“Certainly their best record”: Ray Davies on Blur’s best song
It certainly can’t be much of a surprise that Kinks frontman Ray Davies is a Blur fan. Both bands soundtracked a time in the UK’s cultural history when the nation felt like the epicentre of popular music, whether it’s the ‘Swinging Sixties’ or the ‘cool Britannia’ of the 1990s. Davies and Blur frontman Damon Albarn also shared lyrical examinations of English culture, class, and smatterings of satirical wit. Some of their respective work feel connected in some strange, symbiotic way. ‘Charmless Man’ could just as easily have been one of Davies’ protagonists in the Kinks’ many concept albums, and ‘Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy’ wouldn’t feel out of place on any of Blur’s mid-90s output.
In an interview with Uncut in 2009, Davies spoke frankly about his liking for a particular album of theirs. “One of my fondest times with Damon is a poetry festival at the Albert Hall. He sang one of my songs and I sang ‘Parklife’. Then I understood the similarities between The Kinks and Blur. It’s in the way I change chords and sing stylistically,” he recalled.
Continuing: “And I’ll tell you why Parklife‘s maybe their best song, and certainly their best record. It’s Damon’s shameless ability to utilise whatever it takes. Because he couldn’t have pulled that vocal off. And using Phil Daniels switched them into the Mockney London thing. It showed they were a band of power.” And a band of savvy nouse, too, devoid of too much ego to get the track done right.
This mutual affection across musical generations was shared throughout the Britpop period. While some felt the UK music scene had become anachronistic and ‘nostalgic’ at the expense of innovation, the bands of the era didn’t care a jot, Oasis routinely declared their debt to The Beatles, and Primal Scream jumped ship from the acid house soaked Screamadelica to indulge in Rolling Stones style swagger rock for ’94’s Give Out but Don’t Give Up. There were parallel cultural shifts, too, each period seeing a new Labour government and enjoying bursts of economic growth. The kids had money, the music was good, and things could only get better, right?!
Not everybody shared the affection for Britpop, Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood once told Rolling Stone, ”To us, Britpop was just a 1960s revival. It just leads to pastiche. It’s you wishing it was another era. But as soon as you go down that route, you might as well be a Dixieland jazz band, really.”
Davies did feel like this was the case, relishing in the vitality of the age. And his affection for Blur was certainly reciprocated. When Albarn was asked by Record Mart & Buyer the song he wished he’d written, The Kinks’ classic ode to young love by the Thames ‘Waterloo Sunset’ was his pick, without a shadow of a doubt.
”It’s the most perfect song I could ever hope to write, with my sort of voice,” he said. The pair eventually joined forces in ’95, fresh after a bucketload of Brit awards for Blur, for an acoustic rendition of ‘Waterloo Sunset’ followed by ‘Parklife’s chorus on Channel 4’s The White Room, a ‘pinch yourself’ moment for Albarn undoubtedly.
With Blur at the peak of their powers, and Davies riding the wave of renewed interest in the ‘British invasion’, Davies’ open embrace of Parklife and the musical moment that shaped it speaks to the old master’s undimmed enthusiasm for the next great pop song.
