Uncommon by Owen Hatherley

Author:Owen Hatherley [Hatherley, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: polica
ISBN: 9781846948770
Google: ejciKQEACAAJ
Amazon: 1846948770
Goodreads: 11281898
Publisher: O Books
Published: 2011-06-15T22:00:00+00:00

We live round here too (oh really?)

All these contradictions are brought to the fore in the follow-up, ‘Mis-Shapes’, where the relentless momentum of ‘Common People‘ takes on a newly insurgent tone. If Pulp’s mid-90s records are best understood as a South Yorkshire retooling of disco, then ‘Mis-Shapes’ is their ‘Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now’. As a statement of triumphant collectivity against the odds, it bottles the giddy feeling’ that ‘we’ were on the move that accompanied both Britpop and early Blairism., and the knowledge of what false dawns both were is bound to colour any listening today. Not incidentally, it’s a song the group themselves quickly grew to hate, and they didn’t play it again from 1996 onwards, although they made a couple of curious attempts to rewrite it. The motorik pulse is replaced by a peculiarly prancing, piano-driven glam-stomp, and like those sleevenote communiques, it’s addressed at the Pulp People, at the constituency of outcasts they acquired after 1992. We’re defined by being poor, weird misshapen waste products, ‘raised on a diet of broken biscuits’, so when facing the enemy, we have to use ‘the one thing we’ve got more of – that’s our minds’; but we’re also defined by certain choices – ‘we don’t look the same as you, we don’t do the things you do’, ‘we weren’t supposed to be, we learnt too much at school’. If it ended there, then that would be one thing – but other, grander associations are courted.

What makes ‘Mis-Shapes’ so exciting, other than the feeling –lesser than in ‘Common People’, but still electric – of someone finally finding the right words to convey an age-old grievance -is the way it speaks unashamedly in the language of class war, with the threat aimed directly at property: ‘we want your homes, we want your lives, we want the things you won’t allow us‘; you hear someone who has unexpectedly chanced their way into the unexpected position of spokesman, and seizing the role with alacrity – or rather, using it as the way of avenging the defeats of the past, that hissed ‘you think that you’ve got us beat, but revenge is going to be so sweet’ – and there’s nothing else produced by Britpop which takes on so fully the role of punk-style upending of received values. Yet though it might present itself as being about class conflict, ‘Mis-Shapes’ encapsulates rather more a conflict which anyone who went to a comprehensive school or lived in a provincial town in the 1990s will be all too familiar with. That is, the one-sided fights between conformist, violent, sportswear-clad ‘townies’ and ‘hippies’/’moshers’/’goths’/’indies’ (otherwise competing tribes pushed into uneasy alliance by a shared and deeply relative nonconformism), fought out in corridors and precincts across the UK.

The phrase ‘townie’ itself – which Pulp used in interviews to describe ‘Mis-Shapes’ adversaries - comes from the town vs gown conflicts of University cities. It’s the students’ derisive term for the inhabitants of the city that they’re exploiting (or, more recently, that is exploiting them).

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