“Song 2” by Blur has been a mainstay at sporting events and in action movies for nearly 30 years, with its blazing guitars, iconic drum intro, and irresistibly simple “Woo-hoo” chorus. Although Blur had a knack for writing incredibly catchy tunes, most of their music, up to 1997, was Indie rock that leaned into social commentary on modern British life. Not the kinda stuff you’d hear over a loudspeaker at a Dallas Cowboys game.
By 1997, the band was moving away from Britpop, a genre it helped define, which celebrated an over-the-top, cartoony Britishness, sneered at the Americanization of UK culture, and stood in opposition to grunge rock. When the band hit the studio to record its 5th album, the eponymous Blur, they did an about-face. The band began taking cues from its former enemies across the pond, embracing American noise rock and hip-hop.
Blur’s ‘Song 2’ began very differently
Damon Albarn, the band’s singer and primary songwriter, brought a goofy song to one of their sessions: an acoustic bossa nova with a chorus that had a whistle like a cat-call or, as they say in the UK, a “wolf whistle.”
Here’s what the original “Song 2” sounded like:
When Blur’s guitarist Graham Coxon heard the song, he told Albarn, “That’s too f***ing nice,” and proposed something entirely different. “I was like, ‘Let’s do it really fast, really noisy, and really horrible, and tell the record label we want to record it as a single. It’ll scare them to death. They’ll hate it,’” Coxon told Produce Like a Pro.
The band rearranged the song with a quiet verse and an extremely loud chorus, reminiscent of American grunge rock, the sound that the band rebelled against for most of their career. By embracing the big, dumb, quiet-loud-quiet sound of grunge, the band was, as the English say, taking the piss from the dying grunge genre.
The band recorded the song with guitars cranked to 11 and doubled the fuzzy bass guitar at the end. Coxon joined drummer Dave Rowntree by tapping his stick on the floor tom and adding an extra tom during the verses, giving it an off-kilter feel. Albarn recorded a scratch vocal with nonsense lyrics he intended to rerecord later. But he realized that he couldn’t recreate the feeling he had on the original vocals, so they stayed on the track.
“I got my head checked by a jumbo jet.” What does it mean? Could it be a Beastie Boys reference? The album Licensed to Ill featured a jumbo jet crashing into a mountain, and the name of the group’s third album is Check Your Head? The song was named “Song 2” because it was 2 minutes and 2 seconds long and would be the second track on the album.
Blur’s joke didn’t go as intended
After the band played the song for their record label, their joke backfired. The label loved the song. “They came in, and we played it to them giggling, and they were like, ‘Wow, this is excellent,’” Coxon recalled.
“Song 2” would be a massive hit in the US, UK, and across Europe, and a high point in Blur’s relationship with America, where its quintessential Englishness had been a barrier to breaking into the mainstream. The band would grow a larger following in the U.S. over the years, after Albarn’s musical second act, Gorillaz, fared much better stateside.
In 2018, Coxon joined Albarn’s Gorillaz on stage at a show outside of Los Angeles for a “Song 2” cover that brought their career full circle. Woo-hoo, indeed.
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