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A hard day's night (part 3)


But even as Damon'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 Dave puts it, "let the songs do whatever they wanted to do."


Graham, 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 a chopped chord every few beats, emulating some of the Françoise Hardy records he had recently fallen in love with. Graham: "I thought Damon's songs were a lot tighter on Parklife. That's why I 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. Damon 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 Graham); 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 dip sharply in following weeks. In this period the records that sold most were made by MOR acts, pop vocal outfits, dance projects and old campaigners from the '80s. In 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. In 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: "That wouldn't have been taken seriously. In 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, "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 aural idyll of music, words and sound effects?


Alex: "It certainly wasn't journalism. It was mythologising everything it dealt with. There's nothing very real about it. It's quite a cartoony record." Damon: "What I'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 Damon more than he revealed at the time - was symbolic proof that Blur had won their war against grunge. But if Damon 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.


Alex: "You walked five yards behind him and you saw jaws drop - literally 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." Damon: "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...'"


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 had 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 Damon, 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 a stand-alone epic.


Alex: "All we wanted to do was to make more records to show everyone how brilliant 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 f***ing sinister, The Great Escape. Nothing is quite right."


In the library of Soho House, Damon 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 that Damon 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, Damon instinctively knew that it was good stuff. More than that, it was the pivotal 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.


Damon: "I think after I'd sung Waterloo Sunset with Ray Davies [on Channel 4'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."


Damon 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. I 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 to what my past was like. Fantastic as well. A real second chance in life."


In former years, a soundbite-loving Damon 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. Graham 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 variety, quality and sense of occasion. In that respect it is near to something like Changesbowie, 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 written, 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 Potter (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 Damon babbling a gibberish 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 Damon 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, Damon 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.


Damon 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."
by scummy | 2008-01-20 02:57 | interview

memo


by scummy

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