Track Listing

1. Stereotypes
2. Country House
3. Best Days
4. Charmless Man
5. Fade Away
6. Top Man
7. Universal
8. Mr Robinson's Quango
9. He Thought Of Cars
10. It Could Be You
11. Ernold Same
12. Globe Alone
13. Dan Abnormal
14. Entertain Me
15. Yoko And Hiro

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2154 in Music
• Released on: 1995-09-11
• Number of discs: 1

CD Description
Beyond British and sensationally sociological, Blur and singer/songwriter Damon Albarn weave tales of stifling middle class ennui into clever pop vignettes. THE GREAT ESCAPE is another demonstration of Blur's unique intelligence, more of Albarn's witty commentary, and substantial proof that the group may be bordering on genius.
As usual, Albarn's senses are keen on THE GREAT ESCAPE. His ear for melody and sound textures shines throughout the album's fifteen brilliant tracks. The ska horns and spy soundtrack guitar riffing on "FadeAway" exemplify Blur's knack for pop music, yet elevate thesong beyond simple genre-fication, with a dignity reserved for the orchestra pit. The snide humor behind "Mr. Robinson And His Quango" rubs shoulders with the desperation of "He Thought Of Cars", all the while dwelling on what they hope toescape. It's this nagging dread that carries the album--thesense that the people Albarn describes are as desperate to find meaning as Albarn is to capture it within the song's narrative.
THE GREAT ESCAPE may not turn into Blur's great American breakthrough album, but if you're not thrown by Albarn's overwhelmingly British aesthetic, it just might be enough to take you away from the confines of your day to day doldrums.

Customer Reviews

Utterly British! Totally underated
As my review title suggests, this is a truly underated album, and I was suprised to see some earlier negative reviews. Truth of the matter however, is that this is one of the best Brit Pop albums i've owned, and it takes a fabulous satirical look at modern day England.
You don't even need to listen to the album to see the theme that oozes through it. A glance through the inner booklet has funny examples of the things were used to - a competition poster on the first page for a typical modern 'Barretts' home, and a basketballer copying some sort of sports advertisement.
Of course, the music is the main focus, and sounds fantastic on a cool summers evening. Possibly one of the reasons people may have been dissapointed with the album is because it sounds quite different to other material they've produced, but at the end of the day, this is vintage blur. The song Stereotypes starts off the album with some good lyrics, reflecting the 'Vicky Pollards' we see in out and about etc etc. Country House has always been a stand out track, and that probably applies for every fan, with its fun lyrics (and video, if you've seen it!). Charmeless Man follows this route, as does Top Man, and well, many other tracks! Universal was a nice track to include, and though I can't remember too well the rivalry between Oasis and Blur during the 90's, this track demonstrates the lyrical and instrumental genious they could produce. I'm not saying Oasis were a bad band, but for, Blur have always had more purpose with their music.
As the album leads towards the end, there are admittedly a few slow tracks, but since the quality of the rest of the cd is so good, this can be let off. I myself bought the album because of its cover - silly, I know, but thats clever marketing. And to be honest, the cover does some justice - it does sound bright and fun, and 'The Great Escape' probably reflects the desire to escape from the fast lives we live.
Their are few better albums out their that will capture our modern day lives as good as this, and if your unsure, just remember that Blur are not that the type of band to release duff albums - all the songs have lots of meaning. 9/10

The most unjustly abused album of the nineties
"Parklife" had been a massive success. "The Great Escape" saw the Britpop backlash beginning in earnest. Yet the astonishing thing about "The Great Escape" is that the overall standard of the songs was better than either "Parklife" or "Modern life...". Musically speaking, "Topman", "Her Thought of Cars" and even the much-abused "Country House" are marvellous. The problem is the lyrics...

By this album, Damon Albarn was well and truly p****d off. Blur had become a superb pop band, but perversely he felt a fraud. His inner pretentious snob kept eating at him, telling him that he had become the commercial entertainer he hated. The lyrics of "Great Escape" are filled with some of the most scabrous misanthropy ever committed to record. The ordinary people are either repressed, middle-class depressives ("Ernold Same", "Fade Away"), or vile vulgarians ("TOPMAN", "Globe Alone"). Yet if you're a rock star you can't escape the meaningless of the world ("Country House"). The obvious answer would be to burn away the cobwebs with rock'n'roll songs that could both provide bodacious grooves while simultaneously savaging our sick society. Unfortunately, Damon didn't feel up to that. After this album Blur collapsed into insular pretension and that is the true tragedy.

Listen to it, but keep your antacids handy...

Beneath swathes of nostalgia, a great album lurks.
In hindsight, the first Blur album, Leisure, seems like the work of a completely different band, with the style of the whole thing steeped in the baggy sound of bands like The Stone Roses and Inspiral Carpets. It wasn't until the second album Modern Life is Rubbish that the iconic Blur sound began to immerge, with the band taking the influence of 60's acts like The Kinks and The Beatles and applying it to the indie-ethos of 80's bands like The Smiths, Felt and The Wedding Present. Things became a little more obvious on the third album Parklife, by which time the term Britpop had been coined in an attempt to pigeonhole other bands with a similar approach to music.

I personally find Parklife a bit grating these days (...it's hard to listen to most Blur albums because of how irremovable they are to my secondary school memories), with Damon's mock cockney antics coming across as more obnoxious than they probably did in 1995. The Great Escape however still stands up extremely well, with the album fusing the more robust pop elements of Parklife with the wit, imagination and underlining social-edge so apparent on Modern Life. Because of this, the album can be enjoyed as both a conceptual piece (with Blur looking at certain themes synonymous with the rat race and the British way of life), or as a collection of fine pop songs (the singles, particularly The Universal, still sound great). As with Parklife, some could argue that the whole thing is a little too over-the-top (especially if we compare it to recent albums by bands like Franz Ferdinand and The Libertines), with certain tracks like Top Man, Ernold Same, Mr. Robinson's Quango and the single, Country House all slipping into the kind of musical-style bombast mainly reserved for mid-period Divine Comedy albums like Casanova and A Short Album About Love. Of course, when picking off random tracks, the whole thing is bound to seem brash and inconsistent, with this album really tying in with a record like The Village Green Preservation Society by the above-mentioned Kinks (it's worth wondering how tracks like Phenomenal Cat, All of My Friends Were There and People Take Pictures of Each Other would have fared as contemporary pop singles?) by being an album that relies on a certain cohesive continuity that flows from song to song.

The giddy fusion of various musical styles, from 70's punk, to 80's indie, to music-hall, to Europop, to lounge-muzak, to cinematic excess, right the way through to novelty bombast and radio spoofary eventually gives way to darker subjects expressed through Damon's mordant, multi-layered lyrics (which again, draw on a myriad of sources and inspirations including everything, from Monty Python, seaside post-cards, British films, Reggie Perrin, English lit, newspaper headlines, brand names, Mike Leigh, Alan Bennett and of course, everyone from the Beatles, to the Smiths, to "place classic British band name here"). The Universal is without a doubt the most achingly melancholic thing on here (...and is perhaps my favourite song on the album), with Damon taking on the bored pre-millennium tensions of a seemingly alien-being looking down on the bland and silly eccentricities of the British public with contempt. The overall band performance here is wonderful and is perfectly complemented by those wilting string-arrangements, which takes the song away from the dull rock-by-numbers of something like Globe Alone and more towards a heartbreaking waltz that seems to be crying out for a more innocent time ("well it really, really, really could happen!!").

There are other highlights too, particularly Fade Away, He Thought of Cars and Stereotypes, each of which stands as a great work of 90's indie-pop to rank alongside the work of similar contemporaries like Neil Hannon, Luke Haines, and records like His N' Hers by Pulp and Morrissey's Vauxhall and I. Speaking of which, the great single Charmless Man is apparently a thinly veiled attack against the former Smiths front man (Charmless Man = This Charming Man... geddit?), which is hardly surprising given that The Great Escape was produced by wronged-Morrissey collaborator Stephen Street (he produced Strangeways, Here We Come and collaborated on Viva Hate). Still, it's a great pop song, regardless of it's supposed hidden-content, and is a track that works well within the context of the record and with the themes of consumerist abandon and technocratic escape (...it's also worth remembering for that great video featuring the actor, Jean Marc Barr).

The album has it's faults, obviously... I mean, for a start it's too long (as were many albums of this era) whilst the brash production might be a little off putting in these earnest, guitar-driven times, however, to dismiss the entire album for such shortcomings would be a great disservice to the immensity of songs like Country House, Charmless Man, Best Days, The Universal and the closing track, Yuko and Hiro, which really show the band sounding darker and more intelligent than many of their detractors would give them credit for. It's not the greatest album in the world (or indeed, my favourite Blur album), but The Great Escape still works surprisingly well, and hasn't dated quite as badly as Parklife or some of the other records of this era, managing to retain a certain wit and charm, whilst also taking the listener behind the calm exterior of commuter life, to find the dark and depressed sycophantic beasts within.