The misunderstood 1995 album Blur thought that fans hated: “The one you didn’t talk about”
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and although Blur’s Britpop-era output is now hailed as a genre-defying masterpiece of optimistic indie rock, that wasn’t always the case. In fact, Damon Albarn himself has cited The Great Escape among the worst albums he has ever created.
Released in 1995, at the height of Britpop’s relevance, The Great Escape was a landmark record in the timeline of that indie scene, arriving in the wake of the group’s chart battle with the Mancunian titans of Oasis.
On paper, the album delivered exactly what Blur set out to do, in creating a record that balances their indie, art-rock credentials with a catchy, euphoric, mass appeal. Indeed, upon its initial release, numerous glowing reviews populated the music press, and the record topped the UK album charts. What more could the band have wished for?
Once the dust had settled on that wildly anarchic realm of Britpop, though, The Great Escape didn’t exactly stand the test of time. Even lead single ‘Country House’ ranks rather poorly in the wider context of Blur’s discography, and even the most devoted of Albarn fanatics must surely concede that the tracklisting is rather muddled, as if each track was thrown together in a haze of cocaine-fueled sleep deprivation. Perhaps that wasn’t far from reality.
Without wishing to buy into the rivalry concocted by the music press of 30 years ago, The Great Escape doesn’t hold up particularly well when contrasted to Oasis’ (What’s The Story) Morning Glory, either. In the years that followed, when Albarn and the gang emerged from the epicentre of that hedonistic indie realm, Blur’s output inevitably improved, but The Great Escape remained a depressing reminder of a misguided period in their existence, at least as far as the band’s frontman was concerned.
Nevertheless, that 1995 album certainly had its supporters. Years after its release, when it was regarded among the band’s lesser works, a new generation of indie aficionados seemingly reappraised the album as a classic of 1990s indie rock.
“It is funny, I’ve seen young bands now having the balls to say that they’re influenced by that record,” Albarn recalled in an interview in 2003. “Which is brave of them because, for many years, that was the one you didn’t talk about.”
In many ways, it is no surprise that The Great Escape emerged from its period of shame and embarrassment to find a new reputation as a classic record. While its tracklisting certainly has its flaws, it also features some of the group’s greatest efforts, ‘The Universal’ being a definite stand-out for its incredible, orchestral evocation of that glorious period in the mid-1990s.
Once you strip back the commercial guff of tracks like ‘Country House’, there are multiple moments of sheer brilliance in its output. Whether or not Albarn and co can accept that fact is neither here nor there, because there are now multiple generations of indie disciples who worship the airwaves that the LP occupies, much to the apparent chagrin of the band itself.
