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Blur - Blur: The Best Of
Reviewed
by NME,
October 2000
 There's a story
going round that Blur had so much
trouble agreeing on the line-up of this album that
eventually the record company lost patience and left it
up to public research groups. Which is, of course, just
how it should be. After all, in the recent past, Blur
have not exactly kept shtoom about the fact that they
don't want these songs any more. In fact, they even paid
them the ultimate insult by bashing them out, with no
feeling whatsoever, in chronological order at the awful
A-sides tour last year; a gesture which disrespected
their fans by sulkily giving in to what the plebs wanted
so that the band need never do it again. Their loss.
These songs are ours now and they're brilliant. Well,
most of them.
The ones we like best - the big pop anthems,
the soundtrack to our very own twin summers of love - are
monuments to the power of pop. The ones the band still
like - the sulky, moody, half-baked, experimental ones -
are a bit lame. Oh well. At the very least, this
magnificent collection reminds us that, at their peak, Blur
were a band who had the balls to be significant, to mean
something other than just doing it for the music,
ma-a-a-n. This was a band with an agenda: to nail the
state of the nation and to make a difference. Can you
believe the audacity of this? To matter. And in
the deepest throes of his love/hate relationship with
this rotten little xenophobic island of ours, Damon
Albarn created some of the proudest pop songs of
his or any other era. That's pop, by the way, as in
popular.
Blur at their best spoke to
the masses. I know it's hard to believe now that they've
prematurely retreated into their navel-gazing middle-ages
(well, all except Alex, who is, in a
warped kinda way, still trying to affect the way we
think, albeit crudely, through the satiric Fat
Les) but Blur were once right
in there at the heart of our culture, infecting the
blood. The magnificent 'Parklife',
beating its chest, half critique, half celebration of our
petty thug culture; 'Girls & Boys',
sheer prophecy when you think about all the Ibiza
Uncovered bollocks that the heads of TV think we
wanna watch now; and 'The Universal',
which could have been written as a consolatory soundtrack
for all those who gagged at Big Brother.
Back then, in the days when Damon
was burning to get inside our skins, he sang some
wonderful things. "She says there's ants in the
carpet/Dirty little monsters..." - did a song that was played on
the radio all day, every day ever begin so surreally? "Well you and
I/Collapsed in love..." - was the worthless, wasted romanticism of
a big night out ever so wonderfully captured for all
eternity? And did there ever exist a song that summed up
the blight and beauty of not-so-great Britishness as the
triumphant melancholy of 'This Is A Low'?
The answer to all these questions, should you be thick,
is no.
Some of us have had a problem with Blur
since then. Not so much that they moved on, musically,
spiritually, socially etc, which is their perfect right.
But their sheer disregard for the boldest and best of
this body of work. Just because these songs embarrassed
them once they started listening to broadsheet critics
and retreated wounded from the big-sales battle with Oasis
doesn't mean that we're morons to love them.
So, let Blur bash their way
on towards the margins. Damon's got
naff-all to say anymore anyway if the soppy clichés of 'No
Distance Left To Run' are anything to go by. And
as for the will-this-do Talking Headsy clunkalong of 'Music
Is My Radar', the one band choice on this
album... 'Best Of'? You're 'avin' a
laugh, boys! All together now: "He lives in a
house/A very big house..." Remember them this way.
9/10
Steve Sutherland
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