Report: Jarvis Cocker Took Greek Finance Minister's Wife to Supermarket
Last week, Greek paper Athens Voice published a story claiming that Danae Stratou, a former student of sculpture at St. Martin’s College and the current wife of Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, was the inspiration for Pulp’s 1995 anthem, “Common People.” While Startou hasn’t commented yet about the allegations, her husband spoke to the BBC about her possibly historic past.
“Well, I wouldn’t have known her back then. But I do know that she was the only Greek student of sculpture at St. Martin’s College at that time,” Varoufakis said. “And, from personal experience, she is a very fascinating person.”
“Common People,” for those of you who are young, begins like this:
She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge,
She studied sculpture at Saint Martin’s College,
That’s where I,
Caught her eye.
She told me that her Dad was loaded,
I said “In that case I’ll have a rum and coca-cola.”
She said “Fine.”
And in thirty seconds time she said,
I want to live like common people,
I want to do whatever common people do,
I want to sleep with common people,
I want to sleep with common people,
Like you.
Later in the song, he takes her to a supermarket.
The Guardian reports Stratou studied sculpture at Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design between 1983 and 1988. Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker studied film studies at the college at the same time. Also lending credence to Athens Voice’s theory: Stratou’s father is the Greek is industrialist Phaidon Stratos, who certainly qualified as “loaded.”
Then again, there’s Cypriot artist Katerina Kana, who in 2012 told a Greek magazine that she was the song’s oblivious inspiration. Cocker, for his part, has denied that Kana had anything to do with the song.
“On that BBC3 documentary, the researchers went through all the people who were contemporaries of mine at Saint Martins and they tried to track her down,” he told Uncut in 2014, according to the Guardian. “They showed me a picture and it definitely wasn’t her. I dunno. Maybe she wasn’t Greek. Maybe I misheard her.” Cocker also once claimed that he made the woman up.
“I say in the song, ‘She studied sculpture at Saint Martins College’, which is actually untrue,” he said in documentary The Story of Common People.
Regardless of the inspiration behind “Common People,” we can all agree “Babies” and “A Little Soul” are the two best Pulp songs.
