The Singles

[Kailey]

Blur Singles
Which are your favorites? Judging by the extras and the covers



More info on Blur singles can be found here!

[marilynroxie]

"There's No Other Way" changed my life after I heard it! "For Tomorrow", "Parklife", "Girls & Boys", "Stereotypes", "Beetlebum", and "Coffee & TV" are all perfect. "Good Song" nearly puts me in tears for some reason, ahh Damon's melancholy voice...:')

[Kailey]

I think Blur had a really amazing array of singles, and the covers were always very interesting as well! It's so cute "There's No Other Way" was the first song you heard :'3

Does anyone here collect singles? I have Stereotypes, There's No Other Way and Sunday Sunday.

[notsomanicnow]

There is much competition and all Britpop artistes had their moments (and usually many of them).

But I think overall Blur were the best band of the Britpop period, and probably of the entire era.

They had lots of good singles. 'She's So High' was a bit typical of indie but 'There's No Other Way' was a brilliant break through to the big time, owing a debt to early (Syd Barrett) Pink Floyd though this is no bad thing and was a step up from typical bland 'baggy' music of the time. But how long could they last? The 'Madchester scene' to which they were loosely latched onto was fading and 'Bang' reverted to typical indie. But then came 'Popscene'. It was a stand alone single and should have carried on where 'There's No Other Way' left off. But it didn't because in only a year 'baggy' had ended and industry attention had moved on to other things.

'For Tomorrow' was just the tonic for the loyal fans who waited patiently to see if Blur could revive their momentum. Was it the first 'Britpop' single? It certainly set the template for Blur's future and the wider indie scene. The forthcoming album 'Modern Life Is Rubbish' introduced to a new audience a kind of British pop songwriting that was brilliant but had been lost in the mists of time. The brief top 30 chart placings of the singles off this second album showed that Blur were holding their own in their particular market and were certainly not retrenching. But would we wait another two years, only for a third album to fail....?

No! Apparently through financial necessity Blur had to go back in the studio to record more work. Thus hardly had the second album deserted the shelves when their next pieces of work were made available. It was a throwback to the 60s/70s when artists had a more constant turnover to keep them in the public eye.

And it worked in their favour. The electro-pop of 'Girls and Boys' with its subject of 18-30s abroad appealed to the masses as well as the indie crowd. It was a winner and the imminent 'Parklife' album was what the world had been waiting for after a decade of insipid indie, repetitive dance, soul-less soul and over-produced mainstream. The wider audience was realising what the true Blur fans had realised the previous year. Blur were brilliant and 'Britpop' had arrived.

One thing about Blur was that they had consistently good albums with many tracks that could be good singles other than those that actually became singles. This was not necessarily the case with other 'Britpop' artistes including Oasis. From 'Boys and Girls' onwards the most outstanding singles were probably 'Country House', 'Beetlebum' and 'Tender'. Were not 'The Universal' and 'Song 2' a bit mainstream?

Nevertheless 'Song 2' was the one that broke them in the States I think. And did Blur ever really do a "bad" single? Maybe one or two towards the end but they were very consistent, as indeed Damon Albarn continues to be with his subsequent projects. A dynamic guy and the last 20 years in music would have been much, much poorer without him and those who ably assisted him.