Watch Blur perform For Tomorrow in this stunning 1993 video
20 April 2022, 13:17
Celebrate 29 years of the Britpop band's single, with their iconic 1993 Finsbury Park performance.
Blur’s second album, Modern Life Is Rubbish, was released on 10th May 1993 and marked a turning point for the band.
Their lead track from the record, For Tomorrow, was released just a month later on 19th April.
To celebrate the song's 29th anniversary, we're looking back at the moment Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon gave a rousing performance of the single at Finsbury Park.
Watch it here:
Damon and Graham acoustic "For Tomorrow"
The acoustic performance came in the middle of a star-studded gig that year, which included performances from Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Sugar and culminated in a headline performance from The Cure.
If you're thinking that the crowd look a little unenthused, it's because Blur weren't one of the biggest UK's bands yet, and the word Britpop hadn't even been coined.
Blur’s debut LP Leisure had been issued in 1991 to mild acclaim and had spawned the Top 10 hit There’s No Other Way.
READ MORE: 20 facts about Blur's Song 2
The “Funky Drummer” shuffle and the pudding bowl haircuts led many people to file Blur under the label “Baggy Wannabees”, and the next single, Bang, made an underwhelming No 24 in the UK charts,The next year, Blur embarked on an ill-tempered US tour and their raucous one-off single Popscene stiffed at the bottom end of the Top 40.
When they returned to the UK, they found their old mates Suede had stolen their thunder and work on their second album ground to a halt.
So it was time for a new manifesto: reject the loud, droning guitars of American grunge and embrace all that was great in British pop. The Kinks and early Pink Floyd were the inspirations, rather than Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
The result was Modern Life Is Rubbish - initially greeted with some suspicious due to the overtly “British” images that accompanied the record, it essentially paved the way for Britpop.
And we know how that turned out!
Watch Alex James teach Johnny Vaughan to play bass with Alex James:
Johnny Vaughan learns the bass with Blur's Alex James
QUIZ: Do you know all the words to Blur's Parklife?
