FEATURE:
Far Out
Blur’s Parklife at Thirty: Celebrating a Classic and Ranking the Tracks
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ON 25th April…
IN THIS PHOTO: Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Dave Rowntree and Alex James/PHOTO CREDIT: Fiona Hanson/PA Images via Getty Images
Blur’s third studio album, Parklife, turns thirty. I have already written one feature about it. For this one, I want to get on to ranking its sixteen tracks. Although some might say there is a clear and unarguable top three, many might debate the middle and lower end of the rankings. There is no denying the quality and impact of Parklife. There are those who say that it is a quintessential Britpop album. One that defined an age and inspired Britpop around it. I do think that Parklife was atypical in that way, Something that occurred and succeeded on the fringes of Britpop. I want to bring in a couple of contrasting and interesting features about Parklife. One that embraces it in Britpop terms, whilst the other feels it should not be seen as a Britpop album. Perhaps labelling it and trying to narrowly definer it does not do justice to its breadth, depth and range of emotions. I am going to start with a feature from 2014. Marking twenty years of Blur’s Parklife, Stereogum looked at an album that was a breakthrough for Blur. Two years after Moden Life Is Rubbish – which was sexcellent and underrated -, they released their first masterpiece. A big step forward from them:
“This is sort of weird to think about, but Parklife was at the time positioned as something of a comeback for Blur. After seeing some moderate success with early singles like “She’s So High” and “There’s No Other Way,” (which hit #8 on the UK Singles Chart) Blur had departed from their more Madchester-indebted beginnings and approached what would become the Britpop sound with 1993’s Modern Life Is Rubbish. That transition was a strained one. Blur may have flirted with pop success during the Leisure days, but they weren’t taken seriously critically, and were seen as a ripoff of and studio cash-in on bands like Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, and the Charlatans. As Michael wrote in his anniversary piece for Modern Life Is Rubbish last year, Blur returned from their first, by-all-accounts miserable tour of America with a frontman possessed: to dethrone bands like Suede and take the mantle as the era’s eminent British band, to assert an identity of Britishness sonically and thematically. Blur’s sophomore album had to change their lives and prove something. It was to be a departure from the last generation of British music Blur had at first been lumped in with, as well as a sharp rejection of the American grunge movement. Modern Life Is Rubbish achieved the latter, allowing Blur to crystalize that idiosyncratically English identity Albarn was seeking, but it didn’t make them stars.
With Modern Life Is Rubbish failing to produce major singles, the making of Parklife had a make-it-or-break-it vibe to its creation, partially due to the band’s precipitous financial footing at the time. It of course wound up catapulting them to superstardom, boasting four hit singles (“To The End,” “End Of A Century,” “Parklife,” and “Girls & Boys,” one of the only Blur songs aside from “Song 2″ that I’ve ever heard in public in America). The album was massive, and depending on your allegiance and preferences it basically comes down to this, Definitely Maybe, or Different Class as the quintessential and most pivotal Britpop album. There’s a reason we chose this week to do Britpop Week.
In hindsight, Parklife is the second installment in a trilogy that begins with Modern Life and ends with The Great Escape. Each of these are high up on the list of my favorite albums, period (as are Blur and 13, but I digress), and there have been different moments when each one had its time as my favorite spot amongst the three. I assume I’m in the minority here, but there’s also been a lot of times where Parklife was actually my least favorite of the three. This is not the most rational critical take, and I am aware of this. Modern Life was indeed a manifesto and a confident artistic statement on its own, but Parklife refined the vision, perfected and deepened Albarn’s panoramic take on a certain slice of British life and culture in the ’90s. The Great Escape took it one step further — a glossy, overblown, final act that threw the same themes and images of Parklife into a sort of pop art overdrive. That’s actually why I liked it the most for so long; it was the disturbed and disturbing hangover to Parklife. (Also, it had “The Universal.” Also, it had “He Thought Of Cars” and “Entertain Me.”) There was nowhere else they could take this version of themselves after that, and they needed the reset button of Blur. You could likely make the argument that there was nowhere they could take this version of themselves after Parklife, really. There are strands of Britpop that go back further than 1994, and the genre splintered and mutated even into the ’00s depending on how you look at it, but no matter what parameters you apply to it, Parklife remains definitive. Albarn said it all here.
There is impressive range on most of the Blur albums, but it’s particularly staggering on their Britpop trilogy. Parklife wasn’t my entry point into listening to Blur, but two of its songs were: “Girls & Boys” and “This Is A Low.” These could not be further apart tonally or sonically. “Girls & Boys” blew my mind when I first heard it. That near-indecipherable first line that opens it, and thus opens Parklife. The way the guitars first slash in under Albarn drawling “On holiday” during the first verse and then keep scraping as Albarn sings “Love in the ’90s/ is paranoid.” The fact that there’s a lyric that goes “Love in the ’90s/ is paranoid” in the first place, and the fact that it’s the first of Albarn’s many proclamations about the times-they-lived-in. That hilarious and brilliant and nonsensical chorus: “Girls who are boys who like boys to be girls/ who do boys like they’re girls who do girls like they’re boys.” I didn’t know who the hell this guy was, but I wanted to hear more.
Where “Girls & Boys” starts Parklife off with a squiggly bit of dance-pop equal parts trashy and snarky, “This Is A Low” essentially ends it with what remains one of Albarn’s best sad songs. And while he’s wielded wit and condescension ably throughout his career, Albarn excels at a dark song: “Sing,” “Resigned,” “Beetlebum,” “Tender” (or, you know, all of 13), Gorillaz’ “El Manana,” The Good, the Bad, & the Queen’s “Herculean.” But “This Is A Low” still stands out. Most of Parklife is jaunty and spiky and acerbically tongued, and then “This Is A Low” comes along as this entirely crushing conclusion. The power is mostly in that chorus, which is built on a melody that seems to be the exact aural embodiment of every shade of despair and loneliness available in the human condition. The importance of Graham Coxon’s guitar solo(s) cannot be overestimated here, though. The way the guitar rises up out of one refrain, a gradually overwhelming tide of distortion, and then twists and echoes against itself sums up just as much anguish as Albarn’s vocals. It does something truly powerful when it groans to a halt, then calls back out insistently right before the last intensified refrain comes in. It’ll bring you to your knees. It might be the best moment in all of Blur’s catalog.
Last month at South by Southwest, I saw Damon Albarn twice. He is a very different performer solo than with Blur — more subdued, playing balladeer rather than frontman. Bizarrely, even in talking to people ten or fifteen years older than myself who had ostensibly been standing around waiting to see him, I found myself repeating a similar explanation: “The singer of Blur? No? He was also behind Gorillaz?” Without fail, it was the latter that people recognized. That’s part of the fun of this whole Britpop Week and of looking back at a record like Parklife — there’s an evangelism streak to it, an urge to geek out about artists that are only, still, tangentially known Stateside. That makes the process of revisiting this stuff invigorating, and Parklife still stands as one of a handful of pinnacles in the whole narrative. It’s a rare thing to come around to a landmark album’s twentieth birthday and still feel the need to climb onto something, demand people’s attention, and let them know there is a brilliant song called “This Is A Low” on a brilliant album called Parklife, and that they are missing out. Intellectually, you know it’s not true, but it doesn’t matter: two decades on, Parklife still has the sound of something that’s just starting”.
Reaching number one in the U.K., Parklife is one of the most successful and acclaimed albums of the 1990s. Most people define it as a Britpop album. It does a disservice to the meaning and importance of Parklife. An album that has richness and its own sound. In 2014, Time argued how Parklife should not be seen as the cornerstone of the Britpop movement. Thirty years since its came out, I hope there is reassessment and positioning of this wonderful and timeless album:
“There was a time when everyone you knew knew songs from Parklife by heart. Parklife wasn’t underappreciated — but it was misunderstood.
Britpop fractured; there was no way that something that big couldn’t. By mid-1995, with new albums due from both bands, there was an apparent feud between Blur and Oasis that divided fans. Oasis had a proletarian appeal, eschewing the observational, dryly comedic lyrics that made Blur famous for passionate exhortations for listeners to “roll with it.” They reminded the public that they were “free to do whatever [they] like if it’s wrong or right [because] it’s alright,” never mind the lack of clarity on what “it” actually was. Consequently, Blur was derided as pretentious, insincere and overly intellectual. As Oasis’ stock rose, so did the belief amongst listeners that sincerity was synonymous with quality, and Blur’s Albarn found himself under fire from fans and critics for not singing about “himself.” As the larger genre limped towards irrelevance over the next couple of years — arguably culminating in Be Here Now, Oasis’ unexciting third album — the whole thing was declared little more than an exercise in 1960s nostalgia gone wrong by critics embarrassed by their wholesale embrace of it years earlier.
Listening to Parklife again today, one of the first things you realize is that there really isn’t that much of the ’60s in there. That’s not to say that the album isn’t filled with references and outright theft at times (“Jubilee” sounds like a close relative of David Bowie’s ”Boys Keep Swinging”, although not as close as Blur’s later ”M.O.R.”), but unlike Oasis’ fondness for the Beatles discography, Parklife’s lending library runs across decades: you can hear hints of XTC, Ray Davies, Gary Numan and the English New Romantics of the 1980s, not to mention the jazzy French romantics of the 1960s throughout the album.
For all that Parklife is the work of a young band — “the mind gets dirty as it gets closer to thirty,” one line goes, with the big three-oh still seeming like a distant destination — it’s a remarkably confident, even cocky album. (A line from critic David Quantick about the Beatles recording Revolver and realizing “we are young and we can do anything” — that combination of talent and the invincibility of youth — comes to mind.) But Parklife is also a kind one, as well. “We all say, don’t want to be alone” Albarn sings in “End of A Century.” In “This Is A Low,” he sings of melancholy as something that can bring comfort: “It won’t hurt you/ When you’re alone, it will be there with you.” Even the album’s “comedy” songs show empathy towards their target characters. “Jubilee” is an outsider hated by all, who would love to be accepted but “no-one told him” how to do it, or where to go. For all that the Blur of this era would be attacked for being too arch and unemotional, Parklife is as warm and inviting as anything Oasis (or any other Britpop band) released during the same period.
Parklife may have inspired other bands to reach into their record collections, but it has a breadth and heart that so much of what followed lacked (including the band’s own The Great Escape, which feels cynical and uninspired in comparison). It has an inclusiveness towards music that stands at odds with the small-minded attitude that ended up defining so much of what Britpop became. In many ways, Parklife is larger than the genre that grew up around it, holding it up as a standard-bearer so proudly. It sounds as fresh today as it did 20 years ago — a summation of British pop music up to that point in all its occasionally contradictory, throwaway glory”.
I am going to end by ranking the fifteen tracks from Parklife. They all have their own merit, though there are some that stand out from the pack. I am referencing SPIN and their 2023 feature that provided a track by track guide to this genius album. Whatever you think of Blur’s third album now, one cannot deny the significance of its release. How it had this massive impact when it arrived on 25th April, 1994:
“SIXTEEN: Lot 105
Like side one, side two also ends with another mostly instrumental novelty. “Lot 105” isn’t much to speak of, but like the Beatles’ “Her Majesty,” it’s a cheeky addendum to a serious closer — one last fleeting expression of fun and creativity before we all go our (hopefully) merry ways”.
FIFTEEN: Far Out
The album’s second “side” begins with this sparse, trippy number, which has the distinction of being the only Blur album track written and sung by bassist Alex James. Here, he sounds like Syd Barrett staring into space during an astronomy lecture, as he plaintively muses on the names of various moons and stars.
FOURTEEN: The Debt Collector
This horn-laden, instrumental fairground waltz serves as a demarcation between the vinyl and/or cassette sides of Parklife.
THIRTEEN: Clover Over Dover
This harpsichord-propelled ditty is another musical left turn, the repetitive rhyme scheme of which almost obscures the depression inherent in the lyrics (the narrator fantasizes about jumping or being pushed off Southern England’s famous white cliffs).
TWELVE: Magic America
Blur is about as quintessentially British as modern rock bands come, but it has flirted with the U.S. since the beginning, and “Magic America” is one of its more overt winks in that direction. The song balances disdain and curiosity with lines like “fifty-nine cents gets you a good square meal / from the people who care how you feel.”
ELEVEN: Jubilee
“Jubilee” joins “Message Centre” as the album’s most uptempo, guitar-forward tracks, with the band giving off strong T. Rex glam vibes while Albarn turns his critical eye to a teenage slacker who won’t leave his couch and video game console.
TEN: Tracy Jacks
Blur returns to familiar motifs in this Kinks-y character sketch, which explores the ennui of the working class (“Is a golfing fanatic / but his putt is erratic”) and its potential breaking points. By the end, the title character has been arrested for running around naked and has bulldozed his own house to the ground (“It’s just so overrated”).
NINE: Trouble in the Message Centre
Coxon cranks his amps on this cautionary tale of rave culture excess, which fades into a memorable wordless singalong.
EIGHT: London Loves
We’re back in “Girls & Boys” territory with this jaunty, electro-pop number, as the rhythm section and Albarn’s cooing vocals attempt to rein in guitarist Graham Coxon’s angular riffing.
SEVEN: Girls & Boys
Blur rode the album opener’s undulating bass line and pulsing Eurodance beat into what was then new territory for the band: a top-10 placement on the U.K. singles chart and worldwide airplay in clubs and on dance floors. The subject matter was inspired by a Spanish vacation Albarn took with then-girlfriend Justine Frischmann of Elastica, during which he was bemused by the obligation-free hookup scene prevalent in the local bars. Maybe modern life wasn’t so rubbish after all?
SIX: Badhead
Parklife calms down a bit with this song, which meditates on a relationship the narrator seems to have given up on: “Today I’ll get up around two / from a lack of anything to do.”
FIVE: Bank Holiday
Ninety seconds of terse, punk-tinged energy, “Bank Holiday” packs in as many pints and BBQ revelries as it can before it’s sadly “back to work again.”
FOUR: End of a Century
Parklife’s fourth single is a catchy, coming-of-age reckoning that feels more autobiographical than the surrounding tracks: “Your mind gets dirty / as you get closer to 30.” The song also touches on Albarn’s relationship with Frischmann and how couples often find themselves starting at the flickering light of a TV rather than at each other.
THREE: …To The End
Albarn is thankfully back on the mic for this song, on which his soaring choral vocals interweave with the echoing French refrains of Stereolab chaunteuse Laetitia Sadier to create one Blur’s most enduring ballads. It’s the only track on Parklife not produced by Street, with the similarly named Stephen Hague manning the boards instead. Blur recorded another version with Albarn singing the vocals in French, and in 1995 remade the entire song as a duet with French singer Francoise Hardy.
TWO: Parklife
The album’s ebullient title track is perhaps the quintessential Britpop song, propelled by Quadrophenia star Phil Daniels’ deadpan Cockney verse narration and the band’s beery, pub singalong choruses (with Coxon handling the sax part). “You never knew exactly what the song was about, and I still don’t,” which is part of the magic of it,” Daniels said years later. “What I do know is that as soon as it began to get played on the radio, dustmen started apologizing for waking me up in the morning.”
ONE: This Is a Low
Ever the showmen, Blur saves one of its best for the ostensible album closer. This fan favorite is replete with British place-specific name-checks, shipping forecast allusions, soaring choruses, and an epic Coxon guitar solo. Albarn was scheduled to undergo a hernia operation the day the song was recorded, and when pressed for lyrics, drew from a handkerchief James had given him that was embroidered with different geographic locales. This top achievement contrasts with and crowns an album full of pop oddities”.
On 25th April, we celebrate thirty years of Blur’s Parkllfe. An album that sounds so fascinating and playable to this day, go and play it if you have not heard Parklife for a while. Even if there are one or two tracks not up to Blur’s best, some of their biggest songs can be found on Parklife. Embraced and acclaimed by critics at the time and since, we are going to love and respect Blur’s Parklife..
TO the end.