There's No Other Way

There's No Other Way: Blur's Shoegazing Moment Before the Britpop War

Colchester Boys in the Madchester Afterglow

The British indie scene of the early 1990s was in a peculiar state of flux. Madchester, the guitar-and-dance hybrid movement led by the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses, had peaked and begun its commercial contraction. Shoegaze, the noise-and-texture movement associated with My Bloody Valentine and Ride, was at its most artistically fertile but was never going to deliver mainstream chart success on its own terms. Into this environment stepped Blur, four young men from Essex and London who had absorbed all of these influences and were visibly trying to figure out which of them to bet their career on.

"There's No Other Way" was released in April 1991 in the UK, where it became the band's first major hit, reaching number 8 on the UK Singles Chart. Its American exposure came slightly later, with the single debuting on the Billboard Hot 100 on January 11, 1992, entering at number 92. It peaked at number 82 on January 25, 1992 and held that position for a second week before beginning its descent. The chart run lasted six weeks. For a British indie act crossing the Atlantic, this represented genuine traction: most of their peers of the period never charted in the United States at all.

The Sound That Placed Them

Listening to "There's No Other Way" today, you can hear exactly where Blur were in 1991: deeply indebted to the Madchester template while carrying enough of their own personality to suggest they wouldn't stay there for long. The production has the swirling, slightly blurred quality that gave shoegaze its name: guitars treated with effects to the point where individual notes dissolve into texture, drums with a hypnotic groove underneath the noise, and a vocal from Damon Albarn that floats somewhat dreamily on top of the arrangement. The bass from Alex James provides the melodic anchor that keeps everything from collapsing into pure atmosphere.

The production was handled by Stephen Street, who had worked extensively with The Smiths and Morrissey, and his feel for British guitar pop shaping brought discipline to what might otherwise have been formless. Street understood how to make noise feel organized, how to give indie rock texture without sacrificing the hook, and "There's No Other Way" benefited from that knowledge. The result was a song with genuine radio potential dressed in the language of the indie underground.

The American Crossing

The United States in early 1992 was on the verge of the Nirvana-led grunge moment that would restructure the American indie and alternative landscape entirely. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had arrived in September 1991, and by January 1992, alternative rock was in the middle of one of its periodic periods of commercial reevaluation. British guitar pop, with its slightly different relationship to irony and texture, found a sympathetic audience in this environment, particularly among college radio listeners who had already been primed by years of Smiths and Pixies records.

Six weeks on the Hot 100 was a foothold, not a conquest. But it gave Blur a presence in the American market that they would periodically return to throughout the decade, most dramatically when "Song 2" became an unlikely sports anthem in the late 1990s. The trajectory from "There's No Other Way" to that moment traces the complete arc of the band's commercial evolution, from dreamy indie hopefuls to one of the defining acts of British rock's most creative decade.

The Album and the Transformation

Leisure, the debut album that contained "There's No Other Way," is now understood primarily as a document of what Blur were before they became Blur. Their subsequent albums, particularly Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993) and Parklife (1994), represented such a dramatic transformation toward something more distinctly English, more consciously literary, more combative and conceptual, that the hazy guitar pop of the debut can feel like a different band's work. That evolution was one of the great artistic transformations of 1990s British music. But the seeds of it are here, in the ambition visible even through the borrowed language. Play "There's No Other Way" and hear the beginning of something that would eventually become extraordinary.

"There's No Other Way" — Blur's singular moment on the 1990s charts.