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Sun 10 August 2025 14:30, UK
In 1997, Blur sang, “Beetlebum / What you’ve done? / She’s a gun / Now what you’ve done, beetlebum?”, but has anyone actually got any clue what that means?
The lyrics of their lead single from their fifth album are so vague that it’s hard to piece together any kind of story or meaning. In certain moments, the piece feels like a love song as Albarn croons in one of his sexiest performances, “And when she lets me slip away / She turns me on and all my violence gone,” as if this is a track dedicated to a girl that makes him both hard and emotionally soft.
Given that the track genuinely nears caused a significant rift between the band and Stephen Street, the producer who had worked with them from the start and played a major role in helping to lock down the Blur sound that not only made them famous but also helped to define Britpop, there was clearly more to it. It was also clearly something the band’s team weren’t happy about.
It was a rough period for them anyway. This was a few years after their initial boom to success. They’d won the Battle of Britpop, beating out Oasis to the number one spot with their track ‘Country House’ and, in turn, essentially being crowned as the biggest band in the UK, maybe even the biggest guitar band in the world at that point, as the phenomenon they were causing on home soil was spreading. They had fame, they had fortune, they had the sort of freedom that would make any 20-something-year-old lose their mind slightly.
It wasn’t that the pressure was getting to them, as the band seemed to be annoying the way that each step up in their fame seemed to grant them more openness to do whatever they wanted in the studio, really. Instead, it was simply the fact that in the hedonistic decade where rock stars were the gods of the social scene, all of the Britpop lot were partying too hard and pushing their limits when it came to illicit substances. No longer cocaine socialists, bored with champagne, they’d moved onto something stronger.
What is a Beetlebum?
A beetlebum is a term used to describe the black dots of residue left on the tin foil after someone has heated up heroin. The urge to do more, or the desperation for a fix, then started being coded as “chasing the beetle”, and when Blur’s producer made the connection, he was furious.
At the time, Abarn was in a high-profile and frantic love with Justine Frischmann, the frontwoman of another Britpop mainstay, Elastica, as well as previously being in Suede and dating Brett Anderson. Now, with both of them enjoying their fame, the couple were enjoying the party too much as they started doing heroin together. “That whole period of a lot of people’s lives was fairly muddied by heroin for a lot of people,” he said of that moment when the party drugs began to intensify and he fell into it headfirst.
But the producer was less annoyed about Albarn doing heroin and was more pissed off about the way he was singing about it. Merging depictions of Frischmann, love, sex and the substance all into one sleepy yet seductive track that’s purposefully made to sound scoring like a hit, Street didn’t like the way it seemed to glamourise the drug, and the way Albarn in general didn’t seem to realise the danger and severity of what he was getting hooked on.
“One night, we were out in Reykjavik,” Street told Q. “And we’d been having a drink, and Damon piped up about him taking heroin. I was not amused. He was a bit put out that I took umbrage with him about it.”
It was the attitude he took issue with as he added, “He was kind of gloating about it, and I was saying, ‘I don’t think it’s very fucking clever, basically.’” With so many casualties in music caused by the drug, and so many lives lost, Street didn’t want Albarn to become one of them, or to laugh himself into the grave.
Luckily, he didn’t as he eventually got clean and realised, telling The Guardian, “It’s a cruel, cruel thing,” adding, “[Heroin] does turn you into a very isolated person, and ultimately, anything that you are truly dependent on is not good.” However, the song does remain a banger despite all of this.
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