I’m listening to @steve_lamacq’s Album Club on The Great Escape, a record I used to devour whole on my ever-skipping DiscMan. The thing people seem to forget with all the Country House hoopla is how sad it is. Not just The Universal but bruised things like Best Days.
Damon Albarn was 27 when Blur recorded The Great Escape. He was already so sad and so jaded. But then, he’d been famous since he was 23. Fame is possibly the shittest drug.
The Great Escape is a deliriously weird record. Fade Away is like the output of a haunted Wurlitzer, with the operator coming over the tannoy to talk about dead carnival patrons who still dance in the dust where the big top once was. But sure, Damon Albarn just did mockney shit.
Blur are at their best when they pick at the scabs of Englishness particularly. That’s their inheritance from The Kinks, not the chirpiness.
Top Man, with its doom monk backing vocals, is like the unholy child of the KLF and The Small Faces, which, you know, is hard to pull off.
The Universal is as close to a perfect song as you can get. But it’s interesting too because it sort of presages the inevitable fading optimism of the early Blair years. The Universal was, of course, co-opted for British Gas adverts which is SO Blair era. Take beauty, sell gas.
... and Mr Robinson’s Quango, a sneer at the corruption of the dying Tory regime, ends up being just as applicable to the Blair government of cash for honours, and PFI. The new management was as hot for quangos as the old one. Deniability was king.
Mark E Smith used to like to kid on that his lyrics were prophetic. On 'He Thought Of Cars', the saddest song on The Great Escape (and home to Graham Coxon's most exquisite guitar work on the album), Damon is Nostradamus 
The backing vocal-tastic "It Could Be You" was released as a four-track single in Japan (with B-sides recorded live at the Budokan) but it *really* should've been a UK single.
I'd have picked it over Stereotypes (which is also a good song but a lot lumpier than ICBY)
I'd have picked it over Stereotypes (which is also a good song but a lot lumpier than ICBY)
Ernold Same is still good, despite the presence of Ken Livingstone who just about manages to avoid mentioning that Hitler also recorded speeches.
Globe Alone could’ve been on any of the records that preceded The Great Escape, particularly Modern Life Is Rubbish.
Dan Abnormal — an anagram of Damon Albarn — “It’s not his fault, we made him this way.” — with its mordant “TV! TV!” refrain is as close to the sound of a tight-lipped breakdown as has ever been committed to tape.
Like most people, I have little time for Alex James, but his bass work on Entertain Me is phenomenal.
For someone who has never had a 'real' job as such, Damon Albarn is very good at writing about office mundanity. 'Yuko And Hiro' -- originally called 'Japanese Workers' is a thing of astounding beauty. And look how few words he manages to do that in:
