Different Class

Background and release

The album was released in the UK at the height of Britpop. It followed from the success of their breakthrough album His 'n' Hers the previous year. Two of the singles on the album – "Common People" (which reached number two in the UK singles chart) and "Disco 2000" (which reached number seven) – were especially notable, and helped propel Pulp to nationwide fame. A "deluxe edition" of Different Class was released on 11 September 2006. It contains a second disc of B-sides, demos and rarities.

The inspiration for the title came to frontman Jarvis Cocker in Smashing, a club night that ran during the early 1990s in Eve's Club on Regent Street in London. Cocker had a friend who used the phrase "different class" to describe something that was "in a class of its own". Cocker liked the double meaning, with its allusions to the British social class system which was a theme of some of the songs on the album. A message on the back of the record also references this idea:

"We don't want no trouble, we just want the right to be different. That's all."

Artwork

The sleeve design was created by Blue Source. Initial copies of the CD and vinyl album came with 6 different double-sided inserts of alternative cover art, and a sticker inviting the listener to "Choose your own front cover". In all standard copies thereafter these 12 individual covers made up the CD booklet, with the wedding photograph used as the actual cover.

The full details of the wedding photograph used on the front cover of the standard sleeve editions were described on 2011 tour posters:

LOCATION: St Barnabas Church, East Molesey
TIME: 12pm, Saturday 12 August 1995
EVENT: Sharon & Dominic's Wedding
PHOTOGRAPHER: Donald Milne
CAMERA: 1979 Hasselblad 500CM with 80mm lens
FILM STOCK: Fuji Super G-400
DESIGN: Blue Source
ORIGINAL SLEEVE NOTES: "Please understand – we don't want no trouble. We just want the right to be different. That's all."

In an interview with BBC Radio 6 Music presenter Chris Hawkins on 8 April 2014, Dom O'Connor, the groom featured in the wedding photograph, recalled how the album cover had come about:

"When we got married we were putting the wedding together ourselves, we pulled a lot of favours from people we knew... My little brother Ben went to art college in Edinburgh and he made friends with a guy who subsequently became a photographer and had done a lot of work with the Britpop bands – I think he worked with Blur, and Elastica, and of course Pulp. So we asked him about a couple of months before whether he would be prepared to do some photos for us, and he couldn't actually do it because he said he was busy working on some Pulp stuff. But he phoned us about a week before and said Pulp were thinking about using some photos with real people in them, including a wedding photo, and if we would do some joke shots where he'd bring some life-size cutouts of the band down, he would do some proper wedding shots for us as well. And that's basically what happened. They rocked up on the wedding day with the life-size cutouts of the band and took the photos, and I suppose the rest is history."

Apart from the bride and groom, the photograph features the parents of both the bride and the groom, O'Connor's two brothers, his two best friends and his wife's best friend. O'Connor also told Hawkins that he and his family had no further contact with the photographer after the day of the wedding, and had no idea that the photographs would be used for the album cover until his mother saw a poster advertising the album in an HMV record store. He later saw a billboard poster of the album cover while he was out shopping. Pulp's record company at the time did not pay the family for the use of their picture, but when Pulp reformed in 2011 Rough Trade paid for the family members to see Pulp play live. O'Connor said, "Rough Trade very kindly sent us a signed copy of the photo that Jarvis had signed last year, just saying 'Thank you very much Dom and Sharon for letting us crash your wedding', which I thought was a really nice touch actually".

Critical reception

Allmusic declared that Different Class "blows away all their previous albums, including the fine His 'n' Hers. Pulp don't stray from their signature formula at all – it's still grandly theatrical, synth-spiked pop with new wave and disco flourishes, but they have mastered it here. Not only are the melodies and hooks significantly catchier and more immediate, the music explores more territory... Jarvis Cocker's lyrics take two themes, sex and social class, and explore a number of different avenues in bitingly clever ways. As well as perfectly capturing the behavior of his characters, Cocker grasps the nuances of language, creating a dense portrait of suburban and working-class life." Spin described the album as "songs about naughty infidelities, sexless marriages, grown-up teenage crushes, twisted revenge fantasies, obsessive voyeurism and useless raves; songs that demand your full attention and deserve it". Writing about the album in 2011, BBC Music stated that "over 15 years since its release [it] continues to reward the listener with some of the smartest, slinkiest, sauciest, spectacular pop songs of a decade that was, looking back, not that brilliant once the bucket hats and ironic anoraks are whipped away." PopMatters retrospective review in 2004 opined that "nearly nine years after its release, Different Class has aged very well, possessing that timeless quality that is present in all classic albums, but is still obviously a product of its time, a snapshot of mid-'90s life in the UK. Along with Blur's Parklife, it remains the high point of the Britpop era; music, lyrics, production, artwork, it's as perfect as it gets."

Legacy

The album was the winner of the 1996 Mercury Music Prize. In 1998 Q readers voted Different Class the 37th greatest album of all time; a repeat poll in 2006 put it at number 85. In 2000 the same magazine placed it at number 46 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. In 2005 it was voted number 70 in Channel 4's The 100 Greatest Albums. In 2006 British Hit Singles & Albums and NME organised a poll in which 40,000 people worldwide voted for the 100 best albums ever and Different Class was placed at number 54 on the list. The album was ranked at number 35 on Spin's "The 300 Best Albums of the Past 30 Years (1985–2014)" list. Select ranked the album at number one in its end-of-year list of the 50 best albums of 1995.

Released in 1995 at the height of the Britpop era, it is often considered an album which best defines Britpop. Reviewing the 2006 deluxe edition, Drowned in Sound described Different Class as "easily the best album of its year of release and arguably the best album from the Britpop era" and went on to call it "a certifiable masterpiece that not only lived up to the sky-high expectations heaped upon it with appalling ease, but surpassed them." A 2014 BBC Radio poll of over 30,000 listeners voted lead single "Common People" as the top Britpop anthem. DJ Steve Lamacq said: "It is one of the defining records of Britpop because it seemed to embrace the essence of the time so perfectly." Also in 2014, The Village Voice ranked Different Class at number one in its list of the 10 best Britpop albums. Exactly twenty years on from its release, Complex magazine declared Different Class as "the most important Britpop album."

Track listing

All lyrics written by Jarvis Cocker; all music composed by Pulp (Cocker, Nick Banks, Steve Mackey, Russell Senior, Candida Doyle and Mark Webber, except where noted.

Bonus tracks Different Class was released under the title Common People in Japan on 16 November 1995

Note

Tracks 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 10 from deluxe edition bonus CD were previously unavailable

Personnel

Pulp:

Jarvis Cocker – vocals, Vox Marauder guitar, Ovation 12 string guitar, Sigma acoustic guitar, Roland Vocoder Plus VP-330, Roland SH-09, Mellotron, Micromoog, Synare

Russell Senior – Fender Jazzmaster guitar, violin

Candida Doyle – Farfisa Compact Professional II organ, Ensoniq ASR 10, Korg Trident II, Minimoog, Fender Rhodes piano, Roland Juno 6, Roland SH-09

Steve Mackey – Musicman Sabre bass

Mark Webber – Gibson ES 345 guitar, Gibson Les Paul guitar, Gibson Firebird guitar, Sigma acoustic guitar, Casio Tonebank CT-470, Fender Rhodes piano, Roland Juno 6

Nick Banks – Yamaha drums, Zildjian cymbals, percussion

Additional musicians:

Matthew Vaughan – programming

Olle Romo – programming

Anthony Genn – additional programming

Mark Haley – additional programming

Chris Thomas – additional guitar and keyboards

Anne Dudley – orchestral arrangement and conducting

Gavyn Wright – orchestra leader