There was a huge unspoken irony. Nevermind, the album that had kickstarted the international grunge phenomenon, had impressed Blur greatly Graham Coxon: "I thought Nevermind was brilliant, as I think we probably all did. But we didn't want to say so. We knew that it was the enemy. We had a lot of respect for the enemy, but we knew that we had to be completely different."
With Albarn unshakeable in his belief that English music (not British music, Albarn wasn 't speaking for Scotland or Wales) was going to come back into fashion, the battle with Balfe became a test of both men's character. Balfe was a practised ego-debunker with a withering wit: he was wont to dismiss Blur's B-sides as "art-wank". Albarn had not once shown a chink of weakness or uncertainty to the press during Blur's fall from grace, but his band had severe alcohol problems and the competitive Albarn was having to balance the pressures of writing the songs, leading Blur, pacifying Balfe and gritting his teeth as new records by Suede rose higher and higher in the charts.
Albarn: "I was putting my whole existence into Blur's music. I felt very passionate -for the first and last time in my life- about being English. I just felt America had screwed me badly. It had taken away a lot of my dreams (laughs) .Suede and America fuelled my desire to prove to everyone that Blur were worth it. There was nothing more important in my life, I wouldn 't want to feel like that again."
On the musical front, Coxon, who had been showing himself to be one of the most talented guitarists of his generation, feared that Albarn's insistence on using brass, strings and female backing singers might amount to "unnecessary colouration". For Tomorrow, released in April 1993 after Albarn received a reluctant go-ahead from Balfe, was compared in some quarters to ELO's Mr Blue Sky and its nice fat '70s feel was no accident. Jeff Lynne had been mooted to produce the song initially, while Stephen Street, who did produce it, instructed the backing vocalists to sing like Thunderthighs on the old Mott The Hoople singles. Although For Tomorrow and two subsequent singles from Modern L.ife Is Rubbish charted modestly at 28, 28 and 26 respectively, keeping sales of the album to 40,000 or so, Alex James remembers the mood in Blur being confident and purposeful. "Success wasn 't necessarily something we saw in terms of sales. Modern Life Is Rubbish was a successful record because it achieved what we set out to achieve. I thought everything was shit except us. I wasn't buying many records at all. I don't think I even had a CD player until 1996."
Blur's publisher at
MCA Music reminisced to their biographer Stuart Maconie that the
band spearheaded a very English social scene in Camden Town circa
1993, where everyone wore suits, Fred Perrys and Doc Martens and
listened exclusively to old punk and Mod records. All four
members of Blur remember the time fondly. Rowntree: "I was
never into Mod music -not like Graham- but I certainly revisited
all my old punk records. I fell in love with Gaye Advert all over
again. "Surrounded by their Camden acolytes, Blur were
arguably the most fashionable act in London. Rowntree, a man so
uninterested in clothes that he is today wearing a sweatshirt,
adorned with the logo of American Airlines, found himself at the
height of sartorial elan in his shiny DMs and three-button
whistle-and-flutes. 
ln August 1993, Blur turned a corner with a brilliant performance at the Reading Festival and embarked on their Sugary Tea tour of Britain, named after a line in their sixth single Chemical World. They also began work with Stephen Street on their third album, one song from which -an alternately spoken and sung number called Parklife- proved an immediate favourite with audiences on the tour. Albarn sensed that the new album, an elaboration on some of the vignettes and narratives he had explored on Modern Life Is Rubbish, would have a better-than-average reception awaiting it.
Rowntree: "We were in EMI having a meeting to discuss the album and I remember Damon saying, 'Whatever else happens, we've got a career now, rather than just being a novelty one-album-wonder band.' Which was what we wanted. Having hit records, being on Top Of The Pops and being in swanky cars wasn 't going to be enough any more."
AlexJames: "Modern Life Is Rubbish had done...something. The time was definitely right to strike with the masterplan. We had a great relationship with the producer. We'd been playing together nearly every day for two or three years -and that's the only way to get good. We understood each other."
However, Blur and Street were under firm instructions from Balfe to record only songs that had been demoed and approved by Food. When Street phoned Food to tell them that a surefire hit called Girls And Boys had emerged from nowhere and been recorded in double-quick time, he was admonished for working on it without their permission.
IF BLUR'S 1994 ALBUM PARKLIFE was a watershed in British music that decade, vindicating Albarn's prophecy and sparking off the commercially successful movement of musical optimism known as Britpop, it is nonetheless a fact that Albarn conceived Parklife as anything but a celebration of Britain.
"Never was anything further from my mind than creating some sort of nationalistic issue," he says "If anything, it had a lot to do with being completely captivated by [Martin Amis' novel] London Fields: that seedy vision of West London. l've lived in West London for many years and I really bought into that book. I wanted to create a sort of fantasy world. Everything belonged to this idea of Britain as a kind of innerdome. Like Sherwood Forest, where they cut down the forest and created a Robin Hood theme park. Or the pubs, where they replaced wood with plastic. Everywhere you looked, the country was being refitted."
But even as Albarn's lyrics recoiled from what they had seen -and Parklife is a suite of songs appreciably more judicial than some people give it credit for- the band's arrangements were expansive and gladdening. Alex James had waited for 10 years for the opportunity to play a white funk bass line like John Taylor of Duran Duran, which the disco pastiche of Girls And Boys afforded him. Graham Coxon can be heard on the album playing saxophone and clarinet. Dave Rowntree, who remembers "very special days when everything went well", cued in the title track by smashing a plate, delighted to find that one fragment had rolled off and carried on jingling for an all-important split second. On almost every song, there was licence to go overboard and, as Rowntree puts it, "let the songs do whatever they wanted to do"
Coxon,
conversely, was trying to cut down on his guitar parts and make
each one count. On the Anglo-French ballad To The End,
he limited himself to achopped chord every few beats, emulating
some of the Franoise Hardy records he had recently fallen in
love with. Coxon : "I thought Damon's songs were a lot
tighter on Parklife. That's why l broke down all my guitars to
try and have just one guitar playing -say, like in the way that
when you hear some live Dr. Feelgood thing and there's Wilko
Johnson playing lead and rhythm at the same time."
Befitting an album that had briefly had the working title 'Sport', Parklife was recorded in two halves, bisected by a spell of touring in Britain, Japan and America in the autumn of 1993. Albarn saw and heard nothing in the States to deter him from the music Blur were making back home: "They were in the second stage of grunge rigor mortis by then. The songs we were recording were much more involving. They all seemed to be about 'we', 'people', 'all of us' ..."
Returning to the studio, the band recorded 14 more songs between December and the middle of February, 10 of which would appear on Parklife. To give an idea of the sheer variety of material being attempted, these 14 tracks included two waltzes ; a song that nodded musically to Magazine ; another with a rhythm based on the Tom Tom Club (featuring a surging Robert Fripp-style solo from Coxon) ; a William Blake poem set to music ; a samba ; an inventory of moons and stars sung by Alex James ; a conceptual piece based loosely on the character of Ziggy Stardust ; and an emotional finale to the album with lyrics inspired by a handkerchief showing a map of Britain and its shipping regions. Just as there is much more to Sgt Pepper than Billy Shears and the band you've known for all these years, there is more to Parklife than Phil Daniels and dirty pigeons. Prior to the release of the single Girls And Boys in March -the country's first taste of what Parklife might have in store- only eight British guitar bands in their twenties had made Top 10 chart entries since the summer of 1992. Two of those had been reissues by The Smiths and The Bluebells. Radiohead, Suede and Wonderstuff had each gone in high, only to clip sharply in following weeks. ln this period the records that sold most were made by MOR acts, pop vocal outfits, dance projects and old campaigners from the '80s. ln reality, 1993 had been another 1985, consolidating the long-running careers of Whitney Houston, Annie Lennox, Phil Collins and George Michael.
At Radio One,
however, the arrival of new controller Matthew Bannister in 1993
had brought about some crucial changes. Some of the station's
middle-aged, conservative-minded presenters had been fired, a
more radical schedule put in place. ln December, the old Radio
One rulebooks had gone flying when a promo copy of an unreleased
song by a young band from Manchester -Oasis- was played on the
air on 19 separate occasions. Blur were hoping for a more
favourable response to Girls And Boys from Radio One
than any of their singles had had since There's No Other Way.
They were right to be sanguine. Girls And Boys was
epidemic where There's No Other Way had been merely
endemic. It appealed to clubbers, adolescents, indie fans,
Guardian readers and the Club 18-30 holiday-makers its lyric
satirised. It even picked up a gay following. Entering the chart
at Number 5, it was still being talked about long after it had
left.
As the suspicion now grew that Parklife might do a little more useful business over the counter than anyone had dared imagine, Blur racked their brains for a reference point. Suede had enjoyed a Number 1 album 12 months before, but Blur were inclined to feel that every record Suede sold was an affront to human decency. Alex James: "That wouldn 't have been taken seriously. ln our world, The Stone Roses was the only album that had gone platinum [300,000 sales]. We felt that 100,000 would be fantastic." On May 1, Parklife debuted at Number 1, knocking Pink Floyd's The Division Bell off the top. "Everybody suddenly seemed to know who Blur was," says Graham Coxon, "from builders to schoolchildren to mums and dads." Not long before the album's release, Dave Balfe sold Food to its parent company EMI and retired from the music business.
"THE MAINSTREAM WAS SUDDENLY IN the hands of us irresponsible, drunk, rude kids. We were having the time of our lives," recalls Alex James of the second half of 1994, during which Parklife stayed in the charts and was rivalled in sales and media acclaim only by Oasis' debut album Definitely Maybe.
With six years' hindsight, do Blur think that Parklife struck a chord because it tapped into a heart of England only seldom heard on pop records ? Or because the constituents it sometimes reminded one of -Madness, Bowie, The Kinks, Squeeze- happened to be a wonderful combination when put together ? Or because it created its own auraI idyll of music, words and sound effects ?
James: "lt certainly wasn't journalism. It was mythologising everything it dealt with. There's nothing very real about it. It's quite a cartoony record." Albarn: "What l'd done was bridged the gap between what England was becoming and what it had been. That's totally Kurt Weill. There is an element of drama about that record. It's not a rock record."
The
suicide of Kurt Cobain in April -which affected Albarn more than
he revealed at the
time- was symbolic proof that Blur had won their war against
grunge. But if Albarn thought he could step neatly into pop
stardom and play a versatile game of being a proletarian football
supporter one minute, a pundit on Radio Four the next, he little
realised he was biting off more than he could chew.
James: "You walked five yards behind him and you saw jaws drop -literaly drop. You can't imagine what that must have been like for him. It's no way to live your life. He was the most famous man in the country, and it's a lonely place." Albarn: "It was a very dizzy period. It was like a teleporter. Everything went fffffyyyeeeww ...And then out we came at the other end, and there was Oasis waving at us and going, 'A'right, mucker?' And we went, 'Oh, hello, nice to meet you..."..
CLICK HERE TO SEE LARGER PIC - cliquez ici pour agrandir la photo !!
On the night in
February 1995 that Blur collected four Brit Awards for Best Band,
Best Album, Best Single (Girls And Boys) and Best Video
(Parklife) , they were already halfway through the
recording of their next album. They were in their usual studio -Maison
Rouge in Fulham- working with their trusted producer Stephen
Street. Except that the alley that led off the Fulham Road to
Maison Rouge was now besieged by photographers and journalists.
Dave Rowntree's divorced parents had tabloid newshounds camped
outside their respective homes, trying to get the dirt on their
separation. 
Thus began The Great Escape, the most disputed album in the Blur canon. A majestic show of strength from a group relishing its new position of musical supremacy ? Or a cold, condescending record from a band beginning to lose touch with the man on the street ? It was hailed by critics as the former, ultimately to be reviled six months later as the latter. It is testament to the remarkable recovery of British pop in the mid-'90s that The Great Escape would be ridiculed not so much for its actual content (its 15 songs are as good, if not better, than those on Parklife), but because it sold several million copies fewer than Oasis' (What's The Story) Morning Glory?. The pre-Britpop age had been a time of unilateral achievements and small commercial victories. Britpop was about winners and losers.
There bad been no particular rush for The Great Escape (Parklife was still shifting copies in mid-1995 and would eventually sell 1.2 million in Britain, but Blur had become used to making their records in quick succession and Albarn, tunnel-visioned with his English social commentary fixation, had written plenty of songs. He and his bandmates again used brass, strings and other embellishments on The Great Escape, seeming to approach each song as stand-alone epic (see MOJO 22 for the full in-the-studio story).
James: 'All we wanted to do was to make more records to show everyone how brilIiant we were. The Great Escape was certainly a very different album to Parklife. It's such a down record. It was very elaborate arrangements and very theatrical. It's fucking sinister, The Great Escape. Nothing is quite right."
IN THE
LIBRARY OF SOHO HOUSE, Albarn raises his voice above the chatter to
itemise some of the irritations that ate into his life in 1996,
when nothing was going quite right. He would walk down the street
and hear windows being thrown open, after a few seconds' pause, Wonderwall
or Don 't Look Back In Anger would start to blare from
inside the houses. The story would be repeated in shops and
nightclubs. The country was making sure Albarn got the message.
The realisation that he was not cut out for fame -and that he had lost his race with the Gallaghers- was tempered by his sure footedness as a musician. Recording the stripped-down, at times anti-pop Blur album that year, Albarn instinctively knew that it was good stuff. More than that, it was the pivotaI record of Blur's career. It closed the door on their middle period, recapturing some of the wandering spirit of their 1992-93 B-sides and facilitating their successful rebirth as an inquisitive modern band. In the run-up to Meltdown, Scott Walker applauded them in interviews for not resting on their laurels. Even people who despised Blur in the past are finding things to admire in them now.
Albarn: "I think after I'd sung Waterloo Sunset with Ray Davies [on Channel4's The White Room]... That was a perfect moment for me. I felt like I had the seal of approval from one of my heroes. And I felt : time to move on."
Albarn now has his
own recording studio in West London, where he claims to make
music every day. He talks of open-mindedness, and collaboration
being the ways forward for Blur. By the by, he cannot remember
the last time he bought a record that had guitars on it. "I
am not even in the rock world at all. l suppose in the last
two years my partner Suzi [Winstanley, a painter who works as
part of a team known as Olly And Suzi] has opened me up to so
much different music. She didn 't even really know who Blur were.
It was quite amazing to meet someone from England who was so
oblivious o what my past was like. Fantastic as well. A real
second chance in life."
ln former years, a
soundbite-loving Albarn would doubtless have propounded that Blur:
The Best Of confirmed his band as the supreme pop force of
their day, the last great singles act of the 20th century. Nor
would this have been arrogant of him, for that is precisely what Blur:The
Best Of does. Sequenced non-chronologically, the 18 songs
are startlingly diverse -at one point in the proceedings, the
hooligan hard-rock of Song 2 is followed by There's
No Other Way, which is then followed by the Johnny Franz-style
orchestration of The Universal -and vent an all-round
expertise in musicianship and arrangement that has never properly
been acknowledged. Coxon may stress that Blur: The Best Of is
"the first record we have seen as product", but it is
also the richest and most flattering album that has ever been put
together under their name.
With the possible exception of Primal Scream (who will have far fewer genuine hits to call on than Blur), it is hard to see any single-artist compilation in the near future coming close to Blur: The Best Of for vari ety, quality and sense of occasion. ln that respect it is nearer to something like Changesonebowie, where each song was simultaneously redolent of its year of release and a real departure in its own right. (And, like Bowie, Blur have their own Laughing Gnome -Bang- which they have fastidiously omitted from their album.)
The bizarre new track Music Is My Radar had not even been wrirten, let alone selected as a single, when Blur: The Best Of was first compiled. Recorded the day after these interviews took place, it is a last-minute replacement for a song called Black Book, produced by Chris Porter (Urban Hymns) in August. Black Book would have made an interesting single itself : it's a slow-groove electric piano work-out that builds into an eight-and-a-half-minute pot-boiler. Music Is My Radar, by contrast, has Albarn babbling a gbberish guide vocal over parched-sounding guitar and bass that sound a bit like the Stones on Hot Stuff or Emotional Rescue. The choruses are not a million miles from Crosstown Traffic. As it nears the end, a synthesizer is squawking all over the mix and Albarn is chanting "you really got me dancing" like a demented Bee Gee. It's some revelation.
On the question of a new Blur studio album, Albarn says it might be a Chris Potter production -William Orbit, whom they praise for his work on 13, currently has his hands tied with a Jennifer Lopez record- and should emerge as soon as the shelf-life of Blur: The Best Of is over. Albarn does not envisage any pitfalls. "When we're in a studio now, the only thing we worry about is whether we are surprised. And the only way that we can keep doing that is by discovering more about ourselves and our lives. I couldn't make the records that we made when we were younger. I couldn't sing that way. I couldn't think that way. It's a different world. We don't live in the skins that we lived in in our twenties."
David Cavanagh
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