Songfacts®:

• "St. Charles Square" uncovers the hidden skeletons lurking in our closets, or, in the case of this song, "living under the floorboards." It also explores the eerie, unsettling shadows these secrets and regrets cast over our day-to-day lives. As Blur singer-songwriter Damon Albarn explained on Twitter in June 2023: "'St. Charles Square' is a place where the ghosts of monsters can be found."
• Built around guitarist Graham Coxon's gritty, Robert Fripp-esque riffs, "St. Charles Square" marked a return to Blur at their rawest. In an interview with Apple Music in June 2023, Albarn elaborated: "I was just really relieved it went this way in the studio. I mean, in my demo, it sort of alluded to it, because of the chords that hold in the chorus. It's got that chug to it, but Graham really went with that. It's got an amazing atmosphere. Everybody's playing really well on that thing."
  
  Albarn added how recording the song transported him back to the Britpop band's earliest days in the studio: "Do you know what, the whole thing has really felt like we're sort of somewhere in 1992, something like that. '92, '93. We're just sort of back."
• Blur performed "St. Charles Square" live for the first time at an intimate homecoming show at Colchester Arts Centre in Essex on May 19, 2023. The song continued to serve as the setlist opener for the remaining dates of the Ballad of Darren tour, including two monumental concerts at Wembley Stadium in London in July 2023.
• The official video for "St. Charles Square" was directed by Toby L and is made up of black-and-white footage of Blur captured during the early stages of the Ballad of Darren tour. An official visualizer directed by Fons Schiedon was also released, showcasing haunting illustrations of the clawed hands and basement ghosts alluded to in the lyrics. Schiedon previously directed the official visualizer for "The Narcissist."
• "St. Charles Square" was the second single unveiled from Blur's ninth album, The Ballad of Darren, following "The Narcissist." The album is named after the band's former bodyguard, Darren "Smoggy" Evans. Albarn described it as "an aftershock record, reflection and comment on where we find ourselves now." Coxon added, "The older and madder we get, it becomes more essential that what we play is loaded with the right emotion and intention. Sometimes just a riff doesn't do the job."
• Graham Coxon unleashes some proper mayhem on his guitar. "That's not a tuning I've used an awful lot," he told Uncut magazine. "I have to bend one string every time I play a chord and that's dictates whether it's a major or a minor chord, actually it allows you to play a major and minor at the same time, which can be a bit too much, but I thought it called for that."
  
  "This one came together pretty quick - if we'd have been doing a Modern Life – type thing, it would have been faster and gone into a lot less of a swing," he added. "As it was, I wanted to keep that idea that something is lumbering inexorably towards you in a very awkward, crooked way. There's this god-knows-what within the walls and under the floors, and I really got what Damon meant, because I had a similar experience in a flat."