One Song - Blur's " Song 2"

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

This week, we’re turning the amps all the way up and diving deep into Blur’s explosive, ridiculous, accidentally immortal anthem “Song 2.” Diallo & LUXXURY break down how a two-minute blast of blown-out drums, filthy guitars, and one unforgettable “woo-hoo” became one of the loudest pieces of late-90s pop culture. The guys get into Blur’s post-Britpop reinvention, Damon Albarn’s restless creative brain, Graham Coxon’s chaotic guitar energy, and the question at the center of the whole song: was “Song 2” a joke, a parody, or just a perfect rock record by accident? Along the way, they trace how the track jumped from the studio to sports arenas, commercials, video games, trailers, and TV — plus the early signs of the next band Damon Albarn would create. Songs Discussed: "Song 2" - Blur "There's No Other Way" - Blur "I'm Free" - The Soup Dragons "Bettle Bum" - Blur "Sing" - Blur "Sing (Original Version) - Seymore "On Your Own" - Blur "Song 2 (Unplugged Version)" - Blur "All Day All Of The Night" - The Kinks "Hate To Say I Told You So" - The Hives "Woo Hoo" - The Rock-A-Teens "Woo Hoo" - The 5,6,7,8's "Bug Man" - Blur Diallo & LUXXURY talk about music! One Song Spotify Playlist Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One, two, three, four. Sounds right, man. It's ya! Luxury. Today, we're diving into a song that turned two minutes, a scream, and a wall of distortion into one of the most recognizable rock records of the 1990s. A song that somehow became Blur's biggest doorway into America, even though it was never really supposed to be the full picture of who Blur was.

That's right, Diyah. And we could not talk about this song without talking about where it lands in Damon All Barn's career. So today's episode is part one of a two-part story, where we start with. with Blur and a pivotal moment in Damon Albarn's career before following him into the world of guerrillas. Today we're talking David Alburn, Blur, and the accidental anthem that became one of the defining rock singles of the decade. This is one song, and today that song is Song 2 by Blur. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick.

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Diallo has really held back on literally your favorite band, right? So much restraint. So much restraint, but we finally got there. This is the Damon Auburn episode we've been waiting to make from day one, so we can't wait to launch into the Damon and the blur of it all with you guys. I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes DJ, Diyala Riddle. And I'm producer, DJ, and songwriter and musicologist luxury, a.k.a. the guy who whispers interpolation.

And this is one song. The show where we break down the stems and stories behind iconic songs across genres to tell you why they deserve one more deeper listen. You will hear these songs like you've never heard them before. And you can watch one song on YouTube and Spotify. While you're there, please like and subscribe. All right, let's get started. Diallo, when did you first, her blur?

Fun story. I was actually, Bashir, my writing partner, we were getting kicked out of Amagi's, which was a bar restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. What'd you do? We were just having too much fun, man. You know, like at one point the songs got ridiculously good, and I think that we might have hopped up onto the bar

and thought we could dance with the girls and the establishment didn't want that kind of entertainment. I see, I see. So they tossed us out. No, it wasn't. So they actually tossed us out. But the fun fact is we were getting tossed out. We just graduated from Harvard not that long ago.

We were just getting kicked out. And one of our friends was just like, oh man, what a great night. Didn't you love it when they played that song by Blur? I was like, which song was that? It was like, it was the one with the lyrics that don't make any sense. I can see his face to this day. He was just like, it's the one where he says,

I got my head checked by a jumbojack. And I was like, and the lyric made me laugh. I was like, yeah, that's wonderful. Very funny. Like, does not make any sense. And so I went out and I sought that song. I might have bought the single. Maybe I bought the album.

But either way, I went out and I was like, holy shit, I like all these songs. And so then, you know, as one would do back then, I went back and I bought all their albums. And some of them I liked more than others. That was your doorway into the band. That was my doorway into the band. It was just one crazy night of sunset strip.

That song was played. The ground went nuts. Can we just point out that it's, to me, unusual that he would have referred alluded to the song not by that part where it goes woo-hoo. That would seem to be the easier way to like refer to something that you didn't know what it was when it was happening. He went straight for the jumbo jet though. He thought jumbo jet was so funny and I thought it was funny too and Bashir and I were just like yeah that seems like a really cool band you know because like they just seemed cool at the time this band blur but it's one of those things

where like it accomplished the mission it was supposed to accomplish which was it got it caught my ear and then all of a sudden I'm deep diving through all their stuff. And I might have heard There's No Other Way, which is another great blur song. I might have heard that maybe on rock radio back in Atlanta, back when it first came out. And to this day, there's no other way. It's still one of my favorite songs by them. There's no other way. That song is so great, but it's so interesting to hear it now,

contrasting with song too. They're very different songs. Oh, it's almost like very different bands. They don't like different bands. I would say. some more of a Madchester kind of late 80s, early 90s thing. You can imagine Liam Gallagher coming in on There's No Other Way. Or she's so high in particular.

Right. Or may I say Soup Dragons because my friend Sean from that band was mad at me. Last time when I mentioned the Soup Dragons in passing, Sean, love your band, love. High-Fi, Sean. Soup Dragon's great band, it could have been a soup dragon song. I think that's more of a reasonable connection there. And I'm also trying to make nice.

Don't hate me, Sean. Given the very different paths that Oasis and Blur went down, can I just say, I am a fan of both. It's the same way I like Tupac and Biggie. You know what I mean? Like, I loved Blur. I loved Oasis at the same time. But the band that recorded She's So High could have easily gone into the Oasis.

In fact, it sounds like a song that you can imagine Liam coming in singing over. Yeah. But by the time, even as early as like the Park Life album, which I think is one of the best albums of the 90s.

Yeah. Blur has staked out a distinctly quirky, nerdy, sort of like British sound. It's a very quirky, it's a very quirky time. I think of the UK,

like the whole Britpop movement, it's sort of a celebration of the UK. And I feel like Blur attacks it from a very different point than their Mancunian rivals. Counterparts, right? That's a perfect opportunity.

We do have to talk about two things. both Britpop, the musical movement, the genre, created by NME and Melody Maker and Sounds, but also a real phenomenon where there are a bunch of bands, Elastica would be one, maybe supergrass, swayed. Pulps Common People. 100%.

What a great song, what a great album that that one comes off of. And I just feel like that was when they were really establishing a sound distinct from the new wave of the 80s, even the jangley guitars that we would call Manchester. Yeah, but it was harkening back to kind of a 60s, Britannica, like kind of a love for that Lincoln was alive. Waterloo

Sunset era, kinks and Beatles and the Stones and the Who. There was just sort of a resurgence of love and admiration for those bands. And specifically London, because I think this is the London of David Beckham, this is the London, ironically of an American movie, Austin Powers, that celebrates this period.

Right, but they got it kind of right. The Beatles are releasing their anthology. And then you've got one band, you know, Oasis, it sounds very beetly in one way. But I would argue that Damon without sounding beately, it also sounds like you said, like a band that could have existed, sort of a modernization of that 60s London sound. And it's interesting to make the parallel, too, because as much as Oasis very much stays within the lane, I would argue, like, they're a Beatles loving band. And every now and then, they're kind of a stonesy loving band. And there's a little

T-Rex that gets thrown in now and then a little Gary Glitter. For the most part, they stay in that lane throughout their whole career. They've always said, the first track on this, the track before song, too, on this album is called Beatlebum. for a purpose. Oh, I never made that connection. Oh, beetle bum is great. Let's listen to a little bit of beetle bum. It's funny because you hear the Beatles,

but it's also not the Beatles. It's also not. No, it's a song singing in celebration of the Beatles, but it doesn't sound like, hey, I'm going to do what the Beatles have done. Just real quick, he said it right, and I'm just going to stay for the record. This is one of those groups I know almost their entire catalog

to the extent which this episode, when I inevitably go back and listen to it, will disappoint me. Because I'll be like, why didn't I bring up seeing? I know that feeling, man. Which was that song on the train spotting soundtrack, which was incredible,

but was originally recorded as the song, Sing to Me, by their previous group. Before they were blur, they were called Seymour, named after the J.D. Sallengue. There are going to be crumbs

that you leave on the table. It's part of the tragedy. I don't want to leave no crumbs. It's part of the agony of doing this show. I don't want any crumbs. It's only an hour long, and it's only one song, but it's still, we understand.

I understand you perfectly, man. Listen, real quick. Listen to a little bit of sing from the train spotting soundtrack. Have we talked about this on an episode that this soundtrack we both maybe love as our favorite ever soundtrack? It's one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. I think we share this. I think we were guests on a podcast. I think that's what we like.

We'll do a special one-off call one album or one soundtrack. There we go. And we'll talk about it. But that was Singh. Here's the original 1989 version back when they were called Seymour. Once again named after a JD Soundier book, Nerds. Check this out. That piano almost sounds like out of tone.

Out of tone. He's throwing a couple notes in there that are not in the chord, but like, you know, they're spicy notes, but it sounds cool and messy, which, by the way, is a connection to both of the songs on both of the episodes we're talking about today. And what a great reminder, too, of where they were coming from,

because that's such an era, that sound and that the Britpop thing, we're done with that. In song, that's not there anymore, and this song is kind of an erasure of that. Song, too, in some ways is, there's a song on this Blurrub album called Death of the Party. Yeah.

And I do feel like, to a certain extent, in a very short period of time, London might have partied itself out in the Brock bands of the Britpop era. That's right. We're sort of seeing themselves replaced by more of the poppy spice girls. Just to put dates on this chronology. So if in 1994, it starts to be used. Technically, I've read that in 1992, Damon himself thinks that blur began to use the word Britpop.

By 94, it's definitely in the common parlance. And that means that the British papers are using it constantly to sell copies of Ed me, and melody maker and sounds. 1995 is the famous blur versus OASIS showdown. Absolutely. Where they both come out with their singles at the same time. It's a rivalry. I think Oasis is

thought to have won that particular rivalry in terms of sales. In terms of sales and the fact that they were able to break into the American market, which no, I mean, like go, you know, America never celebrated Swade or Pulp or any of these bands. Or Swade got lumped into that whole like

Swade UK thing that some bands they come over the pun. The Charlottons, Right. They have to add the UK at the end, Wham UK. Wham UK? I didn't know about Wham. There was a Wham UK thing too. So that means there was a U.S. There was a Wham already. I don't know that there was a WAMU.S.

Listen. Swade are great though. Or I think they might have been called the U.K. Swate, even worse. Oof, that's terrible. That was a great band. Something is stick in your pocket for now. Yeah.

I don't know why I said it like that. Something put in your back pocket for now. Remember, I said that they did sing to me, and it was kind of faster and peppy. By the time we get to 96, they slow it one. down, the heroin is in this from train spotting, sing is much slower. Remember that because temples are going to play a role in the conjuring, if you will, of song too. That's absolutely right. Just to finish the chronology by 1997, when this song comes out, we're post-Brit pop. It's all over. At this point, you know, not for all of us. I was just discovering it. But I didn't have the sense

that I was coming in on the party late and that people were leaving. Oasis's Be Here Now was considered kind of a flop at this moment. There was a sense that the party was over to your point of the song on this record. You know, we've got the Verve, Bitter Sweet Symphony is coming out in the same year. They're going to play a part in the Damon Albarns story. We've got Radiohead OK computer and cold play. There's sort of a new rising post-brit pop

sound that's coming out at this point. Absolutely. I don't mean to take up all the blur air luxury, so I do want to ask you, how did you first hear a song too? Well, this is an MTV story. You know, I grew up watching 120 minutes every Sunday night and then the young ones. That was like... Alternative rock curated for the curious. 100%.

And this is where I first was exposed to, or one of the ways, because I was also listening to Live 105 in the Bay Area, but like the Smiths, the Cured, the Depeche Mode, all of these English bands really mattered to me because first of all, the music was great, but they also felt like an alternative and better source than just what the kids at my school were listening to an American radio. There was a sort of vibe that these were the things to listen to that were cooler, frankly.

Like, I don't have a better word than that. It felt cooler. It felt a little more mysterious. And of course, genuinely, I loved the music itself. So this is a few years after that. This is the next generation into the 90s. But all of the bands we've been talking about, I wasn't getting from Top 40 Radio in America.

I'm getting them from, I am reading these magazines. You're reading enemy. I'm reading enemy. I am watching whatever the remnants of 120 minutes was. So there was this idea that they were cool, and I needed to pay attention to what this battle was, you know, between Blur and Oasis, for example. And what's wild is this is the same self-title blur album

that not only gives you a song too, but it also has a song that I never thought I'd have a chance to talk about. On Your Own, one of my favorite songs that's been described by Damon himself as one of the early guerrilla song. Let's check out a little bit of On Your Own. All right. It's so loud as it sounds like a drunken pub sing-along. It's a pub song.

Whose lyrics are totally garbled by the drunkenness of the singers. We'll all be the same. In other words, we'll be dead. We'll all be dead. Okay. Until then, you're on your own. Is that the lyric you were pointing out to me? No, the line that I thought was interesting,

because I didn't know that until we started researching this episode. Okay. When he said that he considers this an early guerrilla song, the chorus starts, so take me home, don't leave me alone. I'm not that good, but I'm not that bad. No psycho killer, hooligan gorilla. So the word gorilla is actually in the chorus of the song.

And the second I read, oh, one of the early guerrilla songs, he actually says gorilla in the chorus. A seed was lain A seed was laid Soccer hooligan, maybe so Shout out to the World Cup It was very hooliganish Shout out for me

That was a very hooliganish sounding song It's a little hooligan but it's a fun It's a fun What's ironic is that Blurf fans thought this album was so dark I had been listening to hip hop Pretty much exclusively since 91 By the time this album came out

And just like you were saying You were looking for an alternative From some of the rock bands you were for it I was looking for an alternative You gotta remember 97 Tupac's dead, Biggie's dead. Puffy has taken over all of hip hop. So 97-98 is when I decided, you know what, I got to listen to more than hip-hop for the first time in like six years.

What am I going to really listen to? And Rip Pop just came. There was a night here in L.A. called Bang. And I feel like some of the party throwers, some of the founders of that night might listen to the show. Shout out to Bang because it was a place that I could go once a week and hear all this stuff played loud. It's one thing when you're like driving around town. you're just streaming your own music and your own your own little bubble. But it's something else to go someplace and hear music that you think it's kind of obscure,

but suddenly it's being played loud among a bunch of like-minded individuals. That's exciting. It's community. And I didn't know that I had a community of a whole bunch of people who obsessed over blur lyrics like I did. So that was a lot of fun. You know what you're making me realize, too? There's a third source of music that I would have had in this moment, too, because we're both post-teenage years.

So we're not listening to the radio anymore. But this is before the era of like maybe Napster and blogs and Spotify where everything is ubiquitous. And in that moment, because as I was saying it, I was like, you know what, MTV was starting to phase out at this time. I just realized what it was. They started to become TRL MTV. That's right. I just realized what would have been my music source, because you just made me think of it based on yours. It was probably just like the record stores in New York City.

Other music. Where'd you go? Kim's video and other music. Other music. 100%. Other music and Kim's video, I'd walk in and I would hear something. And that was my radio station. Whatever the cool, like, record store guys at those places were playing.

I thought they were cool. I bought so many. Are those are. Those records, I bought so many records based on it being played in the store. I probably bought Blur. I definitely bought air. I definitely bought some Leastcrash Perry records. So you're just kind of helping me fill in that gap in my own musical chronology. That's so interesting. Before John Kusack and Jack Black made them seem really like jerks. Right. In high fidelity, I thought the guys in the record store were the coolest.

Well, they were a little bit jerks, too. A song, too, was always just a working title for what they felt they needed for the second song on the album. Literally just the track listing. Right. So it's just, they always knew it was going to be song too. They're like, eventually they're like, okay, Beel Obama will go first. Right. But then we'll do song two.

And we'll come up with a name for it, but they just kept calling it song too. And then we are going to mingle the English accents throughout this episode. British listeners, we are sorry in advance, but we're also not sorry. We're Americans. We're do this. We're not sorry. It's our 250th anniversary here. That's right.

This country, suck on in England. Get in the ring in front of the White House. We don't feel that way. Get in the UFC cage. Come for the music. Stay for the maga talking point. It's fine. No, seriously, it's a confluence of so many things.

They knew they wanted to be the second song on the album, so it's called song 2. It's also two minutes and I think two seconds. Like for a reason, right. Yes, and by the way, when this song came out, we used to laugh that it was only two minutes long. Yeah. We used to laugh about that because it's like, who records and releases a two minutes single? And now that's normal. And now that is it'd be like, damn, why did you give us a day in the life by the Beatles?

Two minutes? Hey, come back with a minute 39 second version of the song. Edit the edit. Jesus Christ. This story really blows my mind. It relates back to how they change that one song sing into a slower song for train spotting. The story behind song two kind of mixes almost better.

So according to Blur, guitarist, Graham Coxon, can we call Coxon maybe one of our unsung heroes? Sure. Many people know the other members of Blur. I think that's hard to say. And the contributions they bring in. Coxon plays a big role here. The song did not start off as the version that we all know.

Damon had this slower acoustic demo of the song. And even the woo-hoo part was different. It was more like a whistle, which to me sounds so so. It was like, he's like very cynical. I love Damon for that.

It sounded like this unplugged version that you were able to find. Yeah, I wasn't able to find the actual demo, but we did find this sort of like unplugged-ish version, latitude version. And we believe that it would have sounded similar to this. A lion I'm easy

all of the time that I've never sure. Why I need you Please to me That's crazy I know right And again to be clear That wasn't the demo

But we think the vibe was a little similar Listen that is Gets Gilberto's version Yes Very Bossa But by the way It also sounds a little bit like blur This is for the real blur fans Am I crazy?

Does this sound a little bit more like Modern Life is Rubbish era blur I don't You know like they did songs It sort of sound like Yeah he's always played around With genre stuff Yeah

And so they record this raucous version Yeah That's almost like a joke. It's like, you know, as you said, it's 1997. Grudge has been dead for a while. Like, in their mind, I think the idea was we're going to do something just to piss the label off and tell them it's our new single. This is going to be a joke.

They were like, hey, this is the single. We're going to release this. In their brains, they're like, we're being funny. Yeah. We're doing the kind of typical Pixies, Quiet, Loud, Crunchy Nirvana thing. And by the way, like, Quiet Loud is not completely gone because, okay, they may not call it necessarily Grunge, but like, you can kind of imagine Billy Corrigan, especially Pumpkins,

Oh, it becomes part of the rock vernacular, for lack of a better word. But at the time, it's also a little bit in 1997, a little bit of like, hey, remember this from two or three years ago when everyone used to do this and it was kind of newish? So it was a bit silly. It was clearly done as a goof. But like, it's the kind of goof that as you're doing, you're like, hey, this is kind of good, right? So that's what they do. And they presented to the label and the label was like not getting the joke.

They're just like, they were expecting them to reject it. They loved it. They were like, this is great. Nice work, boys. The record label loved it. And I want to point out this has happened a couple of times on the show that somebody has recorded a track. Just to piss off the label. It often backfires.

I was recently, and I think of shirt. Screw you suits. Yeah. We're flipping off the record labels. No, just this week, ironically, it came out that a gang star in DJ premiere. He was like when we were producing mass appeal, he said, we came up with the title first. Yeah. Because he was like, all these rappers are going to do a mass appeal. So I'm going to do what I think is a mass appeal hip-hop song.

And I'm just going to do. the laziest bass loop. And guru, you just talk about people selling out to have Mass Appeal. Only an idiot would like this song. Only an idiot would like this song. And the label's like, gangstar, listen, we love Mass Appeal. And to this day, that is a lot of people's favorite gangstar song. But they were attempting to make a commentary about something.

And here, these guys were like, hey, let's make fun of the American market. They blur. I mean, like it's a little bit like blur being a little bit salty that Oasis blew up so big. Yeah. In the United States. And they're like, oh, the United States, I'm sure we would blow up if we did some stupid stuff like, I got my head check. Oh, they're just like big, dumb guitars over there.

Let's see what happens if we do big dumb guitars, crunchy guitars. I bet you start out of it, the world is a vampire. You know, like, they're just like kind of clown in this, but of course, the song takes off. We've actually got a recording of the first ever time the song was performed. They still haven't got a title for it yet, nor have they settled on the absence of a title being the title. So let's listen to Blurr performing the song, June 15th, 1996, in Sweden. The first ever performance?

This is the other new song we're doing. I don't know what it's called and I don't know what it's about but you might get, you might get, because I haven't really written it yet. We're going to do it anyway. At a moment it's called song number two.

And just a couple of like interesting foreshadowing for this episode of one song. One is the whole fact of the lyrics. In the moment he's like, I don't have lyrics yet. foreshadowing, put a pin in that, we'll come back to that in a minute. The other thing I'll say is that until we were preparing for this episode, I could have sworn the song was called song number two.

It's just called song two, but there's Damon calling it song number two. We're also going to talk about feel good ink. And I think you were calling that Feels Good Ink. I thought it was Feels Good, comma, ink with a dot. Well, I have a confession. Okay. I always thought the name of the song was Massive Attack, Unfinished Symphony. I thought that my entire life, and I just was like,

Oh, unfinished sympathy. There's a typo here. And I looked it up and I was like, oh. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Little Mondagreens, punctuation mondagreens. Yeah, you just see it. You've learned it one time wrong and it follows you. All right.

So we've learned that song too lives up to its name quite literally. And the question that remains that will be maybe answering when we get to the stems next. Maybe not. We're going to investigate together. Is this a grunge song? Is it a Brit pop song? Is it a sarcastic grunge song? And if it is, is that still grunge?

Can I pause a possible answer? I think that they are a Brit pop band, but I think that they play in so many genres. Because I think that it'd be silly to say this song, too, sounds like the rest of the Brit pop canon. It does not. I was thinking about the song, Girls and Boys. That doesn't sound like a Brit pop song either. That sounds like their attempt to do sort of like a Paul Oakenfold era dance song. You know what I mean?

I think sort of like how Blondie is hard to classify by pure genre because they dabble in so much. I would argue blur is sort of similar in that sense. Their song actually determines genre, but the band is Britop. That's really well said, and I would even take that a step further and say, you're helping me realize what Damon Albarn likes to do is play with genre. That's kind of like he's thinking about chords, melodies, lyrics, and genre. It was like going into the next song, he's like, that's what he's in, that's his recipe. Sometimes they sound like Stone Roses.

Sometimes they sound like Dill, the funky Homo sapiens. We'll talk about it. And very distinct from Oasis, just going back to that. Oasis stays in their lane. Oasis is always kind of in the Beatles in the 60s lane. Or the Pubby lane. Yeah, or the Pubby. Pubby lane.

I mean, it's in my ears. Sorry. A lot of tortured English accents today. Well, let's take a quick break. But when we get back, we're going to get into the stems and we're going to figure out how song two pulls all of this together. Stick around and we'll break it down. This episode is brought to you by L'Oreal Group.

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I'd love to get into the stems. Where do you want to start? Let's start with the drums. We all know this. So satisfying. Totally. So good, right? Symbol, simple, simple, symbol.

Simple. So simple and so basic, but so cool and, like, the low fineness of it. We're going to get into that. First of all, what you just heard was actually not one, but two drummers. I was going to say there's like a sound in the background doing something. I was going to ask you what that was. I will now tell you. So let's talk for a second about Unsung Hero of this episode, Stephen Street.

Oh, yeah, the producer. The producer of this record, who was the in-house engineer at Island before he started working with the Smiths and the Cranes. and the cranberries and became a producer, a very well-known producer at this point. A very in-demand dude. Exactly right. Went on to work with a lot of Britpop producers.

In fact, I read somewhere he was called, quote, the producer behind Britpop from his work with Blur, Sleeper, Cattitonia, Shed Seven, Baby Shambles. I love all these sort of lesser-known. Because I knew about- It sounds like you're making some up. I remember that because I remember at the time, I was still reading these British magazines

where you would only ever hear about Shed Seven from, like, you know, page 50 of the, like, like NME that week or something like that. I'm going to admit, I feel like Shed 7 is a group that I've always heard about. Yeah. Never heard them. I think I've never heard them either. Menswear, was that another Brit pop band?

Yeah. Yeah, menswear. Gosh, you know, there's a Gomez. Yeah. Gomez was a group. We rarely bring up Supergrass, but Supergrass was in the mix. Supergrass would have been my number one. Really?

They were my favorite Brit pop band. Absolutely. So Mr. Street, by the way, nickname is Streety. That's how they were referred him. That's so British. It's like hooky. Totally. Streety.

So Streety set up two drum kits in the room. We think that one of them might have been like an o'emn, like a U-87. But the other one, the others, were these cheap PZM mics that he put on the wall. These really cheap microphones are contact microphones, which is part of why you get this really lo-fi sound, this really crappy sound. And two, both Dave Roundtree, the regular drummer for Blower. I thought that was going to be our song here. I feel like Roundtree does not give the love that he deserves.

Shout out to Roundtree. Roundtree was one of the two drummers in Graham Coxon, the guitar, player was the other one. Specifically, he's playing that clicking sound on the side of a tom, a floor tom, but then he does the end of four on the tom. So he's going, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tom, don't. And can you play it again just to listen now for that? Because I was wondering what that was. That's a great idea. Here we go. Okay, it's every other one. Here's the tom. But watch, watch. Oh, what? You're right. You're right. You're right.

I had never noticed that before. So it's more of a four-bar loop. I'm just going to listen again. Oh, there it is. I never noticed that. I just wanted to watch you because that was a joy for me. I was looking at the wrong thing. There's actually four notes in there.

I'm going to watch you this. Okay, all right. Here we go. Oh. That last one is so dainty and sweet. It's very kind. It's very loving. It's very loving.

Very posh at the fourth beat. So the other thing to bring into this conversation in 1996, it's still relatively early, especially, especially, importantly, especially, in rock music for there to be digital and the idea of using samplers and loops, et cetera, relatively new. There are some bands that have been doing it for a while, more so than others, New Order being a perfect example. We just alluded to them. But in this moment, Stephen Street is just starting to experiment with digital technology. So he's got this Otari radar, which is this early hard drive recording thing. It's less, screeny and mousey than Pro Tools.

In other words, that's one of the reasons people don't want to move from tape. Because, like, you're just, especially back then, you're locked in this tiny screen with a little mouse, trying to make music. It's very unmusical sounding. So he finds kind of this middle ground, and that's how he gets the two bars that you identified. And that's how we're getting a loop out of that drumbeat. He finds the two bars that you've been noticing all these years are the same throughout the song. And in 1996, that's how you do it. He doesn't have an MPC.

He's using this, like, crazy Otari kind of like lesser-known piece of technology. So the band goes in and plays on top of that loop, including Roundtree who plays the chorus, which is the bigger drum set, right? And Damon is just jumping around with his SM57 singing the song, but he's singing guide vocals. He doesn't have lyrics yet. Wow. Keep that in mind as we go through the song, because that's how all the music that you hear, short a handful of overdubs, came together.

They made that first beat, they band played on top of it, and Damon was just kind of like joking around with his SM 57 with like, didn't have lyrics. He just kind of had like little placeholder words, right? So you've got a British band using sampling techniques. You know what it is? I know what it is. It's the self-looping. It's the self-looping.

Self-looping. Like when you push a pedal. That's right. And you go, to be clear, we've been hearing this for a while. Portishead's dummy, a lot of that record is the band playing. And then not only did they take loops from that record, they put them on vinyl and then sampled the vinyl of their own performances. Yeah. And that became, the Portishead song was a loop of a sample of the band playing.

So again, to be clear, this isn't a new idea altogether. But for Blur, this is starting to lay the groundwork, I think, for what we're going to start seeing in Damon Aubarns later work. I was going to say it's like primitive radio gods standing outside a broken phone booth with money in my hand. Remember that song? That rings a bell. Play it for me. That's an example of Sample. Let's check that out real quick. I'll play it off my lap.

I mean, that's not obviously primitive radio gods sampling themselves, but it is like at the time sort of revolutionary that a rock band would sample anything. But I appreciate that really helps make the distinction. Because people are still saying sampling, stealing. Right. And that helps make the distinction of what's unique about this is the band sampling themselves as opposed to like a record. And if they had really committed to it, they should have sued themselves. They should have sued his band blur.

And said, how dare you sample thieves? Can I just say that crash energy? amazing. Because the drums don't change drastically at the chorus but that constant symbol does a tuculean lift. I can't listen to the song and not like airdrum it. I mean, you saw me in the intro you saw

me just now. Let's listen again. Woohoo! You're in charge of the tom. All right, where are the two drummers? Hold on, where are the two drummers? Ready? Here we go. One, two, three. Woo! I want the fourth song. I can't hear them anymore. Here, I'll give it to you with the full loop. I can't hear them.

is so unimportant that it's going to be cold in the mix. Okay, here we go. Okay, find it there. I can't hear it. Oh, man. It's like when you ask somebody to, like, sing a song, but you're playing another song in their head, I can't hear it at all. Someone sees you on the street who's a fan of some of your work, your comedy work. It's like, tell me a joke.

Be funny, funny, funny, man. Only real assholes do that. That's never a fan of your work. I'm a huge fan, Albert Brooks. Tell me something funny. I was hoping to see that dainty Tom. I can't do the Dainte-Tan. You know, this is why I work alone.

This is why I work alone in the studio. I'm like, hey, everybody, turn down the lights like Marvin Gay and Burns and Minson's. Let's talk about the bass. Alex James, I don't think he gets a whole lot of love outside of us, Blur fans, but he's laid down some of the best bass lines in history.

I think it's safe to say in history. This is not necessarily a song where I feel like the bass has much to do. So what is Alex doing on this song? The notes are few. Yeah. The rhythms are simple, but the sound enormous. Uh-huh.

Let's listen. Eighth notes, eight notes. Wow, that is so nirvana. Can I just say what? Yes, it is. Who's a crystal? What's his name? Chris, no, it's solid?

Yeah, I feel like that is, that is right off of In Bloom, you know? Oh, yeah. Big wall of distorted bass. Big wall distorted bass. Sounds so good. And what's funny is I had actually just heard that my untrained year from 1997,

I just heard that as a guitar. It never occurred to me that's actually. a bass. Like, you got to remember, as a Blur fan, like, Alex is laying down as far as I know, you know, songs like London Loves, which has a crunchy bass line. Yeah. So, like, he's usually, like, kind of prominent. Sure. This was not a song where I, like, even knew that he was even on it, but he's on it. The tone quality overlaps, a crunchy guitar, a crunchy bass. It's just a register thing. It's just lower in frequency, right? Just a quick note about the structure of this song, the arrangement. We start with the intro, which is basically the first chorus.

Yes. Then we go into the first verse, a second chorus. The second time around, we have kind of a post chorus. You know, you might call it a bridge, but there's like a new chord is introduced, basically. Exactly right. We're going to listen to that. And I'll tell you what it is after we listen to it. Yeah, that. Let's listen again because it's so funny.

It's like very funny. It almost sounds word-like-based. So what he does is he transitions from the chord changes into this kind of extended post chorus. Oh, it's her. Pleistination. Yeah, yeah. It's so funny sounding.

That's great. Yeah, and apparently that's a second bass. It's actually just a bass guitar, but being played through a tiny battery-powered Marshall, not a Marshall stack, not the giant amplifiers. Not when you go see ACDC or Weezer or whoever or Judas Priest and like it's a wall of amplifiers.

It's a tiny little battery-powered. Marshall Amplifier. I love it. And it just sounds like this little funny way. Oh, no, it sounds like almost like 8 bit. Yeah, yeah. I love that. Really cheap.

By the way, I was trying to figure out why. Sounds like the 60s to me and I figured it out. Oh. It sounds like Beck, New Pallusia, the... Which I would have heard around the same time. Yes. You know, like it's that sort of like... Mm-hmm.

Going back to our... 60s sitar almost sounding bass. Like our paint-it-blank bass. black episode. There's a sort of nasal connecting of the notes. It's not a distinct one note to the next which is portamento where it's like, eh. It's a little whiny. It sounds like you're in a really cool party in the 1960s, either on the sunset strip or in swing in London, and someone's either got a satar, which is legit, or somebody's just doing something really trippy with their bass guitar. But like, it's a sound, it's a vibe. And it's not the kind of thing you play and you're like,

man, I just played a really cool riff that's like sexy and cool. It's like, this is funny. See, I think it's more, this is fucked up, and I'm fucked up, but this is great. I guess it could also be, hey, this is the latest. I have no idea. It feels silly and just in the tone of the song, it makes sense. It definitely sounds like a good time. Can I also say it doesn't surprise me that they had a small battery powered Marshall because, you know, there's something about like before all of our cars had these amazing sound systems

that any one of us would have died to have back in 1991. You had to get all kinds of thousands of dollars of speakers and amps into your car. back then to equate what is factory now. But like this is a song that like, because it's not relying on like thick and heavy bass, it sounds good on speakers both big and small. Cut through on an AM radio or whatever. It's like distorted, yeah, like no matter where you hear this song,

it kind of works. Yeah. I think that's probably one of the reasons why it works well in car commercials, you know, selling stuff. Because like no matter what kind of speakers you have at home, you're like, oh man, my life's pretty good. My TV's got good speakers. I should probably buy these stakes.

The song that makes you feel good about having cheap Cheap speakers. A song's so good you forget about how your station in life is. See, Blur is just part of the establishment. They're industry plants so that we will not hold a revolution. I'm kidding. Damon is like one of the most revolution in Denver forces out there. My two cents.

Not necessarily luxuries. I think he's shilling for talent here this whole time. Let's talk about what the guitar is doing in this because this is a very guitar-driven, drive-y, let's take over America type song. This is a riffy, riffy song. So let's talk about the riffiness of this riffy song as played by Graham Coxon. And let's listen to the top. So those five course you're going to hear.

Straight up Hawaiian ukulele style. Yeah, it's a little out of tune, too. I've heard him in an interview. I can see that, yeah. Yeah, in an interview, I want to give credit to it's produced like a pro, another great channel I would recommend. He talks about how he thinks in his memory that that was probably a telecaster. And maybe in the next part we're about to hear when he crunches it up, he's probably going through a rat pedal, but the goal was to be cheap sounding. The goal was to be dinky.

In his own words, quote, I wanted a clangy, clean crap sound, not played particularly well. He also said that he was, quote, tired of doing complicated parts. He wanted to do something horrible and noisy. I love it. That's such a mission statement. This song is, quote, horrible and noisy, but like horrible in the best possible use of that work. You have to be really good at something artistically to do the bad version of it. That's right. To see the best bad acting, I'm going to give a shout to Fred Armisen. in front of the show, like, he's really good at bad acting because he's a good actor.

Yeah. You know, and I feel like this is an example of like, it's like Premier, producing what he thought was gonna be a hacky hip-hop hit. Premier, it's actually massive-pil. Premier trying to be crappy is- legendary. And here, Graham Coxon kind of trying to sound crappy,

sounds amazing. That's exactly right. So when he stomps on those stomp boxes, whatever they turned out to have been, we've got two different guitars in the chorus. I'll isolate them. Here's the first one. By the way, there's about, I don't know,

a dozen, Probably 10. Here, I hear it. That's right. Let's isolate that, and I can play that for you. Oh, really? And to be clear, I mean, they've layered that guitar six, seven, 12 times. It's not just a single guitar or two guitars.

Here is that thing that you heard, this, like, one-note kind of crescendo-y thing. This insistent thing. And listen how dissonant it is. This is Sonic Youth, man. I can see that. And it's getting louder, crescendo. So we stop. And everybody out.

Insistent. Back to the ukulele. Just ukulele. It's so like, it starts out sounding a little dissonant, like a little bit Sonic Uthi almost. And we're just hearing this one note and it gets crescendo. It gets louder and louder and louder. And it gets more and more like stress inducing, right? Your brain is telling you it's getting louder, but.

Sounds like danger. But you can't necessarily. I know it's spawning fight or flight. Right. Let's listen together. Here's all the guitars in the chorus together. You hear it get louder. You have one note.

Sweet relief at the very end when we go back to just, you know, crappy sounding. You were just raging and pogo dancing on the dance floor. So when it goes back to like, I'm going to, it's not a ukulele, guys. We know that. But I call it the ukulele part because it's like so small and dainty. Like, you know, that's what you're like, and you got like one more verse to save up your energy before we go into that last. I always like this song because it's called song to.

It's two minutes and two seconds. It has two verses. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's got technically, you would have made the idea. It's got three choruses, but if we weren't counting that intro and the chorus. I'm only saying the intro is the chorus. Yeah, no, no, no, no. It's the thing that happens.

But, but lyrically, it doesn't have the same. But we go to the chorus twice, I would say, in the core of the song. So, but yeah. Yeah. Maybe it should have been called two, song two and a half. Song two and a half for that extra chorus at the top there. Yeah, exactly. And at the very end, we have that same insistent thing, but another note gets added.

Let's listen. I'll isolate that. I hear it. than it's outer. So we had it was a minor third, and then we added a fifth on top. So it's basically a chord. It's a triad.

And it just sort of fills it out a little bit more. But it also makes it more urgent, insistent, and like, ah, I can't wait for this to end. It's a little bit tense. It's always tension resolution, tension resolution. Before, in the earlier choruses, the resolution to the tension was the next verse.

Right. Here it's just the song ending, which is kind of sweet relief what it happens. So let's listen to the very end. That abrupt ending is just like, whew, we made it. We didn't get killed by this third and this fifth that's trying to stab me.

It feels like a stabbing motion. It's very psycho. Neem, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Oh, wait, wait, keep that note, and I'll do the one underneath it. If you're still listening, thank you. Thank you for indulging with us. One of the Graham Coxson stabbing notes.

But Graham's the man. Graham's a man. There's something about this riff that's very old and yet new. Like, it's recognizable to have a riff that's which is one, seven, three, four, five. We've heard a lot of that before. It certainly evokes a lot of the grunge area. It's not literally the same chords as, you know,

smells like teen spirit, but it's got a little bit of that vibe. It also kind of evokes this one to my ears. Now we're getting some more chords there. One, seven, three, one. And of course, it being a riff-oriented song. also part of the character that binds it to this song in the lineage of crunchy, riff-driven, you know, distorted guitar songs. The kinks practically invented that as a genre, as a thing to do. So we're kind of getting a little, a bit of that lineage there. And for me,

another song that evokes it after the fact, I always think of this song that I'm about to play as harketing back to and maybe not existing were it not for song too. That's the Hives. Hate to Say I Told You So. The first three chords are the same in all three of the songs that we've just heard. And they just share a lineage of being like, riff-driven rock songs that start with the riff. It happened to share these chord changes that are very evocative of each other. While we're talking about the hives, I want to give a shout out to the International Noise Conspiracy.

Yes, another great Swedish garage rock band. I thought that group was the freaking truth when they came out. Totally. I loved INC. Yeah. And also the vines. You know, people forget, INC, international noise conspiracy, the hives.

The vines started. off that way. And the Vine's actually had a song that had a major crossover. I would argue that Blur song 2 in 1997 kind of leads the way into this moment where we've got the hives, the white stripes. The white stripes, that low-fi sound. Yes, it's a garage rock riff-driven, crunchy guitar, where the hook starts with the, the guitar riff is the hook of the song at the beginning of the song. Yes, like the strokes, you know, but do, no, no, no, no, no, um, it's part of the BBC and Radio One, they did a lot to champion. and those lo-fi groups early on, probably in part because it was easy to go from being a Blur fan,

which I was, and to a fan of all those groups, which I was. Yeah, it was a gateway drug. Yeah. Blur was the gateway drug. Absolutely. And then one last thing just for fun. So those three songs all have the same first three chords, but here's one song with all the same chords. This is 21 pilots stressed out. Now listen to this and sing song two on top of it.

Ready? Here we go. Woo! Help me off with the words. Wow. I don't know if I hear that one. No, it's literally the same course. I 100% believe you.

Usually I could be like, this one I'm like, no, it's just fun to think about how if you wanted to kind of cover the blur song. Or right sideways from blurr's flow. Way, way, way, way, way down. Just grab those four chords. But keep the loose.

But by slowing it down. So what's interesting about that is by slowing it down. How stressed out is going to sell products. Fun, though, to think about this connection with chord changes, especially as being, yeah, when you change the tempo, when you slow it down, when you change the instrumentation, and the melody is very different, it is hard to hear the similarity. But they are built on the exact same chord progression, the same harmonic progression. Now, earlier, you had brought up the fact that he had placeholder lyrics in this song. Yes. I want to talk about the vocals on song, too, because I just love Damon, love his voice.

and love his lyrical choices. Like, I do hear the humor. Maybe not always in the distorted bass, but I always hear the humor in a good blur line. Yes, he seems sardonic all the time. By the way, that sounds like the worst party. You can have sardonic all the time. My girl is sardonic all the time.

Anyway, listen. Eddie Murphy made the right choice. Come on the show, Eddie. We will definitely talk about, we'll talk about whatever you want to talk about. I want to talk about these lyrics. So tell you the story of the lyrics behind song too. Basically, there were lyrics written. So when they recorded it, as I was mentioning before,

in the control room with the band playing and Damon had his SM 57 and he's just like, woohoo. That was a guide vocal. And then they recorded it. And then he wrote new lyrics and they tried to record the new lyrics. And they listened to it and they're like, it was better before with a guide vocal. And that's what we hear to this day. So that's the guide vocal. What we're hearing to this day is what Damon Alvarn was shouting in the control room on an SM 57 while the band played. And that's the guide vocal. And that's band played it for the first time. One thing we want to point out about song, too, is that the woo-hoo is not

actually a lyric in the traditional sense. It's a sound. It's a hook. It's a crowd cue. It's almost like a drum feel that everybody in the stadium can sing along with. That's the evil genius of having a hook be non-lyrical. It's international. Oh, yeah. You can go to the deepest, you know, outbacks of whatever continent and

Greenland say. Maybe, maybe Australia. Yeah. Let's hear a little bit of isolated woo-hoo. Hear the bleed? Totally, lots of bleed. That's because the band is playing it while he's singing it. That's just it four times. Here we go.

And of course, like Damon did not invent Woohoo. It did not start there. You can go all the way back to the Rock of Teens from 1959. This is Woohoo. That was fantastic. That sounds familiar, but you didn't know the Rocketeens. Right, right. That's probably because it got famously covered.

Let's hear a little. little bit of the 5, 6, 7, 7, 8s, and their version from, When, 1996, a year before song two. So maybe the title was on his mind when we went into the recording with that day. I mean, maybe. I'm always going to associate that song with Quinn Tarantino and Kill Bill, because that was the first time that I had heard it. But we also like to say on this show that who knows who invented woo-hoo. we can't really know. Woo-hoo sounds very like the caveman invented Woo-hoo.

Like some very early human being made the sound woo, and then the sound who came right after it, naturally. Maybe someone's like, hey, woo! They were like, who? We don't know. I often say that... We're doing Dr. Sue Stokes now.

I often say that there could have been a race record that has sort of lost a time. There could have been the first use of woo-hoo on a recorded thing. So like we sometimes say on this show, all recorded history ain't recorded. And so we'll never go out of our way to say, this was the absolute first,

but we can trace some of these lines back to earlier music. I'm curious about the verses on this song. Like who, were these, like, were they intentionally weird and cryptic expressions? We don't know. You know it's fun about this episode is how much research we've all done. And there's a lot of stuff that I love that Alburn has sort of left unanswered.

And I think that's all right. I think whatever popped in his head that day is what we're hearing, where it comes it's unclear, but it's sort of wonderfully poetic as a result. And the fact that your friend, as you said in the anecdote at the beginning of this episode, didn't refer to this song as the Woohoo song as the Jumbo Jets song? Let's listen to that line. I got my head checked by a Jumbo jet.

It wasn't easy, but nothing is. No. Woo-hoo! The metal crazy all of the time, but I'm never sure why I need you. And you can hear in the bleed the entirety of the track. I heard the insistent guitar line. So they'd obviously lay down the entire thing. Or maybe he was playing that live in the room.

That's true. Yeah, it's interesting. You can hear the evidence of the kind of chronology of how the song got made in the bleed. Can we hear a little bit of the second verse? I got my head time. When? When I was young. Uh.

Call her response. Is it your problem? Is it your problem? It's not my problem. Woo-hoo. When I feel... I'll just play it through. Why not?

When a lion, I'm amazing all of the time, but I'm never sure why I need you. Peace time. Meachow. We're just going to listen to the end for kicks. Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. One more. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I counted. There's about, if you don't include repetit. There's like 50 words total. There's not a lot of words.

Not a lot of words. This might be the longest episode of one song ever. It's about a two-minute song. I just want to point that out. Heaven forbid he'd done two and a half minutes. This would just be a five-hour episode. And by the way, the verse melody is, I think, three notes. I think he's little variation.

every now and them, and he's like, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It's three-note melody, two non-verbal words, woo-hoo. What a lesson in simplicity and two minutes on. And not overthinking. I think that in my own work, we've talked about sometimes when you've been working on music. There's so many times I feel like as an artist, it's very easy to just overthink it. And yet when I see things that I really like, they're usually, with the exception of Chinatown, That is an insane plot that does not work.

The protagonist has almost no effect on the story. It breaks so many rules. With the exception of Chinatown, most things I watch, I'm like, they kept it simple and clean, and it was enjoyable. And I think this is an example. I found this really great quote from Albar, and he explains about his own process. He says, quote, as soon as I hear myself doing anything I've done before,

I just do something else. I go the other way or I just go above or below. I can't bear repeating myself. As soon as I've finished something, I think that's terrible. Right, I better start again. I totally get it. I love that about being. Sometimes I do wish he'd go back because sometimes there's like some undiscovered,

gold in some of those early ideas or whatever. But that perfectly fits with the man who I've never met, but I think I know through his art. I totally get it too. It's just like you can't repeat yourself the same way. See, my first job was at Jimmy Fallon, which is technically part of the Saturday Live. It's like, if it works, you do it five more times.

That's right. That's actually interesting. You're right. If Hans and Franz wins or Penelope, you know, Kristen. Making copies. Running it to the ground. Absolutely. A good idea you gets run to the ground on that show.

Domingo, the song that they use it with espresso. Like, do it a couple of times. Then when the audience stops laughing, then you move. Honestly, for my own, like, interpolation thing. Like, there's part of my brain that's like, I should really push that more. But it's really hard for me to be like. You can't be so cynical. Yeah.

Yeah, it feels cynical in class. Yeah. Yeah. If you printed up shirts that said interpolation, you'd probably make a lot of money. I might. But every time somebody passed you, they were like, hey, shoe, on my shirt. Be funny, tell a joke. Then you'd be like, oh, man, I shouldn't have sold out.

Or I should have sold out for more. I shouldn't have held back. All right, we've heard the song, luxury of my man. How did the splits break down? Please don't let me down, Blur. Do you want to take a guess first before I tell you the real numbers behind the scenes? Well, gosh, by this point, I don't know. Let's recap.

Okay. I do know. Can I? Yeah, go for it. I'm going to make an educated guess. the band did kind of break up, you know, not on this album, but after the next one, sort of. You think the groundwork might have been playing. Yeah, I feel like they put out their last thing on 2003, maybe.

That was the think tank album. So I'm going to go with Damon making like 3740 percent, and then the other members splitting the 60. That's a pretty good guess. Damon, Albaughn, 45 percent. I know this man. I've listened to too many hours of his voice to not know his business negotiations. You're dead on. In fact, you did him a solid by guessing, by underguessing, by underestimating.

I was hoping it was 37% of the publishing splits on song two. Graham, Leslie Coxon is next with 25%. Stephen Alexander James. Yeah. Who is that? Oh, Alex James. I was like, who's Stephen James? Oh, Alex James.

His first name is Stephen. And he gets 17.5%. And Mr. Roundtree in the drummer chair is left with the remaining 12.5%. 12% for the drummer. And those drums came in strong, you guys. Come on, guys. Damon made four times as much as the drummer. And let me just say this.

This is no shade on Damon, but knowing now that, like, Damon had, you know, on a slower song, and it was Graham who suggested this stuff, assuming that that's correct, I think that even his percentage sounds. I really am an egalitarian when it comes to splitting the money.

Well, for the sake of a band staying together, certainly. To your point, it's not super shocking. They didn't last much. And if you don't, and if it's not always equal, equal, equal, at least if you know what the guy contributed to the song, hey, speed it up, slow it down, or this other guy is playing some rocket drums here. Like, you know, I don't know, man, I don't know. But you know what, when I meet Damon, he might be like, you know, Graham's overstating it. They get along now. That's good.

Well, as we come to the end of our part one, I guess you could say, of our Damon-Albert series. Yeah. You know, I think the thing about song, too, is that it took all the years of Damon. in the guy's meeting and then, you know, forming a group called Circus and then changing the name to Seymour and then changing it to Blur, took all the albums all the way through Park Life

and self-titled Blur album to get to this point, to release this song, to get, as I said earlier, good enough where they could record a song that was kind of bad, but then also broke them wine. I will say as a fan of Blur, if you go to a Blur fan, you're like, oh, I love song too.

It's a little bit like going to a radio hit fan and say, I love creep. You know, like, it's a little bit... Got to be careful. Yeah, I mean, like, it's not going to impress us right away. We'd much rather hear, oh, you know, I really like a To the End or, you know, one of these other songs. Yeah, I like the deep cuts. I do like some deep cuts.

And after song two, nothing was ever the same for the group. In fact, there was so much pressure on their next album, 13, to have a song to like success. And I would point out that one of my favorite songs by them is the second song on 13, which, you can almost imagine being all choppy and distorted. Maybe the label thought it was going to be the next song, too. It's a great song called Bug Man. And listen to that is a fucking great song. But the group was never the same after song too.

And I think like so many people, you know, the bandmates get older and people want to do different things with their life. You know, it's been almost 30 years since song two came out. And this is still that one song that my kids know. And I know that the band was very frustrated when they've been. play Coachella just last year because America temporarily warm to this band and then the name of the band went away even as the song stayed famous a little bit. And he was very frustrated that that crowd didn't know Blur as well as like a British crowd, you know, even of young people. Meanwhile, Oasis, you know, famously is with their comeback tour, making billions of dollars in America,

no less. It's very interesting in that way. But I just want to say on the behalf of Blur fans, specifically in America, Damon, Mission Accomplished. Those of us who heard it and really heard it, we really appreciate you. We might even be too old to be in Cochella. I know that I feel very comfortable sometimes watching Coachella from the comfort of my house on one of those five feeds. But we're still here.

The American Blur fans are still here, and we hope that you've appreciated this episode because this is a love letter to your blur years. And now I want to say a little bit about your guerrillas years. Well, we're going to get into that in part two of this two-part episode. We talk about the gorillas. And we're going to start with a song not of their first album, but off their second album,

Feel Good, Inc. But trust me, as we always do in one song, we're going to talk about the group. We're going to talk about their albums and songs before that song, Feel Good Ink. And then we're going to talk about the legacy of Damon that continues to this day, both with Blur and outside of Blur.

So I hope you'll listen to that. Check out next week's one song. Until then, be safe. All right, as always, you can find us on social. you can find me on Instagram at Diallo, D-I-A-A-L-O-O, and on Instagram at Diallo-R-L-O-R-Y. And you can find me on Instagram at L-U-X-X-U-S-Y and on TikTok at LuxuryXX.

You can also watch full episodes of OneSong on YouTube and Spotify. Just search One Song podcast. We'd love it if you'd like and subscribe. Also be sure to check out the One Song Spotify playlist for all the songs we discussed in our episodes. You can find that link in our episode description. I don't know why I said it like that, but that's where I'm going to leave it,

because we also have a Patreon now. That's right. Patreon.com slash Diallo Luxury. That's right. And if you've made this far, you're officially part of the One Song Nation. Show us some love. Give us five-star review if you can. And send this episode out to a fellow music nerd.

It really helps us keep the show going. All right, luxury, help me on this thing. I'm producer, DJ, songwriter, musicologist, and every Friday night from 10 p.m. till midnight, KCRW DJ, luxury. And I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes DJ Diallo Riddle. And this is one song. We'll see you next time.

This episode was recorded at KCRW headquarters engineer by Katie Gilchrest, produced, edited, and mixed by the one and only Eric Hicks.