Music

Pulp – Different Class

The year is 1995 and the battle of the bands is being hyped to death. In the Manchester corner, Oasis have released the uninspiring “Roll With It” off the most overrated album of all time; in the Colchester corner Blur have put out the jaunty “Country House” from their uneven critique of Middle England, “The Great Escape”.

But there are four corners to this ring. Radiohead are crouching down with “The Bends” in the Oxford corner, gearing up to release their full potential. In the Sheffield one, Pulp are already on top of their game, head and shoulders above the rest, and they’re seething with a focused, stunningly articulate, burning rage. Much as I like Radiohead’s second album, “Different Class” is, well, different class.

And what an album name that is! Although my parents were both from middle/working-class families, my own upbringing was decidedly middle-class. To a 13-year old living in a “no sex please, we’re British” well-to-do village, this album was a seismic shock to the system. To be honest, even if I thought I could, I couldn’t begin to understand half of it. For me, parks were somewhere you walked, birds were something that woke you up in the morning, and grass was something you played cricket on. As for “A Year in Provence”, my dad was reading it when I got the album, and here Jarvis was, telling him to shove it up his a….



“I Spy” ripped the wool off my decidedly bourgeois eyes. In this alternative universe, “parks are car parks, grass is something you smoke, and birds are something you shag”.

The insanely strong first seven songs of the album flit between light and dark, the overt and the covert, romance and seediness, hope and despair. The musically upbeat opener, “Mis-shapes”, draws the battle lines for the coming class war, telling us “you could end up with a smack in the mouth just for standing out”, a sentiment that sounds like it could be straight out of the “Black Lives Matter” movement of today.

And so it continues: “We’re making a move, we’re making it now, we’re coming out of the sidelines.” / “We want your homes, we want your lives, we want the things you won’t allow us. We won’t use guns, we won’t use bombs, we’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of; that’s our minds.”

Although the next verse was also intended to describe the class divide, it accidentally also foresees the whole millennial/boomer clash: “We learnt too much at school. Now we can’t help but see that the future that you’ve got marked out is nothing much to shout about”. That’s an awful lot of prescience packed into the very first track.

It wouldn’t be a Jarvis Cocker-penned album without a lot of material about sex, and this would get far darker on Pulp’s follow-up album, “This is Hardcore”. Tracks 2, 4 and 6 are all awash with it, with the first of the “dark side” tracks particularly nasty in a hollow, desperate way.



“Pencil Skirt” deals with infidelity that’s begun before marriage and seems likely to continue after. He’s not meeting the bride-to-be out of any lofty ideals as he confesses in the outro: “I only come here, ‘cos I know it makes you sad. I only do it, ‘cos I know you know it’s bad. It’s ugly and it shouldn’t be like that, but it’s turning me on.” The creeping, backing music plays on as he watches his conscience disappear.

“I Spy” uses a James Bond style backing track as Jarvis pits himself against an adversary that seems to be the entire upper middle class/aristocracy. Just as the band sneak into a wedding photo on the album cover, he surreptitiously wreaks havoc on a couple, smoking the man’s cigars, drinking his brandy and messing up the bed he and his wife chose together. There’s no denying his jealousy either; “you never let your mask slip, you’re never hurried” takes aim at that unshakeable and unmistakeable confidence that those born into old money possess.

“Live Bed Show” is a wistful take on an ended relationship from a bed’s point of view. There’s some nice meta work with the snare echoing the “headboard banging in the night” and a lush, dreamy keyboard chord that is only used once to back “everything was going right”. But we’ll move on as “if this show was televised, no-one would watch it, not tonight, but seven years ago…”

I’ve got through ten or so paragraphs and not even mentioned “Common People”? Blasphemy! Despite the song maintaining a relatively sparse sound in places, all 48 tracks were used in recording it, and apparently it wasn’t until Jarvis added an acoustic guitar that it all came together. The result is a piece that doesn’t sound like any other song. It doesn’t even sound like any of the others on the album.



As per usual, Jarvis is the protagonist in the song and after a girl. This time, she’s a kind of “poverty tourist” from Greece who’s a few classes above him. That doesn’t bother him too much though, as she’s buying the rum and cola and wants to sleep with “common people” like him.

The way he turns that line back on her with “You want to see what common people see. You want to sleep with common people. You want to sleep with common people like me?” within the context of a song is utter genius.

After beginning the “poverty tour” inauspiciously at a supermarket, Jarvis lets the Greek art student have it in one grandiose as hell rant/chorus that lasts a magnificent 3 minutes, explaining how she’ll never understand what it means to be poor as at any time she can call her dad and he’ll stop it all, “and the chip-stains and grease will come out in the bath”. Excoriating.

“Common People” has a great retro video showcasing Jarvis’ unique dance moves, as does “Disco 2000”, the other massive, gloriously poppy single from the album. Naturally, Jarvis is after another lady. This one’s not from a different class, but she does seem to be in a different league.



At school, Deborah let him walk her to her “very small house with woodchip on the wall”. but it meant nothing to her. She wasn’t buying the written-in-the-stars being “born within an hour of each other” claptrap that Jarvis is. Still, he keeps on hoping, thinking things will be different when they’re all fully-grown in the year 2000. Fast-forward to the future and Jarvis is “damp and lonely” (lovely image) and Deborah’s got a kid, but he still wants to meet up…and the song remains relentlessly upbeat.

“Something Changed” kicks off the second half of the album. It’s a far more standard love song, so of course it was the one I really liked when I first got the album. The fact that everything that is described within the song didn’t actually happen is also a nice, if somewhat English GCSE creative writing essay style twist. In case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, he wrote the song “two hours before they met” i.e. they didn’t meet.

Track 8 is “Sorted for E’s and Wizz”, which caused a furore with the same tabloid reading idiots who thought Pulp Fiction was a pro drugs film. I particularly like the way the song beats back into life after “you come down” the first couple of times but doesn’t the last, which ends in a possible overdose. “What if you never come down?”

Unfortunately, Jarvis leaves an important part of his brain “somewhere in a field in Hampshire” and I don’t feel like he gets it back until the album closer, “Bar Italia”.

“F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.” (what is going on with those full stops) resonated with teenage me, but seems obvious and unnecessary now, “Underwear” is less erudite than the earlier “sex songs”, and “Monday Morning” is a daily grind number about a city alcoholic that lacks the gleam of the earlier gems.

Best to head straight to the “Bar Italia” flute intro then. This is hands-down the best song I know describing the dizzy, semi-comatose state of the end of a night/early morning. “If they knocked down this place, this place would still look much better than you” is a wonderfully unflattering line and “What did you lose? It’s OK, it’s just your mind” sums up the whole ridiculousness and futility of going out, destroying yourself and reaching the state where the potential loss of a wallet/phone is far more important than the damage you’re doing to your brain.



Twenty-five years have passed since “Different Class” was released, and it’s aged extremely well while remaining very much a snapshot of the time it was written. It’s also interesting to note that the class war idea touted in the opening track recurs throughout the first four songs, but is then more or less forgotten about in a haze of drink, drugs and sex. Let’s hope the movements for change of today don’t run out of steam in the same way.





Ella Guru – The First Album

On a warm summer evening, there’s little better you can do than pour yourself a drink, put this album on, and let it and yourself bleed into the heat and noisy insects humming outside. A candle in the window makes it even better. Trust me!

Noisy Insects

My Scottish friend put me onto this little-known gem. I’ve since spread the word to many, but the band themselves seem to have long since completely fallen off the radar. Their Wikipedia page has been deleted due to a lack of relevance. Sometimes there’s no musical justice.

Ella Guru are named after a Captain Beefheart song, but it’s hard to work out what, if any common ground, they share. Apart from the raucous and totally unexpected “My Favourite Punk Tune”, which always has me dashing to turn the volume down, the rest of the album is exquisitely hushed.

The quietness of the sound and whispered vocals meant the band had to ask audiences to keep it down at the gigs they did perform. If they did as instructed, they were in for a magical treat. I can’t imagine chatting over a live performance of these songs myself; it would be something akin to sacrilege.

The eight musicians who ended up playing on the album chose to keep their eyes closed when they were not playing so as to be transported to the place the music was taking them. And there are oceans of space to travel within the sound, despite the number of contributors. The woodwind and brass are a model of restraint.

Stylistically, the album is music as meditation, warm country-tinged ambience with frequent references to summer. “Park Lake Speakers”, perhaps the finest song, is a night gathering at the park where “your friends will save a place for you on the grass”. You can almost feel the earth below you and smell the summer night air.

Park Lake Speakers

There’s room for romance and reflection on “My Rock and Roll” (I have searched you/You have searched me too), and there’s wry humour on the following track: “I got a cat/And called him Mojo/Now he’s a working cat/I got my Mojo workin'”. The use of a word like “mojo” seems incongruous given the musical backing, but as he’s a cat, it somehow makes sense.

I Got My Mojo Workin’

The album’s coda rides out on a Jimmy Carl Black vocal wave and thus the Beefheart connection is made (he played drums for them at one stage of his long and varied career). His generous deep southern voice confidently guides the album to its close and adds an authentic American timbre to the Liverpool-based group.

As the title implies, this was Ella Guru’s first album. Tragically, it was also their last. But if you’re only going to put out one album, you really can’t get much better than this one.

Cake – Fashion Nugget

This must be the most influential album of all for me. I first discovered it when I swapped some of my CDs with an English girl working as a waitress in Gstaad, Switzerland; I was working a ski season as a night porter at the time. The other albums I picked up were Massive Attack’s “Mezzanine” and Bjork’s “Homogenic”. I’m 100% sure my offerings were nowhere near as good as hers.

Once I got back to England I couldn’t track down the album anywhere until, suddenly, there it was in front of me in a record store in a Gateshead shopping centre I’d popped into on a bowling trip. The CD cost a whopping 25 pounds, but it was worth every one of them.

Victor Damiani’s bass rips through each track as Vince DiFiore glides over the top on trumpet, a truly integral part of the band. John McCrea’s sardonic vocals and Greg Brown’s slacker guitar form the filling of a delicious sandwich . And what about the drummer, Todd Roper? Well, he had to keep it all together while the other band members went on their virtuosic way.

To anybody who knows me and is familiar with the music I’ve made, they’ll realise that band set-up sounds pretty similar to one I played with in Krakow in the mid-2000s. Like we did, Cake also flip between genre on practically every track. DiFiore is far far better than me at trumpet though. His solo on “Italian Leather Sofa” in particular is insanely brilliant.

The gateway for most to this album is “The Distance”, the song that propelled Cake to worldwide fame. It’s a perfectly crafted spoken word poem about a racing driver stubbornly trying to drive out all his frustrations though somebody “long ago left with the cup”.

The bass line growls like a car engine “pumping and thumping in time”. The trumpet signals that “the sun has gone down and the moon has come up”. In the night, “bowel-shaking earthquakes of doubt and remorse assail him, impale him with monster-truck force” as he thinks about someone “for whom he still burns”.

The Distance

It’s breathtaking in its brilliance. But is it really about a driver or is it about how we relentlessly make our way through life putting all the heartbreak and existentialist dread to one side as best we can?

There are a couple of covers on the album, which are probably the next best-known tracks. Gloria Gaynor was apparently not too pleased about McCrea swearing all over her megahit “I Will Survive”, but he kept things cleaner on “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps”.

McCrea thinking “I should have changed my f…… lock”

There’s a lot of fun to be had on the other tracks too. “Friend is a Four Letter Word” doesn’t use any popular curses, but that’s more than made up for in “Nugget” with a catchy as (insert four letter word) chorus demanding you “Shut the f… up”. “Race Car Ya-Yas” and “Stickshifts and Safetybelts” return to the topic of cars, in a totally absurdist way.

Tracks 10, 12 and 14 provide something like normality as they track a break-up. “It’s Coming Down” has her “leaving the house” before the country influenced “She’ll Come Back To Me” has the singer waiting to hear her footsteps “on his walkway”. On the final track, a waltz (yes, the album finishes on a waltz!), he is resigned to his fate, but postulates that his ex has got away with her cheating as “sad songs and waltzes aren’t selling this year”.

Sad Songs And Waltzes

She didn’t get away with it. The album went platinum.

Manu Chao – Clandestino

I have a very vivid memory of a French girl singing along to every word of this album while getting ready for a fiesta on my Erasmus exchange. In the final year of university, it became the backing music for a lo-fi online BMX game that all my mates were playing. When I decided I wanted to be able to play and sing a song in Spanish, I went straight to this album.

I love the way one track morphs into the next, all held together by a magical pinging sound. It seamlessly moves between languages, too. Within four tracks, English, Spanish and French have already featured and there’s even a little basic Portuguese towards the end in A Minha Galeria. But it is doing the album a disservice if you consider the album in its individual parts rather than as a glorious whole.

So what is this album? Mostly recorded on a small laptop whilst rambling lost through West Africa, Central and South America after splitting from the wildly successful Mano Negra and his girlfriend, it evokes the sound and beat of the street. Politics, poverty, revolution, heartbreak, philosophy, immigration, wandering and climate change all come together to form a musical manifesto of everything he believes in and represents.

Desaparecido

Lines, hooks and melodies ebb in and out only to return later on other tracks mixed with samples of political speeches, radio reports and even his answering machine. It’s a swirling stream of consciousness.

A few of the highlights are the “motor” or “curse” that keeps him moving on with no particular destination, deciding that in this world “everything is a lie (that’s the truth)” and his being reduced to tears at the way we are killing “Pachamama”.

Por El Suelo

In Tijuana “there’s no border with “The Coyote”” and near the end he laments “Why do people fall in love? There are always problems”. “La Despedida” is a long and detailed monologue to self about how he is over his break-up, but at the end he stumbles back into “I’ll always be waiting for you, my love”. Sometimes it’s never really over.

The final track concludes on a Juan Rulfo like note. On a dusty road somewhere on the Mexican border, “the wind comes, the wind departs”. Juxtaposed with the line “hunger (hambre) comes, man (hombre) departs”, his final question is “When will man return?” It’s a warning that the world can survive a lot more than humankind can.

El Viento

This is so much more than just an album for me and being able to understand everything on it is a real pay-off for the years I’ve spent studying languages. But even if you can’t understand it lyrically, it’s a treat musically. Just remember that the album is so, so much deeper than the only song in English on it, “King of the Bongo”.