19. ‘Wear Me Down’

On ‘Leisure’. Produced by Mike Thorne.

Balfe had thought Mike Thorne’s production might compliment the darker songs in the Blur canon. Thorne was put to work on ‘Wear Me Down’, a popular live track. “A pretty Zen producer, pretty out there,” according to Graham, Thorne had the band play the song as slowly – and then as quickly – as human possible. They settled for a medium tempo, still far faster than the way they played it live. There is a plethora of loud, uncontrolled cymbal crashes, something the more fastidious Street would not have sanctioned. Thorne was adamant that the song, which struggles to leave dreariness behind, should be a single, evidence of his non-mainstream views. The track was engineered by American Fernando Kral, with whom the band never hit it off, but who proved an invaluable source of Prince anecdotes.