In the course of an interview I conducted recently with the singer of a popular British band, talk turned to the subject of Blur's legendary feud with Oasis. “That was never real, was it?” he said.

Having been too young to move in music industry circles during Britpop's 1995 silly season, he just assumed that it was a media creation. A well-meaning rivalry that might, just for a few minutes, have gotten out of hand. Sure, Damon Albarn is above it all now. Of course he is. Look, after all, at what he has achieved. With Gorillaz, he conquered the American charts. With Monkey: Journey to the West, he wrote an acclaimed opera. With Africa Express, he has become a respected voice in African music. He has said repeatedly that he no longer craves the limelight in the way that he once did with Blur.

While I don't think he is lying, I also think he is a man in denial of the scale of his ambitions. The last time that Blur played together as a four-piece, they were a band pulling in different directions. Hits such as Parklife, Girls & Boys and Beetlebum were too fresh to be judged by posterity. Right now, as I replay their best-known tunes in my head, even the hubristic Country House appears to have dated pretty well.

It takes absence to make the collective heart grow fonder, to restore you to your rightful place. That Blur will sell out Hyde Park is a foregone conclusion. If they add another date, they'll sell that out, too. If, as rumoured, they play Glastonbury, tickets for the festival are likely to sell out on the basis of their presence there. Sure, Albarn no longer wants to be a pop star in the same way that he did 15 years ago. But his hunger to be recognised as the best in his field is just as intense as it ever was. At some level, he knows that won't happen solely by living out the rest of his days as a critically acclaimed polymath. He is far too good a frontman to spend his life in the shadows.

He is Damon from Blur, for heavens' sake. And if, come the summer, he finds that his old band's popularity has finally eclipsed that of O***s, it surely can't fail to endow him with — all together now — an enormous sense of wellbeing.

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