"She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge / She studied sculpture at St Martins College". So began Pulp’s ‘Common People’, one of the greatest pop songs of the 90s. But who was the mysterious woman who gave Jarvis Cocker his inspiration? The Pulp singer has refused to be drawn, saying "On that BBC Three documentary [The story Of… Pulp’s Common People], the researchers went through all the people who were contemporaries of mine at St Martins and they tried to track her down. They showed me a picture and it definitely wasn’t her. I dunno. Maybe she wasn’t Greek. Maybe I misheard her." Is Cocker muddying the waters here? For a Greek website suggests that the privileged student might be non other than the video and installation artist Danae Stratou, wife of Greek finance minister and sexy smart man of SYRIZA, Yanis Varoufakis. As her biography reveals, she studied sculpture at St Martins at around the same time as Jarvis Cocker was there in the late 80s. She certainly had a dad who, if roaches were climbing the walls of her flat above a shop, could have stopped it all after a phone call – he was the industrialist Phaidon Stratos. Coincidence?
Common People: Girl Identified?
Is Danae Stratou, artist and wife of the Greek finance minister, the subject of Pulp's song?
