Blur share “unseen moments” from ‘Parklife’ shoot and restored music video

1 May, 2024

Blur in 1994

The members of Blur have shared some unseen footage from the shoot for the ‘Parklife’ video, as well as a restored version of the video itself.

The clip from the visuals of the 1994 Britpop anthem sees the quartet hanging around an ice-cream van, almost kicking a football into its path. They are also shown dancing in the street and spraying paint on a wall.

In a post about the shoot, bassist Alex James remarked that he had “great memories” from shooting the video.

The release of the archive clips follows the 30th anniversary of the album ‘Parklife’, which the group celebrated last week. One of the defining albums of the Britpop era, it also spawned the singles ‘Girls & Boys’, ‘End Of A Century’ and ‘To The End’ and went on to be a huge critical and commercial success, eventually being certified four times platinum.

Check out the footage below:

In 2019, producer Stephen Street told NME how the album’s title track, which was inspired by the walks Damon Albarn took through a park near his flat on Kensington Church Steet, was “the biggest pain in the butt to record”.

“When we first recorded it, the drums and everything were in time and it just sounded a little bit flat, and at this point Damon was still doing the narration for the vocal. After a while we just couldn’t bring ourselves to work on it. It might not even have made the cut for the record.

“Phil Daniels had been approached to narrate a poem called ‘The Debt Collector’ to the instrumental that’s on the album, a piece about a really nasty bailiff character, and Phil Daniels was gonna recite it. But Damon still hadn’t come up with the lyric, so we had this band meeting, and we said, well Phil’s been approached anyway, why don’t we get him to have a go at the ‘Parklife’ song instead? He came in and that turned into something we got a lot more excited about, and that’s when we put more sound effects on it, dogs barking, glass smashing, had a lot of fun doing it, and Dave went back in to do a much looser drum take on it. Then it went from the back of the queue for inclusion on the album to the front.”

Meanwhile, Blur played “probably our last gig” at weekend two of Coachella 2024 last month.

It comes after Albarn stated in December that the band would be going on a hiatus until further notice, saying “it’s too much for me”.

“It is time to wrap up this campaign,” he said. “It’s too much for me. It was the right thing to do and an immense honour to play these songs again, spend time with these guys, make an album, blah-blah-blah.”

He continued: “I’m not saying I won’t do it again, it was a beautiful success, but I’m not dwelling on the past.”

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