#cw for discussion of addiction/alcohol abuse ig

[holdoncallfailed]

could you maybe explain why battery in your leg is abt graham? thank u!

ermmmm well. i'll put this under a read more actually so i don't look like a total freak lol

anyway looking at the lyrics

i think it's pretty clear that the song is about graham's impending departure from the band—ultimately it was damon (and dave and alex, ostensibly) who made the decision to basically fire graham but i don't think that damon was happy about having to do that. i think he very much wanted to make things work with graham in the band and tried for years to overlook/accommodate graham's alcohol abuse but it was too destructive to damon's work ethic which is/was ultimately the most important thing to him. so the second verse is alluding to the concessions that damon felt he made on graham's behalf throughout their whole relationship/career together. graham had been going to a recovery program (allegedly) when they first started recording think tank but apparently it wasn't working well enough for damon, who was not known for being particularly empathetic towards addicts (i think he was particularly frustrated because graham had previously very publicly tried to get sober in 1996-97 during the recording of their self-titled album and the subsequent press/tour but had obviously relapsed in the process of recording 13 in 1998). (maybe worth also noting that supposedly justine frischmann, damon's ex girlfriend, was a pretty heavy heroin user and that had contributed to their breakup in 1998 as well as the stalling of justine's own career with her band elastica. so it's possible that damon felt that he was losing his other best friend/creative collaborator/lover/whatever to addiction all over again pretty soon after he and justine had split.)

the first verse/"the ballad for the good times" is referring to their long history together, their childhood...the "put a rock beat over anything" i think is a reference to the difference between damon and graham's sound, and graham's preference for noisier american indie music which damon was initially really resistant to but ultimately moved towards with self-titled and 13. the "don't get het up on the evil things" is probably referring to graham's lifelong experience with depression/his sensitivity to criticism. "the dignity we had" well....idk about that one lol cos blur's image had been extremely uh messy for lack of a better word from the beginning of their career so i'm not sure 'dignified' was ever a word used to describe them. but i guess their low points had been pretty public and very undignified compared to the purposeful wackiness of their early performances, so...

BASICALLY "you can be with me if you want to be" is damon's plea for graham to get better for his own sake and for the sake of the band while simultaneously knowing that there was no way to force him to do so. it's a very sad and desperate song that i think is also simultaneously resigned to the knowledge that this wasn't actually going to work in the end, that graham was going to have to leave the band in order to recover and for blur to continue to function as a group and that damon had to be the one to make that call (but, interestingly, not the person to actually tell graham—their manager delivered that message lol yikes and then damon and graham didn’t talk to each other at all for like eight years). it's also the only song on that record that features graham's guitar playing.

the phrase 'battery in your leg' is weird and likely just one of damon's nonsense lyrics but it also calls to mind the spanish phrase ponte las pilas (literally 'put the batteries in') which is used to tell someone to keep going, look alive, get a move on, etc. i legitimately have no idea if damon had any familiarity with this phrase—i was surprised when i listened to the song for the first time cos i assumed that's what he was referencing cos it's such a specific turn of phrase but really who knows. if he was aware of the meaning then i think that would be another message to graham urging him to keep going/make it through this period of his life.