Compared to the other Magic Whip songs, “Lonesome Street” is the first on which guitarist Graham Coxon has taken a starring role, making the song and its riff, as well as the guitarist’s much-missed background vocals, unmistakably Blur. The Magic Whip is the band’s first album with Coxon since 1999’s 13, though he did contribute guitar to Think Tank’s “Battery in Your Leg.”
In another move that shows how Blur are open to revisiting their past, they performed the Parklife cut “Trouble in the Message Center” for the first time in nearly two decades during the encore of their album-premiering gig. The band will stream the show in its entirety via the Beats by Dre YouTube page starting Wednesday, March 25th.
“Graham came to me and said, ‘We’ve got something here,’ Albarn said in an interview with the BBC’s Zane Lowe about hoe the record came together. “I was really busy doing my own thing but they came back and played me what they’d done, and I was like, ‘Oh no, this is really good.'” Regarding how the group made the album, he added, “We didn’t have much [equipment]; it was like back when we first started recording stuff.”