The “perfect” 1967 song Damon Albarn wishes he had written
Damon Albarn has written hundreds of songs in a plethora of genres for a range of groups, collaborations and solo projects, and yet, like a king of old lusting after new territory, he always wants the one thing he doesn’t have.
This is a driving force that has pushed his muse further and further afield in search of the latest thing that he perceives to be missing from his back catalogue. In the process, this has endowed him with one of the most resplendent eclectic discographies of any musician in history.
This prolific drive comes from a unique mindset that he defined as thus: “Productivity can stop. So I’m going to use every second that I’ve got of musical juice. And when it stops, I will, hopefully, take it gracefully. Until then, I’ll try to keep getting up in the morning and going to work.” Moreover, when he goes to work, he’s usually pretty daring to boot.
How many others have blended hip hop, indie, disco, Malian folk, and still had time to half Liam Gallagher in a game of seven-a-side? He’s done an awful lot, and he still doesn’t seem to be stopping. However, the tune that he has always wanted to put his name to has forever remained the same. And it is perhaps fitting that it is, in fact, about stopping; the notion of taking pause on a park bench and soaking it all in.
When he was asked by Record Mart & Buyer what song he wishes he had written, Albarn replied without a second’s forethought, “’Waterloo Sunset’ by Ray Davies [The Kinks]. Without a shadow of a doubt. It’s the most perfect song I could ever hope to write, with my sort of voice.”
Albarn actually got to prove that sentiment when he sang the song with Ray Davies on The White Room back in 1995. Together with The Kinks’ frontman, he offered up a stripped-back serenade to London in its quiet moments. Their version was bedraggled and dreamy in equal measure, like that rare and fleeting moment when the hangover actually has its own oddly pleasurable sullen atmosphere of knowing what life is all about.
The pair enjoyed the kinship of the session so much that they almost invited another of London’s favourite cockney singers to join them in recording an album: David Bowie. Sadly, this tale resides in the annals of rock ‘n’ roll’s great ‘what could have beens’, as Albarn told The Quietus: “I do genuinely like working with people but at the same time I don’t expect it to work, […]. I mean, for about 24 hours, many years ago, I was making a record with David Bowie and Ray Davies. But that only lasted 24 hours.”
If it came about, it may well have captured the spirit of ‘Waterloo Sunset’ in newfangled ways. After all, Bowie also adored the song, commenting, ”There is something so anchored about that song. It is so inherently English. It is as English as Peter Ackroyd is England. It is as London as Peter Ackroyd is London. There is something so deeply moving about the song, it is so timeless. It couldn’t be set in any other place or any other country in the world.”
That’s a spirit that Albarn has often looked to mirror. But for all the Blur man might be an eager magpie in modern music, his carefree approach to blending genres has also blessed him with a slew of unlikely admirers who wish that they could have plucked songs from his back catalogue.
From admirer to admired: the song that made Damon Albarn the object of envy
Britpop was an explosion that was hard to avoid, and Albarn was at the epicentre with Blur. Nevertheless, Radiohead seemed to pride themselves on being independent from the eras emerging zeitgeist. In fact, as Thom Yorke famously stated in a Rolling Stone interview, “The whole Britpop thing made me fucking angry. I hated it. It was backwards-looking, and I didn’t want any part of it.”
As Radiohead guitarist, Jonny Greenwood added: “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.” This point was also elucidated in the ‘The Bends’ lyric: “I wish it was the ‘60s, I wish we could be happy.”
However, away from this art school approach to looking at it, for many people, the movement represented a new and exciting time that reinvigorated guitar music. Something almost tangible was happening and a long list of forgotten nights for millions of young people is proof of this, pastiche or otherwise. There was an unavoidable and intoxicating excitement in the air of indie clubs.
As Ray Davies put it himself, “I loved the Britpop era which produced some of the greatest bands to emerge from the UK in recent times”. And he knew a thing or two about projecting Britishness into music. As Noel Gallagher, Albarn’s best friend/enemy said, “The Kinks, like The Who, are one of those quintessentially great English singles bands but I’ve listened to this album so many times and I just fucking love it.“
He added, “It’s obviously such a big influence on Damon Albarn’s writing. You know the song ‘Big Sky’? ‘Big sky, too big to cry.’ You can almost hear someone shouting ‘Parklife!’ at the end of it, do you know what I mean?”
But the past was the last thing Radiohead wanted their songs to sound like. Thus, it seems fitting that the song Thom Yorke wishes he wrote is one that focuses on the unfurling fun times themselves rather than trying to parody the past. When speaking to fans at a BBC Maida Vale session back in 2003, Yorke was smart enough to separate individual works of art from the movement as a whole and championed the Britpop anthem ‘Girls and Boys’ by Blur as the one song he wishes he had written.
“’Girls and Boys’,” Yorke said to the question without a second’s thought and no hint of irony. “When I heard that, I was like, ‘bastards!’” It is a mark of Yorke’s all-encompassing influences that even amid a genre he wasn’t all that fond of, he could still find something worth celebrating. In truth, this is perhaps because the song was far from backwards-looking and, in fact, crystalised the zeitgeist. Fittingly, you could say the same about ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and the ‘60s. It was the song that gazed upon the era lovingly from afar, perhaps how it was best enjoyed.
