BOXING?
A “heavyweight battle”, the NME cover-billed it. And if “Country House” vs Oasis’ “Roll With It” was a title bout, the music press were desperate to play Frank Warren.
Perhaps they had most at stake. It was, in a way, their last great fight. Many other moments define Oasis. Blur are best remembered for different songs. Britpop itself? Well, this was the high tide – probably the main reason Oasis even count – and the rivalry became an ongoing, rather tiresome, pop storyline for years after. But even then the battle is just one of a scrapbook of memories: Britpop had to be a thing already for this tussle to even matter.
The press, though – this is the climax of its 80s and 90s story, its turn away from other music to keep the indie flame burning, and how it saw its favourites gradually win over first the radio establishment, then a wider public. And look – here they are! Top of the charts, ma! Whoever wins, we won, is the NME’s message, but in that final ridiculous week the story had outgrown them. After Britpop, readers dwindled, and no new story emerged: the price of ‘we won’ turned out to be that there wasn’t a “we” anymore.
FOOTBALL?
The run-in, as I recall it. Oasis, releasing their second album, were a coronation away from being the biggest band in the country. Blur, veterans on their fourth, were returning conquerors, Parklife having defined them (and their genre) in the record-buying eye. Singles release dates at first didn’t sync, then did. Alan McGee at Creation refused to blink. The nation held its breath – or ignored all this entirely.
But just as Cup Finals and Playoffs can be disappointing, cagey affairs, so the Battle Of Britpop played out more warily than it might have. Oasis, it would become apparent, had left commercially far stronger singles than “Roll With It” on the bench – the track doesn’t even show up on their Noel-picked Greatest Hits. Blur didn’t – there are better songs on The Great Escape than this, but “Country House” is one of the few that gets in your face enough to do this job.
WRESTLING?
It’s also a honking, parping pantomime. Both bands played up to their image: if you’d written the whole thing as a TV drama and had to fake up convincing singles, you might have ended up with songs rather like “Country House” and “Roll With It”. Blur could be tough to pin down, but “Country House” gave the public more of what they’d already rewarded from the group – uptempo, brash songs with a bit of satire on top. It’s a bustling, dense song – fun-packed and glassy-eyed, with desperation never far away: that niggling two-note phrase cycling under the final choruses, for instance. It pushes catchiness into exhaustion, mirroring the breakdown of its lead character. My first thought is it’s trying too hard, then I realise that’s the point, then I think it’s trying too hard to make that the point. Then I want it to stop. Then I end up playing it again. The grotesque, much pilloried video only adds to the headaches. Modern life is, as they say, rubbish. But were Blur – was this whole stunt? – criticising it, reflecting it, or making it worse?
ADVERTISING?
In the context of The Great Escape, Country House fits nicely: the album is full of brittle people, awful lives, and melancholy just under the skin. It’s an honest taster – as is “Roll With It”: Oasis at this point met expectations, good and bad. These singles were advertising more than just their LPs, though. To the new establishment at Radio 1 – who grabbed the Britpop battle baton enthusiastically from the NME et al – they were a vindication of controller Matthew Bannister’s brutal repositioning.
Bannister inherited a station listened to by about 20 million people, but the audience skewed too old – his vision, backed up by multiple moody, black-and-white promo vids, was of a station where credible presenters would play credible music to a credible audience. It’s a vision that’s endured ever since – shifting Radio 1’s role away from mirror of pop and towards its mentor. In 1995, though, with ratings collapsed and tabloids circling, Bannister needed a win: the Britpop battle gave him one, putting the spotlight on exactly the music his ideal audience segment loved.
In a sense he was lucky, but the showdown couldn’t even have happened a few years prior. “Chart battles” – we’ll see a fair few more – were a creature of the new age of first-week sales spikes: the winner was guaranteed a number one. If this was, as some said, the first time in ages the charts had mattered, they were mattering in quite new ways.
SEALED KNOT HISTORICAL RE-ENACTMENT?
The retro angle is something of a red herring in the music, too. Blur had influences, as obvious as their rivals’ – the “Country House” lytic is Kinksy, there’s plenty of Langer and Winstanley’s 80s sound in the horns, other tracks on the album nodded to Numan and XTC – but neither they or Oasis ever really sounded like anyone but themselves. As with Oasis, the voice played a huge part: Albarn’s distinctive, stylised singing could flip from naughty choirboy to music-hall rabble rouser with ease, but whoever he played you could spot him immediately (“..inna cun-TREE” could be nobody else). Most of his styles, to be honest, set my teeth on edge: there’s an ironic, above-it-all veneer to his vocals which seemed to begin as strategy on their early records and settle into habit. If I often end up buying Albarn’s melancholy anyway, it’s because he can be a great melodist, not really because of his singing or delivery.
PLAYGROUND SCRAP? CLASS WAR?
On “Country House”, Albarn’s not really trying to be sensitive – it’s one of his occasional character songs, indulging a taste for social observation. It’s about a guy retreating to the country because he’s going through some kind of crisis and either having or faking a breakdown – but the music does a much better job of capturing this chap than the words. Take, for instance, the Balzac/Prozac bit. It was approvingly quoted, apparently evidence Blur were The Clever Ones in this schoolyard swots v jocks fight – but it feels very rhyme-first, with “Woah, it’s the century’s remedy” clunking in to hammer home how zeitgeisty Blur are being. An unfair comparison perhaps, but on “Sunny Afternoon” Ray Davies becomes his character and the music becomes his world, and so the listener gets inside it too. The geezer in “Country House” is caricature – the one stab at any kind of inner life that mocking “I am so sad, I don’t know why” refrain.
(Meanwhile, over on the other channel, Noel’s “I think I’m gonna take me away and hide / I’m thinking things that I just can’t abide” is a good summary of depressive self-hatred. Liam then sings it in the same surly monotone the rest of “Roll With It” stews in.)
So there’s no empathy in “Country House”, just observation, and bald observation at that. Just as on “Parklife” and much of “Girls And Boys”, Albarn does comic journalism, not storytelling: he’s the Peter York of pop, the songwriting equivalent of jokey pen-portraits of “social tribes” in a Sunday supplement. If the bands’ backgrounds made it easier to overlay unhelpful North v South, Working v Middle Class conflicts on Oasis v Blur, this kind of thing helped the charges linger.
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MUSIC, MAN?
Both singles are rescued by their guitarists. Where on “Some Might Say”, Liam bossed the song, he’s flatter on “Roll With It” and the wall of sound has to put in serious work to stop the song becoming a complete trudge. On “Country House”, meanwhile, Graham Coxon puts down a delightful Christ-Are-Pavement-Hiring? guitar solo that’s as endearing as the rest of the track put together.
BALD MAN COMBFIGHT?
The standard anti-Britpop line – the what about Goldie argument, you might call it – hardened quickly during 1995. Why were we paying attention to this charade when there was so much more interesting things happening? How could these throwbacks represent the real, multicultural Britain? I subscribed to this thinking myself, and the “Battle” fuelled it – on paper the idea of Britain’s indie bands straining muscle and sinew to create amazing pop singles was seductive, but if these two weakling, just-about-OK records were the result, the idea was a bust.
Since then I’ve softened. For one thing both “Country House” and “Roll With It” sound a bit better than they did. But also the effects on British indie music, let alone British pop, weren’t nearly as deadening as they seemed at the time. This isn’t as good as Britpop got, but it was as big as Britpop got as a pop event. The noise died down and the charts went on their merry – and increasingly diverse – way.
POSTERITY?
So who won? Oasis won the war and conquered the country. The NME won a last chance to set the agenda. Radio 1 won time to finish its credibility revolution. Graham Coxon, as it later turned out, won a musical argument. And Blur won the Battle of Britpop. Which was just about fair, because of all the records by all the big Britpop bands, none strained so hard to sound like Britpop as “Country House”.
Score: 6
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No word from me about this until TPL comes round to the whole fandango. An 8 from me for this, however, because quite often for pop to matter there has to be The Moment, however it is engineered into being.
This might be the longest Popular entry. And it’s about bloody Blur. Oh well!
Damon’s caricature songs seemed to have ended with “Stereotypes”, that one where the verses describe a ‘typical suburban sex comedy’ and the chorus admonishes the writer for falling in to a too-familiar writing pattern purely to create another song.
“Ernold Same” and “Charmless Man” were more of the same, but it’s possible these were written before, or in the case of “Ernold” casually tossed off because Ken Livingstone had visited the studio and Damon wanted to write something to use him in.
not actually what happened
“Stereotypes” I actually like, it seems like quite a loving tribute to XTC’s “Respectable Street”.
I’ll keep my powder dry until I re-compare these 2 after work…
Data point: my kids were 2-0 to Oasis. “How did that other song get to No.1?” said my baffled eldest after hearing the majesty of “Roll With It”.
(RWI would get a 5, incidentally. Maybe a 4 if the sun wasn’t shining.)
Great read and a nice glimpse into this ‘battle’ which, as an American, I heard about later but didn’t really follow or understand. Blur had an even lower profile over here than Oasis and are effectively understood as one-hit wonders (the still-oft-heard “Song 2”). Probably never heard this one until around three years ago, at which point I played it over and over for a week. It’s good, much more fun to sing along to than “Roll With It” and most of “Some Might Say” for that matter – though I agree that the distancing smugness is a bit much. If it were any less peppier its sanctimony would sink the song (see Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier” for an extreme case).
Probably the key moment is the “in the COUNTRY-Y!” before the goofy little solo – where it’s made clear that Blur are having fun and not just making fun. Still, I wonder if this lyric would be improved by rewriting in the first person; c.f. “Paperback Writer” (which also benefits from being faster and having, to be fair, a much more skilled group of musicians).
Somewhere around 5 is right for this I think. 4 if I have a headache, 6 if I’m in the mood.
Actually, 2-1 would be a true reflection of the count of CD formats which was the main single format of the time.
Tom, I’m staggered at your charity towards “Roll With It!”
I was all set to say how weird it was that Oasis put up the second worst track on Morning Glory as their entry into this contest, but I listened again and was surprised how good Roll With It was. There’s not much to the lyrics or the tune, but the overall sound of it is great – propulsive, exciting, stirring. It sets a mood. If electronic acts are allowed to make mood-based tracks without much of a song to them I don’t see why Oasis shouldn’t be.
Country House is OK but some of the lyrics are annoying. How is it like an Animal Farm?
“In the context of The Great Escape, Country House fits nicely: the album is full of brittle people, awful lives, and melancholy just under the skin.”
This, I think, is the key observation – and not only because it allows me to plug my own essay on the album, one of my occasional and dismally unsuccessful attempts at punctumosity – but because it highlights something rather odd about “Country House” and the album: viz., on an album which is very explicit about its concept, the two songs it begins with are actually these which seem furthest away from it – an album about trapped people desperate to escape begins with two songs about people who have succeeded in escaping. And even if as Tom says Damon is laying out his hand by calling the first one “Stereotypes”, it’s remarkably affectionate, at least far more so than “Country House” is (and given the comfortably middle-class tangents that Blur’s, especially Alex James’s, lives have followed since that point, “Country House” codes now less as sneering at the stupids and more as the sort of self-hatred “Dan Abnormal” trafficked in – perhaps I hold this view because of how explicit John Harris’ “The Last Party” is about how nasty it was being in Blur at around this time).
I like the album, not so much for it being brilliant but for it being so unified and forceful and sincere (much the same thing as I think about The Final Cut, come to think of it), and it’s certainly true that “Country House” (6 seems right to me) isn’t the best thing on it; for my money it’d be “Yuko and Hiro”, I think. I was going to say something facetious about it being J-pop, although come to think of it the keyboards are not a million miles away from Laugh & Peace's work on the Vib-Ribbon soundtrack (how’s that for an obscure reference!)
Oh, and I don’t like “Roll With It” all that much but its existence is vital for the purposes of that joke about serving Noel Gallagher soup at a restaurant.
Interesting how nobody has yet said anything about the actual subject of “Country House,” i.e. Blur manager/record label owner/ex-Exploding Teardrop Dave Balfe.
It’s a fair cop, he paid me not to mention him.
My 15 year old self couldn’t really see at the time what was particularly wrong with the ‘city dwella/successful fella’ taking off to a country retreat for a quieter life and wondered why Albarn found him worthy of such mockery. I possibly misunderstood the phenomenon the character was supposed to represent (something not a million miles from the latter-day Alex James?). On the other hand, while on holiday with my parents a couple of years previously we were subjected to a solipsistic monologue by a boastful pub-bore who was eerily like the character described in ‘Charmless Man’ and so that song was much easier for me to identify with on a literal level.
On the musical side of things – possibly the most unorthodox guitar solo ever to feature on a UK number one single?
How about that “blow blow me out I am so sad I don’t know why”?
Does it belong there? The bitter, britpop-hating Albarn of the early 00s said that this was the kernel of honesty he should have built the song around. I don’t know if he’s changed his mind, post-reunion, but he seems to have embraced the song again, as Pulp have Mis-Shapes.
I was in the UK for two days of that week, en route from Bucharest to Moscow, so I did catch a little of the hype. And I think the better single, at least, won. Which it is not to say it is a great single…
I think the lack of “character depth” attributed to yer country house dwelling man portrays here underlies a sort of cynicism/callousness found elsewhere – in fact almost all too commonly – in some other Blur lyrics too. (“Girls and Boys” being a glaring example. “Should always be someone you really love” sounded intensely insincere.) Damon’s unsympathetic sneer gets rather grating. – and it really is not simpatico at all.
And the song is all a bit too cartoonesque for my liking. Not quite (Danish 1997 bunny) levels of cartoonesquery, but almost. Even without the video. Knowing sneers, too clever-clever references. Another Blur characteristic (the whole bloody Parklife thing, anything involving mockneyisms-a-go-go), apart from when they were at their very best: which was when they ditched the irony (or the excessive nodding towards mid 70s-Bowie-by-way-of-Suede) and dared to be sincere. Which on occasion they were: both in West London paintings (“For Tomorrow”: now that would have been a cracker of a no 1: “To The End” was, even, languid, and delightfully so), or ethnic diversions later on.
A 5 or a 6 from me. Roll With It at best a 3.
#14 I’d forgotten the Balfe thing. I’m pretty sure Julian Cope wrote a couple about him too, probably less charitable.
#17 The problem with it as a kernel of honesty is that, in context, it sounds like a pisstake.
The question of when Damon’s sneer is unsympathetic and when it’s a bluff would be a matter of Humour, and by the grand unified theory of same, the values across all possible readings will be unique to the reader. Which is another way of saying that I always took that line in Girls and Boys as the truth.
kernel of honesty is exactly right – I was considering ‘a pearl in the sharpened oyster’.
#11, because an Animal Farm is full of rural charm, animals, activity, that sort of thing. Whereas an Arable farm is just harvesting corn, etc. and is not full of rural charm. It has some, just not as much. Not full, you might say. So, his country house is full of things that might relate, similiarly, to things on an Animal farm.
#13….
You know what, check out Radiohead’s “Lucky”, as previewed on the WarChild comp. The first few lines I actually wrote, independently of Thom, as a sort of pastiche/step-forward from this song.
“I’m on a roll (with it), I’m on a roll (with it) this time
I feel my luck will change….”
The video’s grotesque? Really? I think it’s a pretty nifty effort at not taking oneself too seriously while also clearly affiliating the song with the whole tradition of Beatles/Kinks/10cc/XTC UK pop clever-clogsiness. Honestly, I find it much easier to hear the song’s parts with all the visual cues in place. By way of contrast, I don’t find, say, ‘Girls and Boys’ (let alone any of Blur’s slower melodic gems) hard at all to aurally parse without its vid., so this may say something bad about ‘Country House’. Indeed, now I think about it, CH is really a slightly-too-arch-for-its-own-good, less-melodically-distinguished rehash of Park Life’s ‘End of a Century’. So, if CH the song is taken by itself I reckon that Tom’s score is right, but vid. included this is a full-service-pop-stars:
7 (could go 8 on the right, sunny Wimbledon day)
#21 I think in the song it’s telegraphing it as honest – the whole song stops, hanging a big fucking lampshade on that as the ‘serious part’. But the telegraphing is exactly what makes it seem insincere to me, like Mr Country House has gone so far down a rabbit-hole of self-regard that even his moments of quiet honesty feel like part of a script. If the whole thing’s set in a country house, that break is your host cornering at you at 2AM to unburden himself.
Ah no no I meant in Girls & Boys, sorry. Not lampshading it also helps in taking it seriously, though Blur always were one to play with all the effects – if they were putting on a play then every lighting effect in the rig would get its time to shine.
I hate this record. Absolutely loath every smug, unpleasant second of it. I can appreciate that Blur had some fantastic songs and were by far the braver and more ambitious of the two groups, but this and Parklife just made it impossible for me to enjoy them.
Vile, an easy 0.
I think Girls And Boys is horrible and sneery and their best song by a mile, BTW.
Format watch:
Blur CD1, CD2 (live), 7″
Oasis CD, TC, 7″
Price watch:
Blur £1.99 (EMI offered the single to shops on a “one for one” deal – we ordered thirty and got thirty free, thus enabling a tarriff half of the standard £3.99)
Oasis £2.99 (two for one deal from Creation’s sales force 3MV)
One aspect of the chart week I rarely see referenced: Creation managed to balls up the barcode on the Oasis CD single and the first batch had to have a replacement on a label applied. The single arrived into stores a day late (Saturday rather than Friday) and it’s conceivable some stored may have had to wait until Monday for delivery, at the mercy of when the Securicor van went past.
On hearing of this I left the shop and stuck a tenner on Blur to win. They weren’t favourites in the betting at this stage.
#14 You beat me to it Marcello. My reaction to this song (and pretty much anything Albarn does apart from the keyboards on Elastica’s “Waking Up” ) is “when you write a song that’s one hundredth as good as “Reward” then you can sneer you Southern art school wanker”. You may have guessed I don’t like this group much. Not that fond of Oasis either so the whole thing left me cold
I seem to recall that Cope sacked Balfe and Gill for writing the hit single that had eluded him.
Grudgingly the Bannister point is a fair one. I can’t stand the bloke and think a lot of his animus against the old DJs came from being patronised by them when his lunchtime “Newsbeat” slot finished and he had to hand back to Paul Burnett or whoever in the 70s. I liked the old style Radio One where bands were expected to hone their craft and produce something commercial enough for the daytime playlist rather than instant access to high chart placings. That sort of influence was waning before Bannister came along though.
Sneer works if the object of this song: “city dweller/successful fella” is a dyed-in-the-wool Tory. And in 1995, the Tories were mired in sleaze, so a pretty easy target. I’m not sure of Balfe’s politics,let alone Noel’s or Damon’s and it probably isn’t even relevant to either Blur or Oasis in terms of any of their output, but it can become relevant if the listener perceives it that way. Sneer isn’t necessarily a good thing to build your pop career around, but it’s useful to dip into from time to time. Ask Roger Waters. Ask Andy Partridge. Ask Graham Gouldman. Taken to its extreme and pointed inwards, then you enter Hotel California territory. And to a lesser degree, I think there’s an element of low self-regard running beneath both songs. The caricature in the Country House could easily be the disaffected pop star.
So what makes either of these songs desirable? It wasn’t just their respective fanbases buying these records. Did the punters just get sucked up in the whirlwind of hype? I perhaps was too young to appreciate the finer aspects of a Bolan/Bowie rivalry and definitely too young for the Beatles/Stones rivalry, so this was quite amusing to me. Neither song was perfect and if Roll With It had been released without a Country House to challenge it, would it have sailed into the top 5? And vice-versa? They needed each other, like a yin-yang arrangement. That’s how I saw it anyway.
Country House looks back to The Kinks, that’s the obvious bit. Where does the whirly, discordant guitar solo come from? It’s perhaps the most enjoyable part of the song. To me it sounds like Johnny Marr’s melody from This Charming Man left out in the midday heat to bend and warp out of shape.
In comparison, Oasis just stick to a lift I first heard on Cozy Powell’s Dance With The Devil many moons ago.
Has anyone mentioned what was at #3?
I didn’t like this at the time – put off by what seemed to me like cheap cynicism and a rancid arrangement. I wasn’t that familiar with Blur’s music apart from a superficial awareness the well known hits and so took this and ‘Park Life’ as indicative of a lazy laddish mentality.
Listening to it now I’m more positively inclined towards it. Now I hear Damon’s apparent cynicism as being just as insincere as the brief interlude of ‘concern’ which (to my ears at least) makes the song more interestingly uncentered and ambivalent.
As an American I was only vaguely aware of the whole Blur vs Oasis thing, and I discovered Blur long after they were a going concern even. It was the XTC connection that got me to check them out (I’m a big XTC fan from way back). For my money, “Country House” is a prime slice of melodic guitar pop with clever lyrics and a fun arrangement. It’s interesting that you could find so much to say about it other than “it’s a fun song”. I like it, I still listen to it a lot.
Yeah, I’m with #33. There’s a lot going on here, and all of it is really good. The only disappointment is that the rug is pulled from under one’s feet when the artist speaks ill of their own work – and although I’ve not heard / read anything specific, I gather Albarn in particular has done so here. But it is witty, tuneful and structured, and sounds great today.
#31. I wrote an essay at the time declaring that the Blur-Oasis battle saved the UK from the “inevitable mathematical alternative” that I Luv U Baby by The Original would be number one. And that’s true. I quite liked the idea that these little piggies had personality and charisma, whereas the number 3 record had none.
Whenever I hear these character sketch Blur songs these days, I get really embarrassed. A friend of mine said to me recently: “You can’t be embarrassed about MUSIC. You’re obviously only embarrassed because of something in your past it reminds you of”.
And my Freudy friend may not be far wrong. There’s something about Blur that ties up with my life far better than any other band. My parents left the suburbs of East London when I was about ten years old to bring me up in Essex. I hated growing up in Essex. I didn’t find any appeal in what I was surrounded by – to be another blank commuter, a City Boy, heading towards Liverpool Street. I wanted to be a Writer or a Musician which I deemed to be grander callings than any on Earth. I joined bands and wrote fairly horrible short stories and poetry in my spare time, many of which were crude little bits of satire which weren’t at all good. I listened to XTC and The Kinks a lot (XTC were my favourite band from the age of about eleven). I also behaved in a very arrogant way to mask my insecurities. Frankly, given that this actually sounds like Damon Albarn circa 1995, the fact I wasn’t a colossal fan of Blur is incredibly surprising.
But I’m embarrassed at all those aspects of my personality now, and whenever they do a revival tour or crop up on the radio, Blur remind me of my awkward past in the way that Pulp or Oasis never could. They also occasionally remind me of what I can be like when I’m at my most stressed out or judgemental, and that horrible part of my personality rears its head again.
I’m only making this huge and possibly ill-advised public confession because any comments I make about Blur are bound to be coloured by my own background. To be frank, though, of all their records I find it a tiny bit more bearable to know that this is allegedly about one particular person – David Balfe, the ex-Teardrop Explode member and Blur’s manager. Once I’d read Julian Cope’s “Head On” and had plenty of insights into Balfe’s personality, and read other interviews with Strawberry Switchblade which highlighted his rather Thatcherite attitudes, the song did become slightly more comedic. True, it speaks volumes about the size of the chip on Albarn’s shoulder that he felt the need to write and release the damn thing, and as Julian Cope later said “Just because the lyrics are true, it doesn’t make it a good record”… but it gives it more purpose and venom somehow. At least you know for a fact that Damon is picking on a viable target, not (as my Dad once said of Blur) “taunting the poor sods with ordinary jobs in the Home Counties”.
Musically it’s also a lot more interesting than superficial early listens reveal. Due to the top melody line it’s almost tempting to write it off as an early Madness or Chas & Dave cast-off (and people did) but they obviously did try to pack a lot of detail into a rather clownish sounding track. And the jauntiness of the rest of it does contrast beautifully with the “blow me out” segment, which sounds like the kernal of truth in the whole record – otherwise “Country House” is, as Jarvis Cocker would say on an unrelated matter “The sound of someone making out they’re OK when they’re not” with its jerky, robotic swing. This probably would scrape a 7 if I was in the right mood for all those reasons… otherwise I’m broadly in agreement with Tom.
I am also a big XTC fan, so I’m a bit surprised when other XTC fans love Blur so much, as when they do sound like XTC they sound like them with a great deal less heart and generosity, and with the genuine eccentricities swapped out for gimlet-eyed style-hopping.
I mean yes, a good band to try and be like, and I’d love to hear the scrapped Andy Partridge sessions, but I also can’t help feel that Partridge and Moulding are the kind of people Blur would write a nasty song about, too.
#30 – but Balfe had pretty much nothing to do with “Reward”. It was a Cope/Gill co-writing effort. Balfe did try to write more songs for the Teardrop Explodes around the point of their “Everyone Wants to Shag…” album, but they’re easily among the worst of the group’s output.
Even then, the only late period Teardrop tune Balfe wrote completely by himself without Cope’s help was this one, which is… OK. But that’s the most you can say about it. http://youtu.be/jRVABaLOVig His main concern was how much Cope was picking up in songwriting royalties, apparently.
Oh, and #37 – they’re online now! Here’s one of them, the Partridge produced “Sunday Sunday’. http://youtu.be/mPVjWHFpgLA In this format, it reminds me more of XTC’s “Everyday Story of Smalltown”.
I love some of the Everybody Wants To Shag… material – “Ouch Monkeys” is one of my very favourite Teardrops songs, “Strange House In The Snow” not far behind (though that was an earlier B-Side), “You Disappear From View” has aged well too. Dunno if Balfe did any of those though.
#38 “Ouch Monkeys” and “Strange House” are Balfe/Cope, whereas “You Disappear From View” is very much Cope’s own work, though he apparently hated the way it turned out. I struggle with “Shag” largely due to the clinical production. The two tracks that escaped that session and made their way on to “World Shut Your Mouth” (“Sex (Pussyface)” and “Metranil Vavin”) sound far superior in that guise, though “Matranil Vavin” admittedly seemed to have undergone numerous rewrites by the time it got to that point.
Incidentally, your point about XTC vs Blur is a familiar argument in my house. My wife hates XTC for their “artschool pomposity” and loves Blur, which I find hard to take. But the criticism Coxon has made of Partridge is that he “over thinks things” and Blur “swing more”. I’d say the reverse is true, particularly if you spin back to the likes of “Black Sea” – there’s an energy, rhythm and force to that record Blur have never even come close to. But hey ho.
13-year-old me took the somewhat diplomatic stance – shared by a great many of my contemporaries – that both Blur AND Oasis were ace, but ‘Country House’ is a better single.
I read somewhere that TBoB saw the two bands release their two weakest singles to date at the same time. While I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that (Hello, ‘Bang!’), whoever said it had a point. CH is a good track, but not one of Blur’s best. They’re a band who’ve had a few songs that would have got a 10 if they made it all the way but, because I’m feeling charitable, I’ll let it squeeze a seven.
I’ll write more about this when I get the time.
#34 I’m fairly sure I’m not the only person on this board who wouldn’t have minded “I Luv U Baby” getting to number one.
Princesque title aside, there were a load of record buyers who couldn’t give two fucks about Blur vs Oasis but wanted to buy The Original single.
I’d have thought it was one of the better selling number threes of the nineties.
Plus, the kerning on the sleeve is horrific. Stylorouge, you did a terrible, lazy job there.
As was already stated above, the Battle of Britpop was wholly ignored in the US. Neither song charted or got any airplay that I was aware of. Oasis of course briefly acheived mainstream US success with their next single, but Blur never quite did. I wouldn’t quite call them a one hit wonder though, as they had a habit of popping into modern rock consciousness every couple years: “There’s No Other Way” in 1991, “Girls and Boys” in 1994, and of course, what most Americans would refer to as the ‘woo hoo song’ in 1997.
I like “Country House”, but I can see why it never hit in the US – it just doesn’t culturally resonate here. 7 for me however.
23 Daves @ #35 – wonderful post, thank you for sharing. You’ve put your finger exactly on my relationship to a lot of the music that I loved as an adolescent – I liked it, but I also liked it because it fit into an idea I had of myself and my position vs. my peers that I cringe at now.
In a lifetime of record collecting I haven’t loved and discarded an album as quickly as TGE. Twenty-one in 1995, I liked “Country House” because it rewarded the listener’s education: I could titter over the Balzac/Prozac couplet because I’d read a few Balzac novels (but knew no one on Prozac, of course — yet). I needed the next two Blur albums to see this phase clearly.
I don’t think I was aware of this battle at all in Canada, though I was already leaning towards preferring Blur to Oasis in general. I’ll be writing about this whole thing in time of course, so I can’t say too much here, but that Elastica were part of Lolla in ’95 and I think they sold more in North America than either Blur or Oasis did, can anyone confirm this? (At the time itself I was interested far more in Pavement and Juliana Hatfield than even Blur – and my beloved Sloan, of course.)
@23Daves, 35. Is music that embarrasses you akin at all to music that you just, you know, hate? I ask this because your comment reminded me a little of (not the Beach Boy) Carl Wilson’s recent Why I hate the National article in Slate. The money quote:
‘[S]ome of my impatience with The National or Radiohead is that they enact what I fear it would be like if I—as a fellow vocationally thinky type—led a rock band.
My band might diligently compose intelligent songs of verifiable pedigree and substance, layering in jokes about our own limitations, and then, anxious whether we were hitting home, say, “Right, and at the end there, let’s lean in and get a little wild.” While never venturing into any genuine wilderness. These bands remind me of myself in earnest-dude mode, thinking I can win someone over if I go on stacking point upon point instead of exposing my unreliable heart.
So maybe I hate this goddamn band because I hate my goddamn self, and I should get some goddamn therapy instead of taking it out on the goddamn National. But perhaps my reaction to the National is a healthy form of self-suspicion. It might be cathartic to reject over-familiar pictures of the world, when the artists seem like they’re getting close to the bone but never truly scrape it.’
And so the story begins…
Somewhere among my CD singles is a copy of “Popscene” picked up in Woolworths for 10p not long after it flopped. Leisure had been one of the albums of my student year in England, but that neglected single signified something new, although I didn’t fully realise it at the time. Who put trumpets on indie songs in 1992? With Modern Life is Rubbish it became clear that Blur had legs – one each of David Bowie’s and Ray Davies’ – which they used to sprint home on Parklife. By the time news of the Battle of Britpop reached Australian shores, I was doubtful whether anything could possibly top “Girls and Boys”. But Blur’s steady upward curve left me hopeful.
The clanking sound at the start of “Country House” could only be that of the band throwing the kitchen sink at the mixing desk. This had everything: a sweeping singalong chorus, an infectious descending bassline, Balzac and Prozak, Albarn’s withering “mor… talluh-tee”, Neuschwanstein on the cover, Coxon’s deliciously mad guitar solo… there was just so much to enjoy. The lyrics skewering the nouveau riche excesses of the Thatcher years (and the Blair years before they even happened) made it a counterpoint to Madness’s celebration of working-class life in “Our House”, to which its horn stabs seemed to allude. And underneath all that exuberance, hiding beneath the second chorus before moving to centre stage: I am so sad, I don’t know why.
The result felt like the summation of everything Blur were attempting in their three-album run up to The Great Escape, and even though that album is marginally my least favourite of the three, “Country House” is definitely one of my favourite tracks of their Britpop era. That it won its notorious chart battle is the antimacassar on the Chippendale. 9.
Greetings from the ferry to Shetland, just arrived in Lerwick.
# 37
You’ve sent me scurrying to my singles box to check if advanced senility is creeping in but no the credit on the 7″ is “Gill and Balfe”.