It takes some doing to accommodate all four members of Blur in the dressing
room of Cliffs Pavilion at Southend, on the Essex coast. While bassist Alex
James enjoys the luxury of a chair, drummer Dave Rowntree is crouched on top
of a counter. Guitarist Graham Coxon makes do with a small cushion. Damon
Albarn also has a chair but no space on the floor for his feet. “I know,”
says the 41-year-old front man, “I can go here.” He hops into an empty white
wardrobe, lights a cigarette and ascertains his bandmates’ plans for
Glastonbury.
After a string of warm-up dates such as the one they are here to play tonight,
the reconvened Blur are headlining on Sunday. Albarn has set aside the
entire weekend, as has Alex James. “By the time we walk on stage I’ll be
transformed,” says James. “I’m heading for the healing fields to have every
form of complementary therapy going. Last time we played Glastonbury I had a
sonic massage. A man with a cymbal came up to me and did something with it
that cleaned out my bad energy. It was like an enema.” Albarn’s eyeballs
practically pop out of their sockets.
It would be easy, at this point, to let a sort of false memory syndrome take
over. As the rest of Blur titter at their foppish bassist, it is tempting to
say that it’s just like old times. In fact, throughout their pop-star years,
Blur — four people with four different ideas of what fame was for — were
rarely this relaxed in each other’s company. In the six months since they
announced their return by way of a Hyde Park show that sold out in two
minutes (another was subsequently added), they have been systematically
running through all their albums — all, that is, except Think Tank,
which they made as a three-piece in 2002, having decided that Coxon’s
alcoholism had made him impossible to work with. Albarn says that one
“doesn’t count because it isn’t part of our real story”.
As the band refamiliarised themselves with each album, what struck them,
Albarn says, was that “the music stood on its own merits without the rubbish
that came with it. Fashion and hype can distort things massively when it
comes to shaping your view of a record.”
Although it is not immediately apparent, the record he is talking about is The
Great Escape. If, all these years later, an older, wiser Blur set about
relearning the swiftly recorded successor to 1994’s all-conquering Parklife
with some trepidation, you could hardly blame them. It was the album that
featured Country House, the single that pipped Oasis to No 1 but
quickly became synonymous with Albarn’s hubristic goading of the Gallaghers.
“I’m enjoying playing Country House again,” says Albarn.
Surprisingly, this is a view with which the now-teetotal Coxon — yes, the same
Coxon who wanted the ground to swallow him up as he donned a milkman’s
uniform for Damien Hirst’s Carry On-style video — has some
sympathy. “People don’t think I like that song?” He smiles mischievously.
“Well, there’s no proof of that. Actually, I think the
lyrics are f***ing brilliant. In my head there was a sort of novel to
accompany the song, but the video replaced that. Now I’ve reverted to this
grotesque tale.”
August 21, 1995 was the day that Country House reached No 1. By chance,
Albarn and I happened to be in the same place. Every Sunday the singer would
ride his scooter from the house he shared with Justine Frischmann, of
Elastica, to Regent’s Park in Central London for a kickabout with assorted
Camden indie types. As if it didn’t already feel like a song from Parklife,
there, in his full Chelsea away strip, was Albarn, too — living the Britpop
dream. That August day, his label boss arrived at the park with cans of
lager. Everyone ambled off to a nearby pub and began a celebration that
would prove to be premature when Oasis released (What’s The Story)
Morning Glory?.
“The proper party began that night in Soho House [the private members’ club].
I think you came for that,” he tells Coxon, who gazes up from the floor,
unable to remember that he did. Albarn recalls “having our publicist come up
to me saying, ‘Oh, Damon. Graham’s really not happy. I’m worried about
him’.” When Albarn found the guitarist, whom he had known since their
Colchester schooldays, he was trying to jump out of the sixth-floor window.
“Damon talked me out of it,” Coxon says. “People have talked about that
incident a lot but the main thing I remember is being f***ing knackered, you
know? Knackered and drunk.”
It says a lot about the different personalities of Albarn, Coxon and James
that, from thereon in, each negotiated his changed circumstances with the
help of a different mood-enhancer. Albarn smoked the occasional joint in an
attempt to manage his intensely driven personality. The shy Coxon became
ever more reliant on Dutch courage, while James, the rakish bon viveur, used
cocaine. He assumed a character and fastidiously set about turning into it.
During the two years or so that he spent hanging out with Keith Allen and
Damien Hirst in the Groucho Club, he appeared to say nothing that wasn’t
ironic. He was also immense fun to be around. In the early hours of the
Sunday after Blur played a low-key seaside show in Eastbourne, East Sussex,
copies of the Observer interview in which Noel Gallagher wished that
Albarn and James would “catch Aids and die” were circulated at the bar.
James issued a typically offhand aside about the Gallaghers’ repressed
homosexuality. Then he went for a swim. As the sun rose you could just about
make him out, bobbing up and down in the Channel, champagne glass in one
hand and cigarette in the other. With no pun intended, his recollection of
the time is more sober: “To tell the truth, I think we were all quite adrift
in one way or another.”
Had they not already used the title for their previous album, Blur’s eponymous
1997 record could have been called The Great Escape. They killed Britpop and
its cocky new chums in Cool Britannia at a stroke by getting to No 1 with Beetlebum,
a hair-raisingly affecting elegy to Frischmann’s heroin addiction.
For someone often profiled as a calculating character, Albarn could be
disarmingly frank both in music and in conversation. By the time I met him
in 1999 for an interview in a US magazine, he would no longer be drawn on
the subject of Oasis. On this occasion, though, he knew that he would have
to rake over what had happened for the benefit of readers who might not know
who he was. “The whole thing [with Oasis] had become something I never want
to go through again. Wherever I went, I’d be walking down the street and
people would open their windows, move their radios [to the windowsills] and
turn up…” At this point he couldn’t bring himself even to say their name.
The whirlwind of pop stardom may pick you up as one but when it has finished,
it scatters you all over the place. Blur have taken six years to find each
other again. In the interim they have all, in James’s words, been “learning
to work out who we are”. Albarn lives with the wildlife artist Suzi
Winstanley, with whom he has a daughter, Missy, 9. Coxon also has a
nine-year-old daughter, by his former girlfriend Anna Norlander, while over
on the Gloucester farm where he supplements his cheese-making operation with
media work, James and his wife, the video producer Claire Neate, have
brought four children into the world.
The one member of Blur not to have had children, drummer Dave Rowntree, has
found plenty of other passions to fill the vacuum. He is training to become
a defence solicitor and says that his aim is to fight on behalf of those
battling with dependency, the homeless and people with mental health
problems. Come the next election, he has been chosen to represent Labour in
the newly created Cities of London and Westminster constituency.
“A politician is the least sexy thing to be, isn’t it?” observes Rowntree, who
is currently immortalised on the Blur T-shirt stand in a red “Vote Dave”
garment. Glancing back at Alex James, I suggest that many would deem the
life of a professional cheesemaker less sexy still. But before James can
react, Albarn shoots forth from his wardrobe, mock-affronted. “There’s
nothing uncool about making cheese. How can you say that?”
James finally speaks up for himself: “After you’ve had kids, I don’t think you
discover anything new about life — but the things you do know, you can
explore further.” Pause. “I dunno. I just f***ing like cheese.”
Everyone likes James’s Blue Monday cheese, named after the New Order song. “I
have gorged upon it late at night,” says Coxon, reliving the experience with
the noise of a mildly aroused pig. “It was good with honey all over it.
That’s when I discovered that it had psychedelic qualities.”
Albarn’s curiosity is piqued. “You’re committed, aren’t you, Alex? It’s not a
dilettante pursuit?” James nods. “Well, yes. I talk to people about cheese a
lot. And still there comes a point every day where I fancy a piece.”
Of the four, it is James who seems the most changed. Having cut down on his
porklife and got some exercise, the slimmed-down bassist is the least
abashed about telling the others how much he missed playing with them.
Much as James and Rowntree missed being in Blur, though, both knew that
nothing could happen until Coxon and Albarn put their differences behind
them. As Albarn had enjoyed almost uninterrupted success with Gorillaz, The
Good, The Bad & The Queen and — in Monkey Goes To The West
— even a Chinese opera, his stock was at its highest when he and Coxon met
last year. It was the first time they had spoken since 2002. The guitarist,
who has amassed a formidable canon of eight solo albums, remembers feeling
nervous as he strolled to meet Albarn at Camden Palace, where the singer was
presiding over one of his Africa Express global get-togethers. “Not that I
felt that way for very long,” he says. “We came out of there and the first
thing he did was spill coffee on his chinos.”
Talk turns again to this weekend’s Glastonbury set. What is shaping up well in
rehearsals? Girls and Boys? Parklife? Song 2? Tender?
In Southend, two hours from now, I will watch them play all those songs and
more with a ballistic brio that portends one of Glastonbury’s all-time great
headlining sets. Damon Albarn can’t wait. “I want to make my way towards the
site from behind a hill. And I want to walk up it. And when I get to the
top, I’ll see all those people and walk down. Preferably as the sun is in
transition.” Dusk, then? “Or dawn. Either will be fine.”
On March 7, 1990, Andy Ross signed Blur to Food Records. The advance was
modest and the event low-key: “It was a pizza house on Beak Street. That’s
[Dave] Balfe for you,” says the former head of A&R of his boss,
who inspired Damon Albarn to write Country House. On Sunday, Ross will be on
the bus that Blur have organised for friends and family to see them at
Glastonbury. He has seen them play hundreds of times but remembers these as
their best performances:
A bit of a Blur...
Islington Powerhaus, November 1989 “They were called Seymour then. It
was mayhem. Damon was jumping around like a lunatic; some things don’t
change. They played She’s So High but it was a bit of a
mish-mash. Dave Rowntree was wearing pyjama bottoms. We actually put it into
the deal that if he wore them again, they would be in breach of contract.”
Islington Powerhaus, February 1992 “It was my birthday do! Alex managed
to miss the entire first song because he was ‘distracted’ backstage. I’ve no
idea what the set list was but they played There’s No Other Way.”
Unknown venue, April 1992 “I can’t remember the club’s name but they
were supported by the Senseless Things and it was their most punk-rock gig;
Damon managed to climb along a pipe the length of the club to the back of
the crowd. These guys from SPK, their US label, arrived from a do in dinner
jackets and bow ties. They looked like Goodfellas.”
Reading Festival, August 1993 “This was their career turning point,
from the back-lash of Modern Life is Rubbish to the front-lash of Parklife.
When Modern Life came out, people didn’t give it the time of day. The
audience was the thing about the gig, because the press had underestimated
how popular the band were.
Mile End Athletics Stadium, June 1995 “The year after Parklife and an
intensive year of touring. It was a dreadful day, absolutely shocking, but
the crowd turned it into a great event. Country House went down well,
which is why they decided to release it as a single. After that came all the
palaver.”
Shaun Phillips
