Beetlebum - 2012 Remaster

Damon Albarn admits in 1000 UK #1 Hits by Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh, "It's about drugs basically. I'm not sure what a Beetlebum is. It's just a word I sang when I played the song to myself. I asked the others if I should change it, but they said no. If it felt right, we decided that we wouldn't tidy it up like we've done in the past."

Not only is the song about heroin, but the title is a reference to the practice of "chasing the beetle," a specific method of smoking drugs (it's most commonly done with heroin, opium, methamphetamine, and crack cocaine). To see the sense of this description, you have to understand the technique. Here we go: you have an aluminum foil piece which you have folded into a gutter shape about a foot long. Drop your drugs at one end of the foil gutter, hold it slightly tilted towards the other end. Now run a lit lighter under the drug; as it heats, it will give off smoke vapor, and begin to melt and run down the gutter (that's the 'beetle'). You inhale the smoke with a tube, chasing behind the drop of melting drug. When it gets to the other end, tilt it back and repeat. You're chasing the beetle's bum! And ruining your life and getting some aluminum toxins in your lungs as well! Why would anyone do it this way? Because it's safer than sticking a needle in your arm, requires no specific paraphernalia (so it's easier to avoid being busted), and less wasteful of the drug. We don't advocate it, but we stop at nothing to give you every fact about a song we can. Note the cover art on the album Blur. It's a hospital nurse pushing a patient on a gurney, distorted by blurring. Yep, that's what's going to happen if you chase the beetle's bum too much, alright.

Until two of Elvis Presley's 2005 #1s fell out of the UK Top-40 in a record two weeks, this was the previous shortest-lived #1 at three weeks in the UK Top 40.