There have been no less than two famous singers from the city of Sheffield born with the last name “Cocker.”

The second-most famous of them is the blues shouter Joe Cocker, a moniker that immediately evokes working men’s clubs and kitchen sink dramas. It’s the kind of name you can stamp onto an album entitled “Sheffield Steel” with a straight face.

“Jarvis,” on the other hand, is not a common working-class name. It sounds vaguely French or continental to the English ear — it’s fancy. There was a character in the 1990s British comedy show The Mary Whitehouse Experience called “Jarvis,” but he was an aristocratic middle-aged gay man. Which is why it’s so surprising that a man named Jarvis Cocker wrote the wildly popular anthem “Common People,” one of the few hit songs of the 1990s explicitly about class and class conflict.