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’.”
“The band and I were already pretty sick of that song,” added producer Stephen Street. “But he invigorated it and we were interested again.”
For his part, Phil Daniels reminisced about appearing on the track during a Radio X interview in 2019. “I used to play football for [defunct music paper] Melody Maker at the time and Steve Sutherland was the Editor and the manager and he said, ‘Some young band are interested in you singing this song’,” he recounted. “I said, ‘I haven’t heard of them and then I got in contact with Damon and we had a chat. He sent me a tape and did it and it was about 40 minutes and that was it. I thought little of it really.”
Daniels has appeared with the band at some of their biggest shows to perform the song, including last year’s gigantic two nights at Wembley Stadium. He says getting to do that is an added bonus. “I’ve been all over the world doing it,” he said. “Damon always said, ‘You can do it whenever you like. I’ll tell you when we’re going to an interesting country and you can come along if you want’. So I’ve been to Japan, South America, America… all over the place.”
He also performed Parklife with the band at their legendary 2009 Glastonbury headline. Watch that brilliant rendition below:
