No? Well, I did. It was truly a gesture for the common people.
The ensuing hubbub was not without irony. Cocker was by then one of the most recognisable men in Britain.
The fame he had been working towards for nearly 20 years had finally been visited upon him and his band Pulp. Many would have considered him as guilty of Christ-like pretensions as Jackson, with media worshipping his every wardrobe choice and seeking out his wittily jaundiced pronouncements on this and that.
With 1995 hit album Different Class having elevated Pulp to challenger status in the war for Britpop supremacy, much was expected of the follow-up. When it arrived three years later, This Is Hardcore bore the hallmarks of a band on the down slope from celebrity.
Which makes it an excellent album.
Gone is the cocksure Cocker. In his place is a man hinting at early midlife crisis, aware that his posturing can look a bit sad when the mirror ball stops turning and the house lights go up.
Lead single Help The Aged is a plea not so much on behalf of the over-80s as the over-30s, observing how "it all falls away" when thoughts of mortality replace those of invincibility. I'm A Man also speaks of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it brevity of the human lifespan and the coping mechanisms men employ to assuage their fears.
Fear and fantasy mix throughout, with Seductive Barry a dream of a conquest that never was and A Little Soul finding a father in dread of passing on his failings to his son. It's meaty stuff, nattily dressed in Pulp's gloriously lush pop sound.
And for those who might have thought otherwise, Cocker has some advice: "I am not Jesus though I have the same initials."
