Blur: 1 Hidden Gem On Every Album

10. Leisure - Sing

Blur helped define the sound of British music in the Nineties but with their earliest studio efforts they were very much chasing rather than setting trends. You wouldn’t guess they were going to be anything special.

Their debut album Leisure is all baggy beats and dreamy shoe-gaze guitar with singer Damon Albarn droning vacant nothings over the top. Even the more memorable bits(She’s So High, There’s No Other Way) wear their influences on their sleeve.

The album is inessential to all but the most ardent Blur fans but there is one moment that towers above the rest. Sing is a winding, hypnotic track built on a relentless, pounded piano that builds to a transcendent, blissed out chorus. It speaks to a potential that otherwise goes untapped.

It speaks volumes that when Blur had long since left the sounds of their debut behind them, they were happy for this song to be on the Trainspotting soundtrack. For that matter, it speaks volumes that the people making Trainspotting even wanted it.