Blur

In the perpetual transatlantic swing of the pendulum of musical supremacy, 1994 found the needle pointing towards America. Despite the triumph of the 1990 Spike Island concert, the Stone Roses and their fellow Madchester travellers had failed to hold onto British dominance, overwhelmed by their own addictions and by the destructive force of American grunge.

Four years after the "Woodstock of the Baggy generation", though, it took just a week to turn things around again: only a few days separated Kurt Cobain's hospitalisation for an overdose in Rome from the release of "Girls & Boys", the first single from Blur's third album, "Parklife".

A far more complex record than its predecessors, this was, in the words of the band themselves, "a concept album with very loose connections. It's the struggles of the mystical lager-eater, who sees what's going on and comments on it", as Albarn himself put it, shifting his gaze from Britain to the United States. The inspiration came from the band's close contact with American culture during an exhausting tour across the pond; an anthropological encounter that gave birth to the characters populating the stories of "Parklife", embodiments of the powerful influence the American way of life was having on Europeans.

Albarn's stance was a deeply critical one, turning the album's tracklist into the index of an imaginary current-affairs weekly, alternating songs that read like satirical cartoons with more introspective pieces, a black humour paired with intimate flourishes that closely recalls Martin Amis's "London Fields".

It's precisely this ironic intent that would become the most underrated aspect of the album. Starting with "Girls & Boys", which opens the parade of sixteen tracks: in no time at all it morphed from a caricature of the sexual habits found at mass holiday resorts into an anthem of the new post-Thatcherite freedom for that section of the British population (Blur themselves included) who had grown up knowing nothing but the Iron Lady's rule.

Pornography, television, forced fun as a distraction from the present, obsessive health-consciousness and the loss of self are the themes underpinning the narrative of the whole record: the fun pub of "Bank Holiday", the end-of-millennium paranoia of "End Of A Century", the jogging of "Parklife", the American dream of Bill Barret in "Magic America", a song written in Milan and inspired by the porn channel of the same name.

It's the title track that acts as a bridge between the Fred Perrys and tailored suits of "British Image #1", the persona Albarn and co. had adopted on the previous "Modern Life Is Rubbish", and the new England: over a backing track that harks back to the pop tradition of Madness, Mod icon Phil Daniels narrates tales of overweight joggers and German advertising slogans calling for progress through technology.

"[Parklife] is a convergence of different influences", Graham Coxon told the Guardian, "Alex wanted to be in Duran Duran, I wanted to be in Wire, and Damon... I don't know". In truth, it isn't hard to guess what Damon Albarn's points of reference were: certainly Kurt Weill's "The Threepenny Opera", one of the cornerstones in the Colchester musician's compositional makeup, which surfaces in the two instrumental minutes of "The Debt Collector", conceived as a piece à-la Tom Waits; the Nouvelle Vague France of "To The End", also covered in a version by Françoise Hardy and accompanied by a video directly inspired by the films of Alain Resnais; or again the postmodern atmospheres of Derek Jarman, turned on their head in "Jubilee".

How the spirit of 60s pop that Albarn draws directly upon and the alternative rock of Graham Coxon's guitar could give rise to the most sophisticated strand of what would become britpop is made abundantly clear by the closing track of "Parklife", that "Lot 105" born as a divertissement to try out an old Hammond organ bought at auction, which went on to become an overlooked manifesto of the deep-seated anger running, beneath its thick layer of irony, through the whole record.

Considered "a mistake" by David Balfe, founder of Food Records, who had Blur under contract at the time, "Parklife" would become the first album to earn the same artist four Brit Awards, at the 1995 ceremony. "It got terrifying", Albarn recalls, "we got up to collect the fourth award and I think that's when we realised everyone had taken it all far too seriously, completely missing the point of the whole record". The acceptance speech could only end with a none-too-subtle sarcastic "Wake up, America!".

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21/07/2013