This is where the crowd is split. Blur’s mocking, cockney accent and their appropriation of a working-class base comes to life here. For better or worse, it would define the more popular efforts of the band in this period. They sound like outsiders looking in, though even then, they offer a more nuanced and respectable take on the at-the-time expectations of in-country holidays and bank holiday spectacles than other bands claiming to be for the people. Sunday Sunday is a mixed bag. It highlights the instrumental qualities which Blur would begin to develop, and the darker tone taken in the lead-up to the song is, perhaps, misremembered. Sunday Sunday may be a twee and chipper number but its longing and mocking contrast blurs together, a neat spin of both angles of dread and delight. That walk in the park and clinging to nostalgia, to the old days, is haunting.
Sunday Sunday grasps that well. Brass additions may take the song a step too far but it remains one of the better Blur singles, thanks to Graham Coxon’s brooding guitar. This is the contrast the song is so desperately in need of before the jumped-up, hammered out, summer energies which come in the latter half of the track. The Sunday sleep is longed for not because it is a break and reset from the rest of the week, but because it is just another day. Avoidance is the aim of the game on Sunday Sunday, a song which looks to the weekend with the same disgust as we have for the week. The predictability should put us off. From Songs of Praise to that Second World War remembrance which defines the life of those patriots without a second thought for the consequences of history, the everyday is mocked because there is a rightful bitterness in existing with these thoughts, in spite of reality.
That “England he knew is now no more” is a neat, post-modern tip now. It is the bait planted by those who do not know their history. In those twee adaptations Blur offers, there is often a shadowy venom, a knife in the back of those who take their songs of dog tracks and binmen at face value. It is not a knock at class but those who contain themselves for they see no route out, or are content with the symmetry of their weeks. Early Blur songs are acts of projection. Hear what you enjoy and, hopefully, reflect on the correlation between the mockery and the monotony of TV guides and Sunday dinner. Accompanying Sunday Sunday are three Seymour demos, the band’s name until 1990. Dizzy, Fried, and Shimmer are nice additions to Sunday Sunday, the contrast is monumental.
From the wild-eyed, brilliantly crazed vocal lead on Fried to the wonderful, punk-like pangs of guitar work on Shimmer, the consistencies of instrumentals combatting the cultural observations from Damon Albarn in their early form are great listening experiences. This is the blueprint for a band which would soon turn their focus inward, singing and working on the effects of being a commentator on the world around them. Their earliest sound is not far off the grunge and pangs of brutal instrumental work which would come after this period of sunny wonder and suggestive lightness. It is this back-and-forth which would define Blur for a long while, the staggering over and back again of that line, the languid weekends and the erratic trials we throw ourselves into to break from it. Each has its purpose, but Sunday Sunday and the Seymour spills highlight it best of all.
Love me some Damon Albarn! 💯