11

I love you but you're green

The third (and presumably final) cut to be taken from The Good, The Bad and The Queen's sumptuous self-titled album is a lush exercise in heartfelt avant-pop. "Green Fields" achieves that rare feat of being both disconcertingly odd and supremely catchy at the same time.

The waltz-like chorus is particularly compelling and forms the centre-piece of this ode to the declining London fields which have been gradually swallowed up over the years by the growing urban sprawl. In many respects this single harks back to ye olde Blur (we're talking circa "Parklife" here) but the music hall jauntiness of the past is replaced by something much darker. Scratchy guitars are again predominant (as on previous single "Kingdom of Doom") but it's the swirling organ motif that captures the imagination, Albarn's world-weary vocal turn adding extra pathos to the best lyric he's written in some time.