FEATURE:
Know What I Mean?
Blur’s Parklife at Thirty
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EVEN though….
IN THIS PHOTO: Blur in Tokyo, 1994 (Alex James, Graham Coxon, Damon Albarn, Dave Rowntree)/PHOTO CREDIT: Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images
its thirtieth anniversary does not happen until 25th April, I did want to write a few features about Blur’s Parklife. One of the best and most important albums of the 1990s, the band’s third studio album reached number one in the U.K. It is one of those albums that was both a product of the time but sounds so fresh now. In the sense that one can identify Parklife as being part of the 1990s and the sound favoured then. You can listen to it through today and it doesn’t sound dated. Still so amazing and engrossing. I will come to reviews for the mighty Parklife. I want to start off with a feature form NME. In 2019, marking twenty-five years since the album’s release, they wrote about how Blur were sort of in a last chance saloon. They had to create something magnificent after the slightly underwhelming Modern Life Is Rubbish. Parklife not only won huge reviews and big sales. It was a major cultural shift in British music. I am not including the entire feature – I hope it is cohesive and not too mangled -, though I was keen to explore a deep dive into an all-time classic album:
“Accounting tomfoolery had also left them massively in debt, meaning they had to tour and record incessantly to dig themselves out of a £60,000 financial hole. But it was slow going. Released in May 1993, ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’ received a smattering of decent reviews, but they didn’t result in many record sales.
“We had no end of belief in ourselves,” says guitarist Graham Coxon today, “but the rest of the world had their own brains. I guess we were sort of warming up people at that point.”
Graham Coxon confirms this: “[Food Records joint boss] Andy Ross would buy me couple of pints and bag of chips every night. I was totally skint.”
For Ross, the mediocre chart performance of ‘Modern Life…’ and the hesitant endorsement of the music media (“Not a single front cover – hang your heads in shame!”) meant insecurity surrounding both band and label continued to bite.
“We’d only just come out of a really, really bad time for Blur and my record label was on a sled,” he admits. Thankfully, EMI, [who owned a share in Food records and were about to buy the label outright], gave the green light for a third album.”
But as Stephen Street recalls, another commercial under-performance was not an option.
“There was a sense of ‘this has got to work’,” he says. “But at the same time, we were confident. There seemed to be a feeling that the time was right.”
That sense continued to seep through the back half of 1993, helped by the growing feeling that Blur had fellow travellers on their quest to re-establish a potent strain of artful indie-rock with a smart (in both meanings) British accent, steel toecaps and a subtle but distinct sense of humour.
“At first it had felt like we had no compadres, no gang,” says Coxon, “until we saw Pulp and thought, these guys get it too – a bit eccentric, more highbrow pop with a bit of wit.”
Mike Smith, the A&R legend who had snapped the band up for their original publishing deal and has been a close friend ever since, could also see the tide turning for them.
“They did a show headlining the tent at Reading in August ‘93, and you suddenly realised people were really starting to get it. It was full of kids, in suits and boots – it was a take on mod identity which a lot of people got into, and it’s an easy look.”
The music press were also starting to get excited, Andy Ross recalls. “The fans really came through for the band that day, and it turned the corner significantly. A lot of journalists realised, ‘Oops, we really fucked up there’. The press in general seemed to come to a collective conclusion that they’d missed the boat, and went into damage limitation mode, getting more and more receptive to anything the band subsequently did.”
The new material ranged from cartoonishly speeding romps like ‘Bank Holiday’ to suburban vignettes like ‘Tracy Jacks’, which took the Kinksian template heard on ‘Modern Life…’ and then decorated it with strings, swirling sound effects and giddy falsetto, as well as the trademark Blur harmonies that Graham and Damon had been perfecting since they met at school. If ‘Modern Life…’ was a guitar record, this added an evocative, quirky jumble sale orchestra to their musical palette.
Street’s love of sound effects helped add further colour to this embryonic world, helping evoke a Britain of trippy TV theme tunes, enticing, ersatz fairground jingles, traffic news, juvenile delinquents, underage drinking and duck pond eccentrics. “A lot of it is nostalgic, referencing our youth,” says Coxon. “It felt comfortable to us, bringing all these elements together like creating Sunday lunch with sound.”
A key example is of course the title track, lyrically inspired by Damon’s walks through a park near his flat in Kensington Church Street. Yet for a while, its prominence on the record was in some doubt.
“It was probably the track that was the biggest pain in the butt to record,” says Street. “When we first recorded it, the drums and everything were in time and it just sounded a little bit flat, and at this point Damon was still doing the narration for the vocal. After a while we just couldn’t bring ourselves to work on it. It might not even have made the cut for the record.”
It was then that another track that they couldn’t quite nail produced the key for this one’s resurrection.
“Phil Daniels had been approached to narrate a poem called ‘The Debt Collector’ to the instrumental that’s on the album, a piece about a really nasty bailiff character, and Phil Daniels was gonna recite it. But Damon still hadn’t come up with the lyric, so we had this band meeting, and we said, well Phil’s been approached anyway, why don’t we get him to have a go at the ‘Parklife’ song instead? He came in and that turned into something we got a lot more excited about, and that’s when we put more sound effects on it, dogs barking, glass smashing, had a lot of fun doing it, and Dave went back in to do a much looser drum take on it. Then it went from the back of the queue for inclusion on the album to the front.”
Street feels that part of the problem with that song’s original gestation was that label had heard a demo and had earmarked ‘Parklife’ as a potential single, so they felt pressure to get it just right. Food Records’ policy of pre-approving songs for recording based on initial demos had long been a source of frustration for the band (indeed the nice cop, nasty cop partnership of Andy Ross and Dave Balfe would break up during the recording of the album when the latter sold his shares to retire to a soon-to-be-infamous house in the country) even if their tough love approach had got results when provoking Damon Albarn to write ‘For Tomorrow’.
Given that policy, then, band and producer were apprehensive when they took the liberty of creating a new song in the studio without the label’s prior permission.
“Damon played me this demo he’d done at home with a little drum machine, and the chorus stood out straight away to me,” says Street. “I said, ‘This is great, let’s make it what it obviously is, a disco record, record it at 120bpm, and just have fun with it.’ We programmed the bass, synth and drums and then got the band in on top of it – Alex does what he does with the bassline, and Graham does what he does with the guitar, and it still sounded like Blur, so it was really exciting.”
The song was ‘Girls & Boys’… and Andy Ross had yet to hear it.
“The next day he was asking me how the sessions were going,” says Street, “and I said, we’ve done this new track, ‘Girls & Boys’…”.
“There was this slight pause at the other end and then he was like, ‘Stephen, you’ve not been authorised to record that track…’ And I was like, ‘You’re gonna love it,’ and thankfully I was right.”
It was arguably the first song that proved that this was a band who could turn their hand to any genre and still put their own sonic stamp on it.
“It was a bit like when I was working with the Smiths,” says Street. “Both bands had a confidence where you feel like you can do anything you wanna do, in any style, and it will still hang together and it’ll still sound like a proper album.”
‘Girls & Boys’ also worked via juxtaposition of two key creative forces within the band.
IN THIS PHOTO: Damon Albarn in 1994/PHOTO CREDIT: Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images
“I was being a little arty aggro player, a little bulldozer,” says Coxon, “and Alex was being all bottom-wiggling cheeky. He’s actually a hugely underrated bass player, but when I hear Uncle Monty [from Withnail & I] say ‘he’s so MAUVE’, I think of Alex in those years. But that tension, clash of personalities, and that mix of rhythms kind of helped.”
“It reminds me of Public Image,” says Andy Ross. “They came from a place of, let’s make a racket and see if convert it into a pop song. This was a pop song subverted by Graham’s noise.”
With ‘Girls & Boys’, the band were convinced they had a hit on their hands, and they weren’t the only ones. Mike Smith remembers driving around London with Damon as they played the track over and over, and later dancing around Alex James’s new flat in Covent Garden, as the bassist blasted the newly received 12-inch version of the single out of the open windows, determined the world should hear it. They soon would. And not only would it give the album a head start with a top five hit, but it would repeat a trick managed by ‘For Tomorrow’.
Just as Blur wouldn’t have pricked up disinterested ears ahead of ‘Modern Life…’ if they had chosen a different lead single, the arrival of ‘Girls and Boys’ grabbed people’s attention in a way that, say, ‘Parklife’ might not have done, given that its mockney narration could have been seen as a more predictable logical step on from their almost self-parodic final single from Modern Life…, ‘Sunday Sunday’.
But when we look back on ‘Parklife’ as the first big step in Britpop’s journey to dominating the charts of the mid-’90s, it’s slightly frustrating to note that a lot of the more inventive, anarchic and eccentric aspects of the music made back then didn’t ultimately have as big a cultural impact as the broader melodic strokes.
Graham Coxon tells of being regularly approached by guitarists citing his gnarly, abrasive fretknots as an inspiration, and he also feels ‘Parklife’ ushered in a different kind of songwriting.
“Lyrically you could see that the kitchen sink dramas with a twist had a clear influence on all of what would become Britpop. The narrative wasn’t about vaguely digging the words if it sounded good, it was proper stories – coming from ‘Arnold Layne’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘She’s Leaving Home’.”
He also feels that unlike certain notable contemporaries, they took inspiration from the sheer eclecticism of their cultural forefathers’ approach.
“What Oasis didn’t get from The Beatles was that you could learn everything – R’n’B, blues, music hall, folk, classical music, even a bit of grunge – you could get a massive education from The Beatles, not just big blocks of chords and singalongs.”
Nonetheless, the seductive pull of chart success would draw both Blur and Oasis closer to such crowd-pleasing tactics in the year that followed ‘Parklife; (“We both ended up producing sub-par work,” Coxon concedes), even if they subsequently reverted to unconventional type.
But for Mike Smith, whose job has been to track trends in British music ever since, there’s one Britpop trope that we see more than any other now – one unwittingly pioneered by Parklife tracks such as ‘To The End’ and ‘This Is A Low’.
“It’s interesting that Britpop’s enduring legacy is not the art school take of Elastica, Blur or Pulp, it’s the big rock ballad of [Oasis’s] ‘Live Forever’, ‘Wonderwall’, [The Verve’s] ‘Drugs Don’t Work’. You see a line through to Coldplay, through to arguably James Bay and George Ezra. I sadly see precious few contemporary artists doing much [that is] as left-field as Blur did.”
Well, in theory there’s no reason why they can’t. Maybe, like Blur, they just need to be angry, skint and hungry enough”.
I will move to a review from NME. Reviewing the album back in 1994, they tried to take in and evaluate an album that was a huge revelation. Few expected something as huge and brilliant as Parklife. Blur were a band many wrote off by 1994. They proved doubters wrong. I don’t think Parklife was a Britpop precursor or something very defined and of a forgotten and past time. The incredible songwriting and phenomenal range throughout means it is an evergreen and always-relevant classic. Kudos to the production of Stephen Street:
“THIS WEEK of all weeks it has been easy to forget what a daft, wonderful thing pop music can be; how it can zip into your life and make the world a happier place. And in 1994 it's easy to forget what an album actually is; CDs have turned us into album surfers, skipping the fillers and forever programming in our favourites. Help is here with 'Parklife', something that will help all of us remember. Put simply, it is a Great Pop Record.
And for once it's an LP that deserves to be played from start to finish; sure there are bumps and detours along the way but somehow these are part of the appeal. The first four tracks will knock yer sideways, and by the time you hear Phil Daniels holler "Oi!" in his role as guest parky on the knockabout title track you will know this is no ordinary LP. It's a mess, all over the place, no song blends easily into the next, they all jar into each other like some home-made compilation chucked together when you were pissed. And so a buttery pop tune like 'End Of a Century' is followed by the spiky punk attack of 'Bank Holiday' and then a spot of trad German 'oompah' drinking music. ('The Debt Collector'). On paper it sounds like hell, in practice it's joyous - a band prepared to have a laugh, to forget about the pomposity that surrounds the music business. Amid the mayhem it takes two plays before you discover the album's two true gems - the John Barry/Walker Brothers epic 'To The End' and the languid 'Bedhead' - which is kind of like discovering a fiver in a jacket you haven't worn for months.
It begins, as all pop albums should, with a hit single, 'Girls And Boys', a song that sounds as if it was designed by robots as a soundtrack to fun-fair bumper car rides - pointed, niggly, angular and persistently catchy, it's strange and magnificent that something so obtuse should have been taken to the nation's bosom. Testament to its success is the way it has inspired such ardent, nosebleeding hatred among rock puritans. Nothing like a spot of oversprung pop muzik to wind up Grandad Rock - and Blur are past masters at it.
From their beginnings, Blur have got up peoples' noses with a strike-rate that more blatantly antagonistic bands can only dream of. During baggy, when it was cool to look like Peter Beardsley's less attractive cousin, Blur were unabashed pin-ups. Later, when their contemporaries stared at their plimsolls and courted grunge attitude, they employed a brass section and looped around like space hoppers. And as we looked to Seattle for new language, Albarn name-checked Primrose Hill and sang with an accentuated Southern accent that hadn't been heard since the likes of Anthony Newley were hip.
Still Blur were accused of that most heinous of crimes - the jumping of bandwagons. Yet they re-invented themselves, it was no corporate marketing play, and what 18 months ago looked like retrograde precociousness (sticking up for Little England as US culture steamrollered into Hertfordshire) is not little short of maverick genius.
'Parklife' is 'Modern Life Is Rubbish's' older brother - bigger, bolder, narkier and funnier. Musically they're leagues better than before, the ill-formed ideas have reached fruition and lyrically Blur now find themselves at the end of an inheritance that starts with The Kinks and The Small Faces and goes through to Madness and The Jam. Not just because they are blatantly inspired by all four - the comparisons are easy to make - but because they articulate the everyday world with equal potency and humour. Where Ray Davies saw beauty in the skies over Waterloo Station, Damon Albarn sees it in the mirror ball above a Mykonos dancefloor. And while contemporaries like Pulp are drawn towards the seedy glamour of sex behind the net curtains, Blur see the mundanity and ennui of suburban living.
Although they may affect the stance of council estate lads (the sleeve artwork pictures them down the dog track) the characters knowingly portrayed in much of 'Parklife’. 9/10”.
I am going to wrap this feature up with a more contemporary review from We Plug Good Music. As I say, I will be putting out a couple more Parklife features before its thirtieth anniversary on 25th April. It is an album quite rightly heralded as one of the greatest and most important ever. I was ten when the album came out. It was one that definitely affected me when I heard it. A major statement from the legendary band:
“Parklife (1994) from Blur is the album that essentially sparked a whole new musical genre, and beyond that a cultural movement, that of, Britpop. Yes, to any fellow millennial, I do feel a tragic need to non-assumingly define Britpop to our proceeding, autotune generation (Maybe that’s a bit harsh, maybe not).
Mind you, for all my generational bashing, Parklife was an album that was so satirical of British ’90s culture and yet simultaneously, so influential and impacting upon it, that it’s best appreciated by a little reminiscing upon a strange and garish decade.
Britpop was the ’90s answer to that romantic, unapologetically British spirit of the swinging ’60s whereby bands like The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones, and The Kinks, to name but a few, flaunted a certain, snazzy kind of national narcissism.
The ’90s saw a return of Britannia the cool, a formidable backlash against the American grunge invasion, Nirvana et al, a reformulating of British musical identity. Damon Albarn even stated directly: “I’m getting rid of grunge“. Blur, along with Oasis, Pulp and Suede, were dubbed the ‘big four’ Britpop bands, but there were many others of the same ilk – Supergrass, The Verve, and Elastica, to mention a few.
The British press galvanised the Britpop phenomenon considerably, racking up column inches into an accumulative media marathon, relentlessly fawning over the bitter Blur and Oasis rivalry, Northerners vs. Southerners, selling that central ‘Battle of Britpop’ with plenty of hyperbole, as if it was literally, territorial combat.
The ’90s art, fashion and political scenes all got in on it. It is no coincidence that Damien Hirst directed the music video for Blur’s “Country House“, nor that when New Labour got into power in 1997, photos of Noel Gallagher and his wife, Meg Matthews, in deep conversation with Tony Blair, were all over the media. Britpop took a nation by storm.
Pulp’s song, “Cocaine Socialism“, tells of Jarvis Cocker’s surprise at being invited to coked-up parties at Whitehall and his bemusement at politicians contrived, vote-baiting allegiances with pop stars. Britpop went beyond itself, sometimes transcending into genuine artistic ingenuity, sometimes descending into a hedonistic farce of one big ’90s’ cultural aesthetic.
While the early material of all the quintessential Britpop bands had a trial and error, hit or miss incoherency to it, it was Damon Albarn’s men who landed that first, definitive, prototypal classic with Parklife.
Parklife begins with “Girls And Boys“, with its Duran Duran styled bass, disco drum and keyboard jangling making for an eminently catchy opener.
It is a tongue (or whatever your preferred vice) in cheek ‘celebration’ of that infamously loutish holidaying phenomenon, generically referred to by tourist boards as 18-30 holidays in lieu of a far more accurately sordid label, whereby, say, Greece’s Zante and Spain’s Benidorm, are tragically one and the same place, England in the sun.
A chav, an STD, and a bemusement at the locals not speaking enough English, walk into an expat’s bar and the punchline is “Girls And Boys”. The song’s inspiration came from Damon’s trip to Magaluf with then-girlfriend Justine Frischmann (Yes, that’s the lead singer from Elastica, the one he ‘stole’, according to Suede fans, from Brett Anderson), whereupon Albarn noticed “really tacky Essex nightclubs”.
The opener’s distinctly nihilistic feel sets the tone for an album that seems to both revel and deplore in that niche ’90s perverse patriotic revival. Immediately after “Girls And Boys” comes “Tracey Jacks“, a ‘character’ song about a civil servant’s disgruntlement at suburban life, this is a ’90s malaise that transcends class.
We then have “End Of The Century”, which is ‘nothing special,’ and that thematic cynicism is in full and fine flow.
The millennium was approaching, and Albarn’s lyrics bemoaned society’s anticipation of it: “He gives her a cuddle, Glowing in a huddle, Good night TV“. He could only expect a future full of tacky, techy commodification, instead of the romantic, organic candlelight of the past.
That commentary on banal, unsentimental modernisation and globalisation is continued later in “London Loves“: “Coughing tar in his Japanese motor … So sleep together, Before today is sold forever”.
The title track, “Parklife“, is one of the most, if not, the most prolific Britpop song, as much well known for its raucous, comedic, music video. It won both the ‘British Single of the Year’ and ‘British Video of the Year’ at the 1995 BRIT Awards. Actor Phil Daniels cocky, cockney narration grates in the memory, in a good way.
Albarn has cited Martin Amis’s novel London Fields as a major influence on the album’s concept, and the song echoes a similar kind of psychogeography and philosophical unease. Just how Amis’s character Sam states in London Fields: “This is London and there are no fields”, there is this funny sense of urban entrapment of rural ideal, a bittersweet ethos to the title track and to its mantra, the glibly sung ‘parklife’ interspersing Phil Daniels verses.
“This Is A Low” is Parklife’s best song. It is by far the most technically impressive track on the album, a complex, looping composition, melancholic, yet soothing. There is a rightful consensus among fans and critics alike that this is the standout track, the album’s magnus opus. You have to love the strangeness of its subject, a poetic reimagining of a shipping forecast.
Among Parklife’s other challengers to accolade of the best track is the orchestral, love song “To The End“, with its accompanying eerie French vocals (courtesy of Lætitia Sadier from Stereolab), while “Badhead” is an underrated gem.
Parklife was truly a classic. There was such an eclectic array of influence – Synth, punk, pop, disco, psychedelia. Blur’s alchemy was to transmute that into a new gold standard in music, a new sound, a new kind of pop.
This album was like a Union Jack flag on a field at a festival, pinned down precariously by pints of lager, its white stripes lined with coke, its fabric sullied by young love in the ’90s. But now as new music takes centre stage and that flag has sailed off into the distance, we must always remember Parklife is up there with some of finest albums of the past few decades”.
On 25th April, we celebrate thirty years of Blur’s third studio album. Parklife is an iconic release that still reverberates to this day. With tremendous singles like Girls & Boys, Parklife and End of a Century showing what incredible quality and variety can be found through the album, there is no wonder it endures so strongly. It is hard to believe that the album is almost thirty years old! It is both current-sounding and nostalgic. Blur are still together to this day. They released The Ballad of Darren last year. It is among their best work. Parklife was a heady and fascinating time for them. Their career changed hugely in 1994. When we mark thirty years of Parklife on 25th April, I hope that they all…
RECALL it fondly.