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| Totally missed the boy-band thing with them.... |
I’ll start with a confession: if it wasn’t “Song 2,” I couldn’t pick a Blur song out of a line-up. This past week’s deep dive showed a knew a couple more songs, but, and in my defense, Blur was always much, much bigger in their native UK than they ever got in the U.S….
…and “Song 2” wasn’t even their biggest U.S. single. That was “Girls & Boys” from 1994’s Parklife…which, for the record, started a string of six albums by Blur that topped the UK charts, everything between there and 2015’s The Magic Whip. As I said, much, much bigger in the UK.
And now, a crash course on their story. And anyone who wants to read more will find links to every source I used for this post at the bottom of it.
The Very Basics
“There’s Albarn, the intense workaholic who will collaborate with anyone from Malian kora players to cartoons; Coxon, the cripplingly shy guitar nerd who couldn’t cope with the band’s gigantic 90s fame; James, the party animal who subsequently reinvented himself as a gentleman farmer; and drummer Dave Rowntree, about whom people still know so little that they describe him as the “everyman” or “normal bloke” despite the fact he works as a criminal solicitor, has a pilot’s licence and stood as the Labour party candidate for the Cities of London and Westminster, which doesn’t seem very everyman.”
The flesh out the surnames in the above, that’s Damon Albarn (vocals/songwriting/control), Graham Coxon (guitar/earnest intensity), Alex James (bass/enthusiasm)…and the quote gives Rowntree’s (drums/drummer personality) full name: those were, and may yet continue to be, the members of Blur. Those original pieces fell in place over a two-month period when Albarn joined James’ band, Circus, in December 1988, two months after Rowntree and Coxon, who’d already joined in October. They played as Seymour - named after J. D. Salinger’s, Seymour: An Introduction - but landed on “Blur” a couple years later and from a list of alternatives pitched to them by Andy Ross, Food Records’ A&R rep.
They came up in the so-named “Scene that Celebrates Itself” of the London/Thames Valley (see also, Chapterhouse, Lush, Moose, Thousand Yard Stare, See See Rider, and Stereolab for further research/listening), but broke out of it, to borrow words from NME, as “the acceptable pretty face of a whole bunch of bands.” Related, I once read Coxon marvel bitterly about being packaged as something of a boy band. Their debut album, Leisure chased the fraying threads of the Manchester sound’s coattails, but Blur dug deeper into their English pop roots (The Kinks, Beatles and XTC get name-dropped) over the next several albums - from Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993) through The Great Escape (1995; here’s the discography). Coxon was not a fan (“Talking as a guitar player, Britpop for me was dull”), but the inspiration for the tonal switch came from a charming place: homesickness for England. Blur “discovered” they were in a ways in debt after Leisure and tried to recoup money on a U.S. tour where they “were forced to play their Anglocentric songs in tiny venues to bewildered crowds.”
Apart from one truly great story (see below), that U.S. tour fueled the creative/personality-driven rift between old friends, Albarn and Coxon. Good came from it - for example, Albarn finally embraced Coxon’s push to embrace the “lo-fi and underground music,” which came to fruition in 1997’s eponymous 5th album (home of both “Song 2” and “Girls & Boys”) - but the collective tension between the two continued to build. They carried on as a band - even managed another album with 1999’s 13 - but, by 2001, the inevitable side projects started up; solo projects for Coxon, some collaboration and co-writing for James, and The Gorillaz for Albarn. The tensions came to a quiet, yet damaging head when Coxon checked out of the band/fame, and into rehab for “drink problems” (ah, the phrasing). I did pick up a little “did he jump, or was he pushed” between sources, but the main thing is, Coxon left while the rest of Blur kept going. In 2003, they released Think Tank without Coxon - who they replaced by way of “simpler guitar lines played by Albarn, and largely relying on other instruments to replace Coxon” - and that would be the last Blur album until The Magic Whip…which, fun fact, was inspired by a fortuitous stranding in Hong Kong back in 2015. And, for a touching finale, it sounds like Coxon poured his heart and time into engineering that one.
Coxon had returned to the fold well before then - 2008, just ahead of a much-hyped reunion show at London’s Hyde Park in July 2009 - and they continued to play live shows (mostly festivals), in The Guardian’s words, “as a sort of Britpop nostalgia act.” Blur’s final chapter started with The Magic Whip, but it still hasn’t ended. Coxon thought it did in 2018 - and how on-brand is that for the man who once compare touring with Blur to being "dragged around the fucking world on [Damon Albarn’s] megalomaniacal trip”? - but he made some interested noises in recent interviews. Something that came out in more recent interviews was a wariness about any one member pushing the others - Albarn, seemingly with Coxon in mind, said "I don’t want to foist that stuff on anybody unnecessarily" - which feels like a nice coda for the story of a pair of friends.
Five Fun Things
1) BritPop Battle Royale
Ah, I can hear the asshole Gallagher saying, "fuck off," but Blur and Oasis had beef back in the mid-‘90s, one that came to a head when both released singles on the same day. Blur’s “Country House” beat Oasis’s “Roll With It,” 274,000 [units moved] to 216,000 (and rightly so), but critics and audiences agreed Oasis won the war when the latter’s, What’s the Story (Morning Glory), went quadruple platinum in the same U.S. market Blur struggled to crack. That said, I never hear anyone say they hate Blur, or see them as overrated, but I hear that all the time about Oasis.
In a fun twist, the strong personalities that made up Blur make it possible to give each member a Fun Thing of his own.
2) Alex James
First, and wonderfuly, he fell in love with being a musician the second he saw his silhouette on the back of the stage at a shitty venue. But, a better, more recent story centers on his politics, something James strains between managing and avoiding. Apparently, there’s a picture of him with Jeremy Clarkson and David Cameron that The Guardian, among other outlets continue to rip him for (in his defense, he claims two other members of Blur attended the same event). His response when The Guardian brought it in a 2015 interview is good comedy:
“'Oh, God. How long ago was it? Four years ago!' he says, before grimacing: 'That picture will be on my fucking obituary, won’t it? I knew you were going to ask me about that fucking picture. Haven’t you fucking moved on? Jesus Christ ...'”
3) Dave Rowntree
In contrast to James’ alleged (yet, on the body of evidence, probable) Tory leanings, Rowntree is (or was) involved in Labour Party politics, serving as a Councilor; for the record, both he and James swear this isn’t an issue between them. The better story about Rowntree involves a game he brought with him on that debt-driven U.S. tour: the Punching Game. As he recalled once:
“It wasn’t playful, it really hurt. We’d sit on chairs in a big circle and everyone would punch the person to their left as hard as they liked in the head, and it would go on round. Generally it wasn’t too bad. You rarely fell off your chair from being punched in the head too hard, mainly because we were always too drunk.”
James fills in the story by talking about the time they played Dinosaur Jr: “I remember playing it with the bass player from Dinosaur Jr ... he was fucking massive. Taller than me. He lumped the shit out of everyone.” Speaking of that tour, and probably others…
4) Graham Coxon
I like Coxon best because he sounds most like someone I’d get along with, all the way down to asking reporters to ‘ask some stuff that people haven’t asked and people don’t know,’ when he gets bored of their questions. But, besides from giving the best quotes of the band, it was fun to see Coxon give nods to some American indie legends over a couple interviews, all the way from “people like Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, Pavement and other small-label punk groups from America – these kids were teenagers, they were playing like they didn’t give a shit and like their life depended on it,” down to smaller, yet awesome acts like The Melvins and the Wipers. You get the feeling he could name-drop for hours.
It sounds like Coxon has found real peace, for what it’s worth. And, again, the way he talks the way he ruined it for himself…very relatable.
5) Damon Albarn
“I’ve a house that’s built on a piece of land which was a recognised fairy community. We had to get a fairy lawyer in. When people come and stay at my house, they go and give them an offering just to keep them happy because we’ve built on their land.”
That’s pretty light for a work-aholic. But even he agrees he’s a work-aholic.
About the Sampler
Happily, I had time to get to Blur’s entire catalog, even if I dwelled on some albums more than others. The most stiffed albums were Modern Life Is Rubbish -repped only by “Popscene,” and mostly because that laid the foundation for their Britpop phase - while “Tender” is the only song from 13 - then again, I’m deeply infatuated with that one.
If I had to name the strangest thing about the sampler, I held on to just through from Blur, the album one part of my musical past says I should love the most. However it happened, I wound up with only three songs: “Song 2” (because familiarity),” and, by way of demonstrating that Blur still found those buttons, the delightfully lo-fi “You’re So Great,” the lo-fi burner, “Chinese Bombs,” and my pick of the bunch, “M O R” (though it looks like Spike Jonze and/or The Beastie Boys' legal teams should have a look at the official video). I’ll be revisiting that album tomorrow, not least because I don’t know how the hell I ended up with six (6!) songs from The Great Escape: “Country House,” “Mr. Robinson’s Quango,” “Top Man,” “Charmless Man,” “Fade Away,” and “Best Days.” I’m listening to “Best Days” and guessing the choruses had something to do with it, but…no, that doesn't feel right.
If I had to pick two favorites, I’d go with Parklife - due to a long-held soft-spot for “Anglocentric material” - and Think Tank, probably because I really like The Gorillaz and Albarn had something like total creative control on that one and during The Gorillaz period. And, to Blur’s credit, both albums sound totally different, but still like some iteration of Blur. At any rate, those include (from Parklife): “Parklife,” “End of a Century,” “Magic America,” and “To the End,” and (from Think Tank): “Out of Time,” “Brothers and Sisters,” “Jets,” and “ Moroccan Peoples Revolution(ary Bowls Club)”…and, now that I think about it, I’ll have to revisit the latter one more time, dammit.
Last but not least, I found three songs to love in Blur’s (currently) final studio album, The Magic Whip: a late-stage blending of their first two phases, “Go Out,” the slick re-working of the sum of their sound, “Ghost Ship” and “Lonesome Street.”
Sources
1) Wikipedia - your best source for chronology and factual details
2) The Guardian, a 2015 write-up/retrospective from after the band made peace; best source of the bunch
3) NME, a 2021 interview with Albarn, him in all his mid-life glory
4) Guardianinterview with Coxon (2018) - very interesting dude, gives great stories about how badly he coped with fame and some great old-man rants on new music
And that’s it for this one. I do prefer this format, even if it doesn’t save me any damn time. Till the next one…
…and “Song 2” wasn’t even their biggest U.S. single. That was “Girls & Boys” from 1994’s Parklife…which, for the record, started a string of six albums by Blur that topped the UK charts, everything between there and 2015’s The Magic Whip. As I said, much, much bigger in the UK.
And now, a crash course on their story. And anyone who wants to read more will find links to every source I used for this post at the bottom of it.
The Very Basics
“There’s Albarn, the intense workaholic who will collaborate with anyone from Malian kora players to cartoons; Coxon, the cripplingly shy guitar nerd who couldn’t cope with the band’s gigantic 90s fame; James, the party animal who subsequently reinvented himself as a gentleman farmer; and drummer Dave Rowntree, about whom people still know so little that they describe him as the “everyman” or “normal bloke” despite the fact he works as a criminal solicitor, has a pilot’s licence and stood as the Labour party candidate for the Cities of London and Westminster, which doesn’t seem very everyman.”
The flesh out the surnames in the above, that’s Damon Albarn (vocals/songwriting/control), Graham Coxon (guitar/earnest intensity), Alex James (bass/enthusiasm)…and the quote gives Rowntree’s (drums/drummer personality) full name: those were, and may yet continue to be, the members of Blur. Those original pieces fell in place over a two-month period when Albarn joined James’ band, Circus, in December 1988, two months after Rowntree and Coxon, who’d already joined in October. They played as Seymour - named after J. D. Salinger’s, Seymour: An Introduction - but landed on “Blur” a couple years later and from a list of alternatives pitched to them by Andy Ross, Food Records’ A&R rep.
They came up in the so-named “Scene that Celebrates Itself” of the London/Thames Valley (see also, Chapterhouse, Lush, Moose, Thousand Yard Stare, See See Rider, and Stereolab for further research/listening), but broke out of it, to borrow words from NME, as “the acceptable pretty face of a whole bunch of bands.” Related, I once read Coxon marvel bitterly about being packaged as something of a boy band. Their debut album, Leisure chased the fraying threads of the Manchester sound’s coattails, but Blur dug deeper into their English pop roots (The Kinks, Beatles and XTC get name-dropped) over the next several albums - from Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993) through The Great Escape (1995; here’s the discography). Coxon was not a fan (“Talking as a guitar player, Britpop for me was dull”), but the inspiration for the tonal switch came from a charming place: homesickness for England. Blur “discovered” they were in a ways in debt after Leisure and tried to recoup money on a U.S. tour where they “were forced to play their Anglocentric songs in tiny venues to bewildered crowds.”
Apart from one truly great story (see below), that U.S. tour fueled the creative/personality-driven rift between old friends, Albarn and Coxon. Good came from it - for example, Albarn finally embraced Coxon’s push to embrace the “lo-fi and underground music,” which came to fruition in 1997’s eponymous 5th album (home of both “Song 2” and “Girls & Boys”) - but the collective tension between the two continued to build. They carried on as a band - even managed another album with 1999’s 13 - but, by 2001, the inevitable side projects started up; solo projects for Coxon, some collaboration and co-writing for James, and The Gorillaz for Albarn. The tensions came to a quiet, yet damaging head when Coxon checked out of the band/fame, and into rehab for “drink problems” (ah, the phrasing). I did pick up a little “did he jump, or was he pushed” between sources, but the main thing is, Coxon left while the rest of Blur kept going. In 2003, they released Think Tank without Coxon - who they replaced by way of “simpler guitar lines played by Albarn, and largely relying on other instruments to replace Coxon” - and that would be the last Blur album until The Magic Whip…which, fun fact, was inspired by a fortuitous stranding in Hong Kong back in 2015. And, for a touching finale, it sounds like Coxon poured his heart and time into engineering that one.
Coxon had returned to the fold well before then - 2008, just ahead of a much-hyped reunion show at London’s Hyde Park in July 2009 - and they continued to play live shows (mostly festivals), in The Guardian’s words, “as a sort of Britpop nostalgia act.” Blur’s final chapter started with The Magic Whip, but it still hasn’t ended. Coxon thought it did in 2018 - and how on-brand is that for the man who once compare touring with Blur to being "dragged around the fucking world on [Damon Albarn’s] megalomaniacal trip”? - but he made some interested noises in recent interviews. Something that came out in more recent interviews was a wariness about any one member pushing the others - Albarn, seemingly with Coxon in mind, said "I don’t want to foist that stuff on anybody unnecessarily" - which feels like a nice coda for the story of a pair of friends.
Five Fun Things
1) BritPop Battle Royale
Ah, I can hear the asshole Gallagher saying, "fuck off," but Blur and Oasis had beef back in the mid-‘90s, one that came to a head when both released singles on the same day. Blur’s “Country House” beat Oasis’s “Roll With It,” 274,000 [units moved] to 216,000 (and rightly so), but critics and audiences agreed Oasis won the war when the latter’s, What’s the Story (Morning Glory), went quadruple platinum in the same U.S. market Blur struggled to crack. That said, I never hear anyone say they hate Blur, or see them as overrated, but I hear that all the time about Oasis.
In a fun twist, the strong personalities that made up Blur make it possible to give each member a Fun Thing of his own.
2) Alex James
First, and wonderfuly, he fell in love with being a musician the second he saw his silhouette on the back of the stage at a shitty venue. But, a better, more recent story centers on his politics, something James strains between managing and avoiding. Apparently, there’s a picture of him with Jeremy Clarkson and David Cameron that The Guardian, among other outlets continue to rip him for (in his defense, he claims two other members of Blur attended the same event). His response when The Guardian brought it in a 2015 interview is good comedy:
“'Oh, God. How long ago was it? Four years ago!' he says, before grimacing: 'That picture will be on my fucking obituary, won’t it? I knew you were going to ask me about that fucking picture. Haven’t you fucking moved on? Jesus Christ ...'”
3) Dave Rowntree
In contrast to James’ alleged (yet, on the body of evidence, probable) Tory leanings, Rowntree is (or was) involved in Labour Party politics, serving as a Councilor; for the record, both he and James swear this isn’t an issue between them. The better story about Rowntree involves a game he brought with him on that debt-driven U.S. tour: the Punching Game. As he recalled once:
“It wasn’t playful, it really hurt. We’d sit on chairs in a big circle and everyone would punch the person to their left as hard as they liked in the head, and it would go on round. Generally it wasn’t too bad. You rarely fell off your chair from being punched in the head too hard, mainly because we were always too drunk.”
James fills in the story by talking about the time they played Dinosaur Jr: “I remember playing it with the bass player from Dinosaur Jr ... he was fucking massive. Taller than me. He lumped the shit out of everyone.” Speaking of that tour, and probably others…
4) Graham Coxon
I like Coxon best because he sounds most like someone I’d get along with, all the way down to asking reporters to ‘ask some stuff that people haven’t asked and people don’t know,’ when he gets bored of their questions. But, besides from giving the best quotes of the band, it was fun to see Coxon give nods to some American indie legends over a couple interviews, all the way from “people like Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, Pavement and other small-label punk groups from America – these kids were teenagers, they were playing like they didn’t give a shit and like their life depended on it,” down to smaller, yet awesome acts like The Melvins and the Wipers. You get the feeling he could name-drop for hours.
It sounds like Coxon has found real peace, for what it’s worth. And, again, the way he talks the way he ruined it for himself…very relatable.
5) Damon Albarn
“I’ve a house that’s built on a piece of land which was a recognised fairy community. We had to get a fairy lawyer in. When people come and stay at my house, they go and give them an offering just to keep them happy because we’ve built on their land.”
That’s pretty light for a work-aholic. But even he agrees he’s a work-aholic.
About the Sampler
Happily, I had time to get to Blur’s entire catalog, even if I dwelled on some albums more than others. The most stiffed albums were Modern Life Is Rubbish -repped only by “Popscene,” and mostly because that laid the foundation for their Britpop phase - while “Tender” is the only song from 13 - then again, I’m deeply infatuated with that one.
If I had to name the strangest thing about the sampler, I held on to just through from Blur, the album one part of my musical past says I should love the most. However it happened, I wound up with only three songs: “Song 2” (because familiarity),” and, by way of demonstrating that Blur still found those buttons, the delightfully lo-fi “You’re So Great,” the lo-fi burner, “Chinese Bombs,” and my pick of the bunch, “M O R” (though it looks like Spike Jonze and/or The Beastie Boys' legal teams should have a look at the official video). I’ll be revisiting that album tomorrow, not least because I don’t know how the hell I ended up with six (6!) songs from The Great Escape: “Country House,” “Mr. Robinson’s Quango,” “Top Man,” “Charmless Man,” “Fade Away,” and “Best Days.” I’m listening to “Best Days” and guessing the choruses had something to do with it, but…no, that doesn't feel right.
If I had to pick two favorites, I’d go with Parklife - due to a long-held soft-spot for “Anglocentric material” - and Think Tank, probably because I really like The Gorillaz and Albarn had something like total creative control on that one and during The Gorillaz period. And, to Blur’s credit, both albums sound totally different, but still like some iteration of Blur. At any rate, those include (from Parklife): “Parklife,” “End of a Century,” “Magic America,” and “To the End,” and (from Think Tank): “Out of Time,” “Brothers and Sisters,” “Jets,” and “ Moroccan Peoples Revolution(ary Bowls Club)”…and, now that I think about it, I’ll have to revisit the latter one more time, dammit.
Last but not least, I found three songs to love in Blur’s (currently) final studio album, The Magic Whip: a late-stage blending of their first two phases, “Go Out,” the slick re-working of the sum of their sound, “Ghost Ship” and “Lonesome Street.”
Sources
1) Wikipedia - your best source for chronology and factual details
2) The Guardian, a 2015 write-up/retrospective from after the band made peace; best source of the bunch
3) NME, a 2021 interview with Albarn, him in all his mid-life glory
4) Guardianinterview with Coxon (2018) - very interesting dude, gives great stories about how badly he coped with fame and some great old-man rants on new music
And that’s it for this one. I do prefer this format, even if it doesn’t save me any damn time. Till the next one…
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