Blur: Classic Or Dud

I just hate the way the song is called 'Mr Robinson's Quango' and it starts 'Oh Mr Robinson..../And his quango'... I mean.

country sad ballad man

― imago, Friday, April 17, 2015 9:26 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wouldn't call this a Barrett-esque character study really? tGE had too many of them - Ernold Same, Quango, Charmless Man, Stereotypes etc. etc. etc. etc. So many of them really. Thank christ he stopped writing those. CSBM is written in first person, less scathing more self-deprecating maybe?

mr robinson's quango is great, all sandwiched in between the two most beloved songs on the album being obnoxious

Mr Robinson's Quango - like most of the album - has terrible lyrics/singing but brilliant playing/production/arrangement. If you can manage to ignore or just tolerate Damon, the Great Escape is pure pleasure all the way through.

Maybe...but that is still the worst song on the album.

EK OTM

Yeah, it's a very good album, I'd have it as their third best behind 13 and MLIR

For me it's:
Parklife > MLIR = BLUR > Great Escape > Leisure > Think Tank

Parklife has become very underrated in recent years, possibly because it's cooler to hold up MLIR as the go-to fan favourite, but I find it more consistent in its vision than MLIR which has a few hotch-potch moments.

Heh, I'd go the other way - I like all of MLIR (even Turn it Up) whereas I could do without London Loves, Magic America and the title track off Parklife.

MLIR > Parklife > Blur > Think Tank > TGE > 13 > Leisure

Great Escape is such a frustrating album e.g. Charmless Man which has a great intro/bridge (one of Graham's best guitar lines there) matched to a massively irritating chorus (the verses aren't too great either).

On Parklife, I find the run of songs between To The End and This is a Low rather middling. If you removed then, the album could have been a kind of Britpop Pink Moon, I think.

I'd rate MLIR slightly over PL and TGE. The second half of it is inferior to the first but it is less saggy than the saggy patches on the latter two. In TGE's favour, I do think "Best Days" is probably Albarn's finest song - hugely overlooked, that one.

In John Harris' britpop book he calls the vibe of The Great Escape 'ugly whimsy', which he means as a diss, but I think sums up what is good about the album pretty well. More bands should have filled their 'being famous and successful is actually kind of unfulfilling' album with songs about Reggie Perrin style middle manager having breakdowns etc

There's a degree of "ugly whimsy" on all their albums arguably.

TGE was def a point when Albarn had either hit a rut lyrically or had just stopped sweating in terms of trying to write decent lyrics. The clunky observations and lousy character studies had become embarrassing by that stage and while TGE gets called their 'depressive' album, its also incredibly cynical, setting up and tearing down societal strawmen at will when really that style of writing had been done a lot less hamfistedly on PL.

In retrospect, Best Days and Yuko & Hiro are the highlights on TGE. The latter has grown on me quite a bit in more recent years. But there's too much 'dirty knickers/'ows yer farther/wear a kappa tracksuit' shit on the rest of the songs for me to like them.

"Ooh, I'm the naughty boy!"

feel like there's actually more gorblimey stuff on the previous two albums, The Great Escape mostly concerned with the lower middle class

The Great Escape definitely has more 70s sitcom/carry on style stuff, though

Other than the title track I can't think of all that much bad Cockney rubbish on the Parklife album really. I mean, the mockney accent is in full force but some bits of MLIR (Sunday Sunday) and especially TGE (oooh I'm a naughty boy etc) stretch it pretty considerably

towards the end of the Parklife tour (at a warm up in a leisure centre in Birmingham for their first really big show, at Earl's Court) Damon announced "this is a song off our new album, we've never played it before.." and they did '..Quango'. and i was like "uh oh..".

what I like about The Great Escape is that it actually gets the Carry On vibe right, as in all the ribaldry is incredibly depressing and evocative of lives of cramped frustrated despair.

I wonder if Mr Robinson's Quango was directly inspired by Kenny Everett's Mr Angry of Mayfair?

http://beatlephotoblog.com/photos/2010/09/53-300x249.jpg

i think Graham in particular is narked by how history has judged TGE. in an interview in 2009 he said that Best Days was one of the best things they ever did and that it was a shame no-one seemed to like it much.

i tell you what Fade Away is a *cold* song man.

yep, it is the dark, dark heart of the album

Always loved Best Days and remember it getting a lot of love in the press on release. Surprised Graham felt that way about TGE as it seems like a much more Albarn-esque album, with the S/T feeling more like a response to that.

In my head I always associate Fade Away with Punch and Judy by XTC, I always wondered what Albarn and Partridge's respective significant others thought of those songs

Fade Away, along with much of TGE, gets the dreary rundown More Specials vibe spot on.

Always thought it interesting that the Specials influence carried over to the s/t album with Theme From Retro and Death of a Party - wonder when those two songs were written.

'Top Man' is the worst track on The Great Escape for me, without a doubt. Never liked it. I like both 'Quango' and 'Stereotypes'.

Death Of A Party was originally demoed in June 1992 in the post-Leisure comedown/burnout era

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhvqOKCtw6M

On Parklife, I find the run of songs between To The End and This is a Low rather middling. If you removed then, the album could have been a kind of Britpop Pink Moon, I think.

― Freedom, Friday, April 17, 2015 10:01 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The 'London Loves' -> 'Trouble In The Message Centre' -> 'Clover Over Dover' run is the best part of the album for me. The title track of Parklife has aged incredibly badly, in my opinion. I don't think I ever thought it was a highlight of the album at the time, even though I did like it back then. Nowadays, I find the track makes me cringe more than anything.

That demo Death of a Party is pretty cool! (xpost)

Back in 2001 when this thread was started, Blur were one of my biggest favourites, but I kinda lost interest in them soon after "Think Tank" was released. I still like them, and my answer to the original question in the thread title is definitely "Classic!" (with a capital C and an exclamation mark), but I must say that some of their music hasn't aged very well. The cheery/uptempo tracks from their first few albums are as difficult to like as "Alright" by Supergrass these days - they're not bad songs but there's something a little bit annoying about them. Or perhaps I just played them too many times back in the day... Many of the deep/mysterious/way-too-serious tracks from their latter albums have lost some of their edge too.

But Blur still did a lot of good stuff, and they were one of the more interesting bands throughout the nineties. Perhaps all their different styles didn't impress everyone, but at least they tried to experiment with different ideas without (usually) going too far - that's something that I've always liked about Blur.

TGE (and to a lesser degree, Parklife and MLIR) also suffers from some prime CD-era bloat.

I say, ditch "Quango", ""Top Man", "Ernold Same", "Dan Abnormal", and maybe "Entertain Me" (I've always liked the vibe of "Entertain Me" but it seems to fall a bit short of the mark it was aiming for), do a bit of re-jiggering, and you have a cracking Blur record, certainly their most immaculately produced and featuring some absolutely remarkable guitar playing.

"Best Days" is my fave Blur track after "Beetlebum," achingly sad from deep-in-the-bones place.

I like 'Entertain Me' a lot, because it takes the musical template of 'Girls and Boys' but lyrically looks at things from a different angle altogether. 'Girls and Boys' is far more upbeat, in the sense of "we're off on holiday to Greece to forget about our lives for a little bit and we're gonna make the most of it and have a good time."

The escapism in 'Entertain Me' comes across as much less optimistic to me: "the boredom of a sober week/the weekend's here, hip hip hooray/to make the blues just go away" ... it seems less like a celebration of the end of the working week, or looking forward to a break from the working week, and more like weekly self-medication due to general unhappiness. Or at least that's what I get out of it.

what kills the vibe of Best Days on TGE for me is all the woozy, sea shanty/tearoom-orchestra-on-a-boat stuff.

*however*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flUnDtO7_gI

I wouldn't change a single thing about 'Best Days' on the album, really. I particularly love those descending guitar lines after the chorus!

Yeah, the production on the album recording is perfect.

Loving the "Best Days" love. I recently decided it's my favorite Blur song, just around the time I decided Quango is total shit.

"My Terracotta Heart" is on Spotify.

Gorgeous.

Two more tracks from Later...

Go Out
My Terracotta Heart

Arriving late to the conversation coz I've been away from home and unable to open youtube clips on my phone, but I'm underwhelmed by the two tracks about 50 posts upthread. I don't dislike them, but they don't really do anything for me either, just seem like B-side filler.

Repeated listens have improved the Blur tracks for me -- especially Go Out and Lonesome Street.

Anyone noticed the inclusions of distant sirens in some of these tracks? Studio bleed? thematic device?

The album is now streaming on iTunes.

Yup. I'm going to wait until it hits Spotify.

listened on some french stream

this album is bullshit, absolute bullshit, but that's what i expected tbh

all creative ingenuity and spark is gone, replaced with albarn's dismal crooning and worthy lyrical themes

the only two songs of any worth are the two longest ones - everything else feels completely throwaway

blur's worst album by about a zillion miles

gonna say it again: listen to the teleman album instead

it's mostly an equally dreadful follow-up to everyday robots. despite coxon supposedly being the driving force behind the album he barely feels present.

agreed that it's easily their worst. would have been better off not happening really

has any band ever come back with their original line up after such a long spell away, and done anything better than only half decent? i mean.. maybe but not many leap to mind.