Different Class

Chris Thomas produced the record, and also added guitar and keyboards, at the Townhouse in London between January and July 1995. Anne Dudley arranged and conducted the orchestra on I Spy, Something Changed and F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E. Simon Reynolds wrote in Pitchfork that Cocker wrote eight of the 12 songs in a 48-hour burst, and that the sound is a shabby sumptuousness, a meagre maximalism. Four singles came from it: Common People on 22 May 1995, the double A-side Mis-Shapes and Sorted for E's & Wizz on 25 September, Disco 2000 on 27 November and Something Changed on 25 March 1996.

The title came to Cocker at Smashing, an early-1990s club night at Eve's Club on Regent Street in London, where a friend used the phrase different class for something in a class of its own. The back of the record carries a line asking for the right to be different. Blue Source designed the sleeve. The first copies came with six double-sided inserts of alternative covers, showing cardboard cutouts of the band, and a sticker inviting buyers to choose their own front cover. The wedding photograph used on standard copies shows a real couple, Dom O'Connor and his wife, whose photographer brought life-size cutouts of the band to the day.

It entered the UK chart at number one, was certified platinum within two weeks and is now certified four times platinum, with sales in the UK of 1.33 million as of September 2020. The label estimated worldwide sales at 1.5 million by September 1996, 40,000 of them in the US. In the NME John Mulvey called it funny, phenomenally nasty and genuinely subversive. Select put it top of its 1995 albums list. Looking back, Adrien Begrand wrote in PopMatters that, along with Parklife, it remains the high point of the Britpop era, and BBC Music said it continues to reward the listener with some of the smartest pop songs of a decade. NME ranked it number six in its 2013 list of the 500 greatest albums, and Rolling Stone placed it at 162 in 2020. It is included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. A deluxe edition with a disc of B-sides, demos and rarities followed on 11 September 2006.