“If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I’m getting rid of grunge”. Suffice to say, a lot of aspiring British musicians, including Damon Albarn, were understandably proud of their small, miserable, rain-swept island’s foundational contribution to rock music, and they were less than pleased about the invasion of flannel-wearing, heroin-addicted American rockers, descending on the British Isles like members of the US Air Force during the Second World War, taking our jobs, women, record deals, and drugs. Britpop was thus a kind of reverse Boston Tea Party directed at the triumphant high priests of grunge, and it is, for example, to sentiments such as these:
“I remember Nirvana had a tune called ‘I Hate Myself and I Want to Die’, and I was like – I can’t have people like that coming over here, on smack, saying that. It’s fucking rubbish.”
…that we owe the existence of Britpop anthem “Live Forever”. Nice one, Kurt!
In retrospect, though, how omnipresent was grunge in Britain at the start of the 90s, really? My memories of the UK charts during this period are most definitely not of Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley singing about their suicidal ideations and drug addictions; they’re of M People and Right Said Fred purveying godawful dance-pop, or 2 Unlimited blitzing the airwaves with unbearable Eurotrance. From my point of view, the guitar-sporting British rockstars of the mid-90s did not vanquish Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder; they cleared the stage of Heather Small and Torsten “call him Mr Vain” Fenslau, an estimable service for which they should have been knighted, perhaps canonized. To the untrained eye, however, the differences between Ten and What’s the Story Morning Glory? aren’t immediately apparent; it’s all just blokes with loud guitars, isn’t it?
But, well, whatever, never mind; let’s indulge the conceit of the Britpop luminaries that they were rolling back the tide of American guitars on behalf of Elizabeth Windsor. According to the music journalist John Harris, the real progenitors of Britpop were Suede, with their T.Rex-esque transgender crooning (brilliantly described by Luke Haines, the unsung architect of Britpop, as “more Grange Hill than David Bowie”). But just as Damon stole Brett Anderson’s bird, he also usurped his preeminent position as Führer of the anti-grunge resistance movement, and he did so with Parklife, Blur’s third album and arguably the first landmark of Britpop’s mid-90s heyday. If memory serves, the ensuing rock’n’roll blowout – lager, lager, lager, Es, whizz, Jarvis Cocker getting his arse out on national television – lasted until summer 1997, when Princess Diane perished in a car accident, abruptly ending Britpop and plunging the entire British Isles into mourning. The selfish cow.
Several of the key songs on Parklife are historical snapshots of this jubilant period in British history, with an effervescent and seemingly ubiquitous social scene of lads, booze, and football, a dying Conservative government, and the ecstatic rise of Cool Britannia, all presided over by smarmy man-of-the-people (and soon to be aspiring war criminal) Tony Blair. Parklife opens with “Girls and Boys”, an edgy, attitude-laden dance rock track which casts its eye over hordes of British tourists descending on sun-kissed Mediterranean islands and turning them into bacchanalian warzones. The song is part affectionate tribute to these obscene, hedonistic peasants, part bourgeois horror at their sheer lack of civility and potential for untrammelled violence. The alcohol-fuelled self-abandon of the British masses is again the subject matter of “Bank Holiday”, a manic punk song which frantically thematizes the collective loss of self-control which customarily descends on broad sections of the British public when they have three consecutive days off work.
“Parklife” is also about the man in the street, but not the in-your-face lager louts of “Girls and Boys”. Its playful and mischievous guitars soundtrack the perspective of a dole-queue layabout, a scion of the cockney underclass, who spends his time lounging around the house and feeding the pigeons, which gives him “a sense of enormous wellbeing.” He may sound like a bit of a Dickensian reprobate, but the wry lyrics and bouncy music cast him as basically sympathetic, just one among “so many people” making the best of their brief stay on this planet as they “go hand in hand through their parklife”.
That said, other quintessentially British personalities presented to us by Parklife are less agreeable. Damon Albarn has long specialized in songs about ordinary people whose ostensibly prosaic lives are underpinned by a creeping madness, and who long to break free from the routinised dullness of their existences. “Tracy Jacks” starts with, incongruously, submarine sound effects, which are perhaps supposed to represent the clandestine insanity beneath the exterior of this “golfing fanatic” who “works in civil service” because it’s “steady employment”. True to form, by the end of the song, the pillar of society has run naked along Walton seafront and bulldozed his own house, because he’d “love to stay here and be normal, but it’s just so overrated.”
Such “social commentary” is, of course, the snobbery of the bohemian middle-classes toward their immediate inferiors; status-obsessed, security loving petit bourgeois dullards. This haughty and not very empathetic worldview provides the impulse for several of Parklife’s bitterest songs. “Trouble in the Message Centre” is a raving, raucous rocker – the heaviest on the album – shot through with a fingernails-down-blackboard synth, and coldly intoned vocals which narrate the perspective of a tyrannical call centre manager (“a new type face, a new day”). The belligerent punk rock of “Jubilee” perhaps describes the offspring of such a banally authoritarian figure – a lazy, spotty, teenage stoner, understandably reluctant to follow in his father’s footsteps, and concerned only with video games.
“Magic America”, meanwhile, touches not so much on Damon’s dislike of the US, but his dislike of perceptions of the US among broad swathes of the British public. To Bill Barrett, the song’s protagonist, the United States is a Shangri La, a land of plenty where all desires can be sated and all impulses indulged (“bought and ate until he could do neither anymore / Then found love on channel forty-four”). Basically, a pool of shit to a moronic pig, of whom there are seemingly many on the sceptred isle of Damon’s imagination.
At other points on Parklife, however, Damon ventures away from his Ray Davies snarkiness, and exposes some of the acute vulnerability beneath the japing, Jack in the Box exterior. It seems very likely that several songs on the album were inspired by his tempestuous dalliance with Justine Frischmann, the frontwoman of Elastica, a “pioneering” Britpop act who nicked so many riffs that they were practically a cover band. “End of a Century”, for example, treats the banalities of middle-aged domestication (“there’s ants in the carpets / eating all the morsels / good morning TV”) and identifies a fear of being alone as the primary motivation for signing away our souls to married tedium. The melancholy, but also sympathetic trumpet at the song’s end reassures us that, as devastatingly boring as this arrangement is, submitting to it is entirely human (“it’s nothing special”). “To the End” is a similarly doleful account of a disintegrating relationship, but the lush strings and sweeping choruses indicate that Blur were, in fact, trying to write a Bond theme – a trick apparently also attempted by Pulp and Radiohead, surprisingly.
Either way, such songs indicate that Damon Albarn was not merely the obnoxious Artful Dodger of Britpop, who flooded the airwaves with mean-spirited songs about his least favourite social stereotypes. Clearly, there was a budding – one might even say grunge-like – darkness here, which more fully manifested on later Blur albums such as Blur and 13. But it also shows up on Parklife. “Badhead” is languid, R.E.M.-style jangle pop which describes the lifestyle of a permanently hungover depressive (“I get up around 2 from a lack of anything to do”), while “Clover Over Dover” is particularly concerning. Although it uses a harpsichord rather than a scuzzy grunge riff, it’s about suicide, with Damon sat on the white cliffs of Dover and thinking about jumping off (“a cautionary tale for you”).
The source of all this malcontent is vividly illustrated on “London Loves”, which is so downbeat and synth-laden that it borders on post-punk. It tackles Damon’s life in hyper-competitive, status-obsessed London. Clearly, beneath the superficial revelry, the compulsion to succeed, keep up appearances, and conceal all forms of weakness was becoming acutely toxic. “London loves the way people just fall apart / London loves the way you just don’t stand a chance”, he laments in the shrill, sludgy chorus, before the song ends with a radio report on London traffic; the trivial frustrations of daily life adding to the unbearable pressure of the shark tank. Being at the eye of the Britpop storm was obviously generating considerable inner-turmoil (“at least I didn’t have a fucking nervous breakdown”, Noel Gallagher would later observe, with characteristic compassion).
Fortunately, Parklife does not end on this bum note; instead, it culminates with a moment of peaceful respite. “This Is a Low” is a blatant attempt to rewrite “Waterloo Sunset”; plaintive, but warm, acoustic guitars, and a rousing, anthemic, rather gorgeous chorus. The quintessentially British imagery of the lyrics was apparently drawn from the shipping forecast, which the members of Blur would listen to during dark nights of the soul on tour, to alleviate their homesickness. It’s a worthy end to a fantastic album that is entirely of its time; mean, swaggering, bratty, elegant, tuneful, keenly observational, occasionally melancholy, frequently flat out mental. These are all adjectives one would readily associate with Damon Albarn, the middle-class art student-turned cockney cartoon character who tried to slum it by eating fried bread in the local caf, all the while living in his exceedingly rich rockstar girlfriend’s London condo at the height of a renaissance in British rock music, and, annoyingly, actually having the talent to back it all up.
8/10
Highlights: “Girls and Boys”, “London Loves”, “This Is a Low”