Uncommon

You could have gone for £55.25, not including booking fee, or £155 for the Club Experience Package, which featured a private entrance away from the common people, a chill-out area and hot and cold barbecue platters.

As the VIPs chatted and took photographs of each other in their private grandstand, the lanky working-class Jarvis Cocker was on stage, screaming: "You will NEVER understand how it FEELS to live your life with no MEANING or control..."

In Uncommon, Owen Hatherley has produced a wonderful long essay on the "articulate and increasingly furious" working-class pop group Pulp which Cocker fronts.

As the author reminds us, it's barely believable now that this band from Sheffield "managed to send a krautrock epic about class warfare to number 2 and then used this public goodwill to convince tens of thousands to purchase a despairing six-minute dirge on the subject of amateur pornography three years later."

Hatherley's avowed intention is to save Jarvis and band from their association with Britpop, described here as a musical movement "at its most rhythmically inert and vacantly optimistic," anchored in a "Poujadist national resentment."

They deserve better than to be remembered merely alongside the mockney class tourism of Damon Albarn's Blur.

Pulp songs were deeper, truer - twisting, complex worlds of compelling narratives and exotic detail.

Their mastery of the themes of class, sex, and urbanism - the latter Hatherley's area of expertise - means that the songs deserve the detailed analysis received here.

Through the band's finest moments - their febrile Sheffield synth songs of acrylic, adultery, and failed council visions of the future, the epic class revenge fantasies of Different Class and the prescient sex-as-voyeuristic capitalist-exchange masterwork This Is Hardcore - the author sees what Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky called Ostranienie, "a technique that makes the most mundane daily acts into extraordinary rituals."

Pulp are likely to be the last major pop group to be "consciously working class and consciously, unashamedly arty," due to the neoliberal drive to end welfare and free universal education.

Though understandable, the band's reformation for festival appearances like Wireless is perhaps a sadder end than this book suggests they deserve.