Blur – The Great Escape

It might not be Blur’s best album, but it’s almost certainly their most fascinating…

Dissect an album that made millions and was received ecstatically on release, yeah? Why bother?

Because this is an album that suffered severe critical whiplash, so near immediate was the turn against the Essex foursome. Once the fickle finger of popular opinion pointed towards the hoary “authenticity” of contemporary rivals Oasis, Blur were instantly derided as the corporate delivery boys of fakery and sneery-eyed cynicism.

 

1995 - what are you like?

A press fabrication (definitely) maybe, but it’s a feeling that was grounded in reality, and largely engendered by Blur’s fourth studio outing.

So, what’s wrong with The Great Escape? It’s the previous (phenomenally successful) album Parklife but magnified, isn’t it? How can that not be a good thing? Simply, take the nuance, character and charm from that LP, and you’re left with Big Top Blur – an empty vessel dispassionately bolting together a contractual obligation. A functioning pop outfit chugging out plastic, soulless art-rock weaved from ego, hype, and coke binges.

It starts out inoffensively enough – Stereotypes is middling output. Essentially a gaudy half-tempo re-imagining of Squeeze’s Cool for Cats, it was swallowed up anonymously into Britpop’s tiresome gulfstream with little fuss. Unless, of course, you listen to the lyrics.

Cocker. He so common.

When Jarvis Cocker does social commentary lyricism it’s witty working class observation borne from affection. When Damon Albarn tries the same, it’s perceived as snot-nosed condescension. Parklife just about carried off its charismatic parochial vignettes with a fine line in cheeky wit. By contrast, The Great Escape lends itself to snobbery and caricature. From Fade Away to It Could Be You and Ernold Same to Entertain Me, the British (or more specifically, the English) are portrayed as unimaginative automatons, boorish simpletons or both, with not a slither of empathy to be found.

“A car. A house. Both in street.

The boredom of the sober week.

The weekend is here – hip hip hooray,

To make the blues just go away,” monotones Albarn on Entertain Me.

The disdain practically bleeds from the speakers.

Damon Albarn: who's a pretty boy then?

And when he’s not telling his audience how insufferably dense they are, he’s throwing them barely syllabic grunts of a chorus, as in Charmless Man’s lazily yelped “Na na na na na na naaaas”.

Sonically, it’s all over the place. Graham Coxon’s wonderfully inventive guitar parts are buried under an avalanche of kick horns, strings, and oompah trouser twaddle. Usually so favourable to The Smiths, Babyshambles, and Blur themselves, Stephen Street’s hyper-polished production smothers any chance the songs had to survive under layer upon layer of overdubs and needless backing vocals.

The Universal: gassy

The Great Escape stands as audible proof that success had largely ruined the genre. Once the record companies began expecting major label sales from indie label outfits, the pressure was on to provide revenue by crapping out ever more excessively populist nonsense at the expense of artistry.

Take Mr Robinson’s Quango. It’s horrible. A directionless, ADHD-fuelled cacophonous collision of ill-fitting genres whilst Albarn squeals coquettishly over the top about god only knows. (Almost by way of apology, it’s followed immediately by He Thought of Cars, a soporific comedown that could sit on their next eponymous grunge-inspired LP with little tonal difference.)

No wonder Oasis won the war. They sang songs about aspiring and shining and rolling with it: rock you could drunkenly slur along to. Blur were singing about grabbing secretary’s arses and herpes: pop you couldn’t dance to.

Despite the jollity, there’s a mournful quality threaded through much of the album – a reluctant gritted-toothed grin on Best Days, Yuko and Hiro, Dan Abnormal and The Theme from British Gas (otherwise known as The Universal).

The last straw for Coxon...

Of course, towards the beginning is the track that perhaps best (or worst) exemplifies the sadness and overblown pomposity of the entire record: jaunty knees-up Country House. Oh, Country House – what left to say? It’s preposterous to the power of absurd? A vacuous knob-a-long that damn near killed the band’s integrity? Actually, ahem, kind of fun?

All these years later, it’s easier to pick apart the composition from the cultural baubles of the era: specifically, the chart battle and the stupid Carry On Keith Allen promo video. It’s time to recognise the pop brilliance that lies beneath. Irritating it may well be, and perhaps distinctive for having the weediest guitar solo in the history of recorded music, but it’s a joyously-constructed four minutes of multi-layered pop extravagance. Blur now finally play it again as part of their their live set, brass section and all. Having shunned it for over a decade, it's back where it belongs - in the public’s ears. One suspects it’s largely thanks to the mellowing of Graham Coxon, now much more at ease with his musical legacy provided he’s allowed sporadic time off from the mothership to make impenetrable solo albums from old bits of cardboard and dust.

Blur 2012: fittier, happier. No wait, that's the other fellas.

If The Great Escape has an allure then, is that it doesn't try to be loved. It’s the brash kid in the room with little sense of self-awareness, bellowing audaciously out of sheer nihilistic boredom. Ugly, cold and ludicrous? Hell yes, but therein lies a compelling sense of compulsion/attraction. To listen to it is to bear witness to the tipping point of Britpop: the point at which the overindulgence became sometimes un-listenable and occasionally unbearable.

Blur by Blur. File under "Blur", ok?

And after this cultural crash and burn?

Just two short years later the group would reform to give us Blur, their stripped down “lo-fi” effort, shaking off the baggage of before: the cobwebs, the handclaps and the audiences comprising almost exclusively of teenage girls. It’s bloody excellent. If this album gave us nothing else, it made the band reform, retreat, and re-think. The Great Escape is Batman & Robin before we could get to Batman Begins. It's Die Another Day prior to Casino Royale. Beetlebum, not pinching bums. 

And for that, we should be grateful to have made that very great escape.