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Blur -
The Great Escape
Reviewed
by
NME, September 1995
 DON'T
PRETEND you saw it coming. In fact, don't even bother
going back and combing the grooves looking for it.
Because just as no-one could have guessed that the
authors of 'Love Me Do' and 'Please Please Me' would
within five years come up with 'A Day In The Life' or
'Helter Skelter', there was nothing in 'She's So High or
'Bang' to suggest wonders as glorious and diverse as
'This Is A Low' or 'Girls And Boys'. You suspect that not
even Blur themselves couldn't have dreamed of 'The Great
Escape'.
For when we first met Blur they were
terminally of-the-moment. Even their name was a label
invention, for Christ's sake, calculated to say as little
as possible, offend no-one and fit into whatever trend
was available. Five years ago there seemed little doubt
that, as NME put it in reviewing their debut album,
"Blur are merely the present of rock'n'roll".
'Popscene' should have told us that Blur
were different. It ranted, waved and drowned around the
turn of 1991/92, as the butt-ends of fraggle, shoegazing
and baggy were being stubbed out by the grunge invasion.
Spitting contrary attitude and prickly personality,
pogoing in rolled up jeans, Fred Perrys and V-neck
jumpers, and biting back at the hands that had under-fed
them, suddenly Blur were out on their own. It was the
moment they began setting the scene instead of being
shackled by it, the moment they began defining the
zeitgeist. It carved the first scrapings of a niche in
British music, established permanently with a parochial
identity-stamp and rekindled love affair with London and
its mod heritage that was 'Modern Life Is Rubbish'. That
in turn was magnified tenfold by the semi-detached
celebration/indictment of mass consumer culture, and the
thoughts of a 25-year-old everyman that was 'Parklife'.
Now we can only demand a masterpiece. And
they've damn near delivered it.
'The Great Escape' is a spectacularly
accomplished, sumptuous, heart-stopping and inspirational
album. It sees a Blur who've achieved what they strove so
doggedly for, and who are on top of the world (or London,
at least) looking down on creation for any explanations
they can find. Or more importantly for some glimmer of
hope, empathy and love amid the mess of pre-millennial
mediocrity, homogeneity and gloom they see around them.
And the more it sucks you in, the more you
realise it's shot through with a schizophrenia that has
evidently been encroaching on Mr Albarn since he last
opened his heart to us. Every aspect of modern life Damon
(whose vision, for the most part, this record realises)
was able to observe - detached, with a smug, sneer-tinged
affection on 'Parklife' - he now sees haunting his own
life in one way or another. Yuppie stress, impending
madness, professional drudgery, no escape from mundane
stereotype, the goofy drunken 'besht mate', loneliness,
acceptance of grateful second best. To take up the given
theme, everyone's scrambling for an escape, our hero
included. Even the hung-over personal confessions sound
more confused and desperate than ever. He's still
laughing, still on top, but you sometimes get the feeling
he's hanging on by a dangerously fraying thread. All
human life is here, and Blur sound like they're living it
while we listen.
The result is an album which, even in the
wake of a run of exceptional albums by British bands,
sets a new standard for British guitar pop in the '90s.
If Noel Oasis' strength derives from an ambition to be
the John Lennon of his generation, then Blur want to be
Lennon and McCartney. Which means 'The Great Escape' is
so rammed with tunes, ideas, emotions, humour, tragedy,
farce, and edgy beauty that it's utterly beyond
contemporary compare.
Not that you'd immediately realise it. The
opening two tracks, 'Stereotypes' and 'Country House',
initially seem to tread familiar waters - feisty, upbeat
singalong pop, voyeuristic third person tales of suburban
characters and their sad saucy secrets. But repeated
plays reveal one of Blur's greatest strengths - they way
they stack tune upon tune upon image upon idea, all of
which unfold wonderfully and often frighteningly in your
head from an apparently one-dimensional embryo.
Take 'Country House'. If only because it's
the one you know. It first strikes you as 'Oompah oompah
la la la ooh cheeky very nice worralaugh cheers', but
then the bitter, sneery detachment and sarcasm starts to
pervade, the exuberance and good humour hollowing. The
two listens later, the minor chords begin to stand out,
the bubbles of angst and melancholy start to surface from
the insanely echoing "blow blow me out" subtext
and what was a classically boisterous, carefree knees-up
starts sounding fragile and even a little heartbreaking.
It's a by-product of the main fuel of Blur's
genius - an incredible, almost obsessional attention to
detail. You can see it from the chord notations and
myriad visual metaphors on the sleeve, to the startling
atmospheric sounds that pepper many of these songs. It
means they can produce multi-faceted, multi-layered,
cinematic pop records that will keep provoking new
melodies, pictures, emotions and ideas as you live with
them. It's got to the point where Blur just don't write
songs, they compose them.
Damon Albarn rarely has to say everything he
means in so many words, since this record evokes a
continual vivid maelstrom of moods with astonishing
skill. Blur have perfected a soundscaping art no-one ever
has the ambition to incorporate in modern pop nowadays.
You can hear it everywhere here, chiefly through Graham
's amazing melanges of guitar, but also in subtly
masterful brush strokes such as the monotonous
undercurrent of austere, inhuman factory conveyer belts
that haunt 'Best Days'; the smoggy motorway undercarriage
of 'He Thought Of Cars'; the sonic whirlpool of neurotic,
tragi-comic insanity that 'Mr Robinson's Quango' drowns
in; the comical sub-Morricone spaghetti western whistling
that follows 'Top Man' through his wide-boy rampage; even
the sterile muzaky dial-a-waltz serenity that soundtracks
the tortuous mundanity of 'Ernold Same'.
'The Great Escape' is the work of a band
approaching the height of their musical powers and fine
testament to this is 'Fade Away', which succeeds in
stealing the cream of The Specials ' eeriest, emptiest
moments and spreading it over a supremely melancholy
trawl through the detritus of a pointless suburban
marriage, weary trombone and all, and then monotonising
the scene to a hypnotically affecting logical conclusion.
If no one can be truly original in the 90s, they can
instead take the inspiration and run rings round it,
ultimately outshining their heroes.
Much as they would probably hate to admit
it, Blur stab closest to our heart when Damon's at his
lowest ebb. 'He Thought Of Cars' is almost submerged in
dizzy despair, his voice cracking under the weight of
trying to find solace in some human touch amid a world
obsessed with work, success and status at the expense of
its soul.
Likewise, 'The Universal', the impossibly
elegant, silken-stringed epic peak of the album, talks of
karaoke bars, satellite TV and lottery pipe dreams as the
best we can hope for come the year 2000. The sting in the
tail is, of course, that we're all so Prozaced out and
desperate that we'' accept it all with good grace.
"When the days they seem to fall from you, well,
just let them go... Oh lord.
The barest glimpse of the Albarn soul we see
here, however, is in the final track of the album, 'Yuko
And Hiro', where woozy, wobbly Casio technik muzak
accompanies (possibly autobiographical?) lyrics that
detail a hopeless situation in someone's love life:
"I never see you, we're never together". Sob.
But he'll survive, because he's still determined to stave
off self-pity and pessimism, suggests 'Best Days', a
gorgeously dewy-eyed, croaky contemplation of the lonely
uncertainties that tear at our existence. It ends in an
unashamedly naive, almost Morrissey-esque assertion that
"Other people would break out in a clod sweat if you
said that these are the best days of our
lives".Well, cheers.
We've barely touched on half the songs that
glue this album together as such a marvellously eclectic,
head-scrambling tour-de-force, such as the groovily
lolloping coda to 'Girls And Boys' that is 'Entertain
Me', the brilliantly pithy, Madness -tinged 'Charmless
Man', the vaguely self-mocking appeal for understanding
of the anagram-titled 'Dan Abnormal', or the
gut-twistingly aggressive 'Globe Alone'. But that's
because it leaves you with so many things to think about
and so many mini-tunes to keep you awake at night that
you could never hope to consume it all in one sitting.
It falls just short of being a masterpiece -
there are undeniable weaknesses in this huge labyrinthine
web of an album: the slightly restrictive third person
lyrical approach; the obsession with mildly anachronistic
sit-com caricatures; the cultural tourist attraction to a
rubbish modern lifestyle that Damon doesn't always know
that well; the vague filler quality of a couple of tunes;
the continuing mischievous affection for frivolous,
flimsy muso-kitsch.
But if there are failings, they only serve
to emphasise the most inspiring aspect of the whole
affair - that in spite, or maybe because of the dazzling
range of its qualities, you can easily imagine Blur
making even greater records in future.
After all the trials, tribulations, Brits,
Brats, and Number One ego contests, this is Blur's real
triumph, truly their finest hour. But that's not all. The
era-defining 'life' trilogy complete, 'The Great Escape'
should merely be the end of the beginning for Blur and a
weird and wonderful bittersweet taste of things to come.
9/10
Johnny Cigarettes
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