While each of Blur’s albums to this point had been studded with moments of melancholy beauty, Damon Albarn’s songs were never explicitly personal, the singer preferring to cloak any autobiographical elements in character studies. Without Coxon’s contribution, the song would be a beautiful and bruised piano ballad – one of Albarn’s finest, even – but the guitarist adds to the emotional heft by summoning great storms of distortion and an eloquent descending solo as a parting shot, underling just how much the best Blur songs relied on his original talents. The sense of loss is mirrored by the music.
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It’s one of a series of songs that explore Albarn’s relationship with Coxon (see also: My Terracotta Heart, Sweet Song), with the singer attempting to look back fondly on their time together, announcing, “This is a ballad for the good times,” before offering Coxon an olive branch (“But you know you’re not alone/You can be with me”). The result was a record on which the gifted guitarist barely featured, contributing only to the closing track, Battery In Your Leg. Though he’d taken part in early recording sessions for Think Tank, Graham Coxon’s relations with the band soured to the extent that he left long before the album was completed. The public were not quite ready for brass-propelled punk blasts (the single stalled at No.32 on the UK chart), but it remains a defining moment in the band’s early history.ġ4: Battery In Your Leg (from ‘Think Tank’, 2003) While it sounds like a celebration of a bright new scene (indeed, it’s considered to be one of the songs that kicked off Britpop), listen closer and you’ll hear Albarn brattily comparing himself and other musicians to clones going through the motions – a theme he’d return to regularly throughout Blur’s early albums. These 20 best Blur songs reveal how that happened… Listen to the best of Blur here, and check out our 20 best Blur songs, below.įollowing the baggy stylings of their debut album, Leisure (1991), the fizzy noise-pop of Popscene marked the point where Blur really began to find themselves. But they refused to be pigeonholed, moving on to more experimental material and creating one of the greatest catalogues in modern British music. From their indie beginnings, Blur – Damon Albarn (vocals), Graham Coxon (guitars), Alex James (bass) and Dave Rowntree (drums) – became household names as one of the leading groups in the Britpop movement.
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