Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993)

Personnel:

Damon Albarn: lead vocals, keyboards, piano

Graham Coxon: guitars, backing vocals, percussion, Black and Decker drill

Alex James: bass

Dave Rowntree: drums, percussion

Stephen Street: drumbox, handclaps, Casio S1000, typewriter bell

The Kick Horns: brass

Kate St John: oboe, cor anglais, saxophone

The Duke String Quartet: strings

Miriam Stockley and Mae McKenna: backing vocals on 'For Tomorrow'

Recorded: October 1991-March 1993 at Matrix and Maison Rouge studios

Producers: Stephen Street, Steve Lovell, John Smith, Blur

Release dates: UK: 10 May 1993, US: 16 November 1993

Label: Food/Parlophone (UK), SBK (US)

Chart Placings: UK: 15, US: did not chart

Following the near-gold-disc success of Leisure, Food Records sent Blur straight back into Matrix studios in October 1991 to record demos for a planned second album. Optimistically and somewhat naively, the guys had hoped for a Spring 1992 release date for the new LP, drawing up a rough track list which included 'Oily Water', 'Mace', 'Badgeman Brown', 'Popscene', 'Resigned', 'Garden Central', 'Hanging Over', 'Into Another', 'Peach', 'Bone Bag', 'Never Clever', 'Coping', 'My Ark' and 'Pressure on Julian'. As a result of their commercially-satisfied label temporarily relaxing scrutiny, these new tracks were lugubriously introspective and psychedelic in tone, closer representing the sound Blur had wished to purvey on their debut.

Nevertheless, this proposed album never saw the light of day, due to two main factors. Firstly, when Food boss Dave Balfe finally heard the new recordings, he hated most of them, arguing that the band should be aiming to take over the world, not settle for middling indie status. Secondly, and perhaps more significant, was the failure of the April 1992 single 'Popscene'. Stalling at 32 on the UK chart, it prompted Food to scrap plans for the follow-up single 'Never Clever', and instead ordered Blur back to the drawing board.

A difficult and troubling year ensued, with the band sacking manager Mike Collins for financial mishandling (Chris Morrison was subsequently hired, who they had originally rejected), and a miserable April-June US tour led the guys to the edge of their wits, and to blows with each other. They then returned home, only to learn that their domestic popularity had plummeted, with hot new band Suede (led by Elastica singer Justine Frischmann's ex Brett Anderson) breaking through and lapping up all the UK press plaudits.

Meanwhile, new Blur recordings with XTC's Andy Partridge at The Church Studios in Crouch End were deemed unsatisfactory by the band, despite it being very much their idea to hire him in the first place. Graham Coxon explained in 3862 Days:

I was a big XTC fan. I liked the idea of Andy Partridge producing us. The trouble was that it ended up sounding like Andy Partridge's music at that time. You might want to sound like The Eagles, but not Don Henley, you know.

Damon has also stated that the sessions possessed a strange vibe due to Partridge continually saying 'Don't make the mistakes I made', reckoning that he didn't really know how to be a producer.

Partridge himself recalled that Graham was usually drunk during the sessions, and that Damon was preoccupied with his girlfriend Justine, repeatedly arriving late to the studio. Whatever the truth was, and despite Food's Andy Ross arguing that the tracks 'sounded great', these recordings of 'Sunday Sunday', 'Coping', and '7 Days' (with a samba rendition of 'Starshaped' abandoned) were shelved at the band's own insistence, not even permitting Food to issue them as B-sides. The now-exasperated record label were on the brink of dropping the penniless and desperate Blur.

Luckily, a chance meeting between Graham and Stephen Street took place at the Marquee during a Cranberries gig on 1 October 1992, prompting the guys to fight tooth-and-nail with Food to reinstate the producer of their biggest-selling single to date. The band were vindicated when Street eventually returned to the fold - happily and fruitfully recording together at Maison Rouge solidly between November 1992 and March 1993.

Though a few more serious challenges and hiccups arose along the way (see 'For Tomorrow' and 'Chemical World'), Blur's second album was eventually released in May 1993. Replacing its working title of Britain Versus America, the record was ultimately christened Modern Life Is Rubbish, after a piece of stencilled graffiti painted along West London's Bayswater Road. Gone were the baggy indie-dance rhythms and vacuous lyrics of Leisure - in their place, sharply-observational songwriting with taut, intricately-constructed arrangements in the quintessentially classic British pop mould of The Kinks, The Beatles and XTC.

Hitting the UK top 20 and selling around 40,000 copies initially, the album just about kept the band's head above water commercially. More importantly, it marked an artistic turning point for Blur, laying the groundwork for the epochal third album Parklife, and putting them on a trajectory towards becoming one of Britain's biggest and most critically-acclaimed 1990s bands.

'For Tomorrow' (Albarn, Coxon, James, Rowntree)

A-side single. Released 19 April 1993. UK: 28

Though it was actually the penultimate song recorded for Modern Life Is Rubbish, 'For Tomorrow' was truly the beginning of a rebirth for Blur.

In December 1992, the band had just finished recording their proposed second album. Rejecting the group's twelve-track submission for a Leisure follow-up, Food boss Dave Balfe told Damon that it lacked a single, and that if they wanted this new album to be released at all, they must come up with one, and quick. You can imagine the group's frustration and disappointment after toiling for well over a year on this new LP. Understandably, that Christmas, Damon returned to his parent's house in Colchester feeling miserable, going out on Christmas Eve to drown his sorrows. Rising extremely early the next morning, hungover, he wrote 'For Tomorrow' in the family kitchen, to the chagrin of his rudely awoken father Keith. But it was worth the trouble.

Convening back in London after the new year, the label were impressed with Damon's home demo, hearing the commercial potential in the 'La la la la la / Holding on for tomorrow' chorus hook. The rest of the band were similarly enthused and were duly sent back into Maison Rouge with Stephen Street to record the track.

The shimmering backwards reverb that preceded Graham's acoustic guitar intro ushered in a new dawn of sophisticated and sweeping pop, a million miles from the faceless indie thrashing often found on Leisure. Perhaps one of the most significant aspects to strike on the first listen is the chord structure's sheer complexity when measured against previous Blur releases. There are no fewer than twelve different chords in the opening verse and chorus, and it never really settles in any key for too long. After all this harmonic fluidity, the chorus lands on and stays in the relative minor of C: A minor.

Lyrically, Damon paints a picture of London life moving forth at dizzying speed, full of 20th-century boys and girls doing their utmost to keep up the pace, clinging to each other and singing through the fear and uncertainty. Incidentally, the opening line was influenced by a 1964 track called 'He's a 20th Century Englishman', written and recorded by singer Alan Klein. It was on an album called Well At Least It's British, which Damon picked up in a charity shop. Despite its obscurity, the record became a big source of songwriting inspiration for him in this period and - listening to Klein's song, it also sounds like it could've been an influence on David Bowie's 1967 debut album.

Speaking of Bowie, his presence rains down heavily upon the style and arrangement of 'For Tomorrow', with Damon affecting a high-baritone cockney vocal straight from the Hunky Dory era, and the melodramatic but brilliant string arrangement is in the same mould as the Hunky Dory epics 'Life on Mars', 'Changes' and 'Quicksand'. Elsewhere, Stephen Street instructed backing vocalists Miriam Stockley and Mae McKenna to sing like The Thunderthighs - the backing vocal group Bowie had helped produce on the 1972 Lou Reed LP Transformer.

The finished product blended seamlessly, and in Street's correct estimation, 'For Tomorrow' was the best thing the guys had yet committed to tape. Released as Blur's big comeback single after the disappointing performance of 'Popscene' the previous year, 'For Tomorrow' was probably a little too esoteric to be a big hit. Falling short of expectations, it hit number 28 in the UK, though its parent album came in at number 15 a few weeks later, easing concerns. Blur were still alive and 'holding on for tomorrow' - Just about.

'Advert' (Albarn, Coxon,...