28. ‘Badgeman Brown’

B-side of ‘Popscene’ CD. Produced by Blur.

Blur’s greatest debt to Syd Barrett, ‘Badgeman Brown’ brought the full contempt of Balfe down on the band in December 1991, and is still loathed by Andy Ross. “If ever Blur got too cocky or we began to think too highly of them,” he says, “we’d play ‘Badgeman Brown’ to remind us – and them – that they were, in fact, human.” An exercise in nothing more than Syd Barrett emulation, ‘Badgeman Brown’ borrows his ideas about heavy riffs dissolving into echoing murmurs (‘Vegetable Man’) and expertly-judged deflations in tempo (‘(Scream Thy Last Scream) Old Woman In A Casket’), and conveys a Syd-like sense of something being not quite right.

“It was a loose sort of melody tracked up with shouting through a megaphone,” Graham suggests. “It’s a pretty creepy vocal.” Much maligned, ‘Badegeman Brown’ is a great little song originally for a soundtrack Blur intended for a film directed by Storm Thorgeson – half of the legendary Hipgnosis album sleeve design partnership and an old Cambridge friend of the aforesaid Syd. As to the film… “It was a big deal about a man walking out of his house and just vanishing,” remembers Alex dimly. “But the whole thing was a castle in Spain, a pipedream.” Food, faced with an unwanted soundtrack as the follow-up to ‘Leisure’, fought their cornier. Andy Ross insisted the album would fulfill no contractual obligation. He also reminded them that Pink Floyd’s soundtrack albums had sold “fuck all”.