1995 Blur: Country House

Oasis may have beaten them to the laurels of the first Brtitpop number one, but the battle fought and the ultimate victory for Blur with this song was enough to make the national news in 1995; that Blur and Oasis were releasing their latest singles on the same day was a golden egg freshly laid for a media starved of any recent (or decent) controversy or excitement in popular music. As an added bonus, there was the spin of a North/South (Oasis/Blur) cultural battle, a generated rivalry initially fuelled by both bands that always threatened to spill over in fisticuffs at dawn with the angle being that Oasis appealed to the working classes while Blur appealed to the educated South. Or the wannabe working class - I tend to picture Jarvis Cocker's would-be proletariat girlfriend in Pulp's 'Common People' having 'Definitely Maybe' on heavy rotation on her stereo rather than 'Parklife'.

That Blur won the battle but lost the war is a matter of pop folklore/tedious record (take your pick); I've already said enough on that. What's more interesting to me is the circuitous path Blur had taken to get to a point that anyone should care so much about their records. Originally aligned to the baggy/neo psychedelic movement of the early nineties, Blur re-invented themselves circa 1993 as arch social commentators of a very English cast in a series of releases that both presented and romantically nostalgiacised the low key culture of an idealised Albion.

To say that the images of steam trains and spitfires that fronted their record sleeves helped put the 'Brit' in Britpop is obvious and a little trite, yet it's no less accurate for it - Blur purposely set out to turn the attention of the record buying public back from whatever was coming from across the Atlantic (grunge, mainly). And as well as harking back to classic British pop, Liam Gallagher, Damon Albarn et al stamped their music as home-grown by unashamedly putting the regional accent back into music which, after a slew of dance mixes and grunge whinges, was as startlingly refreshing as the sixties Merseysound was amongst the various American imports that filled the domestic charts in the early sixties.

But for me I'm afraid, I had little time for either Blur or Oasis in 1995. I've already laid out my beefs with the latter, but Blur and their Small Faces/Kinks fixations and flirtations were in their own way no less recycling and repackaging music of the past to provide an alternative to the present. And although they may have inadvertently kick started the Brit pop movement, by the time of 'Country House', with a niche finally found, they had climbed into the driver’s seat, taken over the wheel and proceeded to drive it off the road; context may have invested the song with more stature than the band probably intended, but 'Country House' remains a very uneasy sounding single.

'Country House' has the immediate music hall roll of 'Parkilfe' for recent converts to latch on to, but a lyric of Balzac and Prozac paints it with a knowing Groucho club gloss that converts the tune into the key of irony, a suggestion that Blur were talking down rather than to. As a whole, it's a mix and match summation of everything they were 'about' from the knockabout to the arty but flat falling "Blow, blow me out I am so sad, I don't know why" middle eight. Albarn turns the dial on his 'mockney' accent up to 'exaggerated' until Dick Van Dyke's 'Bert' the chimney sweep and Jack Wild's 'Artful Dodger' battle it out for dominance in a mouth that reads the lyric with the smug charm of a bad character actor.

Albarn cast himself centre stage as ringmaster presiding over the anarchic tomfoolery unfolding before him, with his 'Ohhhhhhhh's a laughter track exclamation of constant surprise that he can't believe the mischief they're all getting up to (which presumably also includes the ironic use of the soft porn stars who ironically strip off in the ironic video). But that's it's main problem - no matter how hard it flatters to deceive, 'Country House' is a charmless affair with little warmth or humour; it's all been beaten out by the sheer forced effort of a band attempting to cover all bases as Britpop's jesters and philosophisers, and then ground out by the sheer repetition of the custard pie that the knees up chorus stuffs in your face every time it comes round.

Blur were riding a wave at that point and 'Country House' is probably the single they had to release to keep riding it, but hindsight has shown it to be the short term fix of giving a dog as a Christmas present; smiles at the time, but all that’s left by New Year's is a tune you can whistle (or a dog you can no longer be bothered to walk). All of which went to show that the space between Blue and Oasis wasn't as great as everybody thought. Not yet anyway.