Over many years, I’ve often used the Singular Adventures feature to fill a space on Sundays. It actually didn’t start out purely as a Sunday feature – the first lot I tried to cover were James, beginning in November 2013 and featuring sporadically through to May 2015 when I finished it off with what was then their 28th single, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up). Next up was Altered Images, again on different days of the week between May and July 2015. These were followed up with The Jam (July 2015 – November 2015) and The Style Council (December 2015 – March 2016), while Cinerama‘s 45s were initially posted between April and June 2016 before being given the deluxe treatment via a fantastic guest series by strangeways between May and July 2024.
The first actual Sundays only series was The Clash (10 January 2016 – 15 May 2016). Since then:-
Belle and Sebastian (22 May – 21 August 2016)
Buzzcocks (28 August – 20 November 2016)
The Undertones (27 November 2016 – 26 February 2017)
XTC (5 March – 29 October 2017)
New Order (5 November 2017 – 8 April 2018)
Paul Haig (7 October 2017- 17 March 2019)
Marc Almond (24 March – 16 June 2019)
‘Early’ Simple Minds (23 June – 1 August 2019)
The Auteurs/Luke Haines (8 August – 15 March 2020)
R.E.M. (a joint series with The Robster) (21 June 2020 – 6 June 2021)
The Fall (13 June 2021 – 26 June 2022)
Pet Shop Boys (22 January – 1 October 2023)
The Wedding Present (8 October 2023 – 23 February 2025)*
Super Furry Animals (a guest series by The Robster) (2 March – 21 September 2025)
Orange Juice/Edwyn Collins (28 September 2025 – 19 July 2026)
Magazine (26 July – 11 October 2026)
* series was interrupted by other regular features for Sundays
To the above list will now be added Blur.
It’ll be a wee bit of a cheat every now and again (including today!!) as a number of their singles have previously featured as stand-alone pieces. Indeed, this one was quite recent, back on 21 April this year.
Am I alone on often forgetting that Blur‘s first single came before There’s No Other Way took them into the Top 1o in May 1991?
The debut dates from October 1990, and while many have suggested it is a great example of shoegaze, I’ve often felt that much of its sound, particularly the way Graham Coxon plays the guitar, tips a hat to The Charlatans whose debut album Some Friendly had hit the shops just seven days earlier.
mp3: Blur – She’s So High
The song, even all these years later, long remained part of the band’s setlists, which is perhaps their way of saying that they consider it to have very much stood the test of time. They certainly seem more fond of it than There’s No Other Way, whose baggy sound hasn’t aged quite so well.
It is often forgotten that She’s So High was just one half of a double-A single on 7″ vinyl, along with this:-
mp3: Blur – I Know
Possibly the most Madchester sounding song ever to have come out of London.
Interestingly, a slightly extended version of She’s So High would be the opening track on debut album Leisure, which was released the best part of a year later in August 1991, but I Know was left off altogether.
It reached #48 in the UK singles chart.
JC