Blur 'Tender'

Chart Peak: 2

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The highly anticipated return of Blur comes in the form of the mesmerising 'Tender'... Featuring anthemic support from the London Gospel Community Choir {sic}, the single provides the first taste from Blur's sixth album due for release in March '99.

In early 1999, the magazine Heat was launched amid great fanfare. I didn't buy it, but I was curious enough to flick though a copy of the first issue in Woolworth's and one story near the front caught my eye. In a shock expose of the singles chart, Heat announced that they'd tried and failed to persuade any bookmaker to take a bet on the next three weeks' Number One singles being, in order: '...Baby One More Time' by Britney Spears, 'Tender' by Blur and 'When The Going Gets Tough' by Boyzone. Whilst there was at the time a taboo among bookies about taking bets on the chart performance of charity records, this was taken as proof that the whole thing was a foregone conclusion. There probably was some truth in the original accusation, since this was of course the era of big frontloaded sales and heavy pre-release promotion, with big singles often deliberately scheduled apart.  But Heat overstated their case since, in the event, 'Tender' was no match for even Britney's second-week sales and had to settle for a peak at 2; it did have the consolation of spending more weeks in the Top 10 than their last chart-topper, 'Beetlebum' managed in the entire Top 40. People who bought the second CD got two Number 2 singles for their money, since 'Song 2' - surely the best-known Blur song not to make a Now album - appeared in both sound and video forms. However, given my aversion to multi-format purchases, I made do with CD1, in its annoyingly sealed, ruined when opened, sleeve: perhaps they were hoping people would buy extra copies to listen to and get that Number One single.

As you can see though, my copy remained in fairly good condition because I didn't really play it all that often. Blur were my favourite band in the late 1990s, and I'd enjoyed the swerve in direction they took with the Blur album in 1997, so I was actually quite excited when I first heard news of a sixth album in late 1998. I was even more excited when my dad came home from working on a TV commercial in South Africa and informed me that the ad's directors had been sent a tape of the forthcoming single so they could pitch for the video. In the event, they didn't get the job, but it didn't matter much because the clip that was filmed, at reportedly great expense, was never shown and instead the official promo video is a moody black-and-white live performance. A genuinely live one, dubious singing and all, so it doesn't fully represent the audio track and thus isn't the link at the top of this post. However, it does offer a hint of the aesthetic Blur were going for at this point, supposedly a more honest sound, with Damon Albarn writing about his own emotions rather than the imagined characters and situations with which his earlier lyrics were filled. The trouble was, I didn't really want to hear about his personal life all that much and I was already suspicious of earnestness in pop. Although I persuaded myself I liked 'Tender' the first time I heard it on the radio, and never really considered not buying it, I wasn't sold on it, especially its inordinate length. it's 7:40, and the radio edit was never commercially issued, though it's on the jukebox single and showed up on a covermount CD from Q magazine - even the extensive and expensive Blur 21 box has no room for it. Even here on Now 42 we get the full length version, which might be why there are only 19 tracks on this disc and 21 on the other. It occurs to me in retrospect that this is kind of Blur's 'Hey Jude' and like that song, it's not all bad but it's the work of a band past their prime. Indeed, both songs are the product of a fracturing collaboration: 'Hey Jude' was one of the last McCartney songs John Lennon admitted to liking, and 'Tender' features a chorus written and sung by Graham Coxon, who left the band a couple of years later. Parent album 13 is the band's last studio work to date with his full participation, and ironically it's an album where Coxon is responsible for the poppiest moments whilst Albarn disappears into his own pretentiousness or laziness. In that context, this is actually one of the more melodic tracks and it is a good-sounding record with well-recorded percussion and a surprisingly smooth double-bass line from Alex James of all people, plus the luxuriant backing vocals of the London Community Gospel Choir, which make you wish they'd been given something more exciting to sing than "Oh my baby". It even follows 'Hey Jude' by leaving in a blooper on purpose - at almost exactly the four-minute mark, you can hear the very start of the title word being sung at the wrong moment.

There's a good five-minute single lurking in here, but it's too hidden. It was never the same between me and Blur after this, and I didn't even get round to buying the (largely) post-Coxon album Think Tank until a couple of weeks ago. I only paid £2:99 for it then. 

Also appearing on: Now 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 43
Available on: 13 (Special Edition)

Blur 'The Universal'

Chart Peak: 5

YouTube

'The Universal' made No.5 in November 1995 as the follow-up to 'Country House'... Damon, Graham, Alex and Dave have already recorded another Top 10 success in 1996 with 'Stereotypes' - their 7th consecutive UK Top 20 single.

If you're lucky enough to have the vinyl version of Now 33, I reckon this is the start of Side 2, which offers ten tracks of what might very broadly be called British rock, though not all Britrock let alone Britpop. Blur are obviously most people's idea of a Britpop act, possibly even the defining act of the subgenre; but 'The Universal' is rather a different sort of thing from 'Country House' and despite its slow tempo and luxuriant orchestral arrangement, it was a brave choice of Christmas single. Or at least it would have been had Blur not been so big that pretty much any second single from The Great Escape was guaranteed to enter in the Top 5, alongside tracks by Oasis, Everything But The Girl and Coolio that appear on other Now albums, as well as a single by Robson and Jerome that thankfully doesn't. I think it's to their credit that they (and EMI, I suppose) were willing to use that power to try out slightly more experimental material, and indeed that at this point in their career they were making records that had clear commercial appeal as well as being interesting. It was the more self-consciously arty Blur that began to lose my attention towards the end of the century, no pun intended.

The lyric paints an insidious dystopia, made all the creepier by the promising tone it has: it's not the song of a fascist threatening the populace, nor of the victims protesting, but the sound of false reassurance, of a world where people have effectively chosen to be trapped. You'll doubtless find plenty of conspiracy theorists and political extremists who'll claim that Albarn was being hugely prescient about the 21st century, but I prefer to think that he's looking at a more fundamental element of the human condition, and our natural desire for pampering and hedonism (remember what Alex James was shoving up his nose and down his throat at the time) and for somebody else to take responsibility. I don't know whether some of the odd scansion is an intentional part of the unsettling effect (for what it's worth, on the live radio session on the second CD, he gets the "tomorrow's your lucky day" part slightly wrong) but his deadpan delivery certainly is, as is Graham Coxon's understated guitar playing. In fact the only thing seriously wrong with this is that they whored it out to those gas adverts. They can't need the money, surely?

Also appearing on: Now 28, 29, 33, 34, 36, 37, 42, 43
Available on: The Great Escape (Special Edition)

Blur 'Beetlebum'

Chart Peak: 1 (1 week)

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'Beetlebum' marked a winning return to the chart for Blur when it entered at No. 1 in late January '97... The quartet are now into their 7th year of hit-making. 

I was slightly surprised to get as far as seven tracks into the second disc of an album from this era before I got to a single that I had a photographable physical copy of. For the record, I did buy 'Breathe' as a download, though obviously not at the time. No way I was going to miss out on the long-awaited comeback single from my then-favourite band, even though I'm not sure I'd heard it beforehand: in fact, I even went against my usual principles and bought one of the CD singles as well as the 7", although when I later conferred with my brother it turned out we'd both got the same CD. Darn.

You might have deduced from the above intro, and the fact that this song was widely perceived at the time as an attempt to jettison the kind of fans who'd
cheer when they get to the chorus on Top Of The Pops, that this was heading in the direction of me being disappointed. But no, not a bit of it. I loved this record from the moment I heard the intro. For all that it superficially seems to be the opposite of their other Number One, 'Country House', it's actually a very cleverly structured track: yes, the mood it achieves is very different but it does that through a much more subtle arrangement than is first apparent: listen out for the piano in the chorus and the synthesised trumpet in the verses.

Even the difference in tone seems to me at least partly a matter of choice. It's widely held - and no longer denied by Damon Albarn - that 'Beetlebum' is a song about heroin use, probably inspired by people very close to him indeed. So it's dark territory of course but then again a lot of their earlier songs had darker sides too, they just weren't played up as much. And even this track has a melodic base to it that makes it easier on the ear than if they'd worked as far into the free-jazz direction as they'd threatened to. That didn't stop it being one of the least successful Number One singles ever, but it should have.

Also appearing on: 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 37, 42, 43
Available on: Blur

Blur 'Country House'

Chart Peak: 1 (2 weeks)

YouTube

In the week of August 14, 1995 Blur's 'Country House' was bought by nearly 300,000 people - one of the biggest first week sales ever on a single in Britain... Inevitably it entered the chart at No. 1.

A pedant might point out that probably rather fewer people than that bought it as there were multiple formats available. At the time, though, I resolutely refused to multibuy and made do with the second CD of live tracks; I had this idea that I'd bought a second hand copy of the other CD several years later but if I did I can't find it now. That sales figure also accounted for sales of the cassette single but not the 7", which was issued a couple of weeks later and reached the Top 75 in its own right.

'Country House' is the first upbeat-sounding track on this side of the album at least, if only musically. It certainly makes its appearance known quickly, with a thunderstorm of percussion before the brass section comes in, a batch of guitars hammer out the familiar riff and Damon Albarn supplies an almost music-hall like introduction of "So the story begins..." It was certainly these elements of the track that attracted the most attention at the time, as well as other touches like that "Balzac"/"Prozac" rhyme and Damien Hirst's must-have-seemed-a-good-idea-at-the-time video to give the impression that this was something of a comedy song. What was less remarked upon by people who didn't like it (and, I daresay, by many who did) was the darkness of the lyrical content, which is somewhat of a kind with the preceding Pulp song - there's that shared theme of attempted escapes which only lead to disappointment; the major difference being that this song is in the third person and has much less sympathy for the attempted fugitive (there are of course many theories as to who it might have been inspired by). In fact, the use of japery to sneak in this sort of bleakness is quite reminiscent of mid-period Madness, via their mutual influences and I can imagine this slotting onto The Rise And Fall.

I remember an interview in the NME at the end of the year when the band already seemed to be starting to distance themselves from this record to varying degrees, and Albarn claimed that this had only turned into an upbeat song in the studio, which I can well believe: some trace of what might have been its original incarnation survives in the middle section ("blow me out, I am so sad, I don't know why"). Unsurprisingly, the most openly dismissive member was Graham Coxon, who almost seems to be trying to subvert this song with the unconventional guitar solo which sounds like the the sort of anti-solo Andy Partridge used to do on XTC singles. And after a couple of paragraphs of defending the song, I have to admit that I don't entirely blame them for wanting to move away from this. Even at the time, I was conscious that they were having their biggest hit with what wasn't their best material, and time and over-familiarity haven't been entirely kind to it. In fact, controversial as it may be, I think 'Charmless Man' has aged better. Still, there's a lot more to it than initially meets the ear, and I don't think I'll ever dislike this record.

Also appearing on: Now 28, 29, 33, 34, 36, 37, 42, 43
Available on: The Best of Blur

Blur 'Charmless Man'

Chart Peak: 5

YouTube

Yes, I've had to fetch the camera again to capture my original CD single of this. Alas it no longer has the gold sticker that sealed the case shut, but I think you can probably grasp the concept from here.

With all due respect to Bon Jovi (ahem) if you'd asked me in 1996 who my favourite band were, the answer would have been Blur. If any pop group ever changed my life, it was them: not only was the first record I ever bought one of theirs, but they introduced me to a lot of music that it might have taken me longer to find out about. There was certainly another rush down to the shop after school when The Great Escape came out.

My own teenage life aside, this was the fourth and final single from that album, and in retrospect seems like the end of an era for Blur. When they played the singles tour in 1999, they took a break after this song. Even listening to the three low-budget B-sides (one of which is even called 'A Song') seems like a trail for the next album; but of course those B-sides aren't on this album so I should probably get round to the point. And the point is that 'Charmless Man' is no less than a great pop record, whether Blur care to admit it or not. They may have been right to feel that there was no further to go in this direction, but that's really because this is the peak of a particular style. It's a Ray-Davies-styled character sketch of an unappealing upper-class twit with a cocaine habit ("He talks at speed/He gets nose bleeds"), the sort of person Damon Albarn must have met a lot of at this time, and possibly even feared becoming; I wonder how Alex James might have felt about it. As with so many great records, the bitterness is blended with the sugar-rush of pure pop, something that Blur seem to have been able to do much more convincingly than a lot of other art-school types, and abetted by the seamless production of Stephen Street. There's even a hook outside the chorus, when the first verse strips down to Albarn's single-finger piano.

The video is quite funny too, and possibly intended as a swipe at the stardom they were beginning to dislike. In fact, it's only the lead vocal that I could single out as a weak point, and that's when I go looking for flaws. I'm glad they chose to draw a line under this record, because a longer career of this sort of thing would have become annoying - but this still stands as a classic of its time.

Also appearing on: Now 28, 29, 32, 33, 36, 37, 42, 43
Available on: Gift Pack 2CD+DVD