Issued as a single in the spring of 1994, To The End followed the release of the Parklife album by five weeks. While fans who’d already bought that record knew it contained Blur’s richest music to date, those listeners whose experience of the group was limited to the album’s boisterous lead single, Girls & Boys, suddenly had a whole new image of the band to consider: gentle, introspective and empathetic – everything the satirical Girls & Boys was not.
Proving there was more to frontman Damon Albarn than arch social commentary, To The End marked the start of an emotionally honest strain of songwriting that has continued to make itself felt through many of the best Blur albums. Here’s how the song raised the bar for Britpop, and elevated the group above their peers.
Listen to the best of Blur here.
The backstory: “There was a sense that something was happening. That we were developing”
With their previous album, Modern Life Is Rubbish, Blur had found their creative voice – a whip-smart combination of 60s pop, art-rock eccentricities and modern-day sensibilities that effectively lit the touch-paper for Britpop, ushering in a host of homegrown bands eager to show off their love of retro fashions and classic sounds. Peaking inside the UK Top 20, the album may have taken a step back from the commercial success of the group’s debut, Leisure, but it was a bold artistic leap forward that attracted a fanbase ready to embrace Blur as the voice of their generation.
- ‘Parklife’: A Track-By-Track Guide To Every Song On Blur’s Breakthrough Album
- Best 90s Songs: 20 Era-Defining Tracks From An Undefinable Decade
- Best 90s Albums: 30 Essential Records That Defined The Decade
“There was a sense that something was happening. That we were developing,” bassist Alex James reflected in the Blur documentary No Distance Left To Run. “Word got out that we had some good songs.”
The recording: “The demo of To The End had a good feel so we worked from that”
A few of those songs had been road-tested by the time Blur came to record Parklife, with Girls & Boys and the album’s title track both eliciting audience responses that suggested the group were about to hit a new peak. After Girls & Boys came together quickly during initial recording sessions for Parklife, the remainder of the album’s five singles were laid down “almost effortlessly”, wrote bassist Alex James, in his memoir, Bit Of A Blur – particularly in the case of To The End, which Damon Albarn brought effectively fully-formed to the studio. “The demo of To The End had a good feel so we worked from that, rather than starting again,” James recalled.
Producer Stephen Street oversaw most of the Parklife sessions at London’s Maison Rouge Studios, in Fulham, but for To The End the group relocated to the larger RAK facility, near Regent’s Park, and hired Stephen Hague to man a three-day session during which Blur would record their most ambitious ballad to date. Having previously worked with New Order (True Faith, World In Motion) and Pet Shop Boys (Please, Actually, Very), Hague was able to give the song the widescreen lift Albarn’s lyrics demanded while retaining most of the demo recording’s key elements – cinematic strings, looped drums, vibraphone – and even the majority of Albarn’s scratch vocal.
