‘Song 2’: the classic song Blur wrote as a “joke”
In 1997, Blur could do no wrong. For a period, it felts as though everything they produced was deemed a glorious development of the British rock resurgence. The group decided to put this to the test by writing a ridiculously absurd song as an allaborate joke in order to gauge the reaction from their record label. Much to the band’s surprise, the situation got incredibly out of hand.
Blur were working on their self-titled album when the song in question was birthed. Albarn had been working on an acoustic track, but apart from a “woo-hoo”, the song remained bare before he handed it to his bandmates. The group began work on the effort and gave the creation the working title of ‘Song 2’, which was initially nothing more than a placeholder.
Guitarist Graham Coxon masterminded the reinvention of the track and wanted to turn ‘Song 2’ into a loud, insufferable beast. While it’s widely claimed that the song was written to poke fun at the American grunge movement, there are no quotes from band members which support this idea. Instead, the victim of ‘Song 2’ was intended to be their record label, Food, a subsidiary of EMI. During an interview with Warren Huart on the YouTube series, Produce Like A Pro, Coxon explained how the song started life as an inside joke.
Coxon recalled: “I was like, ‘Let’s do it really fast, really noisy, and really horrible, and tell the record label we want to record it as a single. It’ll scare them to death. They’ll hate it.’ And so, that’s what we did, and we played it to them, giggling, and saying, ‘Let’s play them that one, you know the one, that second song we recorded’. They were like, ‘Wow, this is excellent’, so our joke was foiled.”
Discussing the production of the track, Coxon said: “Streety (Stephen Street) got this loop together for the whole song because it was only going to be a laugh, then we put the guitars on it, and a couple of overdubs. When we were doing the overdubs, Damon just put a guide vocal down, and it seemed to stay.”
Meanwhile, on his own role on the track, the guitarist commented: “It was a time when I was just tired of doing complicated parts, and I just wanted to make something simple and horrible, and I wanted to make as much noise as possible.”
Despite beginning life as a joke, the track peaked at number two on the UK Singles Chart and was nominated for ‘Best British Single’ at the Brit Awards. If Blur had their way, ‘Song 2’ wouldn’t even have been an album track, yet, it’s their most streamed song on Spotify by a considerable margin. Perhaps, their label knew best after all.
