Forget streaming a new album and not bothering to look at the cover art – when Britpop heroes Pulp released their era-defining and career-making ‘Different Class’ in 1995, it contained a dozen different possible covers that fans could pick and choose from. And here they are in all their glory…
This was the official cover of the album, but fans could also make their own album cover using the alternative images that make up this gallery. You could fold these out on the vinyl edition to literally swap and change the front cover as you please. Cool, eh?
The girl on this cover was 16-year-old Clare Zerny, a fan of the band who was also signed to a modelling agency. She later recalled: “Everyone I knew would turn them around in record shops so that my picture was at the front… And one of the guys on the school bus asked me to sign his copy by my picture; I could have died!”
Like most Britpop classics, original vinyl copies of ‘Different Class’ fetch a lot of money online. Pick one up for around £250, but don’t you dare open it.
Jarvis has said of the album: “It’s about situations I’ve been in since coming to London. From living in a squat in Mile End to going to a party at Gianni Versace’s, which I did… I justify it to myself, that you’re not just telling stories about your life, you’re turning it into something else, into songs.”
This poorly, friendly-seeming mutt probably isn’t what Jarvis had in mind when he penned the ‘Common People’ lyric: “Like a dog lying in a corner / They will bite you and never warn you/Look out/They’ll tear your insides out.”
The marital couple here are Dom and Sharon O’Connor and this is their actual wedding, which took place Molesey, Surrey, in August 1995. They were doing the wedding on the cheap, calling in favours from friends, and their pal Donald Milne agreed to take the photographs if they’d pose with cutouts of a band he was working with. That band was… Menswear. No, just kidding, it was Pulp.
When ‘Common People’ reached Number Two in the singles chart and the band were asked to perform it on Top Of The Pops, Jarvis thought his pop star moment had arrived. Yet the singer later recalled: “I jumped off the monitor quite spectacularly, as you do, landed in a puddle, slipped and fell flat on me arse… Not quite what I’d been dreaming of for 20 years.”
