Pulp — Sheffield and Cocker's Early Years

Pulp — Jarvis Cocker's band, formed in Sheffield in 1978 when Cocker was fifteen — spent nearly two decades as cult outsiders before exploding into mainstream consciousness with Different Class in 1995. The album's centrepiece, 'Common People,' is one of the great British pop songs: a six-minute portrait of class resentment and imposter syndrome set in London's Central Saint Martins art school but soaked in Sheffield steel-town DNA. Cocker had moved to London to study at Saint Martins after years of Sheffield obscurity, and the song's fury was specifically directed at middle-class slumming — 'smoke some fags and play some pool, pretend you never went to school.'

Sheffield in the late 1970s and 1980s was also home to the Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, ABC, Heaven 17, and the early UK electronics scene — a cold, post-industrial city generating some of Britain's most forward-thinking pop. Pulp occupied a different corner of that scene, their early records being scrappy guitar affairs before they found the orchestrated irony of their mature style. Cocker's persona — tall, bespectacled, charity-shop dressed, sexually ambiguous — became an unlikely pop icon.

Sheffield's music scene is commemorated in various locations around the city centre. The Leadmill club, where many of these bands played early shows, is still operating and is one of England's great indie venues. The National Centre for Popular Music, which opened in Sheffield in 1999 and quickly closed, was an attempt to capitalise on this heritage. The city's industrial architecture provides the context for all of it.