Common People
by Pulp
- 144
- BPM
- C major
- Key
- 8B
- Camelot
- 33
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Years after its release, "Common People" won two polls. In 2014 BBC Radio 6 Music listeners voted it their favorite Britpop song, and in 2015 Rolling Stone readers named it the greatest. Island Records released it in May 1995 as the lead single from Different Class, and it reached number two on the UK Singles Chart.
Jarvis Cocker took the idea from a Greek art student he met at Central Saint Martins around 1988, who told him she wanted to move to Hackney and live like common people. He wrote the tune on a Casiotone MT-500 keyboard from a shop in Notting Hill. Most of the band were unimpressed when he played it at rehearsal, and Steve Mackey said it reminded him of Emerson, Lake and Palmer's "Fanfare for the Common Man". Keyboardist Candida Doyle saw its potential straight away.
Pulp first played it at the Reading Festival in August 1994. Cocker had written most of the lyrics the night before and had trouble remembering them on stage. To give it a big sound, the band chose producer Chris Thomas and recorded the single over two weeks at The Town House in London, filling all 48 tracks, even with a Stylophone. A year after Reading, Pulp headlined Glastonbury.
Common People runs at 144 BPM, the tempo of dubstep and trap counted in half time, and hardstyle. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.67 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 417 ms. It is in C major, Camelot 8B, which shares its notes with A minor and mixes cleanly with F major and G major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.