So far, I've not really stayed in touch
Well, you knew as much
Here’s one I hadn’t played for about a decade – Blur Parklife.
I had Blur pegged as a wussy indie band with one good, dancey track* until, in my recollection they suddenly resurfaced with an astonishingly bouncy, clever and cheeky single ‘Girls & Boys’. It was smart and infernally catchy and I collared the LP on the day it was released in ’94; partly because of the brilliant cover picture.
Suddenly Blur were everywhere, Britpopping away, channelling a certain type of refracted English cool – Carnaby Street preachers, The Italian Job, swingeing London, cool Britannia, wide boys, even more Michael Caine, the Jam via a Kinks B-side. I have a certain healthy loathing of the Union Jack^ so I could never totally pledge my soul to it all but I enjoyed it, for what its worth.
Short remembered verdict on Parklife? really great and very creative in places, could do with shedding 3 songs. Having played it a bunch of times this week, that stands up to the tests of time and middle age. So basically ‘Clover Over Dover’, ‘Magic America’ and ‘Jubilee’ can fack right orff and will play no further part in this review.
Opening with ‘Girls & Boys’ is a boss-level move. The lyrics make little sense but are brilliantly done nonetheless, phrases keep popping out and still resonate ‘Love in the 90’s its so paranoid’, ‘following the herd down to Greece’ and the bit about ‘nasty blisters’. Damon Albarn is blessedly unmacho and camp in his delivery and the video shows the band standing a slightly ironic degree away from embracing the sex’n’lager’n’suncream lifestyle; that’s art school for you, it holds you back.
They follow this with ‘David Watts’ ‘Tracy Jacks’ with its catchy ‘I’d love to stay here and be normal / But it’s just so overrated’ refrain and tale of seafront-based nudity. Take that proper-jobbers!
Luckily ‘End Of The Century’ is infinitely more creative and harder to pigeonhole. It is beautifully melodic and I love all the reported speech, ants in the carpet, sex on TV, ‘End of a century, oh, its nothing special’. It’s a rather understated, gorgeous corner of Parklife.
Which of course sets up the bombastic Phil Daniels^^ assisted ‘Parklife’ perfectly. The tune is a stonking, strutting, cock sparrow and Daniels’ delivery of the lyrics is the perfect mockney revel. Its so ubiquitous it gets used in adverts these days so I needed reminding how fun and subtle it is in places, those horns.
Blur invert the sequencing trick, the punky ‘Bank Holiday’ setting us up for the soothing ‘Badhead’. Writing this the day after a bank holiday, I still love how it affectionately skewers our national obsession with these days and all our essential predictable tawdriness – barbecues, binge drinking, fun pubs and lost knickers. ‘Badhead’ on the other hand is like calamine lotion in aural form, soothing and a mite uncomfortable. Again the melodies and music show how good Blur were when they allowed a touch of melancholia in.
Let us skip through Parklife to ‘To The End’, the arrestingly sophisticated Laetitia Sadier assisted number. This tune echoes the idea of all manner of Gainsbourg and Lee Hazlewood tunes that I am far too uncultured, poorly dressed to have ever actually heard. I have heard this though and I quite genuinely swoon along to it.
Both ‘London Loves’ and ‘Trouble In The Message Centre’ play up Blur’s post-punk synth-fired credentials, borrowing boinking rhythm and melody from the likes of the Police and the Cars. I’m very fond of them both, which sustains me through a trifecta of lesser cuts to follow.
For me Parklife closes with the lush 5-minute ‘This is A Low’, ignoring the unnecessary ‘Lot 105’. Again, Albarn and the chaps get all melancholic and understated, with the music swirling and occasionally cresting in a stately fashion. The fact that apart from the song title it is almost completely indecipherable, does not detract at all from its loveliness.
Away from all the razzamatazz of those heady times Parklife still stands tall, able to play the lad card and arty melancholia equally. The production, shared between Stephen Street, Stephen Hague, John Smith and Blur, is flawless, managing to be punchy, warm and clear. The whole band are on top form, without any single part of them standing proud of the collective. I would particularly commend the string (both real and synthesised) and horn arrangements, which always sound part of their songs, rather than as so often, bonus gloop added to sound sophisticated/Beatlesy.
Sadly, Blur seemed to play to the gallery and their lowest common denominator for a few years after Parklife, becoming as is so often the case, the mockney parody they were actually parodying at first. They snapped back, weird and proud with Blur in 1997 and won my affections all over again.
It’s got nothing to do with your “Vorsprung durch Technik”, you know.
Parklife is an excellently packaged album. I love the constrained savagery and focus of the cover photo – which did inspire, the newly-minted Mrs 1537 and I, along with a few friends, to have a London night out at Wimbledon dog track*^.
The inner sleeve doodles are all fine but I am hugely taken with the back cover arrangement of the tracks and credits as a race card.
1277 Down.
*I’ve swayed my way around a sweaty student dancefloor or two to the tune of ‘There’s No Other Way’. A less discrete man than I could mention a mid-dance snog with a young lady to this very tune, but I shan’t**.
**and not just because she vomited copiously over her shoes 10 minutes later on in, I would like to think, entirely unrelated circumstances. I never did catch her name; unless it was actually Blerrghkk.
^being Welsh gives me a +6 bonus to Brit patriotism saving throws.
^^sweary contributor to, 1537 rave-up, Flowered Up Weekender (courtesy of Quadrophrenia).
*^a few pints, a few bets and some great chips, the evening actually paid for itself, less 50p.