Blur were getting sick of trying to nail what would become the title track to their era-defining third album but the answer was right in front of them in their studio. It is 30 years later this month that Damon Albarn & co. released their Parklife single, having released the album of the same name a few months earlier. The song helped to move Britpop from indie explosion into mainstream phenomenon, but it nearly never was.
“Damon wasn’t comfortable doing the verses, he just couldn’t get into character,” Graham Coxon told The Guardian in 2012. Luckily, the band had invited Quadrophenia actor Phil Daniels into the studio to recite a poem over their song The Debt Collector. That wasn’t working either (The Debt Collector ended up as an instrumental) but Coxon suggested that maybe Daniels could have a crack at the Parklife character. “At the line, ‘There was a piece of my heart’, Phil said, ‘Should I drop the ‘h’? If I pronounce it, it’ll sound more adorable,” Coxon recalled. “We didn’t want it to use a forced mockney accent, so he pronounced the ‘h’.”
