Common People

The lead single from Different Class was released on 22 May 1995 and reached number two on the UK singles chart. Cocker took the idea from an art student from Greece he met around 1988 on a sculpture course at Central Saint Martins, who told him she wanted to move to Hackney and live like the common people. He has said he does not know her name. He worked out the tune on a Casiotone keyboard bought in Notting Hill, and most of the band were unimpressed when he played it at rehearsal. Mackey thought it sounded like Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Fanfare for the Common Man, but Doyle saw the potential straight away.

Pulp first played it at the Reading Festival in August 1994, where Cocker had written most of the lyrics the night before and struggled to remember them. Chris Thomas produced the recording at the Town House in London over two weeks, and the band filled all 48 tracks, a Stylophone among the sounds. The single left out the final verses, beginning with the dog lying in a corner, which stay on the album. Simon Reynolds wrote in Pitchfork that the chorus rouses unity and release even as the lyric speaks of division and tension.

The 2006 deluxe edition of the album adds the song from Glastonbury 1995. In the Guardian, Dorian Lynskey wrote that the bonus disc's Glastonbury performance captures the moment when lifelong outsiders realise they are at the very centre of things. In 2021 Rolling Stone placed the song at 75 on its list of the 500 best songs, and in 2014 BBC Radio 6 Music listeners voted it their favourite Britpop song. William Shatner's 2004 cover, produced by Ben Folds, brought it to new audiences outside Europe.