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Review
It wasn’t always thus. The album’s September 1995 release saw NME award the record 9/10, Q gave it perfect marks, while Melody Maker broke their rating scale to score the record a wacky 12/10. It was critical euphoria that would prove to be short-lived – truth be told, about as long as it took publishers to realise Oasis would probably shift more magazines for them. It’s not a record the band think particularly fondly of either. In 2007, Damon Albarn mused that it was "messy". Coxon, meanwhile, is unavailable for comment, perhaps on account of still being traumatized from being made to straddle a pig in the Country House video.
The Great Escape was the record that, if it didn’t kill Britpop, certainly tore down the bunting from the party. It’s maudlin (Fade Away, Best Days), it rhymes "hairpiece" with "herpes" (Mr Robinson’s Quango), and it features a song so fundamentally rubbish it could snugly sit on the second side of Leisure (Charmless Man – though It Could Be You runs it close). Even on Country House, the most maligned entry within Blur’s singles discography, the band crowbar in a middle-eight that sounds like four grown men crying themselves to sleep. Albarn would be celebrated for experimenting with atonal angst two years later on Essex Dogs, the closer of the band’s eponymous alt-rock reinvention. Yet one song from the end of The Great Escape, Entertain Me’s bored, detached repeated chorus does the job better, largely on account of the band not selfishly denying their audience their talent for melody in doing so. The Great Escape: polarizing, messy, yes. But soulful and quite wonderful, too.
There could be strong claims made for The Universal – most likely, in truth, from the marketing department of British Gas – or for the pummelling guitars of opener Stereotypes. But the record’s best moment actually comes at its very end, in the form of broken toy ballad Yuko and Hiro. It’s a sweet, sentimental song that uses the old Albarn trick of supposing his own emotions (homesickness, his longing for then girlfriend and Elastica frontwoman Justine Frischmann) on created characters, in this case two Japanese factory employees, tied to the production line and "never together". Regardless, it’s perhaps the most honest song the frontman ever wrote, evidence that he didn’t always hide behind the mask of his creations, that sometimes the mask slipped and we saw something honest about the songwriter. With hindsight The Great Escape showed us the real Damon Albarn, and that we really liked him.
--James McMahon
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Customer Reviews
This album was recorded at the peak of Britpop, just as Parklife when ballastic, and when released, got much more favourable releases than Oasis' What's the Story? It was only when the backlash kicked in towards Christmas '95 that everyone started slating the album. Perhaps the melancholy feel and depressing lyrics (even the Country House lyrics are depressing when you listen to them!) are hard for many to listen to, whilst Oasis' required no real effort on the listener's part.
One day this album will be given the credit it deserves.
By this album, Damon Albarn was well and truly p****d off. Blur had become a superb pop band, but perversely he felt a fraud. His inner pretentious snob kept eating at him, telling him that he had become the commercial entertainer he hated. The lyrics of "Great Escape" are filled with some of the most scabrous misanthropy ever committed to record. The ordinary people are either repressed, middle-class depressives ("Ernold Same", "Fade Away"), or vile vulgarians ("TOPMAN", "Globe Alone"). Yet if you're a rock star you can't escape the meaningless of the world ("Country House"). The obvious answer would be to burn away the cobwebs with rock'n'roll songs that could both provide bodacious grooves while simultaneously savaging our sick society. Unfortunately, Damon didn't feel up to that. After this album Blur collapsed into insular pretension and that is the true tragedy.
Listen to it, but keep your antacids handy...
Other suggestions are Parklife (def Britpop/indie sound, Blur (Really Rockie))and Leisure (Early Britpop). Read more
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