from The Daily What.

P.S   As of the 8th March, we’ll have the record available at the shows, on glorious compact disk!

x

When I was about 9 I bought Parklife from HMV in Cardiff. They did deals back then where you could buy a package of the cd AND the cassette of the same record, for about £17. Never made much sense to me…

I remember purchasing the previous two albums pretty soon after that, Leisure on cassette and Modern Life Is Rubbish from a car-boot sale for £5. Before I knew it, the self titled record was coming out. I bought it the monday it was released, from my local Newsagents, Martin’s. They sold pretty much the whole top 40 in there, then. How things have changed, we don’t even have Woolworths anymore…

I  had kinda skipped The Great Escape. The band were so big at the time, the songs were everywhere, I didn’t need them on CD too! I finally bought it about 4 years ago. Its a bit odd in places, but you can’t argue with the singles like The Universal, mint! The rest followed, and as I grew up, their sound matured, it was great.

13 was released and slowly became my favourite album of theirs. That didnt mean much though, I think they’d all been there at one point. Guitarist Graham Coxon was already releasing solo records by this time. I first heard The Golden D on one of those listnening posts in Hitman Records, Newport. ‘Jamie Thomas’ was, bar none, the heaviest thing i’d ever heard in my life. As Blur released Think Tank in 2003, it was Coxon that interested me most. As Damon & co pranced about to Crazy Beat, Graham was releasing stuff like ‘The Kiss of Morning’, dirty blues riffs and lo-fi ballads about alcoholism. The polished pop rock of ‘Happiness In Magazines’ followed, proving he was still a chart radio act, even on his own.

Anyway, my main reason for this blog was just to post his video for latest single ‘In The Morning’ as it is definately one of my favourite songs of the year so far. The album is great too, called ‘The Spinning Top’.

Sorry to go on so long. Reading it back to myself, it just sounds like a brief history of my favourite band. I cant be arsed to delete it or start again though, so there we go… Listen to more BLUR/COXON is basically what im trying to say! Huzzah…