How Mr Softy inspired a modern Blur classic
In 2015, after taking 12 years out from releasing studio albums, Blur finally returned with The Magic Whip. A sidestep into an artsier form of alternative rock, reverting backwards from the experimentation on Think Tank, the record was born out of an unintentional stay in Hong Kong.
After travelling to the city with plans to play at Tokyo Rocks in 2013, the festival was cancelled, and the band found themselves stranded. Looking for something to do until they could return home, Blur ventured into Avon Studios for a series of jam sessions. The influence of their time in Hong Kong on the album was so pertinent that the band initially planned to name the record after it but eventually settled on The Magic Whip, written in Chinese.
Alongside the pervasive impact of their unforeseen Hong Kong excursion, Blur infused the record with elements of their homeland. On the record’s fourth song, ‘Ice Cream Man’, Blur founding member Graham Coxon paid tribute to the soft scoops of his youth, looking to emulate the familiar sound of a Mr Softy ice cream van in the instrumentals.
If you isolated the track’s instrumentals, ‘Ice Cream Man’ would seem like a light-hearted, bouncy track with playful guitar riffs. Just atop it, though, sit a series of metaphors that liken the power of the ice cream man to government oppression. “The sinister ice cream man with his white gloves. I set him in context of the protest. He’s a policeman, and the whip is the state control. But the ice cream man is really sinister,” the Gorillaz creator explained to Billboard.
Coxon lifted from his youth to match the sinister yet seemingly playful lyrics. Explaining the process behind the song in an interview with NME, he recalled: “Damon’s got all sorts of crazy things he’s done on Garageband, and quite a bit of the album was done by building songs around those ideas and glueing them together with bits of the jam sessions we did in Hong Kong. So that song started as this little sequence, then Stephen and I chopped up some improvised vocals and made a chorus out of them.”
Amidst Albarn’s Garageband experimentation and the band’s Hong Kong jam sessions, Coxon devised the bass solo as “a spin on the Mr Softy Tune that the ice cream van played when I was a kid, it’s not exactly the same, but there’s a definite similarities”. The element only adds to the confused, at once cheerful and eerie nature of the track. “The song that sounds jolly enough on the outside, but there are some dark undertones there,” he concluded.
Listen back to ‘Ice Cream Man’ below.
