Music Maps

Country House is Blur’s worst ever single. As part of “The Battle of Britpop” in the summer of 1995, its release date was moved forward a week in order to clash with Oasis’s Roll With It. It was a clever PR exercise, and one which led to Country House comfortably beating Roll With It to number 1 in the UK single charts. However, Oasis’s corresponding album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory ? went on to comprehensively outsell Blur’s patchy The Great Escape - the former going 14 times platinum in the UK (as well as being the third biggest selling album in UK chart history) compared to the latter’s 3 times platinum status.

The sleeve to part 1 of the single (part 2 was a live EP with drastically different artwork and, like part 1, long deleted but available from eil.com) features Neuschwanstein Castle, a “19th-century Bavarian palace located on a mountain top in Germany, near Hohenschwangau and Füssen in southwest Bavaria” according to trusty Wikipedia, which goes on to explain that “the palace was built by Ludwig II of Bavaria as a retreat and as a homage to Richard Wagner.”

The castle is Germany’s most photographed building and, should you want to visit, available to visit all year round. Should you want to make some sort of Blur related pilgrimage to the palace, then the Neuschwanstein Castle website is probably the best source of visitor information around. It’d probably be much easier just to go for a walk up Primrose Hill, mind.

Bloody awful, but if you’re new to the band and want a better example of what they’re capable of then get hold of the follow up to The Great Escape, the self titled Blur, and then track down magnificent 2000 single Music Is My Radar (again, probably most easily found at eil.com)