Ten years on from the Battle of Britpop, and Oasis are knocked off the top by one quarter of Blur…
Dare, by Gorillaz (their 1st and only #1)
1 week, from 4th – 11th September 2005
Gorillaz were the ‘band’ that Damon Albarn had formed in 1998, and had run concurrently with the day job until Blur went on hiatus in 2003. I say band in inverted commas, because they were completely virtual. Albarn took care of the musical side of things, while artist Jamie Hewlett took care of the visuals and designed the band’s members: 2-D, Noodle, Murdoc, and Russel Hobbs. (I believe this makes them the 5th animated act to top the charts, after The Archies, Jive Bunny, The Simpsons, and Bob the Builder.)
Reading that paragraph back, you can imagine what the Gallagher brothers made of all this arty silliness. It would have been quite funny if ‘Dare’ had been released a week earlier and had held ‘The Importance of Being Idle’ off number one, though by 2017 relations had mellowed enough for Noel to duet with Gorillaz. Anyway, even if proper rock groups would have turned their noses up at an animated alt-rock, art pop, trip-hop group, at Number Ones Blog we’ll do no such thing. For ‘Dare’ is a great track.
For a start, it’s a lot more upbeat and faster paced than many Gorillaz tracks, being both danceable and yet slightly melancholy. It’s got a filthy bassline, and a kooky beat that reminds me in places of White Town’s leftfield classic ‘Your Woman’. Then there’s the contrast between Noodle’s falsetto (provided by guest singer Roses Gabor, not Albarn as I’d always assumed) and Shaun Ryder’s more, shall we say, dulcet tones. It’s not quite pop, not quite dance, not quite a straight forward electronic song. It’s… dare.
Legend has it that the song was originally titled ‘It’s There’, but Ryder’s thick Mancunian accent prevented him from saying the word properly. Shaun himself has denied this, saying that it was because he’s dyslexic, and in text messages always writes ‘there’ as ‘der’. Either way, he’s the star of the show, both in his ranting vocals and in the horror movie inspired video, where he sings the song as a disembodied head. (All I can think of when I see it is Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles…) Though uncredited on both, Ryder gets his second number one appearance of the year, after he’d been one of the many celebs marching with Peter Kay on ‘Amarillo’. It was something of a swansong for him, as his biggest chart hits had come fifteen years earlier with the Happy Mondays.
I loved ‘Dare’ at the time, was very happy a song as odd as this had made #1, and am glad that it still sounds enjoyably weird all these years later. It was definitely a shadow number one though, coming on the back of the much more popular #2 ‘Feel Good Inc.’ In fact, not many would be able to name this as Gorillaz’s biggest chart hit, and would probably go for ‘Clint Eastwood’, their 2001 debut.
Once again I have to try to separate nostalgia from cold, hard fact but… Despite the misty eyed memories I have of the autumn of 2005, as I started my third year at university and fast approached twenty, I do think that with Oasis and now Gorillaz, we’ve hit a rich seam of chart-toppers, and the quality will keep up for much of the rest of the year.
I absolutely love this song, and I love Gorillaz in general. That blend of hip hop, trip hop, electronica, alternative rock, synth-pop and art pop, combined with the whole animated virtual-band aesthetic, is just awesome. None of those musical ideas were necessarily cutting-edge by the time Gorillaz arrived, since plenty of artists had already been experimenting with similar sounds in the late ’90s, but Gorillaz made that kind of genre-blending much more accessible to a wider audience. The animated characters, videos and surrounding lore also gave them this incredibly distinctive novelty and identity that nobody else really had.
Their newest album from this year is really good too. And finding out that Damon Albarn was essentially the main creative force behind Gorillaz musically was genuinely mind-blowing to me. The guy from Blur is the main guy behind Gorillaz? Wow. I remember being a kid in Australia in the 2000s and hearing “Feel Good Inc.,” “Clint Eastwood,” “DARE” and “Dirty Harry” absolutely everywhere.
What’s especially interesting is that internationally, particularly in the US and among people under 40, Gorillaz are much more widely known than Blur. Just look at Spotify right now: Blur have around 14.6 million monthly listeners, while Gorillaz have about 37.6 million. Gorillaz also seem to have retained an enormous young fanbase. I went to one of their shows and the crowd was packed with teenagers and young adults. I always wonder how the other guys in Blur feel about Damon creating this completely separate project that ended up becoming even bigger globally with younger generations. I know Graham Cox didn’t like Damon trying to bring more hip hop/trip hop influences into Blur’s sound and that caused tension between them.
And I really love “DARE” specifically. It’s ridiculously catchy. It obviously isn’t quite as huge as “Feel Good Inc.” or “Clint Eastwood,” but it’s still a pretty damn popular Gorillaz song in its own right. It’s got a strong funk and disco influence in it that makes it very danceable. I’ve danced to this song in clubs in the late-2010s. Shaun Ryder’s vocals are such a huge part of what makes it work too.
I swear, if Blur and Oasis ever do some kind of formal reconciliation/co-headlining tour, they need to perform “DARE” and have Liam Gallagher do Shaun Ryder’s part. He would absolutely crush it.