Caught In A Rat Race, Terminally: Blur and Country House

(originally posted in the UK No 1s of the 90s thread on Gallifrey Base so many thanks to the posters there for the discussion and debate, particularly Manannan of that parish)

Blur’s Shiny Happy People, right down to the lead guitarist very obviously hating every second of the being in that video. I saw them when they played their singles tour in 1999 and Damon at least seemed to regret the decision to play all their singles at that point.

Really it’s the key song in Blur’s career. Sure you can make a case for the initial success of There’s No Other Way or For Tomorrow, the song that Albarn wrote on his parent’s piano on Christmas Day when Food wanted some obvious hits for Modern Life Is Rubbish, or even Girls and Boys or Parklife which established them as an omnipresent Top 5 act. But they’re all about the way up, not the artistic direction. This is the pivot.

On the face of it Blur have everything at this point. They’ve broken out of the indie ghetto – there’s a sackful of Brit awards, Damon’s face adorns the walls of plenty of teenage girls, Parklife made them culturally omnipresent last year and hey, they’ve just beaten their big rivals to No 1 in a massively hyped battle which made the national news. It’s the pick a side rivalry you only usually get with boy bands, not between a load of scruffy herberts with guitars. And the reviews are in for the new albums and again, it’s a knockout win for Blur.

But they’ve painted themselves into a corner. Selling yourself to the public at this level means you’re going to get reduced to caricature to some degree and that’s what happens here. Albarn’s the lad’s mag droog, the pretty boy in the corner cutting everyone down with a witty remark. Which is fun if you’re not on the end of it. Graham’s the human incarnation of ‘piss off’, Alex is the pretty friend who’s hanging with the cool kid to get laid. And Dave is just Dave. They’ve been pigeonholed and that’s going to come back to haunt them.

The song itself? Thanks to the video it’s the indelible zenith of Loaded culture, a Benny Hill style romp with at least one genuine porn star in there and probably a shedload of high quality drugs just out of shot (I defy anyone to tell me Damon’s not off his face during that shoot). If you want to know exactly what was wrong with the triumphalism of Britpop it’s encapsulated in that five minutes. Lyrically it’s Damon at his snidest, a cheap shot at Dave Balfe, and playing up to their cock-er-nee stereotype with an oompah oompah rhythm. But it’s not entirely meritless, the Balzac/Prozac rhyme showing he’s still a smart, witty observer and the drop out to the ‘blow, blow me out’ four part harmony indicating there’s an awareness of how hollow this all is. But it’s still a largely exuberant four minutes that deserved to beat Noel’s chugging, half arsed competitor.

But here’s the trap. Three months later Wonderwall and What’s the Story… have blown Blur away. Because ultimately Noel’s not as clever as Damon but Oasis at this point are all about the communal moment, the simple anthem you can bellow with your mates at the end of a night out. Ultimately it’s more fun to join in than stand on the sidelines and poke fun. In retrospect you can see why Oasis sold by the bucketload and yet why they never particularly appealed to critics. They were a modern Slade, big, dumb, not hugely original in thought or deed but with the common touch. And that meant that Blur lost the war and Damon was faced with a hell of his own making, having Oasis songs sung at him in the street. The schtick of their British album trilogy was now an obvious artistic dead end and the band were faced with either diminishing returns or going away and rethinking everything. One opulent video for album highpoint The Universal aside you can see the band seem to be going through the motions for the rest of the album campaign. So, art or commerce? Artistic satisfaction and sanity or more of the same to the point of fading away?

Noel, of course wouldn’t entertain any notion of art, the money and the drugs meant he never even thought about the choice. But Damon had to and ultimately it sets him off on a far more interesting career.

So, fast forward to the dog days between Christmas and New Year 1996 and Mark Goodier spicing up the end of year charts with a selection of what we’re about to hear in the New Year. And here’s the new single from Blur…

But that’s another story

The Girl From 15 Years Ago Has Packed And Gone Away - Mojo Britpop Special

It always looked like the last survivors of a nuclear war would be cockroaches, Keith Richards and Oasis. Until August 2009 it looked like nothing could stop any of them, even the annihilation of the rest of the world. Noel Gallagher's left Oasis? Again? He'll be back, he always comes back. Except this time, just outside Paris, after one fight too many, he left for good. And the last major Britpop zombie was finally laid to rest.*

The timing might already have been dictated to tie in with Blur's reformation, but Mojo's timing couldn't really be much better. The big music stories of the summer were both related to Britpop's major players, fifteen years on from the release of the albums which made their names with the public at large. God knows if it had any effect on sales, but the fact I only picked it up because it was packaged with another music magazine (hey Q, looking like a glossy lifestyle mag doesn't mean your content is any less shit, just more homogenous). It's a marker though, fifteen years is around the time when the era starts to acquire the sheen of fond nostalgia and the horrors of the likes of Northern Uproar are forgotten by all but the former hardcore addicts. And even then the drugs can thankfully blur your memory.

The magazine covers the major players via a combination of archive interview and a few more words from more minor players. The big names of the era still seem reticent to talk, Brett Anderson's reluctant to discuss the more debauched aspects of Suede's career, or Bernard Butler's departure and the Elastica piece is an exercise in trying to spin towropes from gossamer, Justine Frischmann moving on and even trying to keep others from discussing it. That said, it's worth it for a seriously cute pic of Donna Matthews in her prime, before the drugs really kicked in. The Oasis piece tries to offer an insight into their rise, as part of a few articles documenting major moments (also including such moments as Jarvis' stage invasion at the Brits), but doesn't really offer anything new. That's the central problem here, there's no real new insight for the devotees of any of these bands, and being cruelly honest that's going to be the main audience for this. Instead, it's a nostalgia tour, not quite superficial, but without enough new to say to interest me. Perhaps it's that this was the musical time that dominated my time at university, and unlike most Mojo specials I was familiar with much of the material by living through the music papers for much of the time.

It climaxes with a best of Britpop album list. Creditably it ignores the prejudices of the music papers of the time and comes up with a diverse selection that provides a fairly complete picture of the movement (as always you can argue over omitted favourites such as The Verve's A Northern Soul or how-the-hell-did-that-make-it-in moments such as Stereophonics). Could've done with a little proofreading though, a couple of glaring textual errors aside it's rather unforgivable that Echobelly's 'Everybody's Got One' is accompanied by the sleeve for their second album 'On'. Particularly when said sleeve has ON in big neon orange letters on it.

As an overall picture then it's just fine, and a decent introduction for latter day Oasis or Blur fans looking to get some context. But if you were there, beware.

* Yes I know Supergrass are still going, but despite the attempts to convince you otherwise here Supergrass really weren't that big, much as I love them. No more than Dodgy really and commercially less than the undermentioned Verve