Rockissue

Another Hidden History of Blur

In its July and August, 1995, issues, the British monthly music magazine Select ran an ambitious two-part review of the recorded output of the "Britpop" band Blur, the first part entitled “How Do They Do That,” the second, “There, Told You So...”. Boldly taking Ian McDonald's song-by-song Beatles book Revolution in the Head as their model, authors David Cavanagh and Stuart Maconie claimed to offer the "hidden history" of "the best British band since the Smiths" from their early incarnation, named Seymour, though the release of Parklife and its singles. They interviewed the band members and others in order to dig deeper into the band's history than any other writers had done.

The historical twist, of course, is that these two articles were tied in with the August release of The Great Escape, Blur's fifth album. At that precise moment, things seemed to be going well for the band. Buying into the notion of a "Battle of Britpop" between Blur and Oasis, the Manchester band whose second album was also due for release, Blur's primary composer, the singer and keyboardist Damon Albarn, pushed up the release date of The Great Escape's first single, ‘Country House’, to coincide with the release of the second single, ‘Roll with It’, from the new Oasis album, What's the Story, Morning Glory? Blur's single sold more. They had won the battle. The Great Escape also received warm, at times glowing, reviews upon its release. Any seasoned observer of the ways of commercial entertainment could have surmised, however, that Blur had already reached a peak of popularity unlikely to be matched, while the younger Oasis, whose debut L.P. had only come out the year prior, were still heading towards maximal "market penetration" or some such gibberish concept.

And indeed, quickly enough the situation turned sour for Blur. With their and Oasis's albums going head-to-head, and the latter's ‘Wonderwall’, despite in my opinion bordering on being a crime against humanity in its horridness, billowing the band's popularity up to the levels reserved for the likes of the Beatles and Queen, Blur quickly lost their position as the highest-selling Rock act in the U. K. In appropriately-hackneyed terms, they won the battle but lost the war. Blur then can be said to have lost their exalted cultural/ critical position to Pulp, as critics and many fans began to step back from their high praise for The Great Escape and, in turn, soaked in the genius of the Sheffield group's landmark 1995 release Different Class. By the end of the year, observers saw that The Great Escape was not going to be nearly as highly praised as Parklife. The unsympathetic character studies found on the album clearly left a bad aftertaste (aftersound?) in many ears, at least when compared to the earnest, yet sophisticated and archly humorous, narratives offered by Pulp's Jarvis Cocker. The result was Albarn rejecting the Anglophile "Britpop" sounds, styles, and persona that had consumed his life for about three years, returning his band to an approach that was more eclectic and experimental at the same time.

According to the Select articles, Cavanagh and Maconie circa 1995 mostly wrote for Q, another monthly but arguably more mainstream and definitely appealing to an older crowd than Select, perhaps explaining why they composed such a long piece focusing as much on obscure B-side tracks and a "lost" album that should have come out in 1992 (that is, between the band's justly-maligned debut album, Leisure, and the first of three "Britpop" albums, Modern Life Is Rubbish) as the standard Select coverage of—their words—"what Blur do at night" or the "Brit Awards and backstage at Glastonbury." As to how the articles ended up in Select instead of Q or the weekly music magazines that one would assume ran more material intended for obsessive fans... that remains a mystery to me. After all, at the time I was far away, an American teenager newly in love with U. K. Indie Rock, ever since buying a C. D. of the Smiths' Louder than Bombs earlier in 1995. Following my absorption of the Smiths, I soon latched on to younger British bands, at precisely the moment when the "Britpop" phenomenon was reaching its peak of notoriety. The British magazines where I could read about the "Britpop" movement were not easy to come by, often picked up on Saturday family trips to Atlanta, either at a location of the local Oxford Books chain or record shops in the Little Five Points neighborhood. For many years, I had only the first part of Cavanagh and Maconie's piece, eventually finding a transcription of the second at a Blur fan site in those charming early days of the web.

Their exhaustive review of Blur's songs, even in such truncated or copied forms, was exactly what I wanted at the time: information about B sides, which I otherwise gleaned from online sources (simple discographies) and buying the singles themselves, either online or local record shops like Wax 'n' Facts in the aforementioned Little Five Points or a new shop in my hometown, Athens, called Low Yo Yo Stuff. Or I received mix tapes from friends (again, mostly online sources, meeting via Internet Relay Chat). Finding these singles was hard. Even a transcontinental trip to the Brit-centric record shop Mod Lang, at the time located in Berkeley, California, would only return meager results.

As the years passed by, I began to have other ideas in mind. I did not just want to hear these B-side tracks for their own sake. Though a big Blur fan, I had quickly concluded that their albums were inconsistent (except Parklife), a judgment that to me would continue to hold, to a limited extent, for their darker, “low-fi” self-titled 1997 album. Even their 1999 album, 13, much of it comprised of the most experimental, noisy music made by any mainstream Rock band before or since, was marked to a greater extent by this inconsistency, or, more exactly, the almost-absurd juxtaposition between a few standard pop tunes, one of them great (‘Coffee and T. V.’), three others so-so (‘Tender’, ‘B. L. U. R. E. M. I’, and ‘No Distance Left to Run’) with the digital psychedelic mania of the rest of the album. Overall, something seemed "off" about the way in which Blur organized their recorded output.

Feeling almost offended by this mixed-up nature of their albums, and delving into the band's B-side work, I felt compelled to rearrange the band's discography, asking why certain B sides had not been used on albums. That is, I began to consider alternate histories. There was a lot of material to work with. Blur did not just release original material on B sides, as many British bands were doing during this era of abundant single-exclusive material (record labels preferring to release two C.D. versions of most singles by high-selling acts, even at times reserving additional material for 7-inch and 12-inch vinyl versions). In both number and variety, and whether making available album out-takes, commissioning remixes, or recording exclusive material, Blur possibly released more songs on B sides than any other band. Some of this material was excellent, a lot of it was mediocre; in other words, at least, if not more, inconsistent than their album material. Given how inconsistent the albums were, though, the hiding-away of even a few great songs seemed like a drastic mistake. Only early Suede put more of their better songs on B sides. But Suede's first and second albums, unlike Blur's full-lengths, never veered off-track into dreadful mediocrity (see ‘Turn It Up’ on Modern Life Is Rubbish) or ornery genre jumping (see ‘Mr. Robinson's Quango’ and ‘T. O. P. M. A. N.’ on The Great Escape). Sure, a non-L.P. single has a certain allure: a sign of a band's confidence in their prolific output. But non-L. P. A sides were increasingly a rarity then, even in the U.K. Blur released one that decade, ‘Popscene’, as did Suede: ‘Stay Together’ and Oasis: ‘Whatever’. Contrast this with the number of non-L.P. that the Smiths, the Fall, and New Order put out in the Eighties. The exclusion of potential hit singles from an album was no longer a common thing, yet there were more songs consigned to B sides than ever before. This situation made the discographies of prolific artists like Blur quite a mess. (For a review of a similar situation, turn to the essay on Morrissey, who was still releasing plenty of non-L. P. singles, hardly benefiting his body of work in the long run.)

Cavanagh and Maconie did not merely give plenty of attention to Blur's better B-side tracks, they effectively intertwined the obscure songs into the band's overall history. Indeed, given the large number of songs on B sides, the authors' song-by-song approach seems to mandate an interpretation of the band's history that values artistic detours and dead ends—except that, in this case, the detours and dead ends were as likely to be on the albums as on the singles' B sides. Some of these B-side tracks could have been consigned to a more position prominent in the band's discography, and thus received greater attention, except that the band's label, Food Records, and at times Food's corporate parent, E. M. I., encouraged or forced the band to reconsider the inclusion of certain songs on albums or directly ordered them to record new songs supposedly more commercially viable. The Select article became my guide to rearranging Blur's discography so as to counter both these unfortunate maneuvers and the band's own bad self-editing. Over the years, using programs like WinAmp or burning C. D.-R.s, as my collection of the band's B singles grew, whether in the form of the official releases or the downloads (via Napster or Audio Galaxy) that replaced mix tapes at the turn of the millennium, I concocted an alternate reality. As Cavanah and Maconie introduced their article thus: "The story you are about to read is the hidden history of Blur," I too came to know a hidden history of Blur. Before the band themselves summed up their work with the 21 box set released in 2012, I had a hypothetical complete works of the band drawn up. With this essay, I keep it secret no longer.

The most important factor in the band's history that encouraged me in my strange discographical adventure was emphasized by Cavanagh and Maconie: the lost album of 1992. This was the most blatant of the many ways that Food Records interfered with Blur's work. The band's debut album, Leisure, released in 1991, gave little evidence of any unique artistry on the band's part beyond one of their earliest songs, ‘Sing’, universally regarded as one of the band's best, and perhaps the concluding track, ‘Wear Me Down’. It did feature the band's first and second singles, both hits, both conforming to the "Madchester"/ "Baggy" trend of the day: ‘She's So High’ and ‘There's No Other Way’. Both tunes are catchy enough, and most of Leisure offered more of the same, none of these remaining tracks capturing the same mindless magic (with their simple-minded, downright dumb lyrics and excessive use of backwards guitar) that those first two singles possessed. By the end of 1991, however, the band had taken a sharp left turn. As explained in the article, Blur were "happier with their b-sides", which at that point already included two fan favorites, ‘Inertia’ and ‘Luminous’, and several others suggesting the strong influence of early Pink Floyd and displaying guitarist Graham Coxon's deft layering of electric-guitar textures. At this point in the article, we must forgive Cavanagh and Maconie for mentioning Syd Barrett and My Bloody Valentine in nearly every song entry; the references are accurate.

A session in October 1991 produced ‘Oily Water’, made available at the time on a compilation and included more than a year later on Modern Life Is Rubbish. This track is arguably the band's first essential recording. Let Cavanagh and Maconie explain: "[‘Oily Water’] confirmed what ‘Luminous’ and ‘Inertia’ had implied, that a darker, more glutinous Blur sound was being created," not least due to "the leap in quality of [singer ]Damon[ Albarn]'s lyric writing," which they concur was until that point largely a disaster. Over the next few months, until the "Britpop" sound suggested by another song, ‘Popscene’, compellingly written around the same time as ‘Oily Water’, began to take over, Coxon's guitar experiments became a focal point, while Albarn discovered himself as a singer, veering between mellow, subtle vocals characteristic of his Barrett-influenced early songs and louder, extreme performances that would be heard both when he began to adopt a Cockney, or "Mockney," accent and, somewhat contradictorily, when we could say he let his ‘"freak flag fly"’ on songs like ‘Hanging Over’. Meanwhile, as the Select article suggests, Coxon's guitar feats may have to be heard to be believed. On ‘Oily Water’, besides “‘tap-dancing’ on his FX pedals,” Coxon ‘plays a guitar with all the strings tuned to E, using wah-wah and reverb to create a cacophonous, unearthly, siren-like sound." With Albarn singing through a megaphone, the result is sheer beauty—that is, if you love dissonant Rock that could, in your desire to hear it at its full effect, impair your hearing at least a little bit. As Cavanagh and Maconie explain, plans to release a second album in 1992 fell awry precisely because of the experimental nature of the recordings, which Food and E. M. I. disliked. The possible second album, tentatively called Headist, fell to the wayside as Blur continued to record prolifically throughout 1992 and into the next year.

The Headist that, in Cavanagh and Maconie's account, could have been released as early as spring, 1992, included some songs that, to me, do not rank as album material, that is, they deserved their ultimate fate as B-side tracks. The article describes the situation as such: "The tracklisting included ‘Oily Water’, ‘Mace’, ‘Badgeman Brown’, ‘Popscene’, ‘Resigned’, ‘Garden Central’, ‘Hanging Over’, ‘Into Another’ (aka ‘Headist’), ‘Peach’, ‘Bone Bag’, ‘Never Clever’, ‘Coping’, ‘My Ark’, and ‘Pressure On Julian’. In retrospect, it is a safe bet that the gloomy shadows of that music would have forced people to re-evaluate Blur there and then. But Dave Balfe [the head of Food Records] hated almost all of the songs." Actually, he may not have hated all of them, or at least he evidently acquiesced to the inclusion of four of the songs on what would become the band's second album (and presumably would have consented to the inclusion of the single ‘Popscene’).

In reconstructing this lost album, we do not have to be so strict as the band and label would have been in 1992 or Cavanagh and Maconie were in 1995. Two songs that had already been released as B-sides, the aforementioned ‘Luminous’ and ‘Inertia’, as well as Leisure's best song, ‘Sing’, which contrasts so sharply with the contents of the rest of that album, would have found a better home on the hypothetical Headist. And the crucial ‘Oily Water’, deserves more of a prominent place than it currently holds, buried in the second album. Recorded around the same time as ‘Oily Water’, ‘Resigned’ could also leave Modern Life and make its way to this imagined album. The result is the following modest proposal of a ten-track version of Headist:

A:
‘Beachcoma’
‘Hanging Over’
‘Peach’
‘Inertia’
‘Resigned’
B:
‘Oily Water’
‘Bone Bag’
‘Into Another’
‘Luminous’
‘Sing’

Removing ‘Sing’ from Leisure requires us to go back to revise that album, regardless of how rarely anyone on Earth cares about it. My approach: replace ‘Sing’ with ‘I Know’, a serviceable B-side originally considered as a single, and certainly no worse than most of Leisure—i.e., it fits in with the rest of the tracks, whereas ‘Sing’'s inclusion seems like a cruel joke to anyone attempting to listen to the album all the way through. And, in addition to this switcheroo, remove ‘Bang’ and ‘High Cool’, my choice of the album's worst songs, to make for a 10-track, mercifully-shorter album.

With several of its tracks repurposed for Headist, Blur's actual second album, Modern Life Is Rubbish must undergo some serious revision. Not only do ‘Resigned’ and ’Oily Water’ switch albums, but in the opinion of yours truly and, it seems, every single person who has ever heard the song, ‘Turn It Up’ is one of Blur's worst; it should not have been included on a B side, let alone an album. ‘Villa Rosie’ in my estimation also deserves rejection. However, no less than than three songs: ‘Young and Lovely’, an epic on part with ‘For Tomorrow’ that Cavanagh and Maconie (and Albarn himself) highly praise, the charming ‘When the Cows Come Home’—an addition to the "Britpop" sound more distinctive, with its horns, languid tempo, and whimsical feel, than ‘Villa Rosie’—and a peculiar tune, ‘Es Schmecht’, recorded after Rubbish had been completed and featuring a quirky saxophone-and-synthesizer duet, should have been included. Another song, ‘Never Clever’, for many years only available as a live recording, was finally released in its original demo form in the Blur 21 box, in the process letting us know why it was considered as a single: catchy enough, and with unique contributions to Coxon's catalog of guitar noise, I include it. The non-L. P. single, ‘Popscene’, which the band excluded out of spite because it had not done well on the U.K charts, of course should have been included as well. With 12 tracks remaining from the original Rubbish, we get to 17 tracks. Especially if we are to include the extended, superior ‘Visit to Primrose Hill’ version of ‘For Tomorrow’, leaving the original as a 7-inch edit, we have a double album. Personally, I would remove ‘Commercial Break’ because it is too similar to the other instrumental interlude, ‘Intermission’. Including two such tracks may be too cutesy. Why was a "commercial break" put at the end of an album anyway? Without it, we have 16 tracks, 4 each per L.P. side. And, dare I suggest, a masterpiece compared to the actual album. Take a gander at this track listing, make yourself a playlist of it:

A:
‘For Tomorrow (Visit to Primrose Hill)’
‘Advert’
‘Colin Zeal’
‘Pressure on Julian’
B:
‘Blue Jeans’
‘Never Clever’
‘Chemical World’
‘Intermission’
C:
‘Popscene’
‘Sunday Sunday’
‘Coping’
‘Miss America’
D:
‘When the Cows Come Home’
‘Star Shaped’
‘Es Schmecht’
‘Young and Lovely’

My proposed changes for The Great Escape and Blur's 1997 self-titled album are modest compared to such a complete re-working, while Parklife, again, was Blur's only album that works well enough as a cohesive work to be left alone, that is until their reunion album, The Magic Whip, hardly the band's best work but at least surprisingly consistent throughout. At this point, we leave Cavanagh and Maconie's article behind, wading into the waters of my own listening experiences.

The Great Escape gets a lot of flak, proclaimed by many to be the band's worst album. In all fairness, though, Blur were too talented as musicians, and at this point in their work too discerning as recording artists, to make an album anywhere near as mediocre as Leisure. If anything, The Great Escape should appeal to those who found the entire "Britpop" movement objectionable. Nearly every song stands in stark contrast to the reverie of Parklife: instead of celebrating a supposed quintessential English society, the album presents its characters as living rather dreary, pointless lives. The album alienated listeners not exactly for this reason, but again because these portrayals were unsympathetic. All of the songs except ‘The Universal’ and ‘Entertain Me’ were written in the third person; the snarky narrator condescending to sad souls. The result was an album limited in its appeal, at least when it comes to the lyrics. The eclectic music, on the other hand, offers more. The production is clearer than Parklife and eons away from the muddy sound of Rubbish. At its best, such as the dour ‘He Thought of Cars’ or ‘Yuko and Hiro’, where an empathy for the characters that nearly turns saccharine somehow manages to achieve the sublime, The Great Escape is a necessary counterweight to the jubilant, happy-idiot "Britpop" standard.

As for retracking the album.... Besides the aforementioned dreadful ‘Mr. Robinson's Quango’ and ‘T. O. P. M. A. N.’, two other tunes barely pass muster: ‘Globe Alone’ and ‘Dan Abnormal’. Both explore similar subject matter (spoiled-rotten consumerist drones); the latter possesses a fine rhythmic underpinning, nicely textured as well, but melodically is inferior. ‘Globe Alone’, being one of Blur's obligatory short Punk-ish songs (see: ‘Jubilee’ on Parklife, ‘Song 2’ and ‘Chinese Bombs’ on the self-titled album, ‘B. L. U. R. E. M. I.’ on 13, ‘We've Got a File on You’ on Think Tank) benefits the album by adding some stylistic variety.

A:
‘Stereotypes’
‘Country House’
‘Best Days’
‘Charmless Man’
‘Fade Away’
‘The Universal’
B:
‘He Thought of Cars’
‘It Could Be You’
‘Ernold Same’
‘Globe Alone’
‘Entertain Me’
‘Yuko and Hiro’

The self-titled album, somewhat surprisingly, offers more fodder for revisionist treatment. As a Blur fan who did not limit himself to the “Indie Pop” realm (indeed, I became quite scornful of the self-imposed limitations of such a genre—try having a conversation with a fervid advocate of “Power Pop”; if it doesn't make you run away to the experimental section of your record local shop, I'm baffled), I was happy as hell when Blur, the album, came out early in 1997. It pleasantly surprised the Indie-Rock world nearly as much as Radiohead's O.K. Computer would later that year. But quickly enough, certain tracks did not age well, most of all ‘Look inside America’, a gauche apologia for Albarn's previous disdain for the U.S., and two tracks that rip off David Bowie slightly too much: ‘M. O. R.’ and ‘Strange News from Another Star’. As was the case so often in this era of popular music, including all of Blur's albums, the self-titled album is also too long. Removing the three aforementioned tracks, and adding a B side, ‘Bustin' and Dronin'’, which fits in better with the dense, distorted textures of ‘I'm Just a Killer for Your Love’ and ‘Essex Dogs’, makes for a better album in my book.

A:
‘Beetlebum’
‘Song 2’
‘Country Sad Ballad Man’
‘On Your Own’
‘Theme from Retro’
‘You're So Great’
B:
‘Death of a Party’
‘Chinese Bombs’
‘I'm Just a Killer for Your Love’
‘Bustin' and Dronin'’
‘Movin' On’
‘Essex Dogs’

Moving along.... As hinted above, as much as stylistic and genre leaps from track to track have always been a part of the Blur listening experience, and as well as the shift from, say, ‘Bugman’ (13's second track) to ‘Coffee and T.V.’ (the third track) fits in well enough with that dynamic, two songs on 13—two of the three singles promoting the album, no less—simply do not fit in at all with the rest of the album. I speak of course of ‘Tender’ and ‘No Distance Left to Run’. I have never been able to come up with any justification for mixing these two tracks in with the rest of 13. Indeed, I've never come up with a justification for the very existence of ‘Tender’, to me a slipshod self-mockery that barely raises above being sentimental tripe. Moreover, ‘Coffee and T.V.’, rightly thought of as a highlight in the band's discography, being another single released to promote the album, creates a stark divide between, on one hand, the L.P.-exclusive tracks and, the other, the singles (one of the tracks, ‘B. L. U. R. E. M. I.’, arguably fits in either category). Indeed, as stark of a divide as one could imagine. And moreover, setting aside these four tracks, plus a brief instrumental that closes the album, ‘Optigan 1’, one is left with eight songs that could form a cohesive whole: one of the strangest, "out there" Rock albums ever concocted, at least from such a well-established, commercially-successful act. The argument in favor of this playlist/ alternate history is best understood when considering ‘1992’, a track given such title because it was originally composed that year, roughly at the same time as the tracks that could have ended up on Headist. In the annals of the electric guitar being used as a tool for electronic sound, with his searing climox of ‘1992’, Coxon surpasses his performance on ‘Oily Water’ to stake a claim alongside the likes of his early inspiration Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine or Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth.

Overall, there is no doubt that this abridged 13 takes the listener on an auditory journey like a concept album is supposed to. We could join most commentators on the album in noting Albarn's personal problems influencing the tenor of these songs, but this is not the Sun or the News of the World. Listening to the actual songs, without knowing any tabloid nonsense, a clear picture emerges of a narrator socially isolated (‘Trimm Trabb’, ‘Mellow Song’) due to romantic troubles (‘1992’, ‘Trailerpark’), losing any clear sense of identity in an embrace of Bacchanalian excess (‘Bugman’, ‘Swamp Song’), and finally descending into mental emptiness (‘Battle’, ‘Caramel’). To be immodest, this version of 13 is another masterpiece, and alongside my immoderate editing of Modern Life Is Rubbish, cannot but make me wonder about the permanent, long-term effects of what I call long-album-itis that afflicted popular music in the cassette and C. D. eras into the present. After all, have not many consumers who once listened to C. D.s regularly, as distinct entities, on stereo systems specifically designed for them, over the last two decades switched to television series, on new surround-sound systems, these forms of entertainment offering precisely what popular music used to offer: roughly 20 minutes of sharply-edited entertainment that leaves the consumer wanting more, flipping to the B side, if you will?

A:
‘Bugman’
‘1992’
‘Battle’
‘Mellow Song’
B:
‘Trailerpark’
‘Swamp Song’
‘Caramel’
‘Trimm Trabb’

My abridgment of 13 is a big change, but it at least only removes tracks; there is no addition of tracks or resuscitation of a lost album. However, the songs excised from 13, combined with some B-side tracks and ‘Music Is My Radar’, a single that served as the new track featured on the 2000 Best Of compilation, could in fact have made for another album, a sort of looser, lighter companion to my dark, claustrophobic version of 13. The obvious highlight of this hypothetical album, besides ‘Music Is’, would be that song's B-side track, ‘My Black Book’, plus ‘Coffee and T.V.’. Throw in ‘B. L. U. R. E. M. I.’, ‘No Distance Left to Run’, and ‘Optigan 1’ from 13, the B-side tracks ‘So You’, ‘Mellow Jam’, ‘All We Want’, and ‘Beagle 2’, and you almost have a full album. Yes, I still leave ‘Tender’ out. Again, it could have been a non-L. P. single, between these two hypothetical albums, if you really insist on it not being an embarrassment. Either way, this potential second album never satisfied me until I came across a track entitled ‘“1”’, found on the Rarities Two double-disc compilation included in the Blur 21 box set. This track, one of two recorded with Bill Laswell in New York in the year 2000, is one of the pleasant surprises among the previously-unreleased tracks found in that box. Since we already have a song with “1” in the title, and another with “2”, and since the other Laswell-produced track is called ‘“3”’, let us retitle this track ‘Not 3’. Silly, I know. But the song deserved better (the other Laswell track is more of a throw-away). Given Albarn's apparent distaste for coming up with album titles during these years, I give this imaginary album the title, 2000 Album, fitting in well enough with a self-titled album and an album named after Albarn's studio (founded with engineers and Blur collaborators Jason Cox and Tom Girling) with its basic name, 13. A tracking for this 2000 Album:

A:
‘Music Is My Radar’
‘Coffee and T.V.’
‘So You’
‘All We Want’
‘Mellow Jam’
B:
‘B. L. U. R. E. M. I.’
‘Not 3’
‘Beagle 2’
‘Black Book’
‘No Distance Left to Run’
‘Optigan 1’

‘Black Book’ and ‘No Distance Left to Run’, both "downers," make the album only relatively lighter in mood compared to the new 13. And, admittedly, overall this album would not have been regarded as one of Blur's best or most substantive, but then again it could have been promoted as a minor album, a pleasant surprise coming so soon after its predecessor.

Lest you think that I stopped there.... No, I want to re-order Blur's eighth album, Think Tank [2003] as well, but only slightly. The main problem with this album comes right at the beginning—before the beginning, actually: including a hidden track, ‘Me, White Noise’, that the user can only access by rewinding the C. D. player from the first track. Hidden tracks became common in the peak C. D. times of the Nineties-early Aughts, but artists tended to follow the model set by Nirvana's ‘Endless, Nameless’ on C. D. versions of Nevermind: the track being at the end of the album, often separated by a significant expanse of time or a certain number of tracks that that the user must fast-forward or skip through. That kind of hidden tracks remain accessible. The other kind like ‘Me, White Noise’ require the right kind of C. D. player; many will not allow the user to rewind into the space before the first track, because usually such space does not exist. For example, try accessing the track on a portable C. D. player or a D. V. D./ Blu-Ray player; even many high-end C. D. players lack the capability to rewind before the first track.

The main point being: ‘Me, White Noise’, perhaps the best, certainly the most distinctive, song on the album, featuring a guest vocal from actor Phil Daniels pointedly contrasting from his earlier star turn on the song ‘Parklife’, should not have been consigned to such a lowly, at times virtually non-existent, position. It should have filled the role taken by ‘Jets’, also a long-ish track of an experimentalist bent. ‘Jets’ seems to have been part of a minor trend in the Aughts, wherein song composers explored the potential of repeating a single line of verse, often the only lyric of the song, like a mantra. Smog did it the same year on Supper, with ‘Driving’, and Sparks did it the year before with ‘My Baby's Taking Me Home’ on Lil' Beethoven. None of these tracks exactly achieve what they hope; in other words, they are not Rock equivalents of the Miles Davis Quintet's ‘Nefertiti’. Sparks' song is considered a highlight, but Smog's is the least compelling on an otherwise-brilliant album, and ‘Jets’ is too close to "filler" status, too dashed-off. I replace it with ‘Me, White Noise’. I also axe ‘Sweet Song’, which is one mopey Albarn tune too many—a problem that, years later, impaired The Magic Whip and Albarn's solo album Everyday Robots. Otherwise, the tracking and overall flow of Think Tank remains the same:

A:
‘Ambulance’
‘Out of Time’
‘Crazy Beat’
‘Good Song’
‘On My Way to the Club’
‘Brothers and Sisters’
B:
‘Caravan’
‘We've Got a File on You’
‘Moroccan Peoples Revolutionary Bowls Club’
‘Me, White Noise’
‘Gene by Gene’
‘Battery in Your Leg’

Having written all this, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Albarn's work in this new millennium/ century has not prompted the same concern on my part. Do I care about it less? I certainly have listened to it less, an experience contrary to most American listeners (and, I presume, those of most other nationalities besides the British) who have been more aware of Albarn these past two decades due to the success of his and Jamie Hewlett's Gorillaz project. Even having not delved into his non-Blur music as much, the Gorillaz albums, as well as stand-out albums like the self-titled L. P. from the Good, the Bad, and the Queen or the new Albarn-solo release, The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows, definitely seem to gel together to a greater extent than any Blur album not called Parklife.

To conclude, we should note David Cavanagh, who authored two highly-regarded books on modern British music (My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize: The Creation Records Story [2000] and Good Night and Good Riddance: How Thirty-Five Years of John Peel Helped to Shape Modern Life [2018]), killed himself in 2018; truly a loss for popular-music criticism. Stuart Maconie is a prolific author of books both about popular music and British culture more broadly, and works as a B.B.C. radio presenter. The following Guardian piece about Cavanagh is recommended: John Harris, “David Cavanagh: The Writer Who Saw the Musicians behind the Music”.

–Justin J. Kaw, December 2021