80. ‘This Is A Low’

On ‘Parklife’. Produced by Stephen Street.

A troublesome song to record, ‘This Is A Low’ is the highlight of Blur’s music so far, and as close to perfection as they have come. Behind its pallor, its mystique and its electricity, there lies, fittingly, a story of maps and legends. It began as life as “we are the low” – four words, nothing more – which may or may not have been about the taking of heroin. According to Alex, it was about “people taking smack”. Graham remembers thinking it a bit sinister: “I thought it was a gouched-out song.”

Mid-sessions for ‘Parklife’ – still with only four words to go on – Blur recorded the backing track in its entirety: Damon playing a warm, purring Hammond; a loop of Dave playing drums flipped over and played backwards – with Dave playing on top of that to give an effect of swish and oddness. In the emotional guitar solo section, Graham played three solos, including one of him sat in front of his amp, turned up to maximum volume. This song was clearly going to be an epic, a finale.

But Damon could not come up with a lyric, or even a melody for the verse. The others – and Street – kept on at him to write a lyric. The ‘Parklife’ sessions then broke up for Christmas. Over the holidays, Damon stayed in a cottage in Cornwall with his parents, playing the backing track of the song repeatedly on his Walkman as ha strolled around the Cornwall cliffs at night. Possibly he was now stating to make a connection in his mind between the word “low” and meteorology. However, he was no closer to finishing the lyric.

At Maison Rouge after Christmas, the plan was leave the vocal until the end of the sessions. Damon scuppered this idea by saying that, as he was unable to complete the lyric, the song could not go on the album. Both camps stood their ground. On February 4, 1994 – the penultimate day of official recording – Damon was due to go into hospital for a hernia operation. Street bullied him, telling him he had to come up with a lyric.

Damon came up with the lyric between midnight and 1 AM on the night before he entered the hospital. It was written from a Christmas present given to him by Alex – of a handkerchief showing a map of Britain and its shipping regions (from Stanfords Map & Travel Bookshop in Covent Garden). “We always found the shipping forecast soothing,” Alex explains. “We used to listen to it in America to remind us of home. It’s very good for a hangover. Good cure for insomnia, too.”

Damon began at one corner of the handkerchief – the Bay of Biscay – and worked his way around, quoting names as the mood struck him and the rhyme demanded. Damon: “I’d had this line – ‘And into the sea go pretty England and me’ – for a long time. So I started at the Bay of Biscay. Back for tea. ‘Tea’ rhymes with ‘me’. And then I went ‘Hit traffic on the Dogger Bank’. ‘Bank’ – ‘rank’ – so ‘up the Thames to find a taxi rank’. And I just went round.” Best of all, the chorus now made sense: a “low” as in a low front; or a low as in a mental depression. In rain-battered Britain, after all, mood and meteorology have always been inextricably linked. And by following up with the kindly line “but it won’t hurt you”, Damon is – even if he does not quite believe it – forecasting sunshine.

Instantly, ‘This Is A Low’ was back on the LP, with Damon as enthusiastic as the others. Street was thrilled by the lyric and also his vocal, which made good use of his whistling “s”s (eg “and the radio says”) which is a trait of his speaking voice. Graham sang the moving high notes on the chorus.

Damon has no recollection of this, but others recall him phoning Maison Rouge from his hospital bed, having just come round from his anesthetic and making lucid instructions about how he wanted the song mixed. It is some song that can do that – even to its writer. Even though ‘This Is A Low’ nearly never made it to ‘Parklife’, it is impossible to envisage an alternative climax. The song is five minutes and four seconds of bliss.