Remember 1995? There were those silly Britpop Wars between Oasis and Blur, which seemed to encourage A&R guys to sign a lot of bloody awful carny acts like Spacehog (who had so little imagination they had to rip off the Penguin Cafe Orchestra), Babylon Zoo ("Spaceman", no comment), Reef (their one vaguely redeeming moment is that they somehow managed to offend Darryl Somers whilst out here. Ooh-er.) and Kula Shaker (Geezus Christ. Crispian's grandad is showing more life these days).

But Oasis and Blur! It is to laugh! After a couple of passable homages to listening to the Beatles too much, Oasis hit the floor harder than a striker on a receiving end of a Danny Tiatto tackle. They're still trying to recover, I see. And Blur, fucking Blur, decided to pull out of the pantomine business and put out a supposedly "uncommercial" album, which made them truly "cool" for about two seconds before "Song Two" (yeah, the 'woo-hoo!" one) got shopped to every ad agency in the business. So what happened with Pulp? Well, they won the Britpop Wars with this album, and capped it when Jarvis Cocker 'bummed' Michael Jackson at the '96 Brit Awards while the King of Pop was doing one of his asinine pantomines about how the wonderfully sad the world was. That's a while back now, I grimly note as I type this.

At the time, in terms of not just painting a picture of society but reaching in and ripping its ugly bits out and placing it on display like some Tate exhibit, Pulp nailed it, and they were even remotely funky. Remotely. Listening to "Monday Morning" with its skanky guitar which suddenly collapses into routine, akin to the usual weekend. "Mis-Shapes" call-to-arms to the meek and spindly yet resentful all the same, the jarring transition between adolescent expectations of later life that don't quite turn out that way in "Disco 2000", the tale of domestic creepiness in "I Spy", the 'you're a long way from home raver boy' musings of "Sorted For E's And Wizz", the randy nervousness of "F.E.E.L.I.N.G. C.A.L.L.E.D. L.O.V.E.", and so it goes on. Good tunes that rock along when they need to, or hold back to build the tension and all that, before releasing it with a punchline, or perhaps just letting it go with resolving anything.

In short, it's not so much an album about class in itself, as much a catalogue of accounts of people's awkwardness in their place in society; they may have had aspirations but have watched them deflate in a fog of bad decisions, missed opportunities, and ordinary garden-variety incompetence. It seems the buggers never had a chance.

"Common People" nails all that in place; it's the keystone of the album, a tale of a rich girl slumming it with the proles, before being informed ever so succinctly that she's missing the point and will never bridge the gap. I make that sound like horsemeat, but with the wit and cadence with which Jarvis sets out the opening verse is so cuttingly deadpan, over that synth pulse coupled with the guitars which builds up and up through the song, culminating in Cocker's final outburst in indignant dismay at the cruelty of it all, yet defiant all the same. Determinism is a bitch.