Dave Rowntree shares new single ‘Tape Measure’
Good news, fans of really great 1990s rock music and pretty solid 2000s/2010s reunion projects: Blur is getting back together!
It’s only for three scheduled shows right now – Wembley Stadium on July 8th, Malahide Castle in Dublin on June 24th, and the Beauregard Festival in Paris on July 6th. But it’s still a Blur reunion, especially considering how their last full shows were all the way back in 2015. It really makes you wonder: what has the band been doing since then?
It’s not hard to see: Damon Albarn has been busy with Gorillaz, Graham Coxon has his solo career and plenty of television scores to do, and Alex James has his cheese farm to run. But what about drummer Dave Rowntree? Well, as it turns out, Rowntree has been putting together his own solo album, Radio Songs.
We’ve already heard a couple of singles from the new LP, including the pretty solid ‘London Bridge’. Today, we’re getting yet another preview with the new track ‘Tape Measure’. Rowntree’s whole concept of the record revolves around flipping the dial and changing to new stations on the radio, so ‘Tape Measure’ must be the closest thing this album has to the modern pop station. Lyrically, the song revolves around some of the mental distress that can befall anybody.
“Anxiety — an unpleasant emotion of inner turmoil and dread,” Rowntree writes about the song. “We’re fundamentally herd animals, whose main defensive tactic is running away and hiding. We’ve no sharp claws or teeth to fight with. So we’re over-sensitized to danger. We see shapes in the shadows, faces in the fire. Disaster always lurks on the grey edges of our consciousness. On the upside, come the zombie apocalypse, we anxious people will already be in hiding, leaving all you smug normies to have your brains eaten.”
Check out the audio for ‘Tape Measure’ down below.
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