Can anyone think of any Pulp songs which strongly remind you of other songs?
Obviously She's A Lady seems to borrow very heavily from I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor. Also We can Dance Again, in the chorus, sounds very like the verses to Tragedy by the Bee Gees. Can anyone think of any other examples?
It's a completely different song, and yet at the same time still sounds very similar.
I can't think of any others at the moment, but the other way round Blur's "Tender" has an opening almost identical to Dogs Are Everywhere, and there's an REM song which came out around the same time as "This Is Hardcore" which pretty much is Glory Days. Though some argumentative REM-fan person on the Lipgloss mailing list insisted it didn't count because Pulp had already nicked the tune from Leonard Cohen.
I can't remember precisely off the top of my head, but there is an Oasis song and also a Suede song which both sound like Ansaphone. That Gloria thing freaked me out! I hadn't heard it before.
Wow, that has GOT to be intentional! (I once did a song where the chorus melody was taken from 'Bridge Zone', from the 8-Bit version of Sonic The Hedgehog. I don't quite know why I'm owning up to this.)
I can't remember precisely off the top of my head, but there is an Oasis song and also a Suede song which both sound like Ansaphone. That Gloria thing freaked me out! I hadn't heard it before.
I think you're thinking of All Around The World and Lost In TV. They all have the same C-G-Am-F verse. But Ansaphone was recorded first and is ten times the song of either.
The cod-Latino guitar intro of After You is very similar to the beginning of Beautiful Neighbourhood by Space aswell.
The chorus of 'Weeds' is 'Oh Come All Ye Faithful' which put me off a bit when it hit me recently. Also an old flat mate of mine ruined TV Movie for me, when at the point Jarvis sings, "Anything clever to say... to say... so I say..." he continued into "Thank you for the music, the songs we're singing" (ABBA)... I still haven't forgiven him for that!
There was something on the Mark & Lard Show (back when it was on Radio 1 late at night, so mid '90s) where they played some obscure Spanish new romantic record that had the exact same tune as Common People.
Myself I think that Joking Aside has a certain something in common with Leonard Cohen's 'So Long Marianne'.
Good grief Laura Branigan had scary eyebrows.
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"Yes I saw her in the chip shop / so I said get yer top off"
There was something on the Mark & Lard Show (back when it was on Radio 1 late at night, so mid '90s) where they played some obscure Spanish new romantic record that had the exact same tune as Common People.
I remember that! It was a female singer and there was quite a similarity with the first verse. I think O.U borrows from Artery's In the Garden a bit. We Can Dance again definitely steals from Blakes Seven and Party Hard is a David Bowie song.
The Spanish song apparently ripped off by Pulp was, I think, this one - Los Amantes by Mecano, a Madrid pop group who apparently enjoyed huge success in the Mediterranean and Central America in the 1980s.
The little riff is the same, the rhythm of the verse phrases (even in a different language) also uncanny...and you just know that it's the wilfully obscure type of thing that Jarvis would admire.
It's only the melody on the first bar of the verse, & when you get to the chord change it alters completely. I reckon "apparently ripped off by Pulp" is totally unquantifiable in this instance...Luckily!! (:
It's obviously just coincidence, the melodic phrase is based on 3 notes from the major scale and the chord change is to chord V which is hardly unusual.
Common People was influenced by "Fanfare for the Common Man" according to Jarvis.