A hidden gem of a Pulp song was inspired by a dream Jarvis Cocker had about John Lennon. The frontman behind hits like Common People and Spike Island confirmed the odd influence which had come to him somewhat suddenly. He very nearly passed up on the song too as it came to him in a dream and he had believed it to be a Lennon original.
But it turned out to be a wholly new composition and one worth noting down for The Last Day of the Miner’s Strike, a song which featured on the band’s compilation album, Hits. Pulp’s Sheffield roots put them right at the centre of the miners’ strikes of the 1980s, with former band member Russell Senior involved in the protests. Cocker would note this involvement when speaking about the song, which the band performed at Tramlines Festival in 2025.
He said: “When it was on, Russell [Senior] was going out on pickets all the time, but I had no interest in politics at the time. I kinda regretted it later… I tried to make the song more allusive rather than some Billy Bragg thing.” But Cocker says the song itself was fashioned out of a dream featuring Lennon, The Beatles band member.
Speaking to Mojo Magazine shortly after Pulp split up for the first time, Cocker explained that he had envisioned Lennon playing a song and later realised this was a new track, rather than an already-written song by the Imagine hitmaker.
Cocker said: “I’d had this dream where I was listening to this John Lennon song. Woke up and realised it wasn’t a Lennon song; I wrote it down and tried to remember the tune.” Despite the song’s appeal to Sheffield and former miners, Cocker noted he was “a bit iffy” in writing about the miners’ strike “when I don’t know that much about it.”
The Pulp frontman isn’t the first to write a song supporting the miners’ strikes and those affected by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. Elvis Costello famously featured Tramp Down the Dirt on his album, Spike, to lash out against the policies of The Iron Lady’s government.
Costello has performed the song on occasion and continued to do so following Thatcher’s death in 2013. A performance of the song in Thurles, Ireland, in 1991, even featured alternative lyrics which dubbed England “the whore of the world” and Thatcher as its “madam.”
Cocker has written about public figures before, with a song featuring on We Love Life making him far more nervous than his miners’ strike track ever did. Bad Cover Version would take a swipe at Scott Walker, the veteran songwriter behind The Seventh Seal who would end up producing Pulp’s 2001 album.
Cocker explained: “He was fine, he was OK. I’d written that song before and realised that it referenced him and was very nervous. I kept saying, ‘I’ve got to broach this subject with him before I actually start singing.’
“It was coming to the day when I was gonna start doing vocals and I’d kept just chickening it. And then one morning I went in and decided to just walk straight up to him and say, ‘Anyway, Scott, there’s this song on the record called Bad Cover Version and it mentions you,’ and blurted it all out.
“He was famously someone who never listened to his music after he’d recorded it, so he probably didn’t know exactly what I was talking about, but then eventually cottoned on, and eventually said, in a kind of sarcastic way, ‘Oh, this is the way you treat me, is it?’ But it was fine, he was cool.”
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