“3” was recorded during the 2000 Bill Laswell sessions. The song shares very noticeable similarities with the band’s 2003 album, Think Tank, more so than “1”, which was also recorded in that session.

Because of the repetitive distorted vocals vaguely reminiscent of “Crazy Beat” and the melody (in the same key as the aforementioned song), not to mention a small lyrical similarity, it is theorized “3” is a demo of that song. A demo of “Crazy Beat” was also allegedly recorded with Bill Laswell, either during or after the 2000 session. An alleged earlier version of the song (presumably the unreleased Bill Laswell demo– assuming it isn’t “3”) also featured the line “forget the rock”.

There was also a Think Tank track by track discussion with the band in issue 28 of the fan club magazine “blurb”.
Alex James

Crazy Beat was around for a long long time.
Damon Albarn
Yeah and it had the a line of “forget the rock we don’t wanna stop”. It was a very different kind of track, and then we added a bit, and another bit to it and then when we were sending stuff to Norman (Cook) he picked up on the other bit, which was a very rocky bit which was just a sort of coda to the disco tune we’d written and then he said “I don’t like the way this goes. ‘Forget the rock’” and the lyric I’d written at that point was “I love to feel that crazy beat” and so he said, why don’t you try using that, so we started again with my little voice changer.

On that same note, Damon Albarn had said about an early version of “Crazy Beat”,

The nearest thing I could compare it to is a really bad version of Daft Punk… It had this sort of mad vocoder-ish vocal and the melody was over a real sort of skanky groove and just this almost descending semi tonal guitar.

Which – let us be honest here – is a perfect descriptor for this song.

Whether or not the song is, however, a drastically different demo of “Crazy Beat” is still up in the air. However, it certainly isn’t out of the realm of possibility.