62. ‘Jubilee’

On ‘Parklife’. Produced by Stephen Street.

The protagonist of ‘Jubilee’ is a teenager born in the epochal Jubilee year of 1977, hence the references to “17”, his age at the time of ‘Parklife’. While the tune has a bowie-ish swagger – and the saxophones show a Mott the Hoople influence – the lyrics are downbeat. Hardly surprising, since they concern the practice of sniffing butane from plastic bags. (Damon had been shocked to find that teenagers of his acquaintance were ‘sniffers’). There are some fine turns of phrase, the best being the sneering “rubbish” at 0.21. The sound of a computer game (entrance at 1.46) is, in fact, a hand-held toy designed to relieve traffic-trapped motorists of stress. The song is essentially that which was demoed at Matrix in July 1993 with the appealingly fruity saxes added later. Jubilee is now 18, of course. Damon intends to write about him again.