25. ‘Oily Water’

On ‘Volume 2’, published November 1991. Also on ‘Modern Life is Rubbish’, released 10/5/93. Produced by Blur and John Smith.

Happier with their b-sides than with their number 7 hit album ‘Leisure’, Blur headed back to Matrix (see 14) to begin demoing for the second album. With the sympathetic John Smith engineering, they delivered a four-song salvo that horrified as many people as it electrified. Gone was any pretence of being a happy band. The new material – ‘Oily Water’, ‘Bone Bag’, and ‘Resigned’, with ‘Turn It Up’ as the sole uptempo track – was hard-edged, defeatist and ill-sounding. Ironically, they were enjoying themselves. “We felt that we could relax now because Balfe was off our backs for a while,” Damon recalls. Food Records owner Balfe, a former member of Teardrop Explodes, is often cast as the villain of the Blur piece. He insists his intentions were good: “I wanted them to conquer the globe. There’s more to life than just getting NME and Select covers.”

‘Oily Water’, the first of the four songs to be released to the public, was included in demo form on Issue 2 of the CD-magazine Volume. It confirmed what ‘Luminous’ and ‘Inertia’ had implied, that a darker, more glutinous Blur sound was being created. Not the least impressive aspect of the stunning ‘Oily Water’ is the leap in quality of Damon’s lyric writing. He would never have included as strong an image as “In a sense of self in decline/Growing fat on sound” on ‘Leisure’. Throughout, the song is as polluted as its title. Distorted, howling, anarchic, ‘Oily Water’ is the first of Blur’s ‘hangover’ songs – literal dissertations on acid throat, trembling hands and clumsy heads – and a greasy window on to a post-‘baggy’ world.

From the opening guitar sound – Graham ‘tap-dancing’ on his FX pedals – to the music’s final, overloaded roar, the song baffles and flails. Graham sings the long passages (“ooh-ooh-ooh”) and plays guitar with all strings tuned to E, using wah-wah and reverb to create a cacophonous, unearthly, siren-like sound. Damon sings the verses through a megaphone. “It’s gratuitously nasty and My Bloody Valentine all over,” says Alex proudly. Widely acclaimed at the time, ‘Oily Water’ would turn up, as planned, on Blur’s second LP – 19 months after its conception. And like all subsequent Blur songs bearing the “produced by Blur and John Smith” imprimatur, ‘Oily Water’ was a demo adjudged good enough to be released without further tinkering.