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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.”
…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.”
