“ Everyone knew: this is it“, Albarn later reflected. That August Bank Holiday, I remember lying in the middle of a field in Reading, minus a shirt with steam coming off me as a concerned man from the St John’s Ambulance tried to revive my limp body after I’d fainted on a freezing Berkshire night following Blur’s triumphant second stage set at 1993’s festival.īlur, surrounded by a set from a 1950s parlour room, played their gig of their lives that night as they ripped through the songs from Modern Life… while 80s dullards The The headlined the festival’s stage. Others might point to Denim’s 70s revival show or the World of Twist’s kaleidoscopic Quality Street.īut it was Blur who coalesced both the sound, the look and the ethic on their March 1992 single Pop Scene and then again on the following year’s Modern Life Is Rubbish album. It was there in the charity shop glam romanticism of Suede, the pop-culture, dance-crossover of Saint Etienne and the jaded Bohemia of the Auteurs’ superb New Wave album. Or was it? The keener indie fan had seen and heard something brewing for over a year or more. It would remain there or there abouts for the next 90 weeks. At the end of April, Girls & Boys’ attendant album Parklife entered the album charts at number one. “ If punk was about getting rid of hippies,” he said, “ then I’m getting rid of grunge.” Now, in the most horrible circumstances possible, he’d got his wish. Just a year previously, Blur’s frontman Damon Albarn had laid down his band’s new mission statement in no uncertain terms. His hideous demise had been played out publicly in the music press with a succession of cancelled gigs and overdoses and the contrast with Cobain’s inability to cope with his fame and status and the self confident sense of fun and vindication that seemed to be sweeping through the UK’s indie scene was stark to say the least. Less than a month after Girls & Boys crashed into the top ten, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain committed suicide. One of these islands’ finest ever bands were about to enter their imperial phase. Twenty years ago this week Radio One began playing a song that would become a gaudy yet glorious flagship for a scene that would transform British music.īuilt around a scabrous guitar riff, a gurgling keyboard sound and the kind of bass line that had not been heard since Duran Duran’s Girls On Film, Blur’s Girls & Boys was described by one critic as “ Black Lace meets Public Image” which if you’re looking for a neat summation of the two years which were to follow is pretty hard to beat. As Blur’s outrageous, emotional and era-defining album Parklife celebrates its 20th anniversary, Getintothis’ Jamie Bowman reflects on a record that has cemented itself alongside the pantheon of British greats.
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