Parklife
Parklife is the third studio album by the English rock band Blur, released on 25 April 1994 on Food Records. After moderate sales for their previous album Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993), Parklife returned Blur to prominence in the UK, helped by its four hit singles: "Girls & Boys", "End of a Century", "Parklife" and "To the End".
This article is about the 1994 studio album by Blur. For its title track, see Parklife (song). For the annual music festival in Manchester, England, see Parklife (festival).Parklife
Certified four times platinum in the United Kingdom,[5] in the year following its release the album came to define the emerging Britpop scene, along with the album Definitely Maybe by future rivals Oasis. Britpop in turn would form the backbone of the broader Cool Britannia movement. Parklife therefore has attained a cultural significance above and beyond its considerable sales and critical acclaim, cementing its status as a landmark in British rock music.[6]
In 2010, Parklife was one of ten classic album covers from British artists commemorated on a UK postage stamp issued by the Royal Mail.[7][8] In 2015, Spin included the album in their list of "The 300 Best Albums of 1985–2014".[9] In 2020, Rolling Stone included it in their list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.[10]
Recording[edit]
In 1990, a year before Blur's debut album, Damon Albarn, the band's vocalist, had told a group of music journalists, "When our third album comes out, our place as the quintessential English band of the '90s will be assured. That is a simple statement of fact. I intend to write it in 1994."[11]
After the completion of recording sessions for Blur's previous album, Modern Life Is Rubbish, Albarn began to write prolifically. Blur demoed Albarn's new songs in groups of twos and threes.[12] Due to their precarious financial position at the time, Blur quickly went back into the studio with producer Stephen Street to record their third album.[13] Blur met at the Maison Rouge recording studio in August 1993 to record their next album.[12] The recording was a relatively fast process, apart from the song "This Is a Low".
While the members of Blur were pleased with the final result, Food Records owner David Balfe was not, telling the band's management "This is a mistake". Soon afterwards, Balfe sold Food to EMI.[14]
Music[edit]
Blur frontman Damon Albarn told NME in 1994, "For me, Parklife is like a loosely linked concept album involving all these different stories. It's the travels of the mystical lager-eater, seeing what's going on in the world and commenting on it." Albarn cited the Martin Amis novel London Fields as a major influence on the album.[15] Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher was once quoted saying that Parklife was, "Like Southern England personified".[16] The songs themselves span many genres, such as the synthpop-influenced hit single "Girls & Boys", the instrumental waltz interlude of "The Debt Collector", the punk rock-influenced "Bank Holiday", the spacey, Syd Barrett-esque "Far Out",[17] and the fairly new wave-influenced "Trouble in the Message Centre". Journalist John Harris commented that while many of the album's songs "reflected Albarn's claims to a bittersweet take on the UK's human patchwork", several songs, including "To the End" (featuring Lætitia Sadier of Stereolab) and "Badhead" "lay in a much more personal space".[18]
Title and cover[edit]
The album was originally going to be entitled London and the album cover shot was going to be of a fruit-and-vegetable cart. Albarn stated tongue-in-cheek, "That was the last time that Dave Balfe was, sort of, privy to any decision or creative process with us, and that was his final contribution: to call it London".[19] The cover refers to the British pastime of greyhound racing.[20] Most of the pictures in the CD booklet are of the band in the greyhound racing venue Walthamstow Stadium, although the actual cover was not shot there.[21] The album cover for Parklife was among the ten chosen by the Royal Mail for a set of "Classic Album Cover" postage stamps issued in January 2010.[22][23]