A little under a year passed between the release of Blur’s bold second album, Modern Life Is Rubbish, and its all-conquering follow-up, Parklife. Yet in the months that preceded Parklife’s release, as Blur split their time between a gruelling touring schedule supporting their current record and intense studio hours recording their new one, there was, bassist Alex James later recalled in the Blur documentary No Distance Left To Run, “a sense that something was happening. That we were developing.” Among the many career-making songs that would feature on Parklife there was one clear indicator of this: End Of A Century, a track which Blur’s then producer, Stephen Street, would hear as evidence of the group’s frontman, Damon Albarn, “getting the art of songwriting really sorted”.
Listen to the best of Blur here.
The backstory: “The band were pretty much in their own little bubble”
Where Blur’s debut album, 1991’s Leisure, had found the group looking for a place within the fading indie-dance crossover scene, typified by the looped beats and lightly acid-fried “Madchester” bands coming out of the North of England, with Modern Life Is Rubbish the group took on a new role, putting themselves in a lineage of classic British bands – Small Faces, The Kinks – whose observational songs astutely yet lovingly satirised their homeland’s culture. “The band were pretty much in their own little bubble at this point,” Stephen Street told Uncut magazine years later, speaking of the four musicians’ close-knit bond and the single-minded persistence with which they chased down their new material.
Boisterous songs such as Girls & Boys and Parklife’s title track were built to demand attention, but nestled among these were ballads such as End Of A Century which proved that, as much as they were mastering the brash pop statement, the group were also honing their ability to craft sophisticated songs that were as musically ambitious as they were lyrically arresting.
