Blur are chasing a No.1 album with their Live At Wembley Stadium release.
Here, in an interview from 2019 to mark the 25th anniversary, Dave Rowntree recounts how its Bootsy Collins-approved title track changed their lives and began with the drummer chucking his dinner across the studio…
Bootsy Collins was interviewed after Parklife came out and he was asked what it takes for a band to be successful. He said, “A band has to have the funk to be successful and have massive hits. Even that band Blur, they have the funk, deep down, they have the funk.”
I’ve always remembered that, it was really my contribution to Parklife. I came off the beats and I added in the funk. That’s where my rhythmic sense lies. Quite dramatically, on Parklife, I started adding in offbeats and slanting the rhythms.
Bootsy Collins is quite right, that is what it takes, that’s what stirs people up inside and makes them want to dance rather than sit down, drink a coffee and listen. That’s what pop music is, sexy music to dance to. It seems almost ludicrous talking about Blur having the funk, but there we are!
We were recording in Maison Rouge and Rak. We were trying to figure out the start, we wanted it to sound like a bottle smashing. The sound effects CDs sounded rubbish. In the end, we’d just finished dinner and I took my plate back in the studio and said, ‘Quickly, record this. One, two, three…’ Smash. I threw it on the floor. It sounded absolutely perfect, dinner and all!
We were cutting bits out of magazines, pictures and text, and sticking them on the studio walls. That’s where a lot of the ideas came from. I picked them all up at the end, I thought, ‘These bits of paper are going to be important one day.’ I put them in a folder took it home, promptly lost it and, bizarrely, just recently, having moved house for about the 50th time since then, I opened a box and lo and behold the folder was inside. One of the bits of paper had the word ‘Parklife’ on it; it was talking about a new housing development, very much in the spirit of what that album was all about.
Damon [Albarn] had typed out all his lyrics on his non-electric typewriter and we wanted to include them in the CD booklet but we couldn’t find two of the songs, so Damon retyped a couple and the original ones were in the box too! That’s my pension! I’d unhelpfully labelled it ‘towels’ or something.
Parklife was one of those times where everything you try seems to work, it just seemed really easy. The chemistry of the band was particularly powerful; we were firing off each other. We had a listening party at the end of the session and we were thinking, ‘Wow, it almost sounds like somebody else has done this.’ It had a magic to it. It was very exciting.
We were a tiny struggling indie band back then, we had no idea what was going to happen next. Guitar music was so unfashionable, it was going to be the indie chart or nothing, but Parklife changed that. Between us and Oasis and a couple of others, suddenly guitar music became the mainstream. Everything switched and we’d gone from being a tiny little indie band to being doorstepped by photographers and having fans outside our houses and journalists looking into our parents to find out if there was any dirt. It was really weird.
We’d been watching it happen to Take That and all these pop bands and then suddenly the spotlight switched to us.
We used to call ourselves the poverty jet set, flying around the world first class on somebody else’s money and getting home not having enough money to buy a box of tea bags. We were living in bedsits around London wondering how sustainable this was and then it all changed, we realised we could have a career.
It gave us confidence, too. We’d taken a risk in veering away from the sound of the charts and what the music press was interested in. That set the pattern for our career; by and large we always tried to do something different to what we’d done before.
Writer’s Notes
Publishers Warner/Chappell, Sony/ATV, Kobalt
Writers Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree
Release Date 22.08.94
Record label Food
Total UK sales (OCC) 445,640
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