The 1997 song that Blur and their producer couldn’t agree on: “There was a bit of an atmosphere”
I don’t think the world wanted to accept that Blur was capable of being the most hedonistic band of the Britpop era.
Amidst the partisanship of Blur vs Oasis, the former took on the role of plucky underdog. Supposedly southern and soft, they were the geek to Oasis’ high-school bully, playing songs that were far more obscure and nerdy in their arrangement, more suitable to the sensitive demeanour of their frontman Damon Albarn.
But the reality was anything but. While they may not have been striding around Britain with a warm can in their hand, telling everyone to ‘fuck off!’ á la Liam Gallagher, they still knew how to live life on the edge. A closer listen to their 1997 self-titled album will make you realise that the truth wasn’t so hidden; in fact, the entire record is dripping with Albarn’s drug-addled confessions.
It’s no more evident than on the opening track ‘Beetlebum’, which Albarn was relatively quick to explain: “It’s about drugs basically. I’m not sure what a Beetlebum is. It’s just a word I sang when I played the song to myself. I asked the others if I should change it, but they said no. If it felt right, we decided that we wouldn’t tidy it up, like we’ve done in the past.”
More specifically, the track was about heroin and rather overtly too. The title itself serves as a reference to the idea of ‘chasing the beetle’, which is a specific method of smoking drugs, like heroin. And like most songs in tribute to the drug, there was a romantic underbelly to the lyrics: “She turns me on /All my violence is gone/ Nothing is wrong,” was Albarn personifying heroin as this almighty saviour in his own life. Which, to some degree, he believed, often citing it as a genuinely powerful creative tool for his songwriting.
But the producer of the track was having none of it. The hidden meaning hadn’t yet hit him when Albarn rather arrogantly revealed the truth to him on a night out.
“One night, we were out in Reykjavík…,” Stephen Street recalled. It was the beginning of an anecdote that would reveal a new side of Albarn to him, one he wasn’t sure was all that appealing.
He continued, “We’d been having a drink, and Damon piped up about him taking heroin. I was not amused. He was a bit put out that I took umbrage with him about it. I can remember walking off at a distance because I was a bit pissed off with him… He was kind of gloating about it, and I was saying, ‘I don’t think it’s very fucking clever’, basically. There was a bit of an atmosphere that night.”
Street’s pushback was probably beneficial to the overall outcome of the song. There is a sonic tension in the arrangement that might not have existed had Albarn had the opportunity to go all out in paying tribute to the drug. The outcome was instead messy, complex and slightly jarring, which feels like a perfect representation of Blur at that time.
