Blur - Coffee & TV

How do you make something bland and boring into something interesting? You animate it. That certainly seems to be the case with ‘Coffee & TV’, where an ordinary milk carton foregoes its role of reporting a missing person and instead jumps to life, embarking on a mission to track down Blur guitarist Graham Coxon. Leaving his family in the lurch for no apparent reason whatsoever, the fruitful campaign of the plucky Tetra Pak container is probably Blur’s best-remembered video.

Milky, the protagonist, was created by Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop and helped propel this hit into super-stardom with selfless grace and a lovely smile. Although ‘Coffee & TV’ wasn’t a major hit for Blur, it’s likely in the top five list of Blur songs for almost everyone who liked the band; this is reflected in its popularity on radio since its release back in 1999.

Departing from the sound that 13 – the album it featured on – put forward, it was a glorious return to the Britpop charm of The Great Escape and was generally overlooked when it was released as a single on June 28th of that year. This wonderfully-realised visual accompaniment to ‘Coffee & TV’ would, like the song, only be seen by a few people lucky enough to catch it during music TV’s true formative years in the UK. The advent of YouTube would do the rest of the work a few years later.

While it subscribes to the US stereotype of milk cartons – featuring a missing person on the side – it is a thoroughly British affair, with mannerisms, feelings and humour encapsulating the UK way of doing things. Most of the things you want from a video are here: a jaunty walk, a love story, violent and angry bottles, a touching reunion and a prostitute called Big Suzy.

Ultimately, it’s an absolutely perfect accessory to a song that deserves all the praise it gets. Overlooked in favour of preceding single ‘Tender’, it should have been a number one. Sadly, it didn’t even get in the top ten. As far as videos go, though, this may not only be the best Blur video going – it may be the best that the genre offered in the 1990s.

Of course, it’s worth watching, just in case you disagree.

By Matt Gardner