I feel it’s fair to say that if ever anyone was to think of Blur’s Modern Life Is Rubbish album, its fourth track ‘Pressure on Julian’ wouldn’t be the first that would come to mind. That specific album comes at a weird space in Blur’s career. With it, they began to embark on the whole British music for British people aesthetic which would be their inspiration for their following two albums. But they also weren’t the massively popular band that they would become once that first following album arrived. Out of that ‘Life’ trilogy, as it’s become to be known as, Modern Life… has been my preferred record for the longest time, and while songs like ‘For Tomorrow’ or ‘Chemical World’ may be firm favourites among Blur fans, it’s the deeper cuts from there that have been right up my alley for up to 10 years now.

Actually, it was probably a re-listen to the album in about 2015 where a lot more of the songs clicked and I recognised the record’s strength as a whole. The one note that people may know about ‘Pressure on Julian’ is that the Julian in the title is a reference to Julian Cope, lead singer/songwriter for The Teardrop Explodes, who was also former bandmates with Blur’s manager at the time, Dave Balfe. The reference was only included because any lyrical/music reference (usually done intentionally by Damon Albarn) would drive Balfe insane. However, the song really has nothing to do with Cope, and if you were to have a read through of the song’s lyrics I couldn’t blame you if you were left clueless as to what Albarn was singing about here. I’m not even too sure myself. The ‘magical transit children’ phrase in the first verse was taken from some graffiti spotted during a photo shoot. But all in all, there’s not much coherency within those verses overall. Maybe the whole thing really was just a ploy to annoy their manager. With the “We planned it all this way” repetition in the choruses, it’s only come to me now that that is most likely what they were trying to achieve.

The song is led by this rolling drum pattern that I can only describe as sounding like a train pulling out of a station, joined by Alex James’s jumping bassline and Graham Coxon’s swirling guitar work. Albarn comes in on the vocal, harmonising with himself when the verses build in intensity with what sounds like the addition of more guitars in the mix, before falling into the short choruses that reach a climax with the elongated utterance of the song’s title. There’s also the notable instrumental middle part where the track’s tempo speeds up slightly bit by bit, increasing in tension before exploding into a finish with a climactic guitar chord and falling back into the train-type rhythm established at the song’s start. If only I were into my music theory or composition, maybe I could write this in a way that would make this much more informative to read. Hopefully, you’d be able to tell what I’m on about through listening to the song. And if not, you could at least watch Graham Coxon talking about the track himself. He did play on the track himself, when it comes down to it.