The Quintessential Englishness of Blur’s Parklife
Celebrating 30 years of the band’s classic third LP
Great Britain is known for some unique traditions, from Sunday Roast to tea (the time of day, not the beverage), but nothing is more iconic than the quintessential British character.
And no one kept characters alive in ‘90s British pop quite as heroically as Damon Albarn of Blur, particularly on Parklife, Britpop’s pinnacle, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this week.
Blur started off with more of a whimper than a bang, muddling along in the middle of the “baggy” pack that also included acts like Happy Mondays and the Shamen, but they never managed to ingest enough drugs or expel enough beats to really fit in with the scene. Even though their debut album, Leisure, made a bit of a dent in the charts, the band wasn’t happy with the final product: In fact, Albarn has described it as one of two “bad” albums in his catalog.
As such, it wasn’t surprising to see Blur change its stripes for the follow-up. What was surprising was the decision to shelve post-mod and go rummaging around thrift stores to emerge as actual “mod” – complete with parkas and scooters – for Modern Life Is Rubbish, a full and loving embrace of the days when Brittania ruled the airwaves. The tracks here serve as a snapshot of Damon Albarn emerging as the ’90s heir to the social-commentator-cum-curmudgeon throne variously held by Ray Davies, Pete Townshend and Paul Weller, with that nostalgia tempered by the jagged, solidly in-the-moment guitar slashes of Graham Coxon. On a side note, the band deserves bonus points for assembling an ornate package, complete with The Who Sell Out-styled fake adverts and a lyric booklet that incorporates the chord changes for aspiring guitarists.
Albarn often used words like “obstinate” and “colloquial” to describe his behavior in the wake of America’s decision to greet his band with a shrug rather than a hug, particularly in the wake of Rubbish’s worldwide success. So, naturally, he opted to reinforce the wall that separated the two audiences – their nigh-impenetrable Britishness. That gauntlet was thrown down at the top – with a cover photo showing greyhound racing in the far eastern London borough of Walthamstow, a pastime also referenced by Pete Townshend in White City, and Underworld in “Born Slippy” (the name of a dog that won the duo a sizeable sum during one track visit).
“Early on, we were a bit unsophisticated,” Albarn acknowledged during a 1995 interview. “We would simply attach ourselves to anything identifiably British. I wasn’t trying to appropriate anyone else’s life for my own – I was merely commenting from the outside.”
VIDEO: Blur “Girls and Boys”
But on Parklife, he – and the rest of the band – were intent on closing some of that distance. They delivered the message on the opening track, “Girls and Boys,” a bouncy bit of Eurodisco that was kind of a bait-and-switch in terms of what was to come sonically, but not in terms of spirit. The spirit was purely working-class: Skimp on weekend pints and save on takeaways by switching to beans on toast, and you might magically end up with enough cash to take a stand in Ibiza, home to every form of debauchery, every form of coupling you might imagine – some of which you might even remember.
Ironically, the song – which became Blur’s biggest stateside hit until “Song 2” years later – nearly didn’t make it to the album at all.
As Street recalls, Parklife was a done deal when he and Albarn hatched a scheme. He told the NME “Damon played me this demo he’d done at home with a little drum machine, and the chorus stood out straight away to me. 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.’”
But when the producer approached label boss Andy Ross, he was met with an icy response. Street recalls “he was asking me how the sessions were going 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.”
In 2012, Coxon told the Guardian that the foursome came together in part because they came to terms with their differences. He recalled “The album was the convergence of a lot of influences: Alex [James, bassist] wanted to be in Duran Duran, I wanted to be in Wire, and Damon [Albarn] wanted to be … I don’t know.”
One thing that Albarn didn’t want to be was the voice on Parklife’s wry title track, a look at what the frontman calls Britain’s “park culture” – the elderly, the unemployed, the trash collectors…in short, everyone might see when strolling through a London park, as Albarn did every day. He crafted a lovingly detailed picture of such a scene, but according to producer Stephen Street, didn’t think he had the chops to carry off the vocals, which were more narration than outright singing.
They had an ace up their sleeves, however, in the form of actor Phil Daniels – who starred in Quadrophenia, the Holy Grail of mod films. Street told the NME “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.”
That vibe carried through to the rest of the album. Despite the dour outlook — “Bank Holiday” practically revels in Britain’s state of diminished socio-economic expectations — Parklife brims with the sort of pub-ready melodies that evoke images of sturdy dole-queue denizens packing their evenings with hard-won fun. The fun abates a bit on the woozy morning-after paeans that pepper the album, notably the sweeping “End of the Century” and the wistful “Clover Over Dover,” both of which are redolent of dive-bar mood, if not jukebox sonics.
The class structure breaks down here and there: “Tracy Jacks” might be the most vividly drawn character on Parklife, one with fairly obvious roots in the group’s hometown of Colchester. He’s got plenty of cash, a posh government job, but an increasingly loose grip on reality – one that ultimately leads him from fretting about the holes in his golf game to going completely off the deep end by bulldozing his house on an otherwise uneventful Tuesday morning. The epic sweep of the instrumentation belies the simplicity of the tale, while Graham Coxon’s insistent intoning of the title character’s name, repeated after nearly every line, underscores the pressure within his brain.
The band would mine that latter territory extensively on Parklife’s successor, The Great Escape, which is rife with lovingly detailed character sketches like “Ernold Same” and “Dan Abnormal,” all of which are so vivid that a courtroom artist would have little trouble drawing perfect images of their subjects. The album also marked the apex of the Blur v. Oasis battle, complete with bookies taking action on which of them would notch a coveted number-one slot with songs released on the same day (Spoiler Alert: the middle-class London boys won this round with “Country House”). There were plenty of stops and starts over the next few years, with the musicians growing more precious about what they were doing – although the late ‘90s did produce a few of their most memorable songs (notably 13’s “Tender.”).
”The notion of being a pop star in the ’90s is an anachronism, really,” Albarn told me around that time. ”It’s a bit like being the last of the dinosaurs. I’ve got this feeling that when the millennium rolls around, some comet will wipe out any of us that have survived. Except U2, of course. Like cockroaches, they can survive anything.”
Despite periods of hibernation, Blur have also survived – although their alternately lugubrious and triumphant two-night stand at this year’s Coachella festival indicates that might be coming to an end. Albarn stated pretty directly, at the end of the second show, that this would be Blur’s final curtain. He wrapped the set by telling the crowd “this is probably our last gig…we love you” (a far cry from the previous week, when he spat “You’re never seeing us again so you might as well f—ing sing this” to an ambivalent audience during “Girls and Boys.”
At the time of Parklife’s release, Albarn insisted to Rolling Stone that Blur were not a rock ‘n’ roll band, because “pop is a much more inclusive term. Even so, Parklife, a strikingly adult record, stands head and shoulders above the perpetually adolescent angst that was so common in ’90s pop. It certainly merits inclusion on the short list of the late 20th century’s truly compelling concept albums.
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