The Great Escape

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...

I personally find Parklife a bit grating these days (...it's hard to listen to most Blur albums because of how irremovable they are to my secondary school memories), with Damon's mock cockney antics coming across as more obnoxious than they probably did in 1995. The Great Escape however still stands up extremely well, with the album fusing the more robust pop elements of Parklife with the wit, imagination and underlining social-edge so apparent on Modern Life. Because of this, the album can be enjoyed as both a conceptual piece (with Blur looking at certain themes synonymous with the rat race and the British way of life), or as a collection of fine pop songs (the singles, particularly The Universal, still sound great). As with Parklife, some could argue that the whole thing is a little too over-the-top (especially if we compare it to recent albums by bands like Franz Ferdinand and The Libertines), with certain tracks like Top Man, Ernold Same, Mr. Robinson's Quango and the single, Country House all slipping into the kind of musical-style bombast mainly reserved for mid-period Divine Comedy albums like Casanova and A Short Album About Love. Of course, when picking off random tracks, the whole thing is bound to seem brash and inconsistent, with this album really tying in with a record like The Village Green Preservation Society by the above-mentioned Kinks (it's worth wondering how tracks like Phenomenal Cat, All of My Friends Were There and People Take Pictures of Each Other would have fared as contemporary pop singles?) by being an album that relies on a certain cohesive continuity that flows from song to song.

The giddy fusion of various musical styles, from 70's punk, to 80's indie, to music-hall, to Europop, to lounge-muzak, to cinematic excess, right the way through to novelty bombast and radio spoofary eventually gives way to darker subjects expressed through Damon's mordant, multi-layered lyrics (which again, draw on a myriad of sources and inspirations including everything, from Monty Python, seaside post-cards, British films, Reggie Perrin, English lit, newspaper headlines, brand names, Mike Leigh, Alan Bennett and of course, everyone from the Beatles, to the Smiths, to "place classic British band name here"). The Universal is without a doubt the most achingly melancholic thing on here (...and is perhaps my favourite song on the album), with Damon taking on the bored pre-millennium tensions of a seemingly alien-being looking down on the bland and silly eccentricities of the British public with contempt. The overall band performance here is wonderful and is perfectly complemented by those wilting string-arrangements, which takes the song away from the dull rock-by-numbers of something like Globe Alone and more towards a heartbreaking waltz that seems to be crying out for a more innocent time ("well it really, really, really could happen!!").

There are other highlights too, particularly Fade Away, He Thought of Cars and Stereotypes, each of which stands as a great work of 90's indie-pop to rank alongside the work of similar contemporaries like Neil Hannon, Luke Haines, and records like His N' Hers by Pulp and Morrissey's Vauxhall and I. Speaking of which, the great single Charmless Man is apparently a thinly veiled attack against the former Smiths front man (Charmless Man = This Charming Man... geddit?), which is hardly surprising given that The Great Escape was produced by wronged-Morrissey collaborator Stephen Street (he produced Strangeways, Here We Come and collaborated on Viva Hate). Still, it's a great pop song, regardless of it's supposed hidden-content, and is a track that works well within the context of the record and with the themes of consumerist abandon and technocratic escape (...it's also worth remembering for that great video featuring the actor, Jean Marc Barr).

The album has it's faults, obviously... I mean, for a start it's too long (as were many albums of this era) whilst the brash production might be a little off putting in these earnest, guitar-driven times, however, to dismiss the entire album for such shortcomings would be a great disservice to the immensity of songs like Country House, Charmless Man, Best Days, The Universal and the closing track, Yuko and Hiro, which really show the band sounding darker and more intelligent than many of their detractors would give them credit for. It's not the greatest album in the world (or indeed, my favourite Blur album), but The Great Escape still works surprisingly well, and hasn't dated quite as badly as Parklife or some of the other records of this era, managing to retain a certain wit and charm, whilst also taking the listener behind the calm exterior of commuter life, to find the dark and depressed sycophantic beasts within.