working class area. But within that area there were lots of like subtle gradations in there of this bit's a bit lower than this and this bit's a bit posher than this bit you know.
JONATHAN: Jarvis thought, this woman … she doesn’t get the subtleties. She doesn’t understand that common is an insult where I come from.
JARVIS: The fact that she'd used that word which to me meant one thing and to her meant exactly the opposite, showed that she didn't understand anything at all about these so-called common people that she wanted to go and live amongst.
JONATHAN: This woman may not have understood it, but listeners did. The song went all the way to #2 on the UK singles chart. And just a month later, at the big British festival Glastonbury, Pulp closed their set with Common People and waves of fans were belting it along with them
You wanna live like common people
You wanna see whatever common people see
Wanna sleep with common people
You wanna sleep with common people
Like me
But she didn't understand
She just smiled and held my hand
[fade under]
JARVIS: I was just trying to get my head around what I actually thought about where my life was going, where I actually wanted to live, where I belonged. And so I couldn't really work out. So when I can't work things out, I get frustrated. And you get that in the song, I suppose.
JONATHAN: Pulp goes on to release their first legitimately hit album … Different Class. It’s full of dark, funny, subversive songs about Jarvis’s favorite subjects … sex and class. It goes to #1 the week it’s released.
JARVIS: I knew I was from the working class background, but I didn't want to actively say we are working class, but I wanted to find a different class. I didn't want to be like the guy throwing up in the bin either with his posh suit on. I wanted to find my own place to live, you know, and people to live in that world with me.
JONATHAN: I’d always heard “Common People” and other songs on Different Class as a slam against the rich. But I hadn’t caught this other bit. That Jarvis was running from some of the people he grew up with too. When I started working on this show, I was talking to an old friend and he told me that he and I were kind of similar. We didn’t necessarily make the choice to switch classes … we were running from where we came from. Running from machismo and violence and in my case, being forced to spend Saturdays working on cars with my step-dad. We were running from people who didn’t respect us for who we were to a third, in-between world like the one Jarvis was trying to create … this fantasy land where smart weirdos could thrive.
JARVIS: Like the first song that’s on the record Mis-Shapes, it’s like a kind of call to all the other people who felt like they didn’t fit into any one particular category. It gets it’s title from these chocolates that used to be sold in the corner shop that was in front of our house. Something had gone wrong in the manufacturing process and they were a bit misshapen, so they were so cheap that they tasted just as good as the perfect ones. And I just thought, Well, I'm like that as a person.
JONATHAN: Pulp got swept up into a whole scene of other British bands that kids like me all the way in LA were dancing to. Almost overnight, Jarvis went from being an indie sensation to a genuine celebrity. He was on the cover of magazines … and on TV gameshows. He was one of the most famous men in England – people chased him down the street. He was suddenly tabloid fodder.
JONATHAN: I'm really curious what it's like to go from this guy who, from your origins, you're making music with like cast off instruments and just trying to to do this to becoming a legitimate pop star with like money and fame and like, you aren't suffering anymore.
JARVIS: Yeah, terrible. It was yeah, it was difficult, really, because I'd been doing it for so long by that point that I guess it become more like a kind of psychological crutch than a real ambition. But then it happened and I hadn't really thought about what I would do once it had happened or if it did happen. So basically, I just didn't really handle it very well.
JONATHAN: Mm hmm. What do you mean?
JARVIS: I just kind of lost it, basically because I just had to. I had nothing to look at. I had nothing to inspire me. So I just kind of picked myself apart.
JONATHAN: You can hear this on the very first song that starts Pulp’s next record. Jarvis is back in his head again. Trapped there.
JONATHAN: The record opens with these lyrics please excuse me Jarvis while I read them:
This is our "Music from A Bachelor's Den"
The sound of loneliness turned up to ten.
JONATHAN: And then a little later …
This is the sound of someone losing the plot.
Making out that they’re ok when they’re not.
JONATHAN: So being isolated like that, no longer being able to observe people on the street like ordinary people. Were you worried that it was going to take your voice the way that you developed?
JARVIS: Yeah, I guess so, yeah, because I developed this idea that it was all about details and um, and about real life, you know, about real things that happened. And I didn't have that much of a real life anymore. So I just had to find a way out of it, really. You know, like now I'm very happy I can go on public transport again. So I'm back in the world. And although that world is not perfect, it's better, I didn't really like the the kind of jet set world that all.
[MUSIC]
JONATHAN: Do you feel like you have shifted classes?
JARVIS: Probably. I've got a pepper grinder, so that makes me quite middle class now.
JONATHAN: I tried to push Jarvis on this, but he wasn’t going to go there. I mean joking about class, joking about how much money you have or don’t have … that’s what you do in uncomfortable moments like this. If Jarvis is the embodiment of working-class issues, he’s also the embodiment of the thing that happens to any of us who have jumped classes. The way that you can become kind of a walking contradiction of ideals you always defined yourself against. That even if you wanted to be comfortable and surround yourself with a few nice things, once you’re there … you’re dealing with a privilege you’ve never had before. You worry that you’ve turned your back on where you came from. You might even want to go out and smoke some cigarettes and play some pool … and pretend you’re one of the common people.
[MUSIC]
JONATHAN: Pulp’s last record came out in 2001. Jarvis says that even with his class shift, he still feels the intensity of what drove him to write Common People and the other songs on Different Class.
JARVIS: I'm realizing it at the moment, actually, because, you know, we're going to play some shows later this year. So we've been rehearsing and I have been singing those songs again and it's really quite exhausted because there's a lot of but not really angst, but just a lot of intense emotion. And I think I put a lot of what I was feeling at the time into those songs, and I really feel it when I sing them now.
[MUSIC]
JONATHAN: Thank you so much for this. Um, I should just tell you your music has meant so much to me. I danced to it a lot at a club when I was young. And that really expanded my idea of what was possible in the world.
JARVIS: Well thanks Jonathan, well I mean that’s it. As I say, at one point, maybe I was disappointed that there wasn’t a complete change in the world order. But, I think as I’ve got older, I think every little can help. So thank you, I’m glad that you got something from that from the other side of the world. It’s nice that it made some contact with you.
[MUSIC]
JONATHAN: Jarvis Cocker. His memoir about all of this … is called Good Pop, Bad Pop.
When you’re young, it’s really easy to feel stuck in the place that you come from – especially if you’re growing up without money or a clear path to college or some kind of future. But in America, we do have one classic escape route that teenagers have been taking for generations … the military. On the next episode of Classy, we’ll follow a group of Army recruiters to find out how they convince young people to enlist.
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Before we get to the credits… the Classy team and I just want to say thank you for listening. We hope you’re enjoying the show so far. Please keep on sharing it with the classy people in your life. And you know what's coming next … the best way for people to discover this show is if you take a few minutes to rate and review Classy on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Also, you can still hit us up on our Classy hotline … the number is 844-992-5277 we’d really love to hear any stories or questions that you have about class.
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JONATHAN: Classy is a production of Pineapple Street Studios. It’s written and produced by me, Jonathan Menjivar. Our Producer is Kristen Torres. Associate Producer … Marina Henke. Senior Managing Producer … Asha Saluja. Our Editor is Haley Howle. Executive Editor … Joel Lovell. Our Assistant Engineers are Sharon Bardales and Jade Brooks. Senior Engineers are Marina Paiz and Pedro Alvira. Fact checking by Jane Drinkard. This episode was scored and mixed by me with additional scoring by Marina Paiz who also mixed it. Scoring assistance by Sharon Bardales. Music in this episode from Joseph Shabason courtesy of Western Vinyl, Joseph Shabason and Vibrant Matter and Shabason and Gunning courtesy of Seance Center, And Pulp courtesy of Universal Music. Additional music from Epidemic Sound. Music licensing by Anthony Roman. Our artwork is by Curt Courtney and Lauren Viera at Cadence 13. Marketing and promotion by Grace Cohen-Chen, Hillary Schupf, and Liz O’Malley. Legal services for Pineapple Street Studios by Kristel Tupja at Audacy. Special thanks to Elia Einhorn,
Talia Miller at Rough Trade and Mog Yoshihara. Jenna Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky are the Executive Producers at Pineapple Street. The next episode will be out in a week. Make sure to listen on the Audacy app, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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