5 GREAT ALBUM TRACKS FOR FRIDAY (Part 9)

As with The Police the other week, the vast majority of the best songs ever written and recorded by Blur have been issued as singles:-

She's So High
There's No Other Way
Popscene
For Tomorrow
Chemical World
Sunday Sunday
Girls & Boys
To The End
Parklife
End Of A Century
Country House
The Universal
Stereotypes
Charmless Man
Beetlebum
Song 2
On Your Own
M.O.R.
Tender
Coffee & TV
No Distance Left To Run
Music Is My Radar
Out Of Time
Crazy Beat
Good Song

None of that lot are allowed to make the list today. Which is a relief as I'd spend ages agonising over which of them to select if they were.

But unlike Sting, Stewart and Andy, the four boys of Blur have recorded a fair number of excellent tracks that were never made available except on LPs, and five of them are offered up for your enjoyment today:-

mp3 : Blur - Advert
mp3 : Blur - B.L.U.R.E.M.I.
mp3 : Blur - Colin Zeal
mp3 : Blur - Death Of A Party
mp3 : Blur - This Is A Low

It wasn't until their third and flop single Popscene that I took much notice of Blur, and while I've since bough the 1991 debut LP Leisure, none of the tracks are total standouts. Not so however with Modern Life Is Rubbish the majestic body of work from 1993.

Not only does it contain three excellent singles, but almost all of its remaining 11 tracks have dated superbly well and the LP remains an excellent listen all these years on. Two of the tracks are include - Advert and Colin Zeal, which as tracks 2 and 3 on the LP and following on from For Tomorrow (which remains my all time favourite Blur single), you have a hat-trick of tunes as good as have opened any LP.

Advert and Colin Zeal remind me so much of what I loved about The Jam in the All Mod Cons days. One is a song about an ordinary person living a humdrum life and seeking something dramatic and dreamlike to help them escape the drudgery of their very existence while the other is about a self-deluding fantasist. And both are great guitar-driven tunes....

But no-one really fell for Blur at this point in time. The music world of the masses was in thrall to America...and in particular grunge (not that there was anything wrong with that). But the backlash when it came found Blur perfectly positioned thanks to the very Englishness of their 1994 LP Parklife which orbited them to superstardom. It's a record that is just a bit too quirky for my liking but in This Is A Low, there is a genuinely wonderful ballad that tugs at the heartstrings.....

Put the next LP The Great Escape from 1995 to one side. It's poor fare outwith some of the singles and instead focus on the self-titled comeback album of 1997.

This threw out everything that had made the band famous in the UK and caused bemusement among those who liked the poppy hit-singles. And perversely, with the release of Song 2 the band went to a whole new stratosphere, particularly in the USA. The 14 songs that make up Blur have all sorts of different influences at hand and it is a record that looking back now was an incredibly brave one to make. The band made a conscious effort to change direction and were happy to forego commercial success....but this collection of songs was just too strong for that to happen. There were loads from this LP that nearly made the final cut, but in the end its the sonic noise of Death Of A Party which is the sole selection. Their own personal sign-off to the hedonistic days of Britpop....the LP version is tremendous, but so too are the different mixes which were released on Bustin' + Dronin' a Japanese import CD released in 1998.

But if Blur was a fantastically disjointed and perverse LP, the world was stunned by the contents of 13 which was released in 1999. Its very dark and morbid in places with some of the lyrics relating to Damon Albarn's messy break-up from long-time girlfriend Justine Frischmann of Elastica, and there's far more use of electronics than before thanks to the influence of producer William Orbit. But at the same time, Coffee + TV is one of the most gorgeous bits of pop that Blur ever recorded....

B.L.U.R.E.M.I. is the track to make the list. A two-fingers of sorts to the record industry, you know that with its catchy tune and chorus a sure-fire hit-single mix of this could have been made. Instead it is smothered with all sorts of studio gadgetry that will make it somewhat unlistenable to some.....I love it to bits.

Blur released Think Tank in 2003m but without the input of Graham Coxon, and while it has its moments, none of the non-singles are able to make this list.

But who knows....if I was to write this piece in a few years time some songs not yet written never mind recorded might make it. After all, earlier this year, Blur released a brand-new song especially for Record Store Day 2010. It was limited to just 1000 copies making it hard to obtain as a piece of plastic, but it has been made freely available as a download on the band's website:-

mp3 : Blur - Fool's Day

Quite wonderful.......and if it had been a regular release, a near certainty to have been a massive chart hit.

Happy Listening.