The Blur song Damon Albarn said was similar to Oasis
The Battle of Britpop was nowhere near started when Blur released their debut single ‘She’s So High’ in 1990. In fact, Oasis hadn’t even formed yet – the embryonic version of the band, The Rain, would come together a year later. Mostly still a group of college kids, Blur were largely following the trends of the day with ‘She’s So High’, not that it mattered all that much to the band members.
“It sounded like a record,” bassist Alex James remembered in his autobiography Bit of a Blur. “It was all shiny and shimmering and it floated. We got the tempo spot on. We got the feel spot on. We listened to it a hundred times and played it to all our friends, and also, and especially, to people we didn’t like. We were in business.”
‘She’s So High’ was only a modest commercial success when it was released in 1990. Peaking at number 48 on the UK Singles Chart, the song, nevertheless, laid the groundwork for the band’s ever-growing triumphs. In the following years, Blur would vault to the very forefront of British popular culture, clashing with Oasis, ostensibly as the posh Londoners versus the working-class Manchester unit. Damon Albarn still wasn’t willing to give Oasis a break by 1997, comparing their formative first single to Oasis’ biggest songs.
“We know how to make songs like theirs – if you sang our first single ‘She’s So High’ with a Manc accent it’d be an Oasis song, very simple, very driving,” Albarn told SPIN in 1997. “Even the lyrics are up to Oasis standards.”
There wasn’t much in the way of a rivalry between the two acts until 1995. Blur took the initial lead with Parklife, their third studio album, released the year before. Oasis were still a scrappy upstart band when they went multi-platinum with Definitely Maybe a year later. Now, formally pitted against each other, Oasis and Blur went head-to-head with the releases of their singles ‘Roll With It’ and ‘Country House’. Food Records, Blur’s label, purposefully moved the release date of ‘Country House’ to compete with ‘Roll With It’ on the same day.
‘Country House’ was the champion, landing at number one while ‘Roll With It’ went to number two. But ultimately, it would be Oasis who would win the war. With the release of 1996’s (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, Oasis managed to achieve what Blur had yet to do: sell a large amount of records outside of Britain. The two sides would call a truce decades later, content on letting bygones be bygones in the Battle of Britpop. And the relic of ‘She’s So High’ proves they were on the same side anyway.
Check out ‘She’s So High’ down below.
