The Great Escape (Blur album)
1995 studio album by Blur
The Great Escape is the fourth studio album by the English rock band Blur. It was released on 11 September 1995 on Food and Virgin Records.
The album continued the band's run of hit singles, with "Country House", "The Universal", "Stereotypes" and "Charmless Man" reaching the top 10 of the UK singles chart. "Country House" was Blur's first song to reach number one, beating Oasis' "Roll with It", in a high-profile chart rivalry dubbed "the Battle of Britpop".
Released at the height of Britpop and the band's popularity in the UK, the album was a major commercial success in the UK and Europe, becoming the band's second consecutive album to debut at number one on the UK Albums Chart and being certified triple platinum in the UK in less than a year. The album received widespread critical acclaim upon its initial release, with praise for its songwriting and eclectic themes, though some retrospective reviews have been more negative, viewing it as a less cohesive, uninspired follow-up to Parklife (1994).
The Great Escape is often considered to be the final album of a trio of Britpop albums released by Blur in the mid-1990s, after Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993) and Parklife (1994). With Blur's 1997 self-titled album, the band would change direction and move away from Britpop in favour of a more lo-fi and alternative rock sound.
It was reissued in December 2025 as a two disc vinyl set for the album's 30th anniversary with new cover art by Tony Hung.
Background and recording
Concept
On 17 June 1995, lead singer Damon Albarn and bassist Alex James spoke on BBC Radio 1 about coming up with a title for the album; "We've got until this Wednesday, our record company inform us, to come up with it", said Albarn.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Great Escape (Blur album)” is 1995 studio album by Blur. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Great, Escape and Blur, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “1995 studio album by Blur” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1053032. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1995, 1994, 1993 and 1997.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Great Escape (Blur album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.