“These songs are not, strictly speaking, Blur songs. Intended as ear-catching demos to further the struggling career or Blur’s previous incarnation Seymour, they were recorded at Beat Factory on Eason Road (where Damon worked as a tea-boy) at a time in 1989 when, as Alex puts it, “I was learning to speak French during the days, Graham was putting telephones in washing-up bowls and Dave was driving a brown Ford Escort estate around Colchester and working for the council”. Damon’s job meant he could use the studio out of hours. “That’s why I joined,” Alex says. “I thought he was a bit of a wanker but he had the keys to a recording studio.”
Eventually released in October 1993 as B-sides of ‘Sunday Sunday’, these songs depict a trebly crayon print of baby BLur. At times meekly suggestive of Factory-era James, at times as irritatingly helter-skelter as the Cardiacs, the songs test both the patience and the ear. Graham Coxon says of their 1993 release: “I think we realised that Seymour was still in there in us and it was a shame to keep him locked up. We wanted to release him.”
— On the songs ‘Tell Me, Tell Me’, ‘Long Legged’, ‘Mixed Up’, ‘Dizzy’, ‘Fried’, ‘Shimmer’. Select, July 1995.
