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From Blur: 3862 Days, the official history © 1999 Blur and Stuart Maconie.

'The Great Escape' was finished by the time Blur had headlined Mile End and supported REM at the Milton Keynes Bowl in the summer of 1995, but a difficult choice remained about which would be the first single and the crucial flagship track for this crucial post-breakthrough album. Within Blur's camp, lively debate raged. 'I felt it would be good to lead off with "Stereotypes",' says Mike Smith, 'because it sounded like a fantastic radical move forward and pointed to the darker, edgier stuff on "The Great Escape" like "Yuko And Hiro" and "He Thought Of Cars". I thought it was a less cosy choice. "Country House" is a great pop record. Stephen Street was hugely proud of it because in its own way, it's very sophisticated. There's four melodies in there. Lyrically, it's great. As witty as any Damon had come up with but musically it harked back to "Parklife". That's probably why people loved it. Andy wanted it as the single. He thought it was so obvious that this is what the kids want. We sat outside the Black Horse in Bloomsbury and discussed it. Graham wanted "Stereotypes" but the rest had come round to "Country House".'

'Country House' was, of course, destined to become one of the most famous/infamous singles of the decade, indeed of the British pop era, almost entirely for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality or otherwise of the song. In fact, most of the stories associated with this adequately jaunty tune lie outside the piece itself. It had its genesis in Blur's strife-torn, convoluted history.

ANDY ROSS: Well, it's about Dave Balfe, obviously. No one would deny that. It still rankled with Damon that Balfe earned money from Blur but that is the nature of pop. He'd ostensibly retired on the back of them, though to be fair before 'Parklife' came out, but none the less he did reap rewards from that album and that pissed Damon off a bit so this was his dig. I think Balfe was quite flattered so if it was supposed to wind him up it backfired. Ironic, really, because that song could have helped Damon buy a couple of houses in the country, which he hasn't done. It was great fun. The only annoying thing is that they haven't written a song about me. Or maybe they have and I don't know.

DAVID BALFE: The first I knew about it was when I wandered into Food's office one day as I often did and saw this pile of demos and this one tape marked 'Country House'. Now there was me out in my country house I'd bought after selling the company and I did think, that's a coincidence. So I said, "What's all this about then?" and Andy looked slightly embarrassed and I realised it was about me! I thought it was OK. Not one of their best. I take it that half of it is about me. I'm the professional cynic whose heart's not in it and who left the rat race. But I don't think I'm the guy in the second verse who couldn't drink, who I assume is their manager. At the time I was drinking and smoking a lot and the only pills I took were not for your heart. If you're going to have a song written about you, it may as well be Number 1. When I come to sell that house I will certainly advertise it as 'As featured in the Number 1 hit "Country House"' and I hope it gets a better price for its part in pop history. It's fun and flattering and my son will enjoy it when he's 35.

By virtue of its tremendous response at Mile End and the undoubted geniality of its rollicking nature, 'Country House' became the designated first single from 'The Great Escape'. The only matter for discussion now was the release date. As is the case with any major band, Blur's marketing strategists looked at other forthcoming releases to try and optimise 'Country House''s potential impact. In this case, this obviously meant looking towards Oasis, who were at a very similar stage with their second album 'What's The Story (Morning Glory)'.

As the world now knows, what eventually happened was that the Blur and Oasis singles ended up being released on the same day, thus sparking the most publicised confrontation in the history of British music. How this happened, though, has always been obscured by claim and counter-claim, allegation and denial. With the dust now settled, things are a little clearer.

ANDY ROSS: We did change 'Country House' to come out at the same time as Oasis. We tried to deny it at the time but it was the circumstances that forced us into it. Throughout the year Tony Wadsworth at Parlophone, who's quite matey with Marcus Russell, the Oasis manager, were keeping each other posted on how the albums were coming along on the tacit understanding that it would be stupid for one to come out in the same week or following week from the other. So we had our album provisionally scheduled for a certain date and to our knowledge the Oasis album was to be two or three weeks later. That was all fine and it meant that our single would come out two or three weeks before, which seemed common sense to us. But we made the mistake of thinking that Alan [McGee] and Creation worked on the same level of logic to us. It turns out they had a different idea altogether. They had their single set up for six or seven weeks before the album. So instead of 'Roll With It' coming out two or three weeks after 'Country House', we found out 'Roll With It' was due to come out the week before.

Blur immediately reconsidered their schedule. It was clearly counter-productive for both groups to bring out singles at what was effectively the same time. However, Creation seemed wedded to their schedule and were not minded to change it.

At another meeting on licensed premises, this time outside a pub behind EMI's famous Manchester Square building, Blur's council of war comprising Chris Morrison, Damon and Andy Ross discussed their options. 'We were a bit nonplussed,' says Andy Ross, 'because it had never occurred to us we'd get this single clash. So we thought, Do we put it back for two weeks to make more of a gap? But, you know what it was like at the time. Oasis were very cocky and very much on the up and we knew that if we put our single forward or back they'd say we'd bottled it and they scared us off and quite frankly I wouldn't have blamed them.'

Grasping the nettle, Damon suggested the most forthright solution. 'In the end, I just said, "F*** it, let's go head to head. If they want a kind of confrontation, let's do it properly."' Glasses were charged and raised. It was decided that Blur would shift the release of 'Country House' to 14 August, the same day as Oasis's 'Roll With It'.

Under normal circumstances, this would have added something of a frisson of excitement to the chart rundown of that week. Given the dire state of the British pop charts and the decline of the single as the bulwark of the industry, both were obvious candidates to enter the chart at Number 1. So a straight contest was now set up that had echoes of past rivalries (Beatles and Stones, T. Rex and Slade, etc) but on a much more competitive level.

But the contest had a whole extra dimension. Originally joky sparring between two groups known for their loose tongues, the atmosphere had become decidedly sour. This dates specifically back to the previous April when Oasis had reached Number 1 with 'Some Might Say' and thrown a party at the Mars Bar in Soho to celebrate. Damon went along. 'As I went in Liam was at the door and he came over to me, right in my face, going, "Number f***ing one, mate." Good luck to them, you know, they'd got their first Number 1, but there was something weird about this naked ambition in his eyes.' Later in the evening, a dalliance between Damon and Liam's girlfriend was to bring down the wrath of the Oasis camp. 'The rivalry was all OK at the start. Quite enjoyable really. It was the first time in years that bands had been talked about in this way; that pop had been this important. But after that night it all got very nasty.'

If you visit the press office of EMI/Parlophone's offices in Brook Green, London, you'll notice something significant about the Blur archive. There are a couple of box files each for the years 1990, '91 and '92. A logarithmic expansion occurs in '93 and there is a large cardboard box full; two of them by '94 and so on and so on. No great surprise here: as the group gets more successful, they attract more publicity.

But there is an obvious aberration. One month in 1995 - August, to be precise - has eight bound volumes devoted to it; irrefutable testimony to the collective madness that swept the country that late summer. Everyone of a certain generation can tell you what they were doing the evening that Blur beat Oasis to the top of the singles chart.

The reason for the deluge of publicity, the national fixation with this pop feud, are easy to find. Both groups talked a good fight. Oasis regularly taunted Blur for being 'w***ers' or 'not lads' and even 'southern puffs'. Embarrassingly, Noel Gallagher frothed, 'Blur are middle-class w***ers trying to play hardball with a bunch of working-class heroes. There can be only one winner.' They regularly made reference to Chas And Dave and 'chimney sweep music'. Blur sneered back a little and Damon joked about 'Status Quoasis', a reference to the unsubtle pub-rock strain in Oasis's music. It was playground stuff but it had a certain amusement value, particularly in the slow-moving summer.

'It was the height of the silly season, let's face it,' admits Dave Rowntree, 'but it was great fun. Journalists were being told to write about it. A.N.Wilson wrote about it. What the f*** was going on? We should have won an award for marketing genius. We should take consultancy posts with major advertising companies. Not since The Beatles and Stones, blah blah blah ... but they didn't do anything like this. No one had done it before. If you're gonna sell records with gimmicks they've got to be f***ing good gimmicks and this was. I bumped into Liam in a toilet, mysteriously enough, at the height of it all, and I said to him, "This is all bollocks, isn't it?" He said, "Yeah, of course, but it sells records, doesn't it?"'

Bollocks, indubitably, but there was another reason why the nation took up cudgels so swiftly. As Alex James has pointed out, 'Everyone could project something of themselves, some prejudice, into the debate. It was class war and regional differences and all that stuff.'

The Evening Standard ran a piece on the class ramifications of the contest. The Times, the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph, august breakfast reading of the pinstriped classes, all ran leaders on the issue. Pat Kane, as is customary at such times, delivered himself of a breathtakingly dull socio-political analysis in the Guardian. CNN carried it in their broadcasts. The Oslo Times put the story on their front page. Tabloids ran splurges about Mandy and Richard Vivien-Thomas, who were filing for divorce over their divided loyalties. A million unfunny cartoons were born. Damien Hirst, now the country's most high-profile artist and friends with Alex for the second time, was enlisted to make his first ever pop video. The result was a moderately tiresome 'post-modern' bucolic romp modelled on the puerile Benny Hill routines of the 1970s. It features, inevitably, Keith Allen as the song's protagonist plus the band in various daft outfits and situations and what the rash of men's magazines would term a 'bevy of beauties' - notably Sarah Stockbridge and Jo Guest, giggling, pouting and exposing cleavage to the camera. 'At the time,' reflects Dave, 'I thought it could be quite interesting because Damien Hirst delights in pissing off the same people we do but in the end I don't think he had any ideas. I think he was just interested in working in another media. Really, it's the video Alex would have made.'

It would all have been rather forgettable but for the further couple of inches' extra torque it added to the rack Graham Coxon felt he was on.

On the Wednesday before the chart was issued, Damon Albarn hosted a TV special, 'Britpop Now', a showcase for the likes of Sleeper, Pulp, Elastica, Supergrass and the new Blur single, from which Oasis had pointed absented themselves. All week, the papers and the nation talked of little else: Creation had had obscure barcode difficulties, EMI had shipped about 300,000 copies of the Blur single by Wednesday, the records were neck and neck in terms of airplay, though the midweek sales put Blur ahead by about ten sales to every nine of Oasis.

At 7pm on Sunday evening, most of the country not lounging poolside on the Continent was ensconced by a radio. The Blur camp were geographically scattered. Chris Morrison was on holiday with his family in a remote Scottish cottage where his mobile phone was inoperative and thus had spent the week making pilgrimages to the isolated payphone with pockets of change to ring EMI's biggest wigs for updates and at night driving to the highest point of a deserted moor to check on Elastica's progress on their US tour. Damon had just returned from Mauritius where he'd been visiting his father who was lecturing there. His recollections reflect the growing blackness of the group's mood.

DAMON ALBARN: It was a horrible day, no pleasure at all. I'd gone to Mauritius to get away from it. When I got back, it was like a bloody election. The music had become immaterial. On the day, I was playing football in Regent's Park and Graham, really pissed, turned up at half-time with Andy Ross and then the day just got more and more unpleasant.

More congenially, Dave Rowntree was flying his light aircraft back from a holiday in the South of France. 'I was coming home with my wife. We were flying back for the party. I was asking the air-traffic controllers for the chart on the way back in. Control Tower at Elstree Aerodrome told me as I came in to land. I wasn't enormously surprised. Damon threatened pretty much everyone with the sack if we lost. All the management, everyone at EMI.'

In the end, Andy Ross puts Blur's victory down to that curse of the modern single, formats. 'It's that boring. We did two CDs and a cassette, I think, and they had two CDs and a seven-inch single. Our cassette outsold their seven-inch something ludicrous like twenty to one. If it had been the other way round they would have gone to Number 1. All a bit daft really.' None the less, 280,000 sales later, Alex wore an Oasis T-shirt for Blur's triumphant 'Top Of The Pops' appearance, explaining, 'It was a magnanimous gesture. I think they are a great band and this is the defining moment of Britpop. It's not Blur versus Oasis. It's Blur and Oasis versus the world.'

It's a great irony that the ultimate slug-out between Britpop's two definitive bands should have been fought between two of their worst songs. In the canon of either band, 'Country House' and 'Roll With It' do not rank highly. 'Roll With It' is, simply, a carthorse dragging behind it a cargo of awful formulaic 'boogie' best suited to a Status Quo B-side circa 1978. 'Country House' is vastly better but still no great shakes. Its best feature, the muted 'Blow me out, I am so sad' refrain, is buried beneath The Kick Horns' turgid oompahing and the clod-hopping time signature. Graham and Alex have a go with some sprightly embellishments but the result is one of Blur's weakest moments - though this is still a bone of contention in the camp. Andy Ross will 'grudgingly admit that Oasis have a few good tunes but "Roll With It" isn't one. I think "Country House", on the other hand, is a good song. The peak of that British bombastic oompah period of Damon's. I think it was very much a Kinks record and any criticism you level at "Country House" could be levelled at Ray Davies. It's a music hall record but a very good one. It certainly caught the imagination of people at the time.'

GRAHAM COXON: I grew to loathe it. It started out really well with that nice middle eight but turned into this oompah thing. If you take all the brass out it's not half as bad. But it came out with these huge, very obvious, horribly catchy garish brass hooks all over the place. It was too much. It seemed insincere and cynical. Like a great big trailer filled with money on the back of a fat man's car.

But it was, as The Beatles famously said, 'toppermost of the poppermost'. That night, the band and their entourage gathered at the Soho House club to celebrate their domination of British pop. It was a curious evening. Drink flowed freely and backs were slapped but there was an undercurrent of anxiety. Just to spell this out, the evening finished with Graham, blind drunk and in foul, lachrymose temper, attempting to throw himself out of the window. 'I listened to the chart countdown in the Soho House with a bunch of EMI people. I was really trying to hold in my feelings about the situation. But I drank a lot and spilled wine all over people. I was a bit of an arsehole but the mood was so self-congratulatory. Everyone was telling me that I ought to be happy. In the end I tried to jump out of the window.' As pop star revels go, then, it was interesting.