10 Incredible Blur Songs You’ve Probably Never Heard
3. Me White Noise
Me White Noise appeared on Blur’s Think Tank but you might have missed it even if you bought that album. The track was hidden, so you had to put the CD into your player then press and hold down rewind. The song was before track one on the album. This was the sort of fiddly, tedious stuff we had to put up with before Spotify!
For Me White Noise Blur brought back Phil Daniels, guest vocalist from one of the band’s biggest hits, Parklife. If that sounds like an attempt to cash in on nostalgia, the track isn’t simply a rehash of former glories, if anything it highlights how far the band had come in the intervening years. The relentless, squelching beat and angry, muddy vocals are a world away from Britpop cheeriness.
The chorus finds Daniels yelling, “you think to yourself, why am I here?/You’re here because you’ve got no f*cking choice.” Given Think Tank’s difficult birth, with guitarist Graham Coxon quitting the band early in the sessions, it’s hard not to think lyricist Damon Albarn was assessing his own circumstances. He would soon escape back to the freedom of Gorillaz.