Only four songs from Parklife on here, huh? That makes sense for me. Really, it should be six, but I was going through a period, when I was doing the G section, where I was questioning whether or not I actually liked ‘Girls & Boys’. I do. And I’m a big fan of ‘The Debt Collector’. But it’s too late to change things now. I wouldn’t argue with anyone who says Blur’s 1994 album is their best. It is a definite classic, a touchstone in the Britpop era. It’s not my favourite album of the band’s, though. The compositions are concise, very well-produced and the songwriting’s stellar. But I’ve always felt there’s something very… clean about Parklife. Like, the songs sound a little too perfect, nearly mechanical somehow. It works for the songs I really like and have written about before, but throughout a whole album, I don’t know, seems a little strange for my ears. I’m probably one of the few who prefers The Great Escape because of this, even if it does get dismissingly labelled as Parklife’s sequel.

All that being said, I’ve still got a lot of love for ‘Tracy Jacks’. It’s the second song on Parklife. I’m not sure I cared all that much for it when I went through the album in full the first time in 2013. But Blur were up and about again. The band had done Coachella that year. They’d done Glastonbury in 2009. They played in Hyde Park after the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. Those performances were on YouTube. ‘Tracy Jacks’ was played at all of them. Had to guess it was quite the popular deeper cut among the fans. And general repeated listens to it over the years made the track more endearing. It’s another of Damon Albarn’s character sketch songs, which he was all over in the mid-’90s, concerning a fellow whose name makes the song’s title. Tracy Jacks leads a somewhat mundane lifestyle. As he feels the end of his days rapidly approaching as he passes the age of 40, he seeks out thrills, but probably goes off the deep end with the biggest act of bulldozing his own house down. There’s maybe a little bit of Tracy Jacks in all of us, but, you know, gotta keep him suppressed because society looks down upon the things he does in the song.

The big thing that gets to me in this one? I think it’s the vocals by Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon. Coxon calls out ‘Tracy Jacks’ repeatedly in the verses, a hook in themselves, with Albarn responding with the character’s situations in each line. And this goes on before the two sing together on the choruses, Coxon taking the higher harmony, coming down on the cathartic “Just so overrated” line before rinsing and repeating. I like the sort of marching rhythm the track takes on during those sections too. Thinking about it further, Graham Coxon might just be the main man throughout the whole thing. Everything from the guitar chords during the verses, the lines he’s pulling off during the choruses, the alternating between the two during the outro, the echoing siren-like wails during the break. They’re all like little melodic trips in themselves, they really burrow themselves into the noggin. After the excitement ad hype ‘Girls & Boys’ starts everything off with, it’s nice that ‘Tracy Jacks’ lets things ride out a little. Contains the same appeal, but just a little smoother.