Pulp Best Songs Ranked — The Definitive Guide

"Common People" is one of the greatest British pop songs ever written — a sustained and formally remarkable attack on class tourism that builds from a deceptively simple opening through an escalating verse of increasingly furious specificity to a chorus that manages to be simultaneously an anthem and a cry of helplessness. Cocker's lyric operates on multiple registers at once: the narrator is angry, attracted, contemptuous, and ultimately impotent, because the worst thing he can articulate — "you'll never live like common people, you'll never do whatever common people do" — is not a threat but a fact. The production, centred on Doyle's synthesiser and a genuinely danceable groove, makes the whole thing feel jubilant even as the lyric is devastating.

"Babies" is the most perfectly constructed song on His 'n' Hers and the track that best introduced Cocker's voyeuristic, confessional songwriting style to a wider audience. The lyric — about hiding in a wardrobe to watch an older girl's romantic encounters, then later dating her younger sister — is presented with such matter-of-fact candour that the listener barely has time to register how transgressive the subject matter is before the chorus arrives and makes it feel like the most natural thing in the world. The synthesiser hook is immediate and indelible. It is the track that most clearly previews what Different Class would do at full commercial scale.

"Disco 2000" is the most nostalgic song in the Pulp catalogue and the track that demonstrates Cocker's gift for inhabiting the precise emotional temperature of a specific kind of memory — the reunion with a childhood friend that never quite happens, the relationship that should have been something but wasn't, the way the future you imagined in youth diverges from the one you end up with. The lyric's specificity is remarkable: the name "Deborah," the "babies' names on a bus shelter wall," the invitation to meet "outside the old town hall." The production is the most straightforwardly danceable on the album, which gives the melancholy of the lyric an ironic counterpoint that is characteristic of Cocker at his best.

"This Is Hardcore" is the most formally ambitious song in the Pulp catalogue and the centrepiece of the band's most difficult and most underrated album. The lyric addresses the anxiety of fame, the pornography of image-making, and the sense of watching oneself perform from the outside — all refracted through a metaphor of pornography that is both genuinely disturbing and entirely apt. The arrangement is orchestral and claustrophobic, building across seven minutes to a climax that feels more like dread than triumph. It was designed to unsettle an audience who expected another Different Class, and it succeeded. Its reputation has grown steadily since.

"Mis-Shapes" is the most politically explicit song in the Pulp catalogue and the track most directly addressed to the outsiders, the misfits, and the people who didn't fit the prevailing definitions of cool. The lyric is an anthem for people who have always been on the wrong side of beauty and belonging, delivered with the gleeful defiance of someone who has spent fifteen years being ignored and has now found himself with a platform. The double A-side with "Sorted for E's & Wizz" reached number two in the UK and introduced the band to the mainstream at precisely the moment they had the most to say to it.

"I Spy" is the best deep cut on Different Class and possibly the most unsettling song in the Pulp catalogue — a slow-building, nine-minute account of class resentment told from the perspective of someone who has infiltrated the lives of the privileged by sleeping with their women, and who views this as a kind of revenge rather than a genuine connection. The narrator is not sympathetic; he is bitter, calculating, and self-aware about his own bitterness. It is a remarkable piece of character writing, and the arrangement — which builds patiently through its nine minutes before a final section of controlled chaos — matches the lyric's controlled fury.

"Help the Aged" is the most tender song in the Pulp catalogue — a single written from the perspective of the very old speaking to the very young, addressing them with a mixture of affection and pragmatic urgency: help us now, because one day this will be you. The lyric achieves something unusual in pop — genuine compassion for the aged rather than sentiment about them — and Cocker delivers it without irony, which is even more unusual for a songwriter whose default mode involves considerable distance. It was a number eight UK single and is one of the most emotionally straightforward things the band ever recorded.

"Do You Remember the First Time?" is the most immediately accessible track from His 'n' Hers and the single that first brought Pulp to wider attention in 1994. The lyric — about revisiting a past sexual encounter and finding it harder to locate the emotion that made it significant — is vintage Cocker: specific without being crude, melancholy without being maudlin, and structured around a hook that makes the whole thing feel like a celebration rather than a lament. The accompanying short film, in which celebrities were asked about their first sexual experiences, generated as much attention as the song itself.

"Sorted for E's & Wizz" is the more reflective of the double A-side with "Mis-Shapes" and the song that most directly engages with the rave and festival culture of the early 1990s — specifically the morning after, when the euphoria has faded and the promised revelation hasn't arrived. The lyric is a precise account of the emptiness that follows collective ecstasy, and it generated considerable controversy at the time due to the drug references in the title (the sleeve contained instructions for making a drugs wrap, which several newspapers complained about). The music is slower and more melancholy than most of the album, which suits the subject perfectly.

"Wickerman" closes this ranking as the most distinctive track from Pulp's final original album and the song that best represents the quieter, more pastoral direction that the Scott Walker-produced We Love Life took. The lyric is an account of a couple's relationship through the changing seasons, told with the wry, detached observation that characterises Cocker's best work. The production — more acoustic, more spacious than anything on Different Class or This Is Hardcore — gives it a different emotional register without sacrificing the precision and wit that define the band's best material. An essential listen for anyone who assumes the story ends with the Commercial peak.