I grew up hating Blur; affected, effete, bourgeois southern softies, bête noires to the authentic working-class heroes of Oasis, a band I so loved as a teenager. From the perspective of my adolescent self, Damon Albarn and his coterie of mockney class tourists peddled a condescendingly sophisticated brand of arty rock music, in comparison to the more visceral stylings of the Gallaghers. It was only in my twenties that I began to develop a sneaking admiration for Damon’s arch lyricism, and for Blur’s capacity to evolve their style, as opposed to the Stars in their Eyes-like nostalgia act that Oasis gradually and inevitably morphed into.
Now, at the ripe old age of 40, I’m slowly arriving at the view that Blur were the best, most creative band of the Britpop era. But who were these clown princes of Britpop? They emerged in the early 90s, when dreary shoegaze and blissed out Madchester music ruled the British rock scene. After flirting with these styles on their first album, they made Modern Life is Rubbish, a self-consciously “British” record which, according to some, launched the Britpop movement, and which, according to others, merely attached itself to a cultural trend already unleashed by the likes of Suede and the Auteurs. Either way, Blur became, alongside Oasis, the poster boys of Britpop, until it all went tits up at the end of the 90s in a haze of drugs, alcoholism, and personal and professional acrimony. Nevertheless, and though the band’s profile declined somewhat in the second half of the 90s, Blur never broke up, and they’ve continued to release records, with the most recent coming in 2023.
This album ranking is split into two parts; the first deals with Blur’s peak Britpop-era work, while part 2 focuses on their subsequent, late- and post-Britpop albums.
Leisure (1991)
The listener is perfectly entitled to ask whether or not Leisure can properly be considered a canonical Blur record. As already noted, in the early 90s, British rock was dominated by the funky, acid-fuelled indie of Madchester, as well as maudlin, ethereal shoegaze. It’s very hard to avoid the impression that Blur were simply trying to hitch themselves to these bandwagons in an attempt to mollify their record company. There’s little trace here of the band’s later trademarks – the two-tone and ska influences, the witty meditations on British life, the cutting character sketches. Instead, Leisure delivers dancey, psychedelic, occasionally cacophonous indie rock, with zonked out, ethereal vocals, and run of the mill lyrics about tormented relationships, making for a banal collection of largely indistinguishable and forgettable songs. There’s some promise on the singles; “She’s so High” is a lazy, hazy meditation on addiction and obsession, while the funky, organ driven “There’s No Other Way” is an adept distillation of the baggy mien. “Bang” and “Slow Down” are memorable enough slices of early 90s indie rock, while the distressed cacophony of “Sing” hints at the creeping darkness of Blur’s post-Britpop records. Other than that, however, it’s slim pickings indeed, a band manifestly struggling to find their sound.
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Standout track: “There’s No Other Way”
Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993)
In 1992, Blur embarked on a disastrous tour of the United States, where they and their psychedelic Madchester stylings were roundly rejected by flannel shirt-wearing American teenagers in thrall to the macabre and unwashed luminaries of grunge. Blur returned to the sceptred isle of their birth only to find it in the grip of Suede-mania, which must have been particularly galling for Damon, as he had only recently nicked Brett Anderson’s girlfriend. But on Modern Life is Rubbish, they rose to the challenge, ditching their Shoegaze affectations in favour of a harder, louder, sharper, cockier British rock style inspired by bands like the Jam and XTC, as well as the two-tone ska of Madness and the Specials. Significantly, the lyrics shifted away from whinging about Justine Frischmann to pointed, quirky, sometimes mean-spirited meditations on British life and eccentricity: the snooty, officious, white-collar wanker “Colin Zeal”; the lonely, pervy urbanites of “Chemical World”: the tragic drunks of “Villa Rosie”. The result is a deceptively harsh and abrasive record – only “For Tomorrow”, the opener, could be considered readymade for the charts. But by invoking classic British rock and quintessentially British themes, Modern Life is Rubbish heralded an intensification of the burgeoning Britpop movement then being spearheaded by Suede – though a less glammy, more mischievously laddish manifestation.
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Standout track: “Colin Zeal”
Parklife (1994)
Alongside Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, Parklife surely represents the peak of Britpop as a musical and cultural moment. Yes, Liam Gallagher once acidly characterised the prancing braggadocio that Blur channelled on this album as “chimney sweeper music” but, in my opinion, Damon’s Dickensian buffoonery constituted an essential aspect of both his band’s trajectory and of Britpop’s broader import as a revivification of cheeky, self-deprecating “Britishness” in the face of the po-faced grunge onslaught. Thematically, Parklife is an uncomplicated continuation of Modern Life is Rubbish, with songs like “Tracy Jacks” and “Trouble in the Message Centre” continuing the coldly droll dissection of ostensibly prosaic, but clandestinely insane, suburban British lives. Musically, however, it is considerably more accessible than its predecessor. Whereas Modern Life largely relied on a relentlessly harsh and scything guitar sound, Parklife is replete with poppier moments; the jiving disco of “Girls and Boys”; the Artful Dodger knees-up of the title track; and a surprising plethora of lush ballads, such as “End of a Century”, “To the End”, and “This Is a Low”. The album adeptly channels the spirit of Cool Britannia like no other, the lyrics are fiendishly clever, and there’s barely a bum note to be heard. Britpop’s finest and most emblematic moment.
* * * * *
Standout track: “Girls and Boys”
The Great Escape (1995)
The Great Escape and Parklife could have been a double album; there’s little to distinguish the two in terms of musical style or lyrical focus. The formula is familiar; loud, abrasive dissections of British stereotypes with unappealing personalities (“Top Man”, “Charmless Man”), and of the banalities and wayward frivolities of British suburbia (“Stereotypes”, “Fade Away”), combined with sudden moments of touching balladry (“The Universal”). The Great Escape, however, is frostier, more jaded than its predecessor. There’s a budding darkness here, which points to the introspective glumness of Blur’s later Britpop records. “He Thought of Cars” is a haunting meditation on the unfulfillable ideals of an aspirational society, while “Dan Abnormal” and the deceptively chirpy “Country House” mark the point at which Damon Albarn began to turn his capacity for cutting observational lyricism against himself. He would later dismiss The Great Escape as one of only two bad records he ever made (alongside Blur’s debut), but maybe this assessment is coloured by the torrid time he was having personally while recording it. On its own merits, it’s a great album, an uncertain and dilapidated bridge between the cartoonish exuberance of peak Britpop and the comedown of the late 90s.
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Standout track: “The Universal”
Continued in part II.