Ambulance de Blur

I ain't got
Nothing to be scared of,
No I ain't got
Nothing to be scared of
No I ain't got
Anything to be scared of
'Cos I love you

I was born out of love
It's the only way to come into this world
I know I'm not all there
But I'm getting, getting, getting there
If you let me live my life
I'll stay with you to the end
And I know, lord
I'm nearly there
I want to tell you this

I ain't got
Nothing to be scared of, no
No I ain't got
Nothing to be scared of, no
No I ain't got
Anything to be scared
Cause I love you

I ain't got
Nothing to be scared of
No ain't got
Nothing to be scared of

The album's opening track, "Ambulance", starts off with a complex drum beat. Sam Bloch of Stylus Magazine praised the song's intro, describing the beat as "an offbeat rhythmic synapse that nearly collapses into itself [...] Heavy electronic drums. A flash. A kick. At first, it's really hard to believe that this is a song, functioning on its own. The beat needs crutches to stand upright."[40] Devon Powers of Pop Matters wrote that "the first bars [...] are stricken with throbbing beats that sound simultaneously futuristic and primitive."[39]

Bloch went on to write: "as a low, thunderous bass enters [the listener's] speakers, the whole thing slowly grows. Distinctive African percussion is leisurely incorporated into the bass overtone—it's the darkness in a thunderstorm, the pure, simple fury that comes before a glorious lightning streak."[40]

At 0:52 Albarn's lead vocals come in, repeating the lyrics "I ain't got nothin' to be scared of" in a "gauzy" falsetto. This is accompanied by a "languid" bass groove and backing vocals described by Bloch as "gospel-twinged", as well as a baritone sax line described by Powers as "[cutting] underneath the back-up singers, at an angle—so quirky it feels like Morphine could have played it."

As Albarn delivers the next line ("'cause I love you"), a synthesizer kicks in, described by stylus as "illustrious", "otherworldly" and "flooding the song's deathly stomp. But within this death there is love. Albarn makes this clear in the structure of this song." In Albarn's next vocal lines, he drops out of falsetto into "his low swinging monotone". Powers stated that he "croons, carelessly, almost as if he's freestyling. Things change again. They keep changing."

Powers speculated that the song was about love but said "it's also a fitting introduction to a record that's such an extreme departure from their past work, and so drastically left field from the garage and post-punk and easily accessible poprock currently drenching the airwaves".[39]

In an XFM radio interview, Albarn spoke on the composition of the track, stating, "I try to do a lot of stuff once I've got the melody and the chord structure. I try to just sing it in one go without thinking about it too much. It comes out a sort of partially formed song and sometimes you're lucky and it comes out almost kind of sort of perfect and sometimes it's just a mess." He stated that this was a case of the former. James revealed that "Ambulance" was "the first song that I thought, right this is Blur again. Like I'm in the right place again. I suppose the lyrics have something to do with that, you know, having nothing to be scared of anymore."