by Martin Roach
Progress was quick – after all, songs like ‘Parklife’ and ‘Girls & Boys’ had been played in the Blur live set for Modern Life, so by now much of the material was well understood by the band. Very soon they had twenty tracks to choose from. Once again, a vast array of instrumentation was used ranging from Hammonds, a Moog, harpsichord, melodica, vibraphone, various percussion, and even clarinet and saxophone, courtesy of Graham. The combination of all this musical texture gave the album a sonic variety unchallenged at this time. The array of styles was enormous, and tied in with what teacher Nigel Hildreth had spotted in a younger Damon’s tastes. The record was full of the last thirty years of pop – there was splashes of electro pop on ‘Girls & Boys’, punk rock for ‘Bank Holiday, Gary Numan appears for ‘Trouble In The Message Centre’, and The Kinks, The Small Faces, Buzzcocks, Madness and The Jam gate-crash all over the record. It swept effortlessly from punk rock to the finest ballads. Clanging sing-alongs sat uncomfortably next to robotic instrumentals and lush string laden epics. The Germanic ‘oompah’ of ‘Debt Collector’ sits sandwiched between the seemingly incompatible sugary sweet vocals of ‘Badhead’ and the quirky robotic mayhem of ‘Far Out’. Elsewhere, the pure pop of ‘End Of A Century’ is followed by the punk rock blast of ‘Bank Holiday’. This kaleidoscopic range of styles should have clattered together in one unholy mess, but somehow Blur cleverly pulled it off, with the weird musical variety adding to their achievement, rather than cluttering it up.
Thematically, Parklife introduced many oddball characters and weird scenarios that had been fermenting in Damon’s head for months. Whereas some bands looked to drugs and tour misbehaviour in a desperate attempt to shock, Blur looked inward at the sexually and socially deviant lives of the British population. ‘Tracy Jacks’ was a golf playing civil servant transvestite whilst the barrow boy chant of ‘Parklife’ saw Phil Daniels of Quadrophenia fame filling the shoes of a potty park-keeper, wiling away his hours watching pigeons shag and laughing at flabby suited men avoiding the red faced joggers on the grass. A series of superb couplets told tales of grandma’s dentures, barbecues, pizzas and Snickers bars on ‘Bank Holiday’, perhaps the sequel to ‘Sunday Sunday’. Damon’s anti-Americanism reared its head again for ‘Magic America’, despising the shopping malls and cable TV culture. He even featured the Shipping Forecast, in the sad and dreamy trip around Britain’s shores for what is widely seen as one of Blur’s greatest songs, ‘This Is A Low’. This penultimate track was a dark and introspective near-finale, bulging with emotion. The two instrumental tracks – ‘Debt Collector’ and ‘Lot 105’ – along with ‘Clover Over Dover’ (noted in the sleeve as ‘Theme From An Imaginary Film’) gave the album a cinematic quality as well. Like Modern Life, this album reflected something of Blur’s past, but unlike its predecessor it was far more wide reaching in scope, exploiting the themes suggested at previously with much more depth. Damon warned people of this when he said to NME: “This album is in a lot of ways a massive departure from the last one. If people are scared of that then there’s not much I can do about it.”
Damon was not holding these people up as outcasts or weirdos, there was a genuine affection – he told Puncture he empathised with them: “I’ve always liked the idea that everybody is capable of deviant behaviour, however private. I’ve never been spiteful or angry about the characters – their malevolence is just comical. They’re all doing peculiar things in small ways, not making a big fuss about it.”
Damon later revealed that the rivalry with Suede and his belief that they had stolen some of his ideas had been a major motivation for him during the writing of this album; even so, Suede’s focus tended to be more romanticised, more ambient drama, whereas Blur’s was a very real, very gritty London of false teeth and fly-overs. The London focus was very clear, as he told NME: “I use London for a metaphor for almost every situation I’m in. I can’t help it. I never think of London as just one person, there’s so many different elements to it. It’s not one girlfriend, it’s twenty.” Damon also denied in NME that this was another record in danger of getting lost in fascist rhetoric, saying all his characters were actually fed up and trying to escape England: “The English are so mean-spirited, and I am ashamed, but that’s us isn’t it? I suppose our songs are just telling each other how crap we are. All my songs criticise this country.” The third person narrative style enabled Damon to recount all the lurid stories of his cast with superb detail. Back in the autumn of 1991, Damon had once been asked, “What do you stand for?” to which he answered, “So we don’t have to keep lying down.” It is sometimes hard to believe that this was the same lyricist as on Parklife.
The huge analysis that focuses on any album of such magnitude throws up many comparisons, and it is worth summarising these, since much of what the media said was very accurate. The central theory was that Blur were the next in line of a long heritage of English pop, going back to the beat groups of the sixties, in particular The Small Faces and The Kinks, then through bands like Buzzcocks, The Jam and Madness, on to electro pop such as Gary Numan. Great British albums such as The Kinks’s The Village Green Preservation Society were cited as similar examples of narrative records which contained revealing vignettes of English life and insights behind the net curtains. At the time of Parklife, such lyrical tale telling was still largely unfashionable, so it was a brave reference point for Blur to go for (it was not entirely new however, as Blur had admitted many of these influences way back on Leisure). There was also a ‘quaint’ nature to some tracks, like ‘Trouble In The Message Centre’ that again fitted in with this British heritage. There were lyrical similarities too, with Ray Davies of The Kinks being particularly referred to, as well as more unusual analogies for ‘Tracy Jacks’, a sexual misfit possibly descended from Pink Floyd’s ‘Arnold Layne’. Damon’s vocal delivery especially tied him to The Small Faces, and Graham’s guitar linked back to other craftsmen such as Johnny Marr. Blur readily admitted their influences, and openly revered many of the bands they were now being compared to. The point to remember is that the result was always greater, or rather different to the sum of its parts. Nothing wasted, only reproduced.
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The alternative title of British Pop 1965-82 was often bestowed on Parklife by the unending comparisons and analogies to The Small Faces, The Kinks, The Jam, Madness, Steve Harley, The Who, Magazine et al. It was indeed a very referential record, as Stuart Maconie of Radio 1 put it, “an instant record collection in miniature.” He was right to observe that this made Parklife an album of endless listening, one you could keep coming back to time and time again. In most cases many of these comparisons are valid, but it is interesting to look perhaps further back than that. As well as Steve Marriott and Ray Davies, it is also feasible to look at the music hall heritage which directly inspired tracks like ‘The Debt Collector’ and ‘Lot 105’, and indirectly influenced much of Blur’s very essence. Various British bands had played around with music hall and Vaudeville, with The Beatles’s track ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite’ from the Sgt. Pepper album being perhaps one of the better known examples. Herman’s Hermits enjoyed success with music hall pastiches (Trevor Peacock’s ‘Mrs Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter’) as well as actual music hall (‘I’m Henry The Eighth I Am’). Their frontman Peter Noone was a pretty faced drama student whose theatrical style and good looks reaped rich rewards for the band. Also, many of the bands which Blur were now being compared to were steeped in a music hall tradition, for example The Small Faces’s track ‘Lazy Sunday’. What is interesting is just how far back Damon’s fascination with English music can be traced, and the influence this had on the band’s sound, their live show, his lyrics and performance.
Music hall as an entertainment tradition was largely fading by the late 1940s, having enjoyed a heyday in the late Victorian era through to the 1920s. The 1950s and 1960s saw it increasingly being replaced by variety shows, with the likes of Danny Kaye and other American acts dominating venues like The Pal
ladium. Many of the original British stars of music hall, such as the great Marie Lloyd, had a performance style peculiar to this British tradition, namely ‘audience address’ whereby the performer directly sang to the crowd, rather than at it. This was most obvious on the song ‘The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery’ from the turn of the century, but was also visible on her more famous numbers such as ‘My Old Man Says Follow The Van’. Damon himself brought a dramatic quality to Blur shows, and that theatricality is also prevalent in his songwriting. In the case of Parklife, it is not impossible to imagine Damon singing ‘To The End’ to an actual member of the stalls. He himself said to The Face, “There is a lot of acting in me. The characters I create exist for me, and I have to be them for the three minutes I am singing it.” On Parklife, there are direct music hall spin-offs as mentioned above, but there are also more subtle examples, such as ‘Parklife’ which employs a humour and ultra-reality that was a core element of this period of music.
There has been a long tradition of music hall and musical writers working in the pop vein, and really Damon was just inverting that age-old trend. Just as Lionel Bart had followed the legendary Oliver with pop songs for Tommy Steele, so now Damon was following very modern pop songs such as ‘Bank Holiday’ with throw-backs such as ‘Debt Collector’. Damon has made it clear that during this period of his career he saw himself very much in this vein: “I am part of a tradition. I am part of a music hall-clown-entertainer tradition that’s been in this country since the turn of the century. It’s a theatrical tradition which if you come from this country you lean into. It’s like pantomime, we’ve all been to those at Christmas, so it’s in our blood. I used to love going to pantomime and always feel the need to entertain.” Fast-forward to The Good, The Bad & The Queen and he still clearly draws heavily on this tradition; despite his many personae, there are still very rich veins of creative themes that have been constants in his entire career.
Another link with Blur and this more theatrical British tradition, which pre-dates the beat groups of the sixties, is the radical theatre of Joan Littlewood, who worked at The Theatre Royal Stratford East. Obviously, Damon’s mom working there whilst pregnant with him is the most direct connection. Also, one of Littlewood’s greatest productions was Oh, What A Lovely War, which was one of the key musicals Damon participated in at Stanway Comprehensive. It goes deeper than that. Littlewood, along with their partner Gerry Raffles, pretty much single-handedly changed the face of British music theatre in the late 1950s with her unique productions, and fought off the influx of American actors, placing it in the hands of home-grown innovators. There is a parallel in what Littlewood achieved here with Parklife’s achievements – the fourth Blur album heralded a new era of British music, when the crown of pop was snatched away from visiting American bands. Similarly, Littlewood took alternative theatre which pre-dated the fringe circuit and invaded the West End mainstream. Forty years later and Blur were leaving the pages of NME to appear on the covers of nationwide tabloids, at huge venues and on arena tours, with the year’s most critically acclaimed album under their belts.
One of the hardiest followers of the Littlewood school of thought was East 15, where Damon attended drama school in his late teens. Damon always refers back to this acting background and clearly enjoyed applying these skills on stage with Blur. Simply Red would have gone to RADA, Damon went to East 15, the angry young man’s drama school. It was Tom Courtenay taking on Gielgud. Blur outselling Wet Wet Wet. Both were new waves in their own right.
The other key link here is with Weill and Brecht, who are obviously not British, but easily pre-date the sixties groups. Damon’s fascination with, and admiration for, these two writers has already been mentioned. Having participated in Die Drei Groschen Oper with its hit song ‘Mack The Knife’ at East 15, Damon was aware at an early stage of the oddities and almost atonal appeal of some of Weill’s music. Similarly he was also knowledgeable about Brecht’s radical playwriting. Bits of both can be seen in his work. Most obvious is the influence of Weill, whose odd chromaticisms and nuances are mirrored in the way Damon takes the popular form and twists it, especially on songs like ‘Debt Collector’, which has remarkable similarities to the stylistic brashness of Die Drei Groschen Oper. Whilst Damon is nowhere near as political as Brecht in his Blur-era lyrics, the fresh subject matter and unique characters were similar features.
Pushing the connection still further, there could even be seen to be a vague similarity between Damon’s open attitude to his reverential use of pop’s past and Brecht’s infamous ‘Theatre of Alienation’. This was best seen during the work of The Berliner Ensemble (again something that Damon had worked with in his teens), where the cast abandoned all traditional attempts to suspend audience belief – they walked on stage without a curtain, did not hide the lights or have complex scenery, and even introduced themselves as actors who were about to perform a play. Now, obviously Blur don’t do this live, but this attitude of creating a pastiche that is greater than the sum of its parts is more than apparent on Parklife. Indeed, Damon’s honest admissions about plundering the past were first expressed in interviews for Modern Life. They are both saying, “we know you know, but look and listen, it is still something new and special.”
One final parallel is with Damon and Kurt Weill’s writing prowess. Weill is still seen today as a classical composer in his own right, and yet he also went on to write popular songs (‘September Song’ which has been covered by Lou Reed, and ‘Mack The Knife’), folk opera (‘Down In The Valley’) and Broadway musicals (‘Knickerbocker Holiday’ and ‘One Touch Of Venus’). Similarly, Damon has started off writing linear pop of the day (‘There’s No Other Way’), but has also written film themes (‘Decadence’ and a track for Trainspotting entitled ‘Closet Romantic’; Blur also contributed ‘Sing’ to the soundtrack), and has had his work arranged for orchestra. Even the Steven Berkoff connection is also relevant – Berkoff comes very much from the school of Weill and Brecht, and is famed for his highly physical performances – something Damon was also renowned for in Blur’s early days.
In summary, the multitude of more recent popular influences on Blur, circa Parklife, are justifiably highlighted. However, with Damon’s background, it is too myopic to simply look at these more recent reference points. The above suggestions are certainly worth exploring, if only to understand the breadth of his work better. Damon himself had once said “I can’t agree we are a sixties band – I think we are a very nineties band, the only nineties band around. If you’re going to analyse a set of individuals and their music, you’ve got to look further than what you see on the record. Journalists always try to look further without knowing enough.” He had himself given hints about where to look, as he suggested in the infamous “Empire Under Siege” article: “We have such a rich musical heritage, and it doesn’t just start with rock ’n’ roll, it goes back to the post-war period of Joan Littlewood and Lionel Bart, and before that to Music Hall.”
Whatever your view of Parklife is, it was undeniably a classic album. In a pop world where CDs and (later) selective downloading have enabled listeners to flit effortlessly from track to track, here was an album that demanded playing all the way through, time and time again. Amongst all the protracted discussions and theories that surrounded the year’s most celebrated album, just one sentence in the NME summed it all up perfectly: “It is easy to forget that albums can be this fabulous.”
Chapter 8
JUBILEE
The sheer musical quality of Parklife translated into a colossal commercial impact. Much to the band’s amazement, it outsold Pink Floyd’s chart topping The Division Bell by 3-to-1 and entered the charts straight at No.1. Parklife went on to stay in the Top 20 for 90 weeks and sell over 1.8 million copies. It captured the very zeitgeist of the moment like no other album of the 1990s, and the run of achievements seemed endless. Parklife was nominated for the prestigious Mercury Music Award from a list of 130 acts, along with excellent records by The Prodigy,
Therapy?, Paul Weller and Pulp. Blur were pre-match favourites at 2-1 to take the award that Suede had won the year before, but they were all beaten to the post by M People’s soulless pop, apparently seizing the crown from Pulp’s His ‘n’ Hers by just one vote. Select hailed Blur as ‘The Best British Band Since The Smiths’ claiming that Parklife was the guitar pop album by which all other records of the next decade would be judged. Damon even achieved his life-long ambition of appearing on the BBC Radio 4 chat show Loose Ends with the late Ned Sherrin. With mass coverage in the music press, the tabloids, the teen mags and the broadsheets, Blur had now successfully straddled the often impossible gap between critical acclaim and mass commercial success.
The extent to which Blur had crossed over into the mainstream only became fully apparent during the tour to promote Parklife. Starting in May 1994, the sixteen dates took in relatively small venues considering that Blur were now arguably the biggest band in the country, with Nottingham’s Rock City as the opener. As the tour progressed, the success of Parklife increased, so that by the last date Blur were being greeted as conquering heroes. Damon in particular was being treated like some kind of pop messiah. At one show in Wolverhampton he crowd surfed and lost his shoe, then clambered back on stage and said, “I need my shoe back, I’m not Jesus you know” at which point the crowd began chanting “Je-sus, Je-sus”. This routine became a regular feature of Blur gigs, and on this tour alone Damon lost six pairs of shoes. The popular appeal of Parklife was reinforced by the sing-along nature of most of these Blur gigs – the audience participation was immense, especially on the title track.
Blur were assisted on these dates by Cara Tivey on keyboards who filled out the musical textures of the set when Damon was too preoccupied with being Jesus. He was highly theatrical now, drawing on his drama background to play the roles of his characters on stage, colourfully animating the songs one minute, then plunging head first into a sea of hands the next. His oft-maligned Mockney accent was getting sharper and sharper, and he hammed it up, drawing in the swooning girls and admiring lads.