It Took Seconds

Six minutes and two seconds: “For Tomorrow” is Blur’s most self-conscious record, which is saying a lot. Its calculation was born of necessity: this was a band smart enough to realise they were on the very lip of the dumper, trying to think their way back from it.

So this single - I bought it on cassette, to get this full-length mix - was presented to the press as a statement, kicking off the campaign for Modern Life Is Rubbish. I was slap in Blur’s target market - student, indie listener, Select reader - but it all seemed a bit obvious and unfocused to me. The song too: nobody had used a Langer-Winstanley style brass section in British pop for a decade and it felt forced, way too knowing.

They were on the right side of history, though. What sounded like a cynical gamble in 1993 now sounds like a band groping, in realtime, to invent an audience and pull a genre together. The song itself - it’s OK, it’s catchy enough, nice “Waterloo Sunset” theme, Rowntree bringing the best hook (dum-dum-dum-DUM), but it’s too idealised, too abstract, doesn’t resonate. So the horns come in, a break between rounds, and Albarn steps back, then with a minute to go he’s back in with a sing-song chanted coda about Jim and Susan and it clicks: suddenly he’s singing about real people in a real city, spoiled and directionless and frustrated people, the people who’ll be buying his records and all the records they cause. In two years’ time he’ll be No.1 and it’s Jim and Susan who’ll put him there.