It all seems so oddly innocent, like a '90s Britpop update of Cliff's Summer Holiday capers. Essentially a glorified tour film, shot between 1991 and 1993, Star Shaped captures Blur at a major crossroads in their career, as they seek to shed the baggy influences of their debut album Leisure and reinvent themselves in response to the rise of grunge and their own ailing popularity in the UK.
"The whole thing about pop music is you're ripping off as many people as you possibly can,"an improbably baby-faced Damon Albarn philosophises early on.
Diamond Dogs is often cited as the beginning of Bowie's cocaine psychosis period. In fact, it was recorded before he started giving Hitler salutes at railway stations and aggravating Eastern European customs officers with the books on Goebbels he carried in his rucksack, and now presents something of a field day for hindsight-lovers.
The monumental songwriting prowess of Jacques Brel has traditionally been far too clever for the non-French-speaking masses to care. Even in English. According to the sophisticated French-speaking masses, the translations are a travesty. Not always so. In the devoted, talented hands of Elvis lyricist Mort Shuman, adaptor of the bulk of the songs on this compilation, they pack a heavyweight lyrical punch rarely experienced in the comparatively feeble 'rock' lexicon.
Imagine if the Doors, The Byrds or Love had, long after their late '60s heyday, reconvened to record a quartet of brilliant albums, the first a double LP of classic, even epic, proportions issued just months before punk broke.
