First of all, Parklife is a wonderful record, serving as something of an accompaniment piece to the previous year’s Modern Life Is Rubbish, an album released just 11 months before that the band’s leader Damon Albarn conceived of as a British retaliation to American-born grunge that was dominating both sides of the Atlantic in 1992. So apologies for the sacred cow slaughtering, but as Blur’s third album Parklife passes its 25 th birthday on April 25 th it’s important to place this album within its correct context: that of the movement with which it’s popularly associated. It was hardly a golden age, in short, and in many ways signified a step backwards in the development of British pop. Radiohead, Spiritualized and Super Furry Animals helped to break the deadlock in late 1997 with terrific albums characterised by sonic experimentation, along with bands like The Verve ( Urban Hymns) and Primal Scream ( Vanishing Point) that both dated from before Britpop but were always too inventive to be bracketed along with it. Nothing in 1996 moved without Noel Gallagher’s approval. The ‘proper lads with proper tunes’ paradigm that gave us The Enemy, The Pigeon Detectives and The Twang in the mid-‘00s followed directly from the post- Morning Glory years when what passed for British ‘alternative music’ became horribly conformist and homogenised. Ocean Colour Scene, Menswear, Cast and and whole host of others simply would not have secured a record contract in any other time in pop history.įurthermore, its legacy has been corrosive. With the exceptions of Elastica, Sleeper and Space, all the Britpop bands who followed from that point were either chancers or plodders. Despite lasting roughly until late 1997, all of the genuinely good bands associated with this era were established by the beginning of 1995 (Suede, Pulp, Supergrass, The Charlatans, Boo Radleys). While it provided a clutch of immortal anthems and classic albums here wasn’t much coherence or ideology behind Britpop aside from a broad and shallow ‘60s pop revivalism, sourced from Kinks singles and Beatles LPs. As many of its key works have passed 25 th anniversary milestones in the last year or so, much has been made of the legacy of Britpop by the media, but to our minds it represented one of the most overrated periods of British music.
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