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The Evening Star isn’t a real British newspaper, but it’s similar to the Evening Standard, a daily London newspaper.

The Evening Standard is run by Associated Newspapers, who also control the Daily Mail, a paper that is typically associated with right-wing conservatives and the middle classes.

Indeed, the Evening Standard has openly supported both David Cameron and Boris Johnson in editorials.

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The word “claret” is used by upper-class English gentlemen to refer to red wine from Bordeaux. This stems from the fashion for Georgian aristocrats to drink Bordeaux red as opposed to other French wines. The lines therefore show that:

  • He has learnt to distinguish between different types of red wine;

  • He has a preference for the more sophisticated and expensive Bordeaux wine over the lighter and cheaper Beaujolais

  • His expensive and therefore upper-class education has taught him to use the term “claret” instead of “Bordeaux.

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In the booklet that comes with the 30th Anniversary Edition of Songs From the Big Chair, Chris Hughes, the producer, talks about Shout and mentions this:

By the time we’d finished it, it was very long, the thing was too long as a single. There was talk about how it had to be faded and how it had to be edited down and all the rest of it, which gave rise to the lyric in Everybody Wants to Rule the World, which is the line about, ‘So sad they had to fade it…

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The character of this song is reading the works of Honoré de Balzac, 19th Century French playwright and author.

Whilst taking Prozac, a serotonin-inhibiting antidepressant that has been prescribed to over 6 million people in the UK alone.

A brilliant yet tongue-in-cheek use of rhyming.

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The year is 1995, the month is August. Britpop’s two poster children and arch-rivals, London boys Blur and Manchester boys Oasis, sparked the biggest chart battle of the last twenty years when Blur’s record label decided to release this song on the same day as Oasis’s “Roll With It”.

Fans of each scrambled out to buy copies of their respective singles in an effort to get one over on fans of the other band, and the North vs South dynamic meant the media ran with it. The newly proclaimed “Battle Of Britpop” made the front pages of tabloid newspapers and even the BBC’s leading politics show Newsnight.

The battle was won by Blur, with “Country House” outselling “Roll With It” 270,000 to 220,000. It could be argued, however, that Oasis won the war. Their album (What’s The Story?) Morning Glory was a much bigger seller on both sides of the Atlantic and catapulted the Manchester band to worldwide stardom.

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This could refer to any number of these stations currently operating in the USA.

Britain was much slower at moving to digital TV – many homes still had only five channels in ‘94. America’s huge number of channels was staggering to many Brits.

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Blur recorded a French version of this song with Françoise Hardy. It was released as “To The End (La Comedie)” in France, and included on the “Parklife” 12" single in the United Kingdom.

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Brewer’s droop is a colloquial term for the impotence often brought on in men when they’ve had too much alcohol.

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“Vorsprung durch Technik” is the German slogan of car manufacturers Audi and parent company Volkswagen. It roughly translates to advancement through technology.
A 2012 Guardian article revisits the advertising phenomenon.

In the music video, Phil Daniels drives a Ford Granada Mk1, which were mass-produced by Ford Europe in their Dagenham plant until the mid-seventies. Its typical Cockney Britishness emphasises the sneering line towards continentalism.

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The chorus wasn’t actually inspired by Castle Park – in their 2009 Hyde Park performance Damon Albarn revealed that it was actually Hyde Park that provided the inspiration:

“I came up with the idea for this song in this park. I was living on Kensington Church Street, and I used to come into the park at the other end, and I used to, you know, watch people, and pigeons…”

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