Pulp are one of the most unique bands to emerge from the British music scene. Formed in Sheffield in 1978 by a then-15-year-old Jarvis Cocker, the band spent the best part of a decade and a half toiling in near-total obscurity, releasing records that barely registered and playing to indifferent crowds. Their early musical style was an eclectic, restless blend of influences: electronic new wave, post-punk, and folkish pop; and while the ambition was always there, commercial success was not.
That all changed in the mid-1990s. Signing to Island Records proved to be the turning point, and in 1994, Pulp released ‘His ‘n’ Hers’, their fourth studio album and their first real breakthrough. It reached number nine on the UK Albums Chart and earned them a Mercury Music Prize nomination, announcing Pulp to a mainstream audience that had no idea what it had been missing. Lyrically, the album set the template for everything that followed: unflinching explorations of sex, class, voyeurism, and the mundane textures of British life, delivered with Cocker’s uniquely deadpan wit.
But it was ‘Different Class’ in 1995 that cemented their legacy. The album went to number one, won the Mercury Prize, and spawned four top ten singles, including the number two hits ‘Common People’ and ‘Mis-Shapes/Sorted for E’s & Wizz’. Widely regarded as the definitive Britpop album, ‘Different Class’ did what few records manage: it captured a cultural moment perfectly while also transcending it. Where Oasis were brash, and Blur were arch, Pulp were sharp, funny, and devastating; their kitchen-sink lyricism and disco-inflected pop offering an incisive commentary on class and British identity that felt entirely their own. Cocker and the band became reluctant figureheads of the movement, grouped alongside Blur, Oasis and Suede as part of the so-called Britpop “big four”, though Pulp always felt like they were operating on a slightly different, stranger plane.
Then, just as Britpop reached its bloated peak, Pulp killed it. ‘This Is Hardcore’, released in 1998, was a deliberate and brutal departure: darker, more complex, and deeply uncomfortable. Where ‘Different Class’ had been celebratory, ‘This Is Hardcore’ looked inward with something close to horror, exploring the seedy underside of fame and the slow fade of a life in the spotlight. It debuted at number one and earned another Mercury Prize nomination, but with far fewer sales than its predecessor. NME later wrote that it was “a sloughing-off of fame’s skin, a rejection of the Britpop monster”, an album that brought the whole movement to a shuddering halt. In retrospect, it stands as one of the bravest records of its era.
After releasing ‘We Love Life’ in 2001, the band entered a hiatus, having sold more than ten million records worldwide. They reunited in 2011 for a celebrated run of festival appearances, including a surprise set at Glastonbury, before going quiet again. Then in July 2022, Cocker announced a second reunion, with the full line-up confirmed for a series of concerts in 2023, including homecoming shows at Sheffield Arena. Tragically, bassist Steve Mackey, a core member since the band’s 1990s peak, died in March 2023 at the age of 56, casting a long shadow over the reunion. The band pressed on, and the touring continued into 2024 with a North American leg, during which they debuted a clutch of new songs that hinted at something more than a nostalgia exercise.
That something turned out to be ‘More’, released on 6 June 2025 via Rough Trade Records: their first album in almost twenty-four years, and their eighth studio record overall. Recorded in just three weeks with producer James Ford, it debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, making it their third album to reach the top spot after ‘Different Class’ and ‘This Is Hardcore’. The album was dedicated to Steve Mackey. Critically, it was met with near-universal acclaim, earning an 83 on Metacritic and a nomination for the 2025 Mercury Prize.
Pulp’s connection to War Child runs deep. When ‘Different Class’ was nominated for the 1996 Mercury Prize alongside the original ‘Help’ charity album, Pulp won, and Cocker donated the entire £25,000 prize fund to War Child. Three decades later, the band contributed to ‘Help(2)’, the long-awaited follow-up charity album released on 6 March 2026. Their track, ‘Begging for Change’, a raw, urgent song recorded at Abbey Road Studios and produced by James Ford, had begun life during the ‘More’ sessions before being completed for the project. It featured an all-star choir including fellow Sheffield legends Arctic Monkeys, Damon Albarn, Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten, Kae Tempest and Carl Barât. As Cocker put it: “Thirty years ago, we gave our Mercury Prize and the prize money to War Child. This year, we have given more.”
What follows is a ranking of Pulp’s ten greatest songs: a near-impossible task for a band with such a deep and distinctive catalogue.
First released as the closing track on Pulp's 2002 compilation 'Hits', 'Last Day of the Miners' Strike' is one of the band's most quietly extraordinary songs, with deep roots in both Sheffield's history and the band's own history.
The miners' strike of 1984 to 1985 was one of the most seismic and bitter industrial disputes Britain has ever seen. Triggered by the National Coal Board's announcement that it would close twenty pits with the loss of 20,000 jobs, the strike began in South Yorkshire with a walkout at Cortonwood Colliery on 6 March 1984. Led by NUM president Arthur Scargill, it spread rapidly through the coalfields of Yorkshire, South Wales, Scotland and the North East, and lasted a full year. The strike polarised the country: on one side, pit communities fighting to preserve their livelihoods and way of life; on the other, Margaret Thatcher's government, determined to break the power of the unions. The Battle of Orgreave in June 1984, where thousands of pickets faced police in riot gear on the outskirts of Sheffield, became one of its most violent and defining flashpoints.
By January 1985, with the NUM's assets frozen, mounting financial hardship and dwindling solidarity from other unions, the strike began to disintegrate. On 3 March 1985, the NUM's National Executive voted, by the narrowest of margins, in favour of an organised return to work. The miners went back defeated but defiant, marching behind colliery bands and lodge banners. It was, as the song puts it, the Magna Carta of South Yorkshire: the moment everything changed.
For Sheffield, the consequences were devastating and permanent. The collapse of the mining industry dragged steel and manufacturing down with it, hollowing out communities that had no other economic foundation. The city that Pulp came from was shaped, scarred, and in many ways defined by what happened in those twelve months.
The song itself came about in unusual circumstances. Candida Doyle brought in a sample from Burt Bacharach's 'South American Getaway', and Cocker built the song around it, drawing on a dream he'd had and on the stories of those around him. Pulp guitarist Russell Senior had been a flying picket during the strike and had fought at Orgreave; his political consciousness filtered through into the band's DNA, even as Cocker later admitted, with characteristic self-deprecation, that he himself had little interest in politics at the time and came to regret it.
The song uses the end of the strike not as a political statement but as a personal landmark: a fixed point in memory around which feelings of loss, solidarity, and the passage of time quietly orbit. It is Pulp doing what they do best, finding the epic buried inside the everyday. The arrangement is unhurried and melancholic, the Bacharach sample lending it an almost dreamlike warmth that sits in strange, beautiful tension with the weight of what it is describing.
For over two decades, the song was never played live. That changed on 25 July 2025, when Pulp gave it its live debut at Tramlines Festival in Sheffield, their hometown, joined onstage by fellow Sheffield native and longtime friend Richard Hawley. The moment felt entirely fitting: a song about what Sheffield lost, finally performed in Sheffield, forty years on.
One of the most recent entries on this list, ‘Begging for Change’ is also one of the most unusual: a song that nearly didn’t exist, finally finished for a cause that gave it its purpose.
The track had its roots in the sessions for ‘More’, begun in late 2024, but Cocker couldn’t get the lyrics right. As he later explained on social media: “It didn’t go on ‘More’ because a certain person couldn’t get the lyrics right, even though the rest of the band waited patiently.” The basic tracks sat unfinished until producer James Ford called Cocker about contributing to ‘Help(2)’, the long-awaited follow-up to the original 1995 War Child charity album. Cocker immediately suggested finishing ‘Begging for Change’ for the project, and the song was completed at Abbey Road Studios in November 2025. As Ford himself described it: “’Begging For Change’ nearly made it onto Pulp’s last record, ‘More’, but I actually think that Jarvis has had that track around for years. He could never finish the lyrics. I called him up about being a part of this, and he immediately suggested trying to finish that off.”
The result is one of the most viscerally alive things Pulp have released in years. NME described it as “raw and primal”, finding Cocker and the band “in a stripped-back, urgent and unapologetic form”. Far Out Magazine called it an “abrasive, punkish charge”, while DIY noted it as finding the band “at their most urgent, its propulsive momentum bolstered by an anthemic, spelled-out chorus.” One reviewer described it as a “raucous cowboy romp”, with Cocker stretching the word ‘change’ across the track and applying it to inequalities and everything in between.
The song also features an extraordinary cast of backing vocalists: an all-star choir including Damon Albarn, Grian Chatten of Fontaines D.C., Kae Tempest and Carl Barât of The Libertines, as well as the same children’s choir that featured on ‘Flags’, the album’s second single. The combination of Cocker’s insistent, political vocals and that massed chorus gives the song a communal urgency that feels entirely fitting for its context.
Cocker was characteristically wry about the song’s purpose: “Sometimes a song needs a purpose. Like all the other 22 songs on the ‘Help’ album, ‘Begging For Change’ is designed to raise money to help children living in war zones around the world. This only works if you buy/download/stream it.”
The connection between Pulp and War Child runs thirty years deep. When ‘Different Class’ won the 1996 Mercury Prize, competing on the same shortlist as the original ‘Help’ album, Cocker donated the entire £25,000 prize fund to the charity. The band’s involvement in ‘Help(2)’ closes that circle in the most fitting way: not a nostalgic gesture, but a genuinely vital new song, delivered with all the urgency the moment demands.
The lead single from ‘More’, ‘Spike Island’ announced Pulp’s return in the most emphatic way possible: a disco-flecked, propulsive banger that felt as instantly classic as anything the band had released in their 1990s prime. Released on 10 April 2025, it topped the UK Physical Singles chart and became the first Pulp song to appear on any US radio airplay chart, reaching number 26 on the Billboard Adult Alternative Airplay chart.
The song takes its name from one of the most mythologised events in British music history. On 27 May 1990, The Stone Roses played an outdoor concert on Spike Island: a reclaimed chemical waste site on the Mersey estuary in Widnes, Cheshire. Around 28,000 people made the pilgrimage to this unlikely location, surrounded by cooling towers and chemical plants, for what became known as the Woodstock of the baggy generation; a moment where indie and rave culture converged in a single, euphoric, chaotic afternoon. The sound was notoriously poor, the wind off the estuary carrying it away from large sections of the crowd, but none of that seemed to matter. It was, as one attendee put it, less about what you heard and more about being part of something. Between every song, a DJ chanted: “Spike Island come alive.”
Cocker wasn’t there. He pieced the legend together secondhand, through the stories of those who were, including co-writer Jason Buckle of The All-Seeing I, who had attended the gig and whose memories fed directly into the song. It is the second Pulp song to draw on the Spike Island mythology, the first being ‘Sorted for E’s & Wizz’ from ‘Different Class’ in 1995, which similarly conjured the atmosphere of a generation-defining rave from the outside looking in.
As a piece of music, ‘Spike Island’ is a statement of intent. MOJO described it as “a disco-flecked banger that can sturdily hold its own when measured against anything from the band’s mid-90s commercial zenith.” Paste Magazine called it “existential, propulsive”, noting that it did “the heavy lifting of reassuring any fans worried about the quality of a new record after so long away right off the bat.” One review described it as feeling “as instantly classic as any of the band’s 90s hits”, beginning with an addictive drum beat and bouncy bassline before settling into a deep disco groove.
Lyrically, the song operates on two levels at once. On the surface, it is a meditation on a legendary gig and the mythology that accrues around such moments; underneath, it is Cocker talking to himself, promising that this time, back after all these years, he will get it right. “I was born to perform, it’s a calling,” he sings, before catching himself with a characteristic shrug: “I exist to do this: shouting and pointing.” The Guardian noted that it seemed “weirdly fitting that Pulp have premiered their first album in 24 years with a song that appears to fret about the validity of returning at all.”
The music video, directed by Cocker himself, used AI to animate the iconic photographs taken by Rankin and Donald for the ‘Different Class’ album cover in 1995, dropping the band into surreal, uncanny-valley scenarios. Cocker was typically wry about the technology: “The weekend I began work on the video was a strange time: I went out of the house and kept expecting weird transformations of the surrounding environment due to the images the computer had been generating. The experience had marked me."
‘Spike Island’ is, in many ways, the perfect comeback single: rooted in the past, thrillingly alive in the present, and quietly terrified of both.
‘Sorted for E’s & Wizz’ is, on the surface, a song about going to a rave. Somewhere in a field in Hampshire, twenty thousand people are standing around, all sorted for ecstasy and speed, waiting for something to happen. But Cocker, as ever, is more interested in what happens after: the comedown, the disillusionment, the hollow morning-after feeling that no amount of chemical euphoria can quite paper over. It is a song about the gap between what a moment promises and what it delivers; and in that gap, Cocker finds something genuinely heartbreaking.
The song’s title came from a girl Cocker met in Sheffield. When he asked what she remembered about seeing The Stone Roses at Spike Island, she said she just remembered all these blokes walking around asking if everybody was sorted for E’s and wizz. That single overheard phrase became one of the defining songs of the decade. Cocker later explained the emotional core in an interview with Melody Maker: “Me being a naive get, when I first went to raves I thought there was some change in people’s attitudes going on, that people had decided they’d got fed up of boozing and looking for birds and fighting, that they’d prefer to go out and have a good time and be nice to other people. And ‘Sorted’ is actually about that disillusionment.”
The song is set at a rave “somewhere in a field in Hampshire”, and follows the arc of a single night from the wide-eyed arrival, through the chemically-induced sense of universal brotherhood, to the brutal morning after. “In the middle of the night it feels alright,” Cocker sings, “but then tomorrow morning, oh, then you come down.” The line about wanting to call your mum from a phone box to confess you’ve lost an important part of your brain in a field in Hampshire is one of the funniest and saddest things he ever wrote. The song captures the specific texture of that era with forensic precision: the pirate radio, the tickets bought from shady characters, the strangers shaking your hands and swearing you’re their best mate, and then, once it’s over, the same people telling you to get lost when you try to thumb a lift home.
Released as a double A-side with ‘Mis-Shapes’ in September 1995, the single reached number two in the UK charts, Pulp’s second successive number two that year after ‘Common People’. Pre-release orders topped 200,000, the biggest in Island Records’ history to that point. Then the Daily Mirror got hold of it. The paper ran a front-page story on 20 September 1995 under the headline ‘BAN THIS SICK STUNT’, claiming the CD inlay, which featured an origami-style paper fold, was a DIY guide to hiding drugs. This was the height of the tabloid ecstasy scare; the BBC had been banning records with the word “acid” in the title, and the moral panic around rave culture was at its most hysterical. The paper ran a phone poll asking readers if the single should be banned, and contacted the father of a young man who had died after taking ecstasy for a quote. Cocker was furious. He later described it to Q magazine as “a horror story to be brought into the tabloid world”, though he acknowledged, with typical dryness, that “it sold us loads of records.”
The controversy backfired spectacularly on the Mirror; the same paper that had attacked Pulp months earlier ran a ‘Justice for Jarvis’ campaign when Cocker invaded Michael Jackson’s stage performance at the 1996 BRIT Awards. The tabloid world, it turned out, had no memory and no shame. The furore around the single was later spoofed by Chris Morris on ‘Brass Eye’, which poked fun at the band for claiming innocence.
Cocker agreed to change the artwork, removing the origami element, while insisting the song was anything but pro-drugs: “The whole thing it’s trying to say is that no matter how great a time you have on drugs, you know that it’s been artificially induced. You’ve introduced a chemical into your brain, and that’s what makes it such a hollow experience.”
Musically, the song is one of Pulp’s most atmospheric. Drummer Nick Banks described his approach as trying to capture the sensation of walking towards a rave and hearing the music from a distance, coming through at the wrong tempo, slightly slower than normal. The result is a song that feels genuinely woozy and disoriented, its dreamy drift perfectly matching Cocker’s lyrical comedown. Pitchfork called it “a wistful flashback to the illegal outdoor raves of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s”, while Rolling Stone noted that “the way Cocker whispers the word ‘down’ is so soft and sad, you can almost feel the hurt and morning-after emptiness.” AllMusic praised its “subtle satire”, while Drowned in Sound called it “a fantastically sneering slap at the rave generation.”
It was first performed live at Glastonbury in 1995, the perfect setting, and the basic track on the studio recording actually draws from that Glastonbury performance, albeit with considerable overdubs. It remains one of the great festival songs precisely because it refuses to be a celebration; it is a song about what festivals feel like the morning after, when the field is empty, and you need to find a way home.
‘The Fear’ is the opening track on ‘This Is Hardcore’, and from its very first notes it makes one thing unmistakably clear: this is not ‘Different Class’. Where that album had crackled with energy, wit, and a kind of joyful class fury, ‘The Fear’ arrives like a cold hand on the shoulder. Cocker himself described ‘This Is Hardcore’ as “songs about panic attacks, pornography, fear of death and getting old”, and ‘The Fear’ is where that programme is announced.
The context matters enormously. By 1998, Cocker was a bona fide celebrity, the reluctant spokesman for a generation, battling cocaine addiction and the disorienting vertigo of having spent fifteen years desperately wanting fame, only to find it deeply unpleasant when it arrived. As he reflected at the time: “There’s something to do with realising an ambition that seems to curdle somebody’s spirit in some way.” The song is the direct product of that curdling.
Musically, ‘The Fear’ is a radical departure: its opening notes briefly suggest the rising momentum of earlier Pulp singles before collapsing into something minor and deeply unsettled. NME described how “familiar, sentimental vignettes like ‘Disco 2000’ and ‘Sorted for E’s and Wizz’ seem aeons away as ‘The Fear’ uncoils its horror-soundtrack synths and teetering, doomy chords.” One writer described it as sounding like “a mock-gothic Hammer House of Horror theme tune”, while Vice noted that the chorus arrives “with a choir, screeching, hyperbolic, almost intolerable to listen to, a musical device associated with the ethereal and uplifting, twisted into something disturbing and overwrought.”
Lyrically, Cocker lays out the terms of the album with characteristic bluntness. “This is the sound of someone losing the plot,” he announces, “making out they’re OK when they are not.” The last line is a sly play on a catchphrase of Paul Daniels, the deeply uncool British magician and game show host; a classic piece of Cocker misdirection, smuggling a genuinely despairing confession inside a joke. One critic noted that it was “resolutely English: you wouldn’t catch any other pop musician in the entire history of the world even conceding, privately, that Paul Daniels exists.”
What makes ‘The Fear’ so enduring is that it refuses to stay fixed in its original moment. As a setlist staple in the 2023 and 2025 reunion tours, it has taken on a broader resonance: no longer only a portrait of one man’s anxiety in the late 1990s, but something that speaks to a wider, more generalised dread. The song’s closing lines, about a person who can no longer define what it is they are frightened of, feel as relevant now as they did then. It is the sound of a band not just losing the plot, but being brave enough to say so; and in that honesty, it has outlasted almost everything else from its era.
The title track of Pulp’s fifth studio album is, by any measure, one of the most audacious singles ever released by a British band at the height of their commercial powers. Put out in March 1998 as the second single from the album, it reached number twelve in the UK charts: a respectable position that tells you almost nothing about what the song actually is. At six minutes and twenty-five seconds long, it takes two and a half minutes to reach its first chorus. It was never going to be a radio-friendly crowd-pleaser, and Pulp knew it.
The song grew out of Cocker’s complicated relationship with pornography, which he used as a metaphor for fame itself: the need to see new faces all the time, and the question of what happens to people once they have been used up and discarded. As he put it at the time: “You dream about what being a pop star will be like, and... it isn’t how you imagined.” In a remarkable piece of foresight for 1998, he also predicted that the internet would be the next frontier for pornography, a prediction that has aged with uncomfortable accuracy. The Guardian later described the song as being “not about sex but power, narcissism, performance and ego, and it’s as grim as they come.”
Musically, it is unlike anything else in the Pulp catalogue. Built around a sample of Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra’s ‘Bolero on the Moon Rocks’, it moves with the slow, inexorable momentum of something enormous and unstoppable: a cinematic, orchestral creep that Stereogum’s Ryan Leas described as producing “alternatively some of the dirtiest and saddest sounds to ever make it into a Pulp song.” Rolling Stone called it “less bright and bouncy” than its predecessor but “even more daring and fully realised”, writing that the album “plays like a movie, a series of scenes from a life”, and calling it “arguably the first pop album devoted entirely to the subject of the long, slow fade.” Nick Hornby, writing in Spin, described Cocker as “England’s unofficial poet laureate”, perfecting “his poetry of the prosaic.”
The decision to release it as a single was controversial even within the band. Steve Mackey compared it to Radiohead releasing ‘Paranoid Android’ as a single; Mark Webber was less enthusiastic, though he acknowledged that Cocker “didn’t want people to expect an album of ‘Common People’ and ‘Disco 2000’.” The cover art, directed by Peter Saville and featuring paintings by John Currin, caused its own controversy: London Underground posters carrying the artwork were defaced with the slogans “This Offends Women” and “This is Sexist.” The single’s release was, in every sense, a provocation.
The commercial consequences were real. The album sold just over 50,000 copies in its first week: 62 per cent fewer than ‘Different Class’ had managed. Some of the post-’Common People’ fanbase, who had arrived expecting more of the same, simply did not follow Pulp into this darker territory. The Observer wrote in 2002 that the album was “darkly powerful, as good as anything to come out of the confused and confusing pop ‘90s”, but acknowledged that “it cost Pulp a sizable proportion of their post-’Common People’ fan base.” Cocker was typically direct about what the album represented: “It’s not a record made by contented people. It’s a record about disillusionment.”
In retrospect, ‘This Is Hardcore’, the song has come to be seen as one of the great difficult masterpieces of British pop: a piece of work that, like Sly Stone’s ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’ or Neil Young’s ‘Tonight’s the Night’, only reveals its full depth over time. CultureSonar has argued that the sequence of ‘Help the Aged’ into ‘This Is Hardcore’ represents “perhaps the finest one-two punch in Pulp’s whole discography.” NME placed the song at number 254 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The song that nobody expected, from the album that ended an era, has outlasted almost everything it was competing with.
Because it did end an era, the question of which album killed Britpop has been debated ever since: Blur’s self-titled 1997 record turned its back on Parklife’s mockney knees-up; Oasis’s ‘Be Here Now’, released that same August, was a bloated, cocaine-fuelled folly that lacked the sharpness of everything that came before it; Radiohead’s ‘OK Computer’ pointed the econversationsation somewhere else entirely. But it is ‘This Is Hardcore’ that makes the most compelling case as the final nail in the coffin. As the band’s PR representative Jane Savidge put it: “Britpop might have been tailing off anyway, but this was the final nail in the coffin.” She went further: “I think this was Jarvis trying to destroy his career. And in doing so, Pulp accidentally destroyed Britpop.”
NME’s Matthew Horton, writing in 2013, put it with characteristic precision: the album was “a sloughing-off of fame’s skin, a rejection of the Britpop monster”, and argued that “in its sense of surrender, regret and flashes of panic, it captured the time to a tee.” Stereogum described it as “the comedown record to sum up Britpop’s comedown”, noting that where ‘Be Here Now’ was “coked-out and overblown, much of This Is Hardcore sounds like pained remembrances aired in a seedy bar in the bleary-eyed, early hours of the morning.” It was, as NME put it, “a big grand send-off” for a scene that had always deserved one: “a big grand folly of a scene deserved a big grand send-off, and ‘This Is Hardcore’ is nothing if it isn’t a statement.”
What makes the album’s position as Britpop’s death knell so fitting is that it was not accidental. Louder Sound noted the central irony: “It remains one of music’s great ironies that Pulp spent the best part of two decades trying to become a massive, crossover, guitar pop band, and when that finally happened, they realised they hated it and almost immediately did their very best to retreat.” The smartest, most clear-eyed band in the movement looked at what Britpop had become and chose to burn it down from the inside. While everyone else was still pulling the curtains shut and refusing to call it a night, ‘This Is Hardcore’ was the sound of the morning after arriving with brutal, unignorable clarity.
For a song that is nominally about sex, ‘Do You Remember the First Time?’ is one of the most emotionally layered things Pulp ever recorded. Released on 21 March 1994 as the second single from ‘His ‘n’ Hers’, it reached number 33 in the UK charts: the highest position the band had achieved to that point and their first ever top 40 single. After more than fifteen years of near-total obscurity, Pulp had finally arrived. And they had arrived with a song about losing your virginity that is also, somehow, about the passage of time, the compromises of adult life, the terror of loneliness, and the gap between the person you were and the person you have become.
Cocker has said that he loosely based the lyrics on his own experience of losing his virginity at nineteen, though the song quickly outgrows autobiography. The scenario is a classic Cocker set-up: a narrator addressing a woman who keeps returning to a dull, safe, conventional boyfriend, the kind of man who, as the lyric has it, bores her pants off. The narrator is sardonic, wounded, and just self-aware enough to know he is losing. “I can’t remember a worse time,” he admits, before catching himself: “but you know that we’ve changed so much since then. We’ve grown.” That last word, delivered with Cocker’s characteristic mix of irony and sincerity, is the whole song in a single syllable. Drowned in Sound called it “the most gorgeously spiteful kiss-off ever put down on record.”
But the song’s double meaning is what gives it its lasting power. The title is not only a question about a first sexual encounter; it is a question about beginnings in general, about whether you can remember the version of yourself that existed before compromise set in. As Stereogum’s Ryan Leas noted, “the title of course always pointed towards losing your virginity, but the narrative of the song also had to do with a man addressing his lover who keeps returning to another man.” The song operates in that ambiguous space between the two readings simultaneously, and it is richer for it. NME readers ranked it as Pulp’s fourth best song in a fan vote, calling it “a giddy anthem for those who didn’t feel they had a voice.”
Cocker has described the song as “the day modern-day Pulp was born”: the moment the band’s signature sound finally cohered after years of experimentation and line-up changes. Musically, it is a big, confident piece of work, with swooping synths and a grandeur that anticipates the arena-sized ambitions of ‘Different Class’. Producer Ed Buller gave it room to breathe, and the result is a song that feels simultaneously intimate and enormous. Then-touring guitarist Mark Webber contributed to the track, though the credit caused complications he preferred not to discuss at the time; he would join the band officially the following year.
To promote the single, Cocker assembled a remarkable short film: a collection of celebrity interviews in which public figures recounted their own first sexual experiences. The resulting twenty-five-minute documentary featured John Peel, Jo Brand, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, Alison Steadman and Justine Frischman of Elastica, among others. Cocker had also approached Stephen Fry, whose agent responded, gruffly, that he “does NOT talk about his private life.” The film is a piece of work entirely in keeping with the song’s spirit: curious, funny, intimate, and slightly transgressive.
The song’s greatest trick, though, is what it has become with time. When Pulp reunited in 2011, ‘Do You Remember the First Time?’ formed the centrepiece of the teaser campaign and opened every show of the reunion tour. Not ‘Common People’. Not ‘Disco 2000’. This song. It opened their show-stopping performances at Reading and Leeds, and it opened their farewell show at the Motorpoint Arena in Sheffield in December 2012. A song written in opposition to nostalgia had, through the sheer passage of time, become the most nostalgic thing in their catalogue: a rallying cry for everyone in the crowd who remembered the first time they heard it, and wanted, desperately, to feel that way again.
In a catalogue full of voyeurs, narrators who watch from doorways and listen through walls, ‘Babies’ is the one that started it all. Released as a single for Gift Records in 1992, it failed to chart. Re-released in 1994 as part of the Sisters EP and included on ‘His ‘n’ Hers’, it reached number 19. Neither chart position tells you anything useful about what the song is, or what it did.
The story of how it came to be written is characteristically accidental. Drummer Nick Banks was playing a few mistaken chords on the guitar, producing sounds that caught Cocker’s ear. He took them and built a song around them. Cocker later described it as “the first time we’d written a proper pop song”, and acknowledged the band’s initial wariness: “At first I thought it sounds like indie dance, which really put me off.” It was then-touring guitarist Mark Webber, not yet an official member, who convinced them otherwise: “That’s the best song you’ve written,” he told them. Cocker came to agree, describing ‘Babies’ as the moment of departure from “the long, dark midnight of the soul, the Eurodisco with gothic leanings or whatever, and more of the recognisable Pulp of today.”
The song’s subject matter is, on the surface, scandalous: a teenage boy so fixated on listening to his friend’s older sister having sex that he begins hiding in her wardrobe to watch her. The scenario escalates with the comic inevitability of a bedroom farce: the sister finds him, they end up sleeping together, and are caught by the younger sister, the one the narrator actually loves, prompting the song’s devastating, pathetic punchline: “I only went with her ‘cos she looks like you.” The Guardian’s Ben Hewitt called it “an awkward kind of Bildungsroman: a coming-of-age story full of lust, betrayal and remorse about one youth’s transition from sex-struck fledgling to guilty cad.”
But the song is more than its plot. Like everything Pulp did at their best, it uses the specific and the grubby to reach something true. The boy in the wardrobe is not a villain; he is a fool in love, doing something ridiculous and getting exactly what he deserves. Cocker’s genius is to make him simultaneously pathetic and sympathetic, his desire so transparently displaced that the listener laughs and winces at the same time. uDiscover Music noted that ‘Babies’ perfectly explored Pulp’s recurring theme of voyeurism: “a recurring subject throughout Pulp’s career, but one never so perfectly explored” as here.
Musically, Stereogum’s Ryan Leas praised its “new wave-y guitar and synths” as a clear departure from Pulp’s earlier work, and the song has the buoyant, laconic momentum of a band finally finding their sound.
‘Babies’ is ranked this high not simply because it is a great song, though it is. It is ranked here because it represents the moment Pulp became Pulp: the hinge point between the band’s difficult, obscure early years and the group that would go on to make ‘His ‘n’ Hers’ and ‘Different Class’. Everything that followed grew from this wardrobe.
The song’s critical reception, when it finally reached the audience it deserved, was rapturous. At the time of its 1992 release, one reviewer called it “budget magnificence... a blueprint for an epic to be constructed in a more liquid future”; Cocker’s response, characteristically, was: “That’s quite a laff, that!” On re-release, it became the band’s highest-charting single to that point. Reviewer David Bennun’s prediction proved accurate: the epic did get constructed, and ‘Babies’ was its foundation. According to PulpWiki, it is probably the most-played live song in the band’s entire catalogue, a claim that speaks to how central it became to their identity. The video, directed by Cocker himself and featuring two real sisters, included a title card at the start that read: “A promo video is simply an advert for a song”; a characteristically self-aware line that only made the whole thing more charming.
The song also spawned a sequel. ‘Your Sister’s Clothes’, included on The Sisters EP alongside the re-released ‘Babies’, picks up the story four years later, following the same characters into a more complicated, more compromised adulthood. That Cocker felt compelled to return to the story says something about how much it meant to him; that the sequel is almost entirely forgotten while the original endures says something about how perfectly ‘Babies’ captured its moment. Some songs contain entire worlds. This one contains a wardrobe, which is somehow even better.
If ‘Common People’ is the song that made Pulp famous, ‘Disco 2000’ is the one that made them beloved. Released on 27 November 1995 as the third single from ‘Different Class’, it reached number seven in the UK charts: lower than its two predecessors, but that tells you nothing about the size of its footprint. It is, as Stereogum’s Ryan Leas put it, “one of the ultimate Pulp songs”: a piece of work that is simultaneously a perfect pop single and a quietly devastating meditation on time, longing, and the gap between the lives we imagined and the ones we ended up living.
The song is almost entirely true. Cocker has said that “the only bit that isn’t true is the woodchip wallpaper.” When he was born in Sheffield in 1963, his mother shared a hospital room with a woman who had given birth to a girl named Deborah. The two children grew up as classmates and friends; Cocker fancied her for years, watching helplessly as she became the first girl at school to develop breasts and all the boys started paying attention. “I didn’t stand a cat-in-hell’s chance,” he later admitted, “but then I did use to sometimes hang around outside her house and stuff like that.” Deborah Bone, as she became, moved away from Sheffield to Letchworth when she was ten.
She grew up to be a pioneering mental health worker, developing a programme called Bright Stars and a visual resource called Brainbox to help children cope with stress and anxiety. She was awarded an MBE for her services to youth mental health. She died in 2015 at the age of 51 from bone marrow cancer. Before she died, she wrote on her blog: “Born in Sheffield, my claim to fame is growing up and sleeping with Jarvis Cocker, well, someone had to do it, and it was all perfectly innocent! I have been told and like to believe that I am the Deborah in the hit ‘Disco 2000’, but we never did get to meet up by the fountain down the road.”
That fountain is almost certainly Goodwin Fountain, which stood on Fargate in Sheffield city centre. The song’s disco-inflected riff is built around an allusion to Laura Branigan’s 1980s hit ‘Gloria’. Musically, it is the most purely joyful thing on ‘Different Class’: a glitzy, gaudy stomp, as AllMusic put it, that sits in strange and beautiful tension with the sadness underneath. Melody Maker named it Single of the Week, writing that it showed “what fuels his vindictive bitterness is actually a deep romanticism.” James Masterton called it “easily the best track from the Different Class album, the closest they have ever come to an out-and-out pop stormer.” Elvis Costello singled out the woodchip wallpaper detail in a 1996 interview: “I love the detail. I get the feeling that was a real memory.”
The song was first performed live at Glastonbury on 24 June 1995, debuting alongside ‘Sorted for E’s & Wizz’ and ‘Mis-Shapes’, all three played to a crowd who had never heard them before. It was, as Cocker later noted, a remarkable evening.
The year 2000 loomed in the cultural imagination in 1995 as something vast and futuristic; the song’s central conceit, of making plans to meet up in a future that felt impossibly far away, carried a particular charge at the time. When the year 2000 actually arrived, without catastrophe, the song had already done its work. NME readers ranked it as Pulp’s third best in a fan vote. Stereogum ranked it second overall, calling it “about youth and romanticism, but filtered through the perspective of a man already in his early 30s. That’s what makes it a classic pop single by Pulp.”
Cocker sang ‘Disco 2000’ at Deborah Bone’s 50th birthday celebration. They remained close friends until her death. The song that began as a teenage boy’s unrequited longing became, over the years, a tribute to a real friendship: a life fully lived, a fountain they never quite reached.
‘Razzmatazz’ is the song that should have made Pulp famous three years before ‘Common People’ did. Released on 15 February 1993 as the band’s final single for Gift Records before their move to Island, it charted at number 80 in the UK: their highest singles position to that point, and a number that gives no indication whatsoever of the song’s quality. It was named Single of the Week by Melody Maker on release. It is, in retrospect, one of the finest things they ever recorded, and the reason it earns an honourable mention rather than a place in the top ten is only that the top ten was already full.
The song is a masterclass in a very specific emotion: the bitter, gleeful, slightly shameful satisfaction of watching someone who dumped you fall apart afterwards. Cocker has confirmed it was written about a real ex-girlfriend, one he met at college and who he later bumped into: “She twigged that it was about her, and it wasn’t very complimentary. Actually, we ended up laughing about it; it was all right.” The scenario he constructs is merciless. The girl dumps him, confident that all she needs is a little razzmatazz, some nights on the town, a more glamorous life. What she gets, as the song gleefully catalogues, is rather different: she starts putting on weight three weeks after he leaves, takes up with a man who looks like a bad comedian, sits at home watching television and eating boxes of Milk Tray, and ends up at the doctor’s waiting for a test. Cocker watches all of this with a schadenfreude so pure it becomes almost endearing.
What saves the song from mere spite is the music. The Guardian called it “a supreme pop single with its spinning, dark disco-charged melody, flavoured impeccably by Cocker’s witty, withering vinegar.” Stereogum’s Ryan Leas ranked it as Pulp’s third-best song overall, calling it “one of their finest achievements” and noting that it has “a mean intensity in it not so often seen in their mid-90s work.” NME readers placed it fourth in their fan vote, describing it as “eloquently angry, and scabrously witty to boot: Jarvis doing his modern-day, indie Oscar Wilde thing brilliantly.” Sarah Dempster of NME called it “a Formica-topped, sad-eyed, retro-unique delight.”
The B-side of the single was, if anything, even more ambitious: a three-part suite called ‘Inside Susan’, which follows a single female character from early adolescence in Rotherham through to her thirties, where she is the second wife of an architect somewhere in South London, cheating on him to relieve the tedium. Cocker explained that the final part, ‘59 Lyndhurst Grove’, was inspired by a party he had attended the weekend before writing it. The whole suite is a piece of miniature social fiction of extraordinary compression, and the fact that it exists as a B-side says everything you need to know about how much Pulp had to offer.
ereogum noted that ‘Razzmatazz’ had a “gloss that pointed towards the more thorough production standards” of ‘His ‘n’ Hers’, and one critic observed it was the one pre-breakthrough Pulp song that could have sat comfortably on ‘Different Class’. It is a song that arrived slightly too early for the world to properly notice. The world’s loss.
There is no other choice. There never was. ‘Common People’ is not simply Pulp’s greatest song; it is the quintessential Britpop song, the one that cuts deepest, means most, and has outlasted virtually everything it was competing with. It is the song that took fifteen years of obscurity and redeemed them in a single three-and-a-half-minute rush. It is the song that made Jarvis Cocker a generational icon. And it is, at its core, a song about class: one of the most honest and brutal analyses of the British class system ever committed to a pop record.
The story of how it came to exist is almost too perfect. Cocker had enrolled on a film studies course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London in 1988, taking a break from Pulp. There, during a sculpture crossover fortnight, he met a Greek art student who told him she wanted to live in Hackney like common people, to rent a flat above a shop, to smoke cigarettes and look at the world from below. She said she wanted to suffer. Cocker, who had actually spent years doing exactly that, was transfixed by the gap between her romantic idea of poverty and the reality he knew. He filed the encounter away for years. Then, in the summer of 1994, he bought a secondhand Casio keyboard from the Notting Hill Record and Tape Exchange, took it home, and began to write.
The song he wrote is, as The Ringer put it, “erudite, blunt, suave, seething, carefully observed, carelessly cruel, droll, electrifying”: a devastating portrait of class tourism, the phenomenon whereby the wealthy go sightseeing in the lives of the poor, secure in the knowledge that they can leave whenever they choose. Cocker’s genius is to make this abstract political point viscerally personal: the song’s narrator watches the Greek girl play at poverty, naming all the props she can buy and wear and do, before landing the killer blow: if you called your dad, he could stop it all. That single line is the whole argument. You can smoke cigarettes, rent the flat, dance, drink and pretend, but you will never understand how it feels to live your life with no meaning or control. The privilege is the exit. The common people have no exit.
What is sometimes overlooked, in all the discussion of its politics and its cultural significance, is how extraordinarily well constructed ‘Common People’ is as a piece of music. It is a song that earns everything it takes. It begins almost conversationally: Cocker’s vocal over a bare keyboard figure, the tone amused and curious, the narrator charmed by this woman he has just met. The details accumulate with the precision of someone who has been storing them for years: the sculpture course, the bar at college, the flat above a shop, the cigarettes, the supermarket. The music stays relatively contained through the first verse and chorus, gradually building, with Candida Doyle’s keyboards doing the patient work of laying the foundation.
Then, in the final third, something shifts. The song stops being a portrait and becomes an accusation. The tempo doesn’t change, but the emotional temperature does: Cocker’s voice, which has been wry and sardonic throughout, suddenly hardens into something close to fury. He is no longer describing the woman; he is addressing her directly, telling her what she will never understand, what she can never buy or borrow or simulate. The music surges to meet him, the whole band pressing forward, and the chorus that follows is one of the great cathartic moments in British pop: not because it is uplifting, but because it is true. Pulp drummer Nick Banks once explained the song’s emotional core simply: “Around London, you met these southern toffs. They could muck around and do what they wanted for a few years, then call in the trust fund and bugger off to the south of France. For most people, that ain’t the case. You’re stuck with what you’ve got.
The song’s structure mirrors its argument perfectly. It builds from charm to fury in exactly the way that class resentment builds: slowly, patiently, with a smile, and then all at once. Conversation noted that as the song’s tempo and intensity increase, “Cocker’s vocal delivery also changes: it builds from amused incredulity in the first verse to a crescendo of anger and outrage in the last.” By the time he reaches the line about living your life with no meaning or control, he is raging against something much larger than one Greek art student. He is raging against the whole system, and the crowd, every time, rages with him. That is what an anthem does. That is what this song is.
The song was produced by Chris Thomas, who had worked with the Sex Pistols and the Pretenders, and recorded at The Town House in London in two weeks. When Cocker brought the bare bones of the song to the band, they were initially unimpressed; it was keyboardist Candida Doyle who championed it.
The back of the single sleeve carried a statement that read: “There is a war in progress, don’t be a casualty. The time to decide whose side you’re on is here. Choose wisely. Stay alive in ‘95.” The song was a provocation, but it was also, as Rock: The Rough Guide noted, Cocker “stripping away the glamour from Britpop’s idealisation of the working class”: a direct intervention into the movement’s tendency to romanticise poverty as authenticity.
The Britpop context matters enormously. By 1995, the movement had made being working class aspirational and fashionable, with bands like Blur playing at Cockney street life and Oasis selling a myth of rough-edged northern swagger. ‘Common People’ called out the entire game. As Cocker told Q magazine: “It seemed to be in the air, that kind of patronising social voyeurism, slumming it.” The song was an intervention: an unflinching reminder that class is not a costume you can put on and take off, and that the people who think it is have never had to wear it permanently.
Released in May 1995, it sold 70,000 copies in its first week and reached number two in the UK charts. The only thing that kept it off number one was Robson and Jerome’s syrupy cover of ‘Unchained Melody’. The song’s potential had been obvious to those paying attention: when Pulp supported Oasis at Sheffield Arena in April 1995, Noel Gallagher told the BBC the audience “went berserk” when they heard it. By the time the song was released, it was already becoming something larger than a single.
Released in May 1995, it sold 70,000 copies in its first week and reached number two in the UK charts. The only thing that kept it off number one was Robson and Jerome’s syrupy cover of ‘Unchained Melody’. The song’s potential had been obvious to those paying attention: when Pulp supported Oasis at Sheffield Arena in April 1995, Noel Gallagher told the BBC the audience “went berserk” when they heard it. By the time the song was released, it was already becoming something larger than a single.
The critical legacy is extraordinary. DJ Steve Lamacq called it “one of the defining records of Britpop because it seemed to embrace the essence of the time so perfectly.” BBC Radio 6 Music listeners voted it their favourite Britpop song in 2014; Rolling Stone readers voted it the greatest Britpop song in 2015. Pitchfork placed it at number two on their list of the Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s. Rolling Stone ranked it at number 75 on their updated list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It has appeared on more than sixteen compilation albums. In 2006, the BBC broadcast an hour-long documentary devoted entirely to its composition and cultural impact. It inspired a celebrated cover version by William Shatner, produced by Ben Folds, which brought the song to a whole new international audience. It has inspired a ballet.
What makes ‘Common People’ the number one Pulp song, above all others, is not just its quality: it is its weight. It is the song that carried everything Pulp had been building towards for seventeen years, the song that gave a voice to everyone who had ever felt on the wrong side of a class system that pretended not to exist. As Jacobin wrote, it is “a more honest and brutal analysis of class than you’ll hear in the media today.” As Cocker himself put it, with characteristic simplicity, when he told the crowd at Reading during the 2011 reunion: “If Pulp are only ever remembered for this song, I don’t care."
Neither do we.
Any top ten of Pulp songs is, by definition, an act of violence. The catalogue is too deep, too strange, and too consistently brilliant for a list this short to do it justice. The songs that didn’t make it here deserve their own acknowledgement.
‘Mis-Shapes’, the double A-side companion to ‘Sorted for E’s & Wizz’, is arguably the more urgent of the two: a rallying cry for outsiders, misfits, and everyone who was told they didn’t belong, delivered with a ferocity that made it one of the defining anthems of the era. That it reached number two and still didn’t make this list tells you everything about the competition it faced.
‘Help the Aged’, the lead single from ‘This Is Hardcore’, is one of Cocker’s most compassionate songs: a meditation on old age and the fear of being forgotten, built around a tender, almost hymnal melody. The fact that it reached number eight while sounding nothing like a conventional single remains one of Pulp’s most quietly remarkable achievements.
‘Something Changed’ is the great outlier in the Pulp catalogue: a straightforward, beautiful love song, almost entirely free of irony, about the randomness of meeting the right person at the right moment. It reached number ten in 1996 and remains the song Pulp fans most often cite when asked which one makes them cry.
‘Joyriders’, the opener of ‘His ‘n’ Hers’, established the template for everything that followed: a sardonic, unsettling portrait of bored young men in Sheffield, its menace barely concealed beneath the laconic surface. And ‘Sheffield: Sex City’, the B-side to the 1992 ‘Babies’ single, is a spoken-word, quasi-cinematic tour through the sexual geography of Sheffield at night that sounds like nothing else from any era of British music.
What all of these songs share, and what makes Pulp so difficult to rank and so impossible to dismiss, is the quality of Cocker’s attention. He is a writer who notices things: the woodchip on the wall, the roaches climbing the wall at 3 am, the way a person looks when they are pretending to be fine. He is interested in the people that pop music usually ignores: the ones who didn’t get the girl, didn’t make it out, didn’t get to call their dad and have it all stop. He writes about class without romanticism, about sex without sentimentality, about fame without glamour. He writes about getting older, about the gap between who you thought you would be and who you turned out to be, with a precision that is sometimes almost unbearable.
Pulp spent fifteen years being ignored, then five years being celebrated, then another decade being reassessed, and now, with ‘More’ landing at number one in 2025 and a new generation discovering the back catalogue, they are somewhere more interesting than any of those categories: simply a great band, with a body of work that rewards every hour you give it.
They were never quite the Britpop band people wanted them to be, never quite the outsiders they sometimes claimed to be, never quite the pop stars they spent so long trying to become. They were something better and stranger than all of that. They were Pulp.