Tag Archives: blur

#1449: Blur – The Universal

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Readers from the UK, it is that song from the British Gas adverts. There will be people out there who would have been introduced to Blur’s ‘The Universal’ through its use on the company’s advertising campaign in the early-2010s. I wasn’t one of them. It was those instances where I’d catch its music video on the TV somewhere, about ’05/’06 time. When it came to ‘The Universal’, I found myself changing the channel, the song’s video would be playing, but it would almost be at its end. It seemed to be a pattern that I’d never catch the beginning of it. YouTube was just in its early stages of being a working company, I didn’t know about its existence. But I did watch the video online on a site that I can’t remember and is probably irrelevant now. It wasn’t like I was missing out on much. The opening just shows a microphone, its cord being pulled and a long pull-out shot of the band as they mean-mug the camera. All an imitation of A Clockwork Orange, if you didn’t know already.

I mean, it’s ‘The Universal’, innit? I think even fans who don’t regard The Great Escape as one of Blur’s finest moments – again, I’m not one of them – can still put their hands up and admit that the track’s one of the band’s best. You ever see the group play it live, it brings the people together. It’s that “really, really, really could happen” refrain, just grabs you. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to pin down what the track is about. It seems to be about everyone and everything. When I say “everyone”, I mean the people of Britain. That was Damon Albarn’s whole thing for a while back then. It’s about being under surveillance, it’s about nights out at the karaoke bar. I think the “Tomorrow’s your lucky day” and “Really, really could happen” stuff refers to the National Lottery, which was a relatively new thing in 1995. It’s a subject “discussed” in fellow album track ‘It Could Be You’ too. The track has a sort of ‘The Future Is Now’ theme going on, heightened by the musicality with the horns and choir sections, but undercut by the mundanity of society as observed by Albarn.

Once I found the video online and heard the whole song in full, it was pretty much a given that ‘The Universal’ was gonna be a tune I’d return to for years. By 2006, or whenever it was, that had already been the case for millions of other people. But it goes to show how strongly the song held up even 11 years from its initial release. Let’s take away Albarn’s vocal, which he provides so effortlessly across the board, from the coolness in the verses to the rousing delivery in the choruses. Graham Coxon provides two guitar parts, the stabs in the left ear and the pretty, fluttering pattern in the right. Alex James alternates between ‘silky’ and ‘busy’ in terms for settings for his bass guitar work. And I’ve got no complaints about Dave Rowntree’s drums, he gets the job done. It’s a tight band performance. But the strings, the horns, the “Just let them go”s from the harmonizing lady vocalists. Those are what takes the song to another level. Imagine the song’s triumphant almost-instrumental last-minute ending without those three components. The section would end up sounding very empty. But the mix of the band and the outside performers altogether, that’s what gets the people tearing up at their shows. It’s right in the center of The Great Escape. I have no problems with ‘Yuko & Hiro’ as the whole closer. But I’ve seen a complaint saying ‘The Universal’ should have been, and I see it. It at least closes out the first half.

#1432: Blur – Turn It Up

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Here it is, one of the worst Blur songs the band ever did. Or so you may have been led to believe. Allegedly, when it comes to ‘Turn It Up’, the second-last song on Modern Life Is Rubbish, the one thing agreed amongst Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree is the hate they have for it. There’s no interview confirming this consensus (that I can find). But you can at least find an one with Albarn in which he says, “[Young and Lovely] should have been on the LP. But it didn’t get on there and fucking ‘Turn It Up’ did.” I’ve got a good grasp of the English language to know that any noun prefaced by an intensifier of ‘fucking’ is not being referred to in a good way. ‘Turn It Up’ is a bit of an odd one on Modern Life… It doesn’t fit with the British social commentary theme that runs through the LP. It does feel a little like something that would have been a shoo-in on the previous, debut album Leisure. Judging by the following linked performance, it was one of the first new songs written after that album’s release. But I want to assure you, as a fan of music of all kinds, but predominantly rock as you could tell from everything else on this blog, ‘Turn It Up’ is a great, great time.

In terms of the lyrical content, ‘Turn It Up’ doesn’t really go anywhere and it doesn’t mean anything. “Kazoo, kazoo, you are mine / Kazoo, kazoo, every time”, “Kazoo, kazoo, your reply / Why do you turn your back on me?”. All a bunch of nonsense. Probably an added reason as to why Albarn in particular does not care for the track in any way. Despite this, he sings every lyric within very nicely, alongside Coxon on the higher harmonies. There are great melodies throughout. And the production behind it all is absolutely massive. Mega. There’s an explosiveness to the band’s performance than there has any right to be on a song like this. I’d had Modern Life Is Rubbish in the iTunes library since 2013, but it was a revisit a couple years later that really turned me on to ‘Turn It Up’. The revisit made me pay more attention to the chord changes, the track’s different sections and the various guitar licks Graham Coxon was pulling off throughout. It pricked my ear towards the thunderous drum work by Dave Rowntree, he’s going all over the place, rapid-fire snare rolls and tom-tom strikes abound. Just made me gain a general appreciation for the track I didn’t have before. Even as a “lesser” track, it’s one of the reasons Modern Life… is my favourite of the three “Life” albums Blur did in the mid-’90s.

Graham Coxon once broke down Modern Life…, listening to each individual track and picking out elements a little harder to hear than the average listener may want to. The flickering guitar at the beginning was created by Coxon leaning his guitar against an amp and feeding it through a tremolo pedal. There’s a rattling triangle somewhere in the mix. I think it’s the high frequency of that which adds the trance-inducing quality in the “Kazoo, kazoo” pre-choruses. And the little guitar run he executes before the first pre-chorus is filtered through a wah-wah pedal. The breakdown is a good watch. I’ve kind of run out of things to say here. Sure, ‘Turn It Up’ doesn’t have anything of huge consequence in terms of a narrative, nor in terms of its placement on the album. It’s stuck in that slot in the track list when you’re gearing up for the ending and waiting in anticipation to see how the package finishes. It feels like it’s one of those “we wrote this and our label really likes it, but we don’t” kind of songs. A lot of side-eyeing in this track’s direction. But what it lacks for in importance, it more than makes up for in its intense energy and forceful performance.

#1416: Blur – Trimm Trabb

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‘Tender’, ‘Trailerpark’, ‘Trimm Trabb’. That’s a strong set of songs beginning with ‘T’. All of them on Blur’s 13. Again, it wasn’t too long ago I wrote about a song from that album, so I’m trusting you can all remember how I feel about it. But for any new readers, it’s my favourite Blur record, I’ll leave it at that. A small number of songs from 13 would have dedicated posts on the blog in another universe. But in this one, like I usually say, the stars didn’t align, the timing wasn’t right. Other sayings along those lines. I didn’t get into a bulk of the album until 2015, by which time the ‘H’ section was the latest in this series. I didn’t even get into ‘B.L.U.R.E.M.I.’ until 2023. But considering this whole thing is covering songs I had on my iPhone between 2013 and 2021, the potential 13 posts would have gone to ‘Battle’, ‘Bugman’, ‘Caramel’, and if you want to make an allowance for the 2012 Special Edition, ‘All We Want’. Those are the ones for me.

13 is the musical encapsulation of Damon Albarn going slightly insane after the ending of a longtime relationship with Elastica front-lady Justine Frischmann. Drugs may or may not be involved. General mulling over heartbreak takes place. And ‘Trimm Trabb’ is the climax of it all. At least, that’s how I’ve come to see it. Here, the feeling sets in. Albarn is single for the first time in a very long while, and he can’t stand it. His fashion sense is in the pits, he lacks a general sense of urgency. He finds himself nodding off most of the time. He’s out in the town, sees drunken idiots around him, notices he’s wearing the same Adidas Trimm Trab trainers as the showy, stuck-up assholes in his vicinity. He’s become one of them. He has no one beside him when he sleeps at night. He has officially reached his breaking point, and it’s suitably symbolized by the screaming that occurs for the last minute-and-a-half of the music. By the end, he’s left a broken man as the dust rises from the chaos, leading directly into ‘No Distance Left to Run’ as the tearjerking comedown.

The thing I have with ‘Trimm Trabb’ is how uneasy it is from the get-go. The odd echoing keyboard, the distortion on Albarn’s voice as he recites the address of a hotel the band must have stayed amidst other indecipherable utterances and vocalizations. Underneath Graham Coxon’s jumping acoustic guitar chords and the head-bopping rhythm, there’s an underlying tension, no matter how smoothly Albarn delivers the melody over the top. The tension only gets tighter when the demented electric guitars come in after the spacey break, tighter and tighter it gets as Albarn repeats ‘I sleep alone’ until the cathartic screaming and awesome riffage marks its release. I tell you, after the twist, turns, interludes and experimental moments, it’s those screams – which you can hear looping over and over again in the middle of the madness – that capture the frustration expressed throughout the whole album. It’s not the last song on 13. It very well could have been. But it’s the last time a representative of the record will be talked about on this blog. Another to add to the list of albums out of here.

#1409: Blur – Trailerpark

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Ah, nice, a Blur double-header. You know I was talking about wanting odd moments in music in the last post? Well, it’s nice that another song of the band’s, especially from 13, arrives right after, because that album’s filled with them. One day in either 2015 or ’16, I decided to listen through 13 from front to back, no distractions. I was interning at a music magazine at the time, I could get away with it. And it was there that I had the proper awakening moment. I found… that I actually really enjoyed the whole thing. The first time, a couple years before, I was left confused, feeling that it was a little too long with those random extra interludes, really only liking the singles I knew. The second, I got into a few other deeper cuts. But it was the thorough listen behind the iMac in the office that did the trick. The way I looked at it was, after ‘Coffee & TV’, the album just goes off the deep end, gets stranger as it goes on. If there’s anything that could be labelled as the weirdest song on 13, ‘Trailerpark’ might be the frontrunner.

The song was the first of the 13 songs to be recorded, but wasn’t originally intended to be on the track listing. It was in fact written for the South Park Chef Aid album. It was called ‘South Park’ before the name was changed. But someone on the other end said no to it. Presumably, Rick Rubin. So the band kept it for themselves. As a result, it’s the only song on 13 to be produced by the band without William Orbit. You’d never really know it without searching it up, ’cause it contains the same kind of cut-and-pasting production style Orbit would use to piece almost all the other tracks on the album. The rhythm section during the verses are an obvious loop that you can sort of hear resetting after a few measures. The punk-riff ending, the best part, sounds like it’s been added on from a completely different session. It’s such a left-turn from the rest of the song before, it caught me offguard when I was going through that relisten. Feels like everything’s been constructed piece by piece, and there is a little monster of a number that comes out of the work.

I think we all know 13 for being Damon Albarn’s breakup album and the one where he alludes to drug use a lot. ‘Trailerpark’ combines the two. In a bit of a melodic rambling mantra, the song’s main lines are “I’m a country boy, I got no soul / Don’t sleep at night, the world’s growing old / I lost my girl to the Rolling Stones”. Some exclamations of “Freestyle 45” and angular, woozy guitar breaks by Graham Coxon come in between. He also provides a “solo”, which is essentially fucking around with feedback, during the instrumental break. Oh, and that bluesy keyboard melody throughout that sounds like it’s coming from a tannoy speaker is very cool too. From what I’ve researched, ‘Rolling Stones’ is code for drugs. What kind? Up to your interpretation, I guess. And the rest is self-explanatory, I feel. For lack of a better word, the whole track is a vibe. Comments I’ve seen about it range from it being ‘lo-fi trip hop’, to sounding ‘like a precursor to Gorillaz’, to feeling like ‘walking through a dark empty mall that closed’. They’re all very valid points.

#1408: Blur – Tracy Jacks

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Only four songs from Parklife on here, huh? That makes sense for me. Really, it should be six, but I was going through a period, when I was doing the G section, where I was questioning whether or not I actually liked ‘Girls & Boys’. I do. And I’m a big fan of ‘The Debt Collector’. But it’s too late to change things now. I wouldn’t argue with anyone who says Blur’s 1994 album is their best. It is a definite classic, a touchstone in the Britpop era. It’s not my favourite album of the band’s, though. The compositions are concise, very well-produced and the songwriting’s stellar. But I’ve always felt there’s something very… clean about Parklife. Like, the songs sound a little too perfect, nearly mechanical somehow. It works for the songs I really like and have written about before, but throughout a whole album, I don’t know, seems a little strange for my ears. I’m probably one of the few who prefers The Great Escape because of this, even if it does get dismissingly labelled as Parklife’s sequel.

All that being said, I’ve still got a lot of love for ‘Tracy Jacks’. It’s the second song on Parklife. I’m not sure I cared all that much for it when I went through the album in full the first time in 2013. But Blur were up and about again. The band had done Coachella that year. They’d done Glastonbury in 2009. They played in Hyde Park after the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. Those performances were on YouTube. ‘Tracy Jacks’ was played at all of them. Had to guess it was quite the popular deeper cut among the fans. And general repeated listens to it over the years made the track more endearing. It’s another of Damon Albarn’s character sketch songs, which he was all over in the mid-’90s, concerning a fellow whose name makes the song’s title. Tracy Jacks leads a somewhat mundane lifestyle. As he feels the end of his days rapidly approaching as he passes the age of 40, he seeks out thrills, but probably goes off the deep end with the biggest act of bulldozing his own house down. There’s maybe a little bit of Tracy Jacks in all of us, but, you know, gotta keep him suppressed because society looks down upon the things he does in the song.

The big thing that gets to me in this one? I think it’s the vocals by Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon. Coxon calls out ‘Tracy Jacks’ repeatedly in the verses, a hook in themselves, with Albarn responding with the character’s situations in each line. And this goes on before the two sing together on the choruses, Coxon taking the higher harmony, coming down on the cathartic “Just so overrated” line before rinsing and repeating. I like the sort of marching rhythm the track takes on during those sections too. Thinking about it further, Graham Coxon might just be the main man throughout the whole thing. Everything from the guitar chords during the verses, the lines he’s pulling off during the choruses, the alternating between the two during the outro, the echoing siren-like wails during the break. They’re all like little melodic trips in themselves, they really burrow themselves into the noggin. After the excitement ad hype ‘Girls & Boys’ starts everything off with, it’s nice that ‘Tracy Jacks’ lets things ride out a little. Contains the same appeal, but just a little smoother.