Tag: Blur

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366 Songs 060: Far Out

There’s something charmingly whimsical about “Far Out,” as it appears on Parklife, Blur’s 1994 album that changed everything for the band and British music at the time. Unlike the singles from the album – “Girls and Boys,” say, or “End of A Century” – it’s much less self-assured, starting with the echoey fingerpicked acoustic guitar, before the organ comes in and settles into a fairground ride waltz and the song begins properly. It’s very tentative, very awkward in a winning way, weirdly in tune with the nerdiness of the lyrics, which basically consists of tracing the stars in the sky above us, before reaching the sun and… well, kind of burning out, in its own way.

What’s interesting, though, is hearing the original version of the song (Finally released, in only slightly altered form, as a DVD-extra track on a 1999 single, “No Distance Left To Run”) and discovering that the song was originally something faster, noisier and much longer. As much as I love the version on Parklife, I prefer the “original,” which is much more excitable, eager and – and this may be my own personal prejudices coming out here – confident in its nerdiness. It’s not tentative at all; it owns its nerdiness, as the saying goes, and it’s all the more fun for that.

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366 Songs 053: Sweet Song


I love the sleepy, narcotic haze of “Sweet Song,” one of those things that seems to suggest that the older Damon Albarn gets, the better he gets at creating a particularly beautiful kind of melancholy in his music, filled with vague and wonderfully human lyrics (Like “To Binge,” I guess, there’s a strange power in such a broad statement as “I never meant to hurt you/No no no/It takes time to see what you’ve done” that is, I suspect, as much about what the listener brings to the lyrics as what they actually say; pop songs as rorschach test!). The musical accompaniment, whether it’s the click track, the false start of the piano leading into the gentle riff that floats through the song, or the way the song seems to evaporate at the end, feels just right, as well; there’s something temporary and weightless about the sound of this song, like a memory or dream. Like I said, it’s a sleepy song. There’s something really appealing to me about that.

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366 Songs 011: Dan Abnormal

Of all the albums Blur put out, The Great Escape is far from one of my favorites, and of all the songs on The Great Escape, “Dan Abnormal” is far from the best song on there. And yet, it’s been stuck in my head over the last few days, and when I listen to it to try and exorcize it from my mind, I realize that there’s a lot I really do like about it after all.

Despite it’s brittle upbeat sound (It’s the “La la la la”s, I think), this is a weirdly dark, violent song (“I want McNormal and chips/Or I’ll blow you to bits,” anyone?) that gets even stranger when you realize that “Dan Abnormal” is songwriter Damon Albarn’s name as an anagram, and also the psuedonym he’s used when guesting on other people’s records. I’ve never quite worked out if this was a song of self-hatred, or just using a name that was available and writing something around it. But it’s a song that really dislikes its star, unlike so many other Blur songs of the period – although there are more on The Great Escape than other Blur albums – and so there’s been a weird edge to it that makes me wonder if there’s more to it than meets the eye.