8. Blur - "Country House"

Or, "Has everyone finally realised how important this is?"

“Two of Britain’s most popular pop groups have begun the biggest chart war in thirty years.”

The previous seven posts have all been about songs that were formative for me in their own way but, listening back now, are really just a relic of their time. None of them still resonate today. This song is different.

Well, it’s a little different. It’s arguably dated just as badly as all the others, but this one still matters.

I adored Britpop. I still do. Except back in 1995, it was just an extension of what was in the charts. I wasn’t ensconced in the movement itself but even at age nine, I could tell something was shifting. The mid-90s crystalised so many of my tastes and it’s still a place I regress to, but in the UK, the combination of Britpop, the explosion in popularity of the Premier League, the growth of video games and the imminent rise of New Labour were a heady cocktail, regardless of your age.

Now, Britpop is remembered for its implosion, drugs and sexism as much as it is for the music, football is an immoral machine, video games are too complicated for me to understand, and the less said about New Labour the better. But for a while, the crest of this wave seemed unbeatable.

You know the story by now, Blur versus Oasis for Number 1, a battle royale. What’s often forgotten is that, at the time, these groups weren’t quite the behemoths we think. In fact, they had one chart-topper between them (Oasis’ “Some Might Say”, earlier in 1995) but the media frenzy was such that one of them hitting the summit was inevitable.

And I was hooked. I’d been following the charts like sport for years already, and this was my cup final. I wanted Blur to win (I was never fully onboard with Oasis and, to this day, remain pretty indifferent to them) but the exciting thing was just how excited everyone else was. It felt like vindication. Everyone was giving this kind of thing the attention it deserved. Finally.

As an adult, I have owned a t-shirt with this magazine cover on the front.

I also think this is where my obsession with pop stars themselves started. Yes, Mr C from The Shamen was outrageous now and again, but this felt to me like the first time when the biggest and most famous names in music were larger than life characters. It would only be another two years before I became a subscriber to Smash Hits! magazine (more on that in a future post), a publication whose raison d’être was to celebrate the ridiculousness of the inhabitants of what they gleefully dubbed “Planet Pop.”

I’d love to say I have vivid, formative memories of seeing that week’s Top of the Pops but I don’t. I’ve watched it back several times since though, such that it’s burned into my brain: Liam and Noel switching roles, Alex playing bass in an Oasis t-shirt and—my favourite detail of all—the fact the entire episode was hosted by Jarvis Cocker.

Watching this back, it shows in a microcosm everything that makes Blur one of the most fascinating, contradictory and unlikely bands in all of music history:

• Blurmania being so extreme that there’s a stage invasion (which I don’t recall ever seeing on Top of the Pops before or since)

• Damon strong-arming the band to his own will, hence we have a brass section dressed like the English gentry (add your own comments on foreshadowing Alex’s cheese farm)

• Graham’s obvious hatred for the whole charade. He can barely bring himself to mime his guitar parts properly. While other famous TOTP refusals were often a protest or a joke, Graham’s seems to be rooted in pure shame.

• The fact “Country House” is actually a sad song yet the band (minus Graham) are determined to make it celebratory. You’ll notice Damon adds an unscripted “but I’m happy!” after the line “I am so sad, I don’t know why.”

Back in the outskirts of an unremarkable town, though, this was the sound of the radio and the sound of everything I cared about for the next year. And it wasn’t just Blur. Pulp, Suede, Mansun, Sleeper, Space, Supergrass and countless others were hugely important in forming my music taste, and all still give me a Proustian rush today. They taught me that music could say something, music could be playful, music could be weird, and that music was news. Big news.

---

What didn’t get to Number 1 because of this song?

“Roll With It”, obviously. But perhaps this time, I’ll call this feature: “What was the rest of the Top 5 the week this got to Number 1?” Less catchy, sure, but it’ll do.

• The Original - “I Luv U Baby”

Wild to think that, in a world where Blur and Oasis didn’t have this huge battle, this would have been Number 1 instead.

This is still on regular rotation in my house. A true classic of 90s dance.

• Take That - ‘Never Forget”

This had actually been Number 1 the previous week.

Take That were at their commercial peak at this point but this is probably the point where they went truly overblown. Children’s choirs and six minute singles are two of the main signifiers that you’ve lost sight of what made you successful in the first place. It’s just that it’s usually done by rock bands on mountains of stimulants.

• TLC - “Waterfalls”

This doesn’t seem right. This is the wrong universe.

This is such an undisputed classic that it almost feels like it doesn’t belong to a particular time. The fact it existed in a Top 5 with Blur, Oasis and Take That just doesn’t sit correctly in my brain. It’s definitely aged the best out of any song from that week though.