Previously on this post… In Part One, I considered the parallels in the writing of Philip Larkin and Jarvis Cocker. Both writers use a persona of awkward young men unsuccessful with women, where beds can symbolise flagging relationships. In this post, I’m going to consider the two writers’ use of social satire, some of the key differences in their views of social class and politics, and where meaning might be located in their work.
“Everyone felt the same”: satire in Sorted for E’s and Wizz / High Windows
Jarvis Cocker based his song ‘Sorted for E’s and Wizz’ on the rave culture and recreational drugs popular in the 1980s and 90s:
"Is this the way they say the future's meant to feel? Or
just 20,000 people standing in a field? And I don't quite
understand just what this feeling is, but that's okay 'cos we're
all sorted out for E's and wizz."
He describes how the revellers ultimately fail to connect with one another. Like ‘Disco 2000’, the voice regresses to a child-like state: “I lost my friends, I dance alone. It’s six o’clock, I wanna go home.” There’s then another shift to a tone of over-formality which brilliantly captures the sense of being still-intoxicated-but-coming-down:
"You want to call your mother and say, 'Mother, I can never come home again, 'cos I
seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere
in a field in Hampshire.'"
Sorted for E's and Wizz, Different Class, in Mother, Brother, Lover, p. 49
…best-behaviour meets imagined-confession. In a similar way, Larkin satirises the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s. In ‘High Windows’ (a companion poem to ‘Annus Mirabilis’), he describes how,
"When I see a couple of kids
and guess he's f---ing her and she's...
I know this is paradise
everyone old has dreamed of all their lives...
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly." High Windows (in Collected Poems, p. 129)
Although this is most likely motivated by sexual jealousy, he can nevertheless clearly see that this liberation of sexual mores will usher in its own complications. He ends the poem ambiguously by looking up and out to the “deep blue air that shows/ Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless” (‘High Windows’ in HW, Collected poems, p. 129) — perhaps chiming with the final line of ‘Sorted for E’s and Wizz’, “What if you never come down?” As with ‘Live Bed Show’, Jarvis Cocker’s wavering falsetto suggests a sense of emotional fragility. And both hint at a deeper existential emptiness.
“Think of being them”: Social Class in Pulp and Philip Larkin
Both Philip Larkin’s poetry and Pulp’s music offer social commentary on mid-to-late twentieth-century Britain. ‘Disco 2000’ gives us a close up of late-1970’s working-class life through the playful forced rhyme:
"Deborah, do you recall?
Your house was very small
with woodchip on the wall.
When I came round to call, you didn't notice me at all"
Disco 2000, Different Class, in Mother, Brother, Lover, p. 58
Jarvis Cocker suggests that popularity is the social currency of the teenage years (“I used to walk you home sometimes but it meant nothing to/ you ‘cos you were so popular”), but subtly implies that this is soon replaced by other kinds of hierarchy, such as money, status, success. He picks up the theme of social class again in the song ‘Common People’ in which the wealthy student he meets in a London bar expresses the supercilious opinion, “I want to do whatever common people do.” The young woman it was based on had no interest in him romantically, he has said in interviews, but in the song this is transformed into her obvious desire for the narrator:
"'I want to sleep with common people like you'.
Well, what else could I do?
I said, 'I'll see what I can do."
Common People, Different Class, MBL, p. 64
In this way the song is both a critique of class snobbery, and offers a kind of blithe comic resolution: “But she didn’t understand,/ she just smiled and held my hand” (MBL, p. 46). We can see Jarvis Cocker as the wry observer, standing to one side of the social strata. Philip Larkin was also very much the outsider, although his politics are decidedly more conservative; at times reactionary.
A different class: Jarvis Cocker: outsider-everyman?
In his poem, ‘The Large Cool Store’, Larkin also describes social class in relation to housing, employment, fashion. For him, clothes in a department store suggest workers leaving home to go to their (traditionally male) occupations: “…Who leave at dawn low terraced houses/ Timed for factory, yard and site…” Whilst other outfits in the shop are evocative of young women out partying at the weekend (“Machine-embroidered, thin as blouses…”). So far, so descriptive. He goes on to say:
"To suppose
They share that world, to think their sort is
Matched by something in it shows
How separate and unearthly love is
Or women are, or what they do,
Or in our young unreal wishes
Seem to be: synthetic, new...
The Large Cool Store, The Whitsun Weddings, Collected Poems, p. 101
Here, the imagined women are socially and romantically unavailable to this ‘sort’ of men (perhaps to men as a whole); only available as a kind of fantasy. This theme of social class continues, for example in the title poem, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’:
"The nylon gloves and jewellery substitutes,
that... marked the girls off unreally from the rest."
The Whitsun Weddings, WW, p. 92
In these lines, we can feel the tension between Larkin’s private fantasy and his social snobbery. The mid-1960s in the UK has been described as at once an era of increasing social mobility as the post-war baby boomer generation came of age, and simultaneously quite conventional. It might be that Larkin felt more at ease with a familiar social order. He was in his 40s by then and was conservative at the best of times. He seems to both look down on, and perhaps desire these young women. Here the fault-lines between the two writers start to open up.
In his poem, ‘Toads Revisited’, Larkin considers the unemployed who spend their days in the park: “characters in long coats/ Deep in the litter baskets -/ All dodging the toad work/ By being stupid or weak,” before contrasting it with his own comforting work routines (Toads, Revisited, WW, Collected Poems, p. 89). Larkin espoused a kind of conservative social philosophy. He admired Margaret Thatcher’s politics in the late 1970 and 1980s. His biographer, Andrew Motion, tells the story that when he met her, she quoted from his poem, ‘Deceptions’, the brilliant, disquieting, and rather telling line: “Your mind lay open like a draw of knives” (A Writer’s Life, p. 497).
Philip Larkin: always the outsider
In stark contrast, Jarvis Cocker half-jokes that “One of my favourite ways to get through the horror of Thatcher’s Britain was to sleep a lot” (Good Pop Bad Pop, p. 305). In fact, the battle of Orgreave in which mounted police clashed with striking miners took place near his home town of Sheffield in 1984 when he was the formative age of 21. Jarvis Cocker was clearly part of a younger generation of British artists critical of the social and economic reforms that tended to benefit London and the south of England. In Common People, he says:
"You will never understand how it feels to live your life
with no meaning or control...
You are amazed that they exist
and they burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why"
Common People, in Mother, Brother, Lover, p. 64
The Spectre of Philip Larkin
Alexis Petridis calls ‘Common People’, “Surely the most straightforwardly rousing anthem ever written about class rage.” Curiously, though, Jarvis Cocker expresses some ambivalence about the miners in his memoir, Good Pop Bad Pop: “I associated miners with ‘townies’,” he says, describing several scrapes in Sheffield city centre (pp. 336-7). In his song, ‘Mis-shapes’, he complains,
"...you could end up with a smack in the mouth
just for standing out.
Now really"
Mis-shapes, Different Class, in MBL, p. 51
There’s an element of revenge fantasy in the song:
"Check your lucky numbers.
That much money could drag you under.
What's the point in being rich if you can't think what to do
with it 'cos your so bleeding thick"
Mis-shapes, p. 51
The UK National Lottery had started around the mid-1990s, just before Different Class was released in 1995. Although the aggression is only in the realm of the imagination, there’s more than a touch of contempt for the urban underclass. Afterall, “bleeding thick” isn’t too far from “stupid and weak.” Perhaps here we can just make out the spectre of Philip Larkin polishing his specs.
Jarvis Cocker satirises the upper-middle classes because he feels some among them “think that poor is cool” (‘Common People’); but also the local lads who might have drunkenly taken a swing at him and his friends in their youth. Larkin skewers working people and the lower-middle classes for their tastes and aspirations. It’s all very tribal. So far, so English, you might say. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, Jarvis Cocker’s mother was a local Conservative councillor in Sheffield. When she helped him secure his first job on the fish market, she said “It did him the world of good, and stopped him being so airy-fairy” (What Do You Do for an Encore?) He got to mix with people with whom he might not have otherwise rubbed shoulders.
“Just keep on moving…”: Pulp’s Liberal Existentialism
Despite the similarities we saw in Part 1 – the persona of awkward young men unsuccessful with women, the preoccupation with sex and failed relationships – there are some significant differences between them. Pulp have a much more pro-feminist stance for one thing. This is evident in songs such as ‘Do you remember the first time?’ and ‘I Spy’, as well as the solo single, ‘Don’t let him waste your time’. Jarvis Cocker also points out that Pulp’s keyboard player, Candida Doyle stopped the band becoming too macho or blokey (Good Pop Bad Pop, p. 295). Thank you, he says in What Do You Do for an Encore?
Critics have pointed to a ‘kitchen sink’ realism-quality to both writers. Pulp and Philip Larkin tend to have a materialist view of life, with a focus on concrete experience, colloquial language, and close observation of social life. Taken together, they provide vivid snapshots of England between the end of the war and the millennium, with limited room for the metaphysical. However, Jarvis Cocker tends to have a more liberal-existentialist worldview with meaning routed in lived experience, relationships, community, culture and music itself. Pulp’s songbook is pop music to dance to: it’s ultimately quite life-affirming. Whereas Larkin was reclusive and somewhat death-obsessed: he was famously atheistic, where Jarvis Cocker seems no more than indifferent to religion, “I’ll see what all the fuss is about,” he says when offered the Bible on the BBC’s Desert Island Disks.
There are times when each writer seems to be the other’s shadow: perhaps a touch of snobbery creeps in Pulp’s ‘Mis-shapes’; or Larkin will suddenly write very tenderly despite his reputation for misanthropy, “we should be careful/ Of each other, we should be kind/ While there is still time,” he writes in one of my favourite late poems, ‘The Mower’. The cultural and political differences between them are too pronounced for a comparison to be obvious. But it seems to me that there is a kind of shadow that passes between them. On the back of Mother, Brother, Lover: Selected Lyrics, Frank Cottrell Boyce describes Jarvis Cocker as “John Betjeman with a bassline.” It’s pleasingly alliterative, but Philip Larkin would be closer to the mark.
Alexis Petridis observes very astutely that Pulp didn’t sound like their ‘Britpop’ peers (Oasis, Blur, etc), and were not in step with the prevailing mood of the 1990s. Their “wonky collision of 70s glam, French pop, disco” means that their music hasn’t really dated, he says. At the end of Pulp’s 2025 Glastonbury performance on the Pyramid Stage, the message, This is the best we can do. Thanks for listening, was displayed on the big screen. The underlying Pulp ethos seems to be to live in the now: whatever life throws at you, just keep on moving.
Notes: Jarvis Cocker is currently on the board of judges for the 2026 Booker Prize; Pulp’s most recent album, More. (Rough Trade, 2025), is out now; Garth Jennings’ documentary is streaming on MUBI
The title quotation, “This unique distance from isolation” is from Larkin’s poem ‘Talking in Bed’; the subheading “Think of being them” is from ‘Toads, Revisited’; “Just keep on moving” is from Pulp’s song ‘Sorted for E’s & Wizz’
Part One of this post is here:
I previously wrote about Philip Larkin here:
References:
Garth Jennings, What Do You Do for an Encore? (MUBI, 2026)
Pulp, Different Class (Island Records, 1995)
Jarvis Cocker, Good Pop Bad Pop (Vintage, 2022)
Jarvis Cocker, Mother, Brother, Lover: Selected Lyrics (Faber, 2011)
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (Faber, 1988; 2003)
Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (Faber, 1993)
Alex Petridis, “Pulp’s secret Glastonbury set review – still the magnificently misshapen oddballs of British pop”, The Guardian, Sunday 29 June 2025
Desert Island Disks, BBC Radio 4, April 2005
Larkin, Poems Selected by Martin Amis (Faber, 2011)
