Blur - Pop Gone Free

The britpop era was a period of media frenzy almost as intense as the musical one, with England once again at the center of an invasion of bands, more or less comparable musically, destined to take over the charts and trade quips and insults that bounced from one tabloid to another. Amid all this, the music itself is too often forgotten, along with the sheer number of relevant bands (often relegated to the underground or quickly forgotten) associated with the britpop movement; groups that, beyond the odd magazine cover and attention-grabbing soundbite, frequently delivered great songs and great records.

The most striking example? Blur, the most chameleonic band on the scene. Ahead of the genre before it even existed, they were among the first to bring it to prominence with a sound that crossed the post-punk of Fall with the pop freshness of the Kinks and the punk of Clash, occasionally venturing into the most baroque Sixties and the most glam Seventies (much to the dismay of those who still see them as the squabbling little brothers of Oasis, a band with which they actually have almost nothing in common musically). Crucially, they were also the first to abandon the britpop sound at the height of its success, managing to balance enormous popularity with an almost consistently high musical standard. To understand where these four lads came from, though, we need to take a step back to late-Eighties Manchester, when the so-called madchester sound was born and spread like wildfire.

The arrival of the Stone Roses marked a new course for English music, and the aftershock of the singles "Sally Cinnamon" and "Fools Gold", along with their self-titled album, was so intense that it triggered an irreversible revolution: danceable rhythm had become an integral part of guitar pop, the vibrant energy of their music had enlivened the grey urban landscape of post-punk, while the electric guitar once again became the instrument of choice for the new generation. This was thanks to the charisma of singer Ian Brown and guitar hero John Squire, every bit as important as the music they recorded, which effectively provided a blueprint from which countless bands developed endless variations. It was a revolution that spread (and then faded, though leaving indelible marks) in the blink of an eye, to the point that by 1988 bands carrying on the Stone Roses' work were already springing up all over England - not just in Manchester.

In the final days of that year, four university students barely in their twenties (Damon Albarn on vocals, Graham Coxon on guitar, Dave Rowntree on drums and Alex James on bass) formed Seymour in London, who soon landed a deal with Food Records - who then pushed them to change their name to Blur. A short tour with Cramps and the release of two singles earned the band a decent underground following.

It's almost impossible to recognise the four of them in photos and videos from the era, when they sported Inspiral Carpets-style bowl cuts and oversize outfits perfectly in line with the baggy fashion of the time; after all, imitating Ian Brown and co.'s moves and haircuts was the norm in that context.

It wasn't until 1991 that Leisure came out, a callow album that nonetheless boasts one of the most distinctive sounds of the baggy scene, playing like the swan song of a musical season already on its last legs. Blur were part of the second wave of the Madchester sound, alongside bands like Flowered Up, Airhead and Real People, who absorbed that sound despite being far removed from Manchester, and precisely for that reason gave it a personal spin; their songs today sound like proto-Britpop through and through.

The record's main pillars are the sinuous rhythm section, Albarn's narcotised vocals and Coxon's booming distortion, which set the woodwork of his Les Paul ablaze (only later would he pick up the Fender Telecaster that would become so characteristic of his sound). A crooked, wobbly riff props up "She's So High", at least until the chorus, endlessly repeated by an Albarn more dazed than ever; "Bang" sounds like the Stone Roses on steroids, while the furiously intense "Slow Down" is a guitar electro-shock.

The most inspired ideas come from the boldest songs, like the drugged-out litany "Sing" (fittingly chosen for the soundtrack of "Trainspotting"), or "Repetition", which, true to its title, reiterates a riff that seems to jam and start over again, all set against a dub rhythm. The masterpiece, though, is "There's No Other Way", an ideal bridge between dance-rock rhythms and hard rock.

If the album contained only these tracks it would be a classic, a landmark at the crossroads of Madchester, pop and shoegaze; as it stands, it sounds solid but rather repetitive and one-note. That same year, Sheffield band The Dylans would play a similar blend of genres, but with a sharper melodic freshness, on their underrated self-titled debut.

Given the lukewarm reception of their debut, Blur decide to touch up their image with the single "Popscene", released ahead of a long American tour.

The speed doubles, the volume triples, and the echoes of British pop's distant past (and not just its recent one) become ever more audible, accompanied by just the right amount of sudden pauses and guitar outbursts. The band would struggle immensely to recover from the tour that followed, and it's from this point that the first frictions between the four members began to emerge.

On returning from that tour, the band found itself in a state of ferment: England was feeling the impact of the emerging Britpop revolution, fuelled by Suede's astonishing debut and seminal singles like "Drowners" and "Animal Nitrate", which had scorched the earth of the now-stale dance-rock scene.

With Anderson and co. on one side and the grunge of Nirvana on the other, Blur had no choice but to push forward along the path laid out by "Popscene", bid farewell to their narcotised sound, cut off their bowl cuts and rediscover their own Englishness. The Blur we all know starts here: a good-looking singer, a shy, rather intellectual guitarist (part Woody Allen, part Elvis Costello), a bassist with an implausible fringe and a red-haired drummer: ordinary enough to look like just any other bunch of lads, yet with enough appeal and personality to make them a charismatic band. The road to this new direction was a hard one; they even enlisted Andy Partridge to produce the new album, but it turned out to be a dead end, until work resumed and, thanks to the single "For Tomorrow", the four of them managed to scrape together a decent commercial success.

Modern Life Is Rubbish is Blur's first Britpop album (and one of the very first of the genre), an aggressive, crackling, ever-shifting guitar pop record, fuelled by a melodic and psychedelic sensibility that produces a handful of songs ranking among the best in their catalogue. The strings darting in every direction on "For Tomorrow", the electric urgency of "Advert" (they sound like a more frantic Buzzcocks), the explosive chorus of "Colin Zeal", which seems to come from outer space, through to the bittersweet power-pop of "Star Shaped": a perfect run of melodic, biting songs.

The second side is slightly weaker, steeped in psychedelia (the lysergic folk of "Miss America", the shoegaze of "Oily Water") and lifted back up by that handful of excellent choruses Blur have always known how to write. Not a perfect album, then, but a great display of eclecticism and class, planting the seeds from which future masterpieces would grow. With a bit of imagination, one could argue that if XTC's "Black Sea" had been made by a Nineties band, it would have sounded something like this album. The public response was being felt too: Blur were laying the groundwork for the explosive success of their next record, which would turn them into one of the most famous pop bands of the decade.

But who could have expected such a huge leap in quality with the following Parklife? Blur reach an enviable compositional maturity, enriching the formula of the previous album with a wealth of new arrangements and ideas that are as brilliant as they are disarming and ironic. By now idolised by both audiences and critics, the four of them carve out a place for themselves as sharp observers of mid-Nineties British social reality: if Oasis were the champions of the northern working class, Albarn presented himself as a critic of middle-class vices and lifestyles, educated, yes, but just popular enough not to sound irritating. Always detached and cynical, he prefers to speak through his masks (the sex tourist, the spotty, loser teenager, the middle-class man driven mad by the monotony of his own standard of living...), giving a caricatured portrait — but never a negative or contemptuous one — of the world around him.

Musically speaking, this ironic streak translates into a barrage of unmissable songs. "Girls & Boys", the lead single riding in the wake of the most danceable Human League, is one of those tracks that alone would be enough to make a basement band great. Deceptively simple, it's actually built on a brilliant structure: the guitar, following the melodic line of a toy-like Eighties-sounding synth, plays a repetitive riff that, halfway through, rewinds on itself as if sucked into a flanger whirlpool, before closing out the chord sequence. Just as good is the super-rubbery, disco-tinged bass, bouncing between the lines of Albarn's nursery-rhyme lyrics. And after that first hit comes an astonishing run of classics, foremost among them "Tracy Jacks", which, between counter-melodies and little interludes of strings and marching-band flourishes, rewrites the history of English pop starting from the Beatles and the Kinks, all while never forgetting it's firmly rooted in the Nineties. This is exactly where Coxon comes into his own, bringing to maturity his sound built on cascades of overdrive-swollen notes that thicken the chords, forming the scaffolding of the songs; thirty years of rock music (from power-pop to new wave, from shoegaze to punk) chewed up and spat out to create one of the most recognisable trademarks of the Nineties. To his meticulous guitar phrasing he adds his own horn arrangements, which colour Albarn's anything-but-predictable melodies (while Albarn himself plays a multitude of keyboard instruments).

Speaking of the Kinks: the title track takes them and turns them inside out, pairing an amusing spoken-word part delivered in a thick Cockney accent (courtesy of actor Phil Daniels) with a killer riff that repeats endlessly, right up to the chorus, where the backing vocals and lead guitar once again call back to Ray Davies's band; the result is a sort of The Fall filtered through Sixties pop. "End Of A Century" is one of the finest manifestos of that bored early-Nineties mood, an electro-acoustic ballad with a heart-tugging melody that's nonetheless bold in its choice of chords and arrangements, such as the trumpet solo that closes it out. The Sixties pastiches are splendid too, with "To The End" painting a classy lounge pop picture, and the interlude "Far Out", a psychedelic nursery rhyme about the stars sung by Alex James, a well-known space-travel enthusiast — so much so that he helped fund the British Beagle 2 probe project!

It almost seems as though Blur had set themselves the goal of making every song different from the one before it: hence the fanfare of the instrumental "The Debt Collector", the ironic "London Loves", with its syncopated riff, daft backing vocals and synthesised bassline, the Slade- and T. Rex-style glam racket of "Jubilee" and the robotic rock of "Trouble at the Message Center", with its android vocal and walls of guitars building to a devastating crescendo. Everything is so perfectly judged, effective and ironic; only the ballad "This Is a Low" takes itself a little too seriously, though it has a beautiful acoustic guitar arrangement going for it. The masterpiece, for this writer, is the bucolic ballad "Clover Over Dover", perhaps the least flashy track of all, but how can one not melt at that delicate harpsichord and that achingly sweet chorus?

Parklife is a timeless record that nonetheless seems to capture the essence of a certain slice of the Nineties perfectly, and it launched Blur definitively into musical stardom. Coxon started getting hailed for his guitar skills, Albarn established himself as pop's rebellious genius and sex symbol (the "Boys And Girls" video speaks for itself), while Alex James ended up sucked into a lifestyle of pure excess. Nineties icons, then, who before long found themselves on stages all over the world, with the main effect of becoming genuine cult objects of British rock, and the side effect of becoming raw material for the usual band-rivalry wars cooked up by the English tabloids. Their rivals of the moment were no longer Suede (with whom the rivalry had actually been real, partly due to personal/romantic matters), but Oasis, with whom things escalated into collective hysteria, often crossing the line of good taste (the battle of Britpop and the chart race, a drunken Blur taunting Oasis from the Nme Awards stage, Noel Gallagher wishing Albarn would get Aids only to later apologize publicly…).

The Great Escape came out the following year, right in the middle of the race for the Britpop crown (won commercially by rivals Oasis, whose "What's The Story Morning Glory" would sell 10 million copies against the 2 million of the Blur record), but it doesn't hit as hard as its predecessor, towards which it betrays a strong inferiority complex. The music is largely the same, a sturdy guitar-pop sound stuffed with wildly varied, airy arrangements, this time even fuller and more eclectic, to the point of overdoing it on more than one occasion with an excess of choirs, orchestral instruments and genre-hopping (it swings from psychedelia to ska). The album is in fact almost entirely the product of Albarn's mind, with Coxon relegated to a thoroughly secondary role, limited to playing songs conceived by his bandmate, with all the pros and cons that entails.

The leader's overflowing eclecticism indeed takes centre stage, since the tracks — less sharp than those on Parklife — rely more on variations in sound and arrangement, satisfying mainly on the singles and elsewhere offering little more than slick craftsmanship. Faced with the singles, though, you can only bow down: "Charmless Man" is pop by the book, a melodic yet energetic song, framed by meticulous guitar flourishes, lively piano, falsetto vocals and that biting English-style social satire: pure Blur material taken to the highest level. "Stereotypes" is a succession of slashing electric guitars, aggressive choruses and surges of Hammond organ, a masterpiece worthy of early Xtc. "Country House" shifts gears, unleashing an electro-acoustic folk sound livened up by a brass fanfare (a curious fact: the single was released on the same day as Oasis's "Roll With It" and outsold it by a few thousand copies). The true masterpiece, however, is "The Universal", an orchestral track with sixties colours, split between a skipping verse and a wall of sound of strings in the chorus. The atmosphere seems to sway between a heavenly melancholy and a surreal sense of estrangement, both conveyed by the alternation of epic surges and minor tonalities in the refrain, and by the skittering violins and trumpet in the verse, a far-from-trivial backdrop for a dystopian, deceptively optimistic lyric.

The rest sits at an acceptable level, but one was entitled to expect more, since behind the wildly imaginative arrangements there are precious few memorable melodies. There's the wonky pop of "Dan Abnormal" (the title is an anagram of "Damon Albarn": is the abnormal one in the lyrics the singer himself?), the punk blasted at full speed of "Globe Away", the indefinable goofiness of "Fade Away" and the lysergic ballad "He Thought Of Cars", but there's not even a trace of a riff as lethal as the one in "Parklife".

The Great Escape receives a far from enthusiastic welcome (Albarn himself would later disown it), and so Oasis replace Blur as the darlings of the British press, thanks to the enormous success of their "What's The Story? Morning Glory", while Blur's image becomes increasingly associated with pomposity, artifice and a certain bourgeois intellectualism, largely due to their cynical, disillusioned lyrics focused on tales of troubled lives.

Not that the band was doing well, with Coxon isolated and spiralling into alcoholism, Rowntree hooked on cocaine, and James adrift amid parties, women and drugs; rumours of a possible split seemed more plausible than ever. A decline loomed, much like the Stone Roses, who after making their money had practically committed career suicide amid press pannings and internal feuds. Instead, no: it's 1996, Britpop is about to produce its second commercial peak ("Urban Hymns" by Verve, second only to "Morning Glory" in sales) but Blur opt for a bold move: changing genre altogether.

The British and cool image they had built for themselves, and which they could no longer shake off, had slowly eroded the band's creative drive, leading them to isolate themselves from the Britpop scene and move closer to certain underground sounds, both English and American (lo-fi rock, a passion of Coxon's, and a revival of certain kraut stylistic traits, running parallel to the British post-rock movement). The change brought fresh energy to the band's music, effectively bringing about a genuine metamorphosis.

The follow-up Blur comes as a surprise to everyone, a genuine gust of fresh air that drags alternative rock of the era into the British charts (the album hits number 1 for one week, before being dethroned by Mansun's sci-fi concept album, "Attack Of The Grey Lantern").

Arid, nasty and filthy, muddy in places, the record's sound had little to do with the glittering tones of Britpop and much more in common with American indie-rock (even the thoroughly British Auteurs were drifting towards America at the time, getting themselves produced by Steve Albini), starting with the use of distorted bass and a guitar sound that had never been so abrasive. The record's real triumph, however, lies not just in the production, but above all in the incredible variety of solutions it deploys: Blur is too violent to be pop, too pop to be post-rock, too polished to be strictly lo-fi, too crowd-pleasing to be noise; and yet it manages to be all of these things at once, sometimes even within the same track.

The first to underline their change of direction are Blur themselves, who choose as their lead single the wonky, Pavement-esque pop of "Beetlebum", a ballad about drugs; the video, too, shifts register entirely compared to previous ones, flirting with a more casual, less flashy look. The following "Song 2" was destined to become one of their classics, and indeed it's still remembered today as one of the biggest college-rock hits of the Nineties. It's hard not to move to that massively heavy drumbeat and that nimble, maddeningly sticky guitar riff, not to mention the chorus explosion, with the bass detonating loaded with overdrive and Albarn punctuating the lines with his now-legendary "whoo-hoo!". "On Your Own" is the third hit, a folk tune shattered by waves of heavy distortion, an almost hip-hop rhythm and flashes of electronics, but all arranged so as to highlight rather than smother a catchy chorus that begs to be screamed at the top of one's lungs.

The rest of the album moves in less commercial, more experimental directions, also highlighting the shift in balance of power within the band: the tracks are in fact credited to all four members, and Albarn's presence in the songwriting process is diluted by the other three. Creative masterstrokes benefit from this, like "Theme For Retro", a mostly instrumental jam with warped, echoing vocals, samples, long guitar feedback and a stream of organ radiation that makes the track even more disorienting and psychedelic. The same material is channelled into an outstanding song in "Death Of A Party", where the abnormal layering of saturated sounds works together with the vocal line and a circular riff to perfectly reconstruct that frustrating feeling of abandonment and loneliness.

Other strokes of genius: "I'm Just A Killer For Your Love", loaded with tons of shrieking sounds and distortion, but what remains in the end is a slightly wonky, slightly soothing folk tune, somewhere in the territory of early Beta Band. "Look Inside America", an acoustic ballad decorated with airy strings; the electric chorus and the harp flourishes in the bridge are utterly disorienting. "Movin' On", the definitive outcome of Blur's quest to write a punk song, as aggressive (feedback, filtered vocals, a searing Moog solo) as it is melodic (the backing vocals, finally light and never as intrusive as on the previous album). "M.O.R." is yet another showcase single: it speeds up Berlin-era Bowie to supersonic velocity, jolting it apart with continuous seismic shocks between each chorus and the following verse.

A mature album that, despite being so colourful and varied as to constantly leap from one idea to another within each track, leaves its mark above all through its darker, greyer songs, like the lo-fi ballad "You're So Great", sung in Coxon's fragile voice (he would go on to build an entire solo career on songs like this one), delivering a shy vocal performance perfectly suited to a gloomy, autumnal love song. As if that weren't enough, closing the album is "Essex Dogs", Blur's take on post-rock. The track unfolds like a huge monstrum blending kraut repetitiveness, bass improvisations, hyper-distorted lead guitar and sinister rhythm, complete with a backdrop of vintage synths emitting whistles that sound like they're straight out of old UFO movies, just to make the atmosphere even more surreal and inexplicable. The spoken-word lyrics conjure images of a decayed, sick urban landscape, but everything is seen through the distorted lens of a man in the grip of hallucinations — who knows what's real and what's a figment of imagination. What remains etched in memory is the boredom of the metropolis, the repetitiveness of everyday life and the escape from reality: the most monotone Fall, outdone and taken to its most extreme consequences. It would be Radiohead who'd go down in history as the band that turned Britpop into an experimental genre by importing kraut influences, but isn't this daring track from a full three years before their "Kid A"?

Back when The Great Escape came out, it was said that Blur had won the battle against Oasis but lost the war (since the single sold well, the album did not); this record is proof of the opposite: at the time, the British press sided with Oasis, but it's precisely thanks to this experimental turn that Blur still enjoy due reverence today, drawing attention even from the United States and winning over the sympathies of many who hadn't given them a second look before 1997, while today the Gallaghers are remembered by pretty much everyone as rockers who simply refuse to grow up.

What to expect as a follow-up? Obviously, an even more disorienting, deconstructed and noisy album. 13 comes out in 1999, presenting itself from the cover art onward as a rougher, more unpolished work (a painting by Coxon depicting a half-naked man replaces the glossy covers we'd grown used to) that continues the more cacophonous, psychedelic thread of the self-titled album. This time, though, things go wrong, and everything sounds annoyingly forced, out of focus and gratuitous, as if the quartet wanted to reassert and flaunt their anti-commercial stance and their defiance of conformity compared to the other successful Britpop bands.

It's a goldmine of hot air instead, pretentious from the very first moments, with the folk of "Tender" (the gospel choirs in the refrain feel out of place) doubling down on the band's new tendency to stretch out and deconstruct songs rather than properly compose them. The rest is a mess of kraut, lo-fi and psychedelia: "Swamp Song" is a disfigured blues sung terribly, "B.L.U.R.E.M.I." a jumble of booming guitars, deranged little voices and silly, indigestible effects. "Battle" combines dub and noise-rock, like a sort of rock-flavoured trip-hop, but aside from a few melodic, melancholy oases, it ends up wearing thin (like other tracks on the album, it runs past the seven-minute mark).

Of this new direction only "Bugman" survives, offering a well-placed riff and a visceral beat beneath its cacophonous surface, while the only nod to the past – and the album's sole masterpiece – is the single "Coffee & Tv", a pop ballad penned by Coxon. The mood is as nostalgic and melancholy as ever, but what sets it apart from the usual ballad is its fabulous bassline and organ textures; equally wonderful and melancholy is the now-legendary video of the milk carton wandering through the city in search of the missing Coxon.

After a record like that, Blur go on standby for four years, drifting apart from one another (not helped by Coxon's problems with alcohol, which culminated in his departure from the band in 2002, also driven by artistic differences) and devoting themselves in the meantime to their solo careers.

In 2000, The Best Of Blur collects the singles from the Coxon era, adding a surprising "Music Is My Radar", an extremely experimental track that blends Can, electro-pop and Japanese scales.

Think Tank, from 2003, drifts even further from the "Blur sound", partly due to the guitarist's departure. The final blow comes from the guest appearances behind the mixing desk by Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim and William Orbit, who alternate with producer Ben Hillier in indulging the band's anarchic talent, or rather that of its leader.

This is a deliberately uneven album, if not in quality then certainly in stylistic range. Having seized the helm, Albarn drags the producers and remaining bandmates on an aimless tour through his latest fixations, musical and otherwise. The African Sahel, the restless punk of the Clash, gospel, dub, the collage-like, understated aesthetic of street art.

The lead single is "Out Of Time", suspended between sub-Saharan music and a placid, Radiohead-esque disillusionment. "Ambulance", a fake gospel smothered by electronic polyrhythms, with its dejected gait sounds like a "100% London" reading of Berlin-era Bowie. Other tracks evoke the Thin White Duke's experimental flair, if not vocally, then in the construction and treatment of the sound. "Brothers And Sisters" again incorporates gospel (and blues) elements to stage a surly nursery rhyme that runs through every kind of drug and its social use. Like almost every track here, though, it also stands out for its lopsided mixing: a prominent, muscular, circular bass, and brazenly kitsch synths looming over the rhythmic/vocal textures.

Orphaned of their guitarist, the remaining three Blur members make a virtue of necessity and sharpen their command of studio techniques and sampling. The quasi-ballad "Caravan" rediscovers a passion for lo-fi crackle. But to its poorly recorded acoustic guitar loop is added, one instrument at a time, an orchestra straight out of another era. The result is a wan, faded watercolour, though still lifted by a touch of warm light in the chorus.

"We've Got A File On You" condenses Blur's stylistic diaspora into a single minute: a sort of Turkish-tinged oi! punk that, with a coup at the mixing desk, veers into turbulent territory before erupting into an unthinkable muezzin-like howl in whistle register. The electronic drift becomes definitive with the hidden track "Me, White Noise". Over a crescendo of raw beats and processed noise, Albarn unleashes his most abrasive cockney and shapes a club-ready ride that, in tone and delivery, is the manifesto of metropolitan youth culture. Being English isn't about hate – it's about disgust.

Banksy's cover art, the street-art guru, is in perfect harmony with the record's urban character – it's precisely the metaphor of the city that best captures its spirit. The pop world as seen through Think Tank is a galaxy of subcultures with no centre. Independent yet interconnected, "minor" in the sense of being unable and unwilling to take over. Detached from any geographical or temporal logic, they are nonetheless pervaded by a shared spirit, a mix of torpor and dynamism, cosmopolitanism and Englishness. An oxymoron made of boundlessness and a sense of powerlessness, raised on club culture and dad's old vinyl, crystallised into a mood that is, more than depressed or downcast, lazily nostalgic.

In the six years following the release of this controversial album, Blur go quiet as a band, with each of the four members busy with their own artistic projects or other commitments. James, now sober, lives in the countryside with his wife and children and runs a dairy farm; Rowntree splits his time between law studies, a passion for computing (he works in computer graphics, open-source software and is a pro-file-sharing activist) and political engagement with the Labour party.

In the spring of 2009, news of a reunion leaks out. A hoax? Not at all – Blur's reformation is real, as proven by the concerts in Great Britain, hailed by the press as a triumphant return. At the moment no further shows or new albums are planned (except for an anthology, Midlife: A Beginner's Guide To Blur), but even if the Blur story were to end for good, two outstanding albums and a string of great songs remain as proof of the worth of one of the greatest bands of the Nineties, capable of moving with incredible versatility between the charts and the underground, pop melody and experimentation.

On 19 February 2015, in a live interview on Facebook, Blur announce the release of a new album of original material. It's called The Magic Whip and contains twelve songs recorded during studio sessions the band held in the course of a tour in the Far East.

This time it's Coxon who is the mastermind behind the project. It was his idea to go back to those demos recorded during a four-day break in Hong Kong in the middle of the 2013 reunion tour; his idea to work on that material with Stephen Street, the band's longtime producer from the golden years of Britpop. A turning point, a passing of the baton, almost a changing of the guard, aided by Albarn's commitment to his "Everyday Robot" and his near-indifference to finishing the record.

And it's Street who once again, for the umpteenth time, defines the band's sound. In the year of the twentieth anniversary of "The Great Escape", further from Coxon's rough guitars than from Albarn's slow-burning melancholy, The Magic Whip draws a line of continuity with the sound that defined the band's mid-Nineties glory days, from "Lonesome Street", which even harks back to the days of "For Tomorrow", to "Go Out", which recalls "Entertain Me".

If “Ong Ong” is the most Coxon-esque track, with a wink to the Beatles, “New World Towers”, “Though I Was a Spacemen” and “My Terracotta Heart” lead straight back to the dark, solitary atmospheres of “Everyday Robots”. On the other hand, the reggae rhythms of “Ghost Ship” still point to Albarn, but to the one wearing the Gorillaz mask.

Reggae resurfaces, twisted together with soul sounds, on “Ice Cream Man”. The hazy garage of “I Broadcast” and the martial (and emotional) crescendo of “There Are Too Many Of Us” are among the chapters of a work that is necessarily fragmented in content and overall feel, a sort of compendium of the last decade reshuffled with youthful escapades. The album closes with the sprawling riffs of “Mirrorball”.

Eight years after The Magic Whip, and with the usual scattered horde of lasting or one-off projects in between — most recently The Waeve and Dave Rowntree's solo album — a new Blur album was something we had stopped hoping for. Or maybe not, bearing in mind that they're an unpredictable bunch, capable of staying silent for years and then one day suddenly announcing a finished album out of the blue.

Back then, it was the Far East that had reignited the spark and inspired the English band to make a work that, while not a full-blown concept album, was at the very least a heartfelt tribute to that world and its multifaceted culture. For The Ballad Of Darren (2023), however, the fil rouge appears thinner, and traces back to a mural depicting Leonard Cohen that Damon Albarn could see from his hotel in Montreal, Canada, during a trip he took some time ago. The spirit of the great songwriter, who died in 2016, does indeed seem to guide Blur by the hand through this set of songs which, unusually, is made up largely of the ballads already announced in the album's very title.

Billed as an “aftershock record”, what Albarn has written for his band turns out, unexpectedly, to be a breakup album, twenty-four years after the first masterpiece of love gone wrong, 1999's 13. And that emotional urgency is exactly what makes this new record by the Colchester group so powerful and present — it doesn't ape the Blur of thirty years ago, but instead tells of the great personal and human growth of its members, who have managed to stay credible in the present day throughout their whole career.

“It was like a cataclysm that hit me. I hope I won't have to live through it a third time” is the only comment the band's singer and songwriter has given in an interview about the breakup that fuels the power of the ten tracks, and “barbaric” is the word he uses to describe it, which also gives its title to the album's third track, the one where everything is revealed. It's a confessional record, closer to Albarn's solo work than to Blur's usual output, but one that confirms the English musician's great ability to lay himself bare without ever coming across as pathetic, over-the-top or excessive. A mood that is, perhaps, implicitly captured in the cover art too: a shot by photographer Martin Parr showing a lone man in the middle of a swimming pool, under a leaden sky.

Burt Bacharach is, after Cohen, the album's second guiding spirit. His melodic lines, his horn arrangements, the sweetness of his lyrics echo repeatedly through the album's thirty-six minutes – 36 minutes that sweep the listener away, drawing them into an emotional whirlwind between moments of introspection entrusted to masterful ballads and bursts of anger that bring back the dirtiest side of Blur, the one where the noise Coxon loves takes over and blows your head off. This is especially true of “St. Charles Square”, which follows the glossy, charming opening of “The Ballad” in the tracklist: a slice of the garage-rock that the guitarist has sporadically drawn the best out of with Blur, and almost systematically throughout many years of solo career; and in the coda of “The Heights”, which sends the listener off with an explosion.

Between electric squalls and near-singer-songwriter moments that act as the two poles of this new poetics — which often drifts into territory reminiscent of Albarn's solo work (“The Everglades (For Leonard)” sounds as if it came from the same sessions as “The Nearer The Fountain…”) — there emerge midtempo tracks wrapped in a rarefied beauty, chief among them a magnificent “Goodbye Albert” and the introspective “Far Away Island”. No doubt the fanbase will find tracks like “The Narcissist” and “Barbaric” more to their taste, the latter a perfect example of how to make art-pop without slipping into the banal or the standardized. And after all, the task The Ballad Of Darren seems to set itself is rather to unsettle, to offer new ways of reading musical material we thought we knew, that we thought we'd mastered. The album's sound, instead, is enriched by all the parallel experiences the members have pursued over the years — different in taste and intent, but born from the same mother cell.

And while the Fila hoodies, the thick black-framed glasses and the fringe flopping with every touch of the bass remain the same as in 1991, Blur's artistic maturity is undeniable, crowning them as one of the few bands to return to the scene after long years away without looking like a caricature of themselves, without needing to restage their twenties with questionable results, but still with plenty to say and give to today's music scene.

“Dan Abnormal, not normal at all…” – An overview of Damon Albarn's musical projects

Albarn is a strange character. Well-off, strikingly good-looking, cultured (he studied music and acting), cosmopolitan enough to flirt with the music of every place and people, he's one of the few (alongside Thom Yorke and co.) figures from the Britpop scene to have survived the Nineties commercially. Eclectic and outgoing just like him (zany, at times), he follows a bumpy path along trajectories that only a mind like his could make sense of. A genius? Yes, but far too undisciplined, since the final stretch of his career is simply the flip side of the same creative drive that had made Blur such a great band. So many ideas, too many, and precious few quality results; in his book, chasing new solutions always comes before refining them, so what we're left with is a lot of albums — some truly dreadful, among the worst ever recorded — a handful of decent tracks, and just one masterpiece: Gorillaz's “Dare”.

Gorillaz was the first outlet for Albarn's overflowing musical ego, but also one of the earliest signs of his artistic decline. In 1998, fresh off Blur's self-titled masterpiece, the eclectic singer thought to exploit the potential of MTV and the internet to create a pop project built around a virtual band. Devised together with his flatmate, comic artist Jamie Hewlett, Gorillaz are nothing more than a cartoon band (2D, Murdoc Niccals, Noodle and Russel Hobbs are the characters' names) behind which Albarn alone is hiding, joined each time by different collaborators.

Musically, what we're looking at is the fruit of a decade of musical postmodernism, a creature that takes up the weapons of hip-hop, dub, trip-hop and Dj Shadow-style collage, refreshing them with a pop streak inherited from Blur's golden era. All of this sounds great, but only on paper. Gorillaz, in fact, are the prototype for all of Albarn's future projects: ambitious and brilliant in ideas and intent, but muddled and inconclusive in practice, whether thrown together too hastily or so overambitious as to lose all contact with what actually matters: the music.

Specifically, we get great sounds and plenty of eclecticism, but a songbook that, between albums and b-side collections, numbers at most five tracks worth noting (almost all of them singles).

Mission accomplished on the commercial front, though: the idea of the fictional band was a hit — nothing to say against the band's imaginary side, which gave us some magnificent music videos — to the point of comfortably outselling Blur (there was even talk of a possible end for the original band…), who had never managed to crack the American market, except in small part with their self-titled album. That remained the case until 2010, when Albarn finally made a quality album with this project.

Gorillaz from 2001 is a collection of bland songs clinging to the collage format to justify their own existence. Monochrome, listless and damn boring, the album makes you miss even minor Blur. The exception to the rule is the single "Clint Eastwood", a magnificent experiment in bastard pop: a salad of piano, brash rap and a melodic chorus sung by Albarn.

Space Monkeyz vs. Gorillaz: Laika Come Home is instead a very dull and unfocused dub remix experiment.

Decidedly better is Demon Days (Virgin, 2005), which at least boasts a more lavish and varied sound, better incorporating the hip-hop element with the pop one and broadening the arsenal of ideas and solutions (from acoustic ballads to spoken word); if the songs are in short supply, at least Albarn does everything he can to surprise with the arrangements and production, handled by Danger Mouse.

Good tracks include the sinuous "Feel Good Inc.", powered by a killer bassline, and the sophisticated retro pop of "Don't Get Lost in Heaven", with a dash of gospel. The masterpiece is the danceable, Human League-style synth-pop of the single "Dare" (the second voice is Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays), a simply perfect song, urban and nasty, yet just as sinuous and catchy; the spare, unadorned arrangement is spot on.

Between episodes of his new cartoon band (a new album was announced for 2010, by the way), Albarn devotes himself to a few solo episodes, some that went unnoticed, others subjected to disproportionate hype.

Among the former we count 2002's Mali Music, a collection of recordings made in Africa, released under the name Afel Bocoum, Damon Albarn, Toumani Diabaté & Friends. It's an album that crosses world music with minimalism and sees Albarn collaborating with local musicians during a trip to Africa; the intent is commendable but the result is rather dull.

At the dawn of the new decade, the planet's most famous cartoon band updates its sound to the era of Eighties dance revivalism and surrounds itself with a cast of rock, soul and hip-hop legends to create Plastic Beach, Gorillaz's third album. Hip-hop remains the basic component of the Gorillaz formula, but one must remember that "Plastic Beach" is first and foremost a pop album in the most genuine sense of the term, that is, a blend of sounds, colours and images that empties every musical genre of its content and pours it into a highly digestible smoothie for all seasons. Just hear De La Soul rapping about breakfast on "Superfast Jellyfish" to believe it, while Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals pops up singing the sweetest chorus on the record, as if it were an advertising jingle. A prophetic Mark E. Smith guests on "Glitter Freeze", mumbling a handful of lines and otherwise just dodging the laser beams of an analogue synth; far more decisive are Lou Reed on "Some Kind of Nature" and Yukimi Nagano (of Little Dragon) on "To Binge", both starring in thrilling duets with Albarn.

Versatility is the keystone of the record, which ranges from hip-hop to Italo-disco even within the same track, as "Stylo" demonstrates, a sparkling single driven by a stubborn bassline and accompanied by a very cinematic video; a shame only for a somewhat out-of-place performance by Bobby Womack. In the wake of the single, "Empire Ants" starts out as a gentle, mildly psychedelic ballad but then evaporates, giving way to a dance coda reminiscent of Washed Out; the new retro, eighties sound also works in the more melodic tracks, such as the chillout lullaby "On Melancholy Hill", which strikes the perfect balance between sugar and melancholy, or in the indecipherable mix of surf and hip-hop of the title track.

Plastic Beach is an excellent album of songs and should be approached as such, savouring the variety and craftsmanship of the individual tracks while setting aside the work's overall continuity. Sonically there's a clear common thread (the vintage synths, the sixties guitars…) but the choice to hand almost every track to a different singer (with results that are almost always excellent, barring a couple of horrendous raps on "Sweepstakes" and "White Flag") should be read as an intention to create a succession of little pop gems, rather than a cohesive album. In this, Albarn has hit the mark completely: an enjoyable, summery, slightly melancholic record with a great number of well-judged tracks and few missteps.

Democrazy (2003) is the first fully solo album and consists of a pile of lo-fi acoustic sketches or toy-like electronics. These are songs to be finished, revised, redone; as they stand, not one of them is worth listening to. With this album (a double, released in very few copies) Albarn seems to want to imitate the exploits of another leading mind of English pop: Lawrence Hayward of Felt, who after his band's experience devoted himself to the homeliest lo-fi with his projects Denim and Go-Kart Mozart. But unlike the Felt frontman, who despite his spartan means kept producing decent songs, Albarn seems to want to use low fidelity only to flaunt his eclecticism and his desire to defy the music business, making it the end rather than the means of his music.

The Good, The Bad And The Queen is the album that the eponymous supergroup led by Damon will release in 2007. The other members of the venture are ex-Clash bassist Paul Simonon, ex-Verve guitarist Simon Tong and drummer Tony Allen, formerly with Fela Kuti. The aim? To revisit English pop through a hazy, gloomy lens, dressing it in a climate of insecurity, if not outright tragedy and disillusionment. The production, entrusted to the now well-established Danger Mouse, succeeds in sculpting a smoky sound perfectly suited to the context, but the group proves to be less than the sum of its parts. The songs sound far too lacklustre, failing both to stick in the memory and to sound original (there are one too many nods to the Kinks), while of the four talents only Simonon lives up to his reputation.

The latest production from the Albarn and Hewlett duo is the unpresentable A Journey To The West, a sort of melting pot of electronics, Chinese opera and ethnic music serving as the soundtrack to a modern-day theatrical staging of the Chinese literary classic of the same name. The work presents itself as twenty-two noisy, chaotic micro-tracks, full of highly irritating vintage synthetic sounds, orchestral interventions and synthesised voices aping Chinese opera: this is one of the worst albums of all time, an absolute disaster.

Albarn, however, doesn't put away his ambitions, and in 2012 he gives life to a new, eccentric project: Dr. Dee, a concept album with the cadences of pop opera, inspired by the life of John Dee (1527-1608), mathematician, philosopher and advisor to Elizabeth I of England.

A record that has the merit of tackling the postmodern idiom in a personal and thoroughly contemporary key. Interesting in this sense is the frequent impression of recordings made in real time with few overdubs. A work that is certainly bizarre and "unprecedented" in form but not in content, which harks back to the old idea of "total music", explored far more convincingly in the Seventies and Eighties. If nothing else, because from start to finish — with the exception of a few tracks such as "Apple Carts", "Cathedrals" (among the absolute peaks of Damon's output) and, in part, "Coronation" and "A Prayer" — the record seems like nothing more than a collection of undeveloped, largely unfinished themes, spat out of a manic radio blender.

In 2014, Everyday Robots seems to mark a new stage within Albarn's sprawling discography. The frontman of the reunited Blur this time carves out a space entirely his own, laying down a repertoire of songs as intimate as they are intense, underpinned by a sense of alienation towards "modern life" — once dismissed as "rubbish" ("Everyday Robots") — or towards a loneliness that clashes with the hyper-connected age in which we live ("Lonely Press Play"). "Everyday Robots" tells a personal, autobiographical story, built quite literally by retracing the places of his own upbringing, from Leytonstone, London, to Colchester, Essex, recounting places and people, but above all, recounting himself.

A life story that makes no claim to teach, in which the writer doesn't place himself on the pedestal of experience but, on the contrary, bows his head before his listeners, just as in the photo chosen for the cover. Albarn lays himself bare, speaking openly in the lyrics about his drug habits, as in "You and Me", about "the story of his unfaithful heart", about the failure to communicate in "Hostiles" and "The Selfish Giant", which completely overturns the wildiana fairy tale of the same name.

A demonstration of maturity and coherence in every sense: in style, through the gorgeous, melancholy ballads that blend English pop tradition, gospel, African music, sampling and electronic beats into a perfect summary of the composer's entire musical experience, managing to become synonymous with a true Albarn touch; and in the choice of collaborators: the gospel choir from the Pentecostal church in Leytonstone that the musician used to hear singing from outside as a child, production entrusted to Richard Russell – already at his side on other projects – and Brian Eno, whom he met at the gym and brought in for the closing "Heavy Seas Of Love", the album's upbeat ending.

At the end of 2018, the The Good, The Bad & The Queen project is unfrozen, more than 11 years after their first work. The backdrop is provided by Brexit. Rather than tackling the central subject head-on, Albarn and co. prefer to walk at a slow pace, as mere onlookers, through the rubble of a reality they perhaps believed was settled before it crumbled before their eyes. It's clear that the overall mood of the record lies in an inextricable blend of veiled melancholy and unjustified lightheartedness, which is also well reflected visually in the songs' videos, where Albarn moves like a puppet with no mind of his own. Guided by the hand into the recording studio by Tony Visconti, the quartet stages a little theatre in which every element is pared down to the essential, so as to remain all the more vivid. The halting melancholy of "Merrie Land" gives way to the picaresque reggae of "Gun to the Head", never so close to the Gorillaz playbook.

The heartfelt "Nineteen Seventeen" and "The Great Fire", cryptic and solemn in their own way, represent the beating heart of the record, the point where past and present overlap in visions of life and death. The gospel feel of "Drifters & Trawlers" warms the heart, but it's in the arpeggios of "Ribbons" that we find the full melodic mastery of an Albarn increasingly at ease in the role of minstrel for a "middle" generation now bereft of points of reference. It could be an outtake from "Everyday Robots", and in a sense it is: it's part of an open dialogue that the now fifty-year-old "Dan Abnormal" continues to cultivate with the world. In his own words, "I'll be the last man to leave: And now I've gone away, what will you do?"

By autumn 2021, the time is ripe for the second solo album. The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows takes its title from a line by the poet John Clare and draws inspiration from the landscapes of Iceland, where Albarn has also built a house. In place of the din of the contemporary world, Damon now prefers the archaic silence of nature. Its slow, unchanging flow, the redemptive energy it gives off. The desire to marvel, once and for all, at something "positive", purging himself of the toxins left to settle by a present day that has taken a rather different turn from the "Parklife" that could still be dreamed of back in the nineties.

Iceland, then. But not only that. There's a fundamental, recurring element running through Albarn's second solo album, and it's water. Within the eleven songs, and even in the cracks between them, everything is liquid, everything flows at a greater or lesser pace, just as the album's title suggests. There's fresh water, symbolically represented by the fountain from which the current flows. But there's also the salt water of the North Sea which, as in the transition between the title track and "The Cormorant", breaks against invisible rocks.

It's in this flow, above all a flow of inspiration, that the English composer loses and rediscovers the cornerstones of his art. A cursory listen might give the impression of a tracklist muted in tone and perhaps also in content, but that illusion soon fades with patience: not only is there a great deal of substance here, there is perhaps even more than in the past.

Indeed, while the mood is similar to that of "Everyday Robots" – fragility, loss, emergency and rebirth are the themes under examination, by the artist's own admission – the comparison with that record only holds up to a point. Sure, we've learned that "solo" Albarn is the more reflective, introverted, contemplative one. Even so, "The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows" is not short of new elements. First and foremost, the choice to always start from the piano and build subtle orchestrations around it, often tilting towards jazzy tones. Furthermore, one shouldn't underestimate this material's ability to carve canyons within the listener, rather than opting for a quicker grip. In other words, these eleven tracks seem designed to unfold gradually, with patience and judgement, until they reveal their true essence. What they lose in immediacy, they seem to gain in purity.

The unreal elegance of a piece like "The Tower Of Montevideo", which blends South American pulses with a sax forever on the verge of breaking into a solo, resolves into an ambient catharsis of rare beauty (“I can hear music/ I can hear footsteps/ Ghost of an empty room/ Montevideo”), forgetting for a few moments to answer to song form. The adoption of a sufficiently carefree uptempo that in certain cases – "Royal Morning Blue" – evokes the more recent Blur, generally brings a gust of lightheartedness to the record. Such is the case with "Polaris", another typically Albarn-esque little gem that, beneath its bittersweet atmospheres, reflects on universal themes such as distance and reconciliation.

The pagan prayer that gives the album its title, and which takes on the task of opening it, is as heartfelt as it is rarefied; the piano chimes falling like drops will go on to form the brackish pool of "The Cormorant", an introspective and essentially unresolved round dance. The emotional climax comes later, in the pairing of piano and synthesizers on "Daft Wader", and it's water again – this time in the form of rain – that bridges into a "Darkness To Light" that takes on the guise of a postmodern nursery rhyme, or perhaps a love song without quite looking like one. A device that good old Damon also employs on "Combustion", a track that moves from noise through bizarre orchestral scoring before finally dissolving, programmatically, into a cascade of notes pouring from the piano keys.

Even the two instrumental pieces on the tracklist allow themselves a touch of experimentation: "Esja", also destined to break against the waves of the sea, and "Giraffe Trumpet Sea", another attempt to reconcile multiple worlds in a sketch of under two minutes. If the previous record had a pulse, a heartbeat, here Damon Albarn brings feeling, atmosphere and sensation to the fore: the more ethereal side of his art. More than just a title, "The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows" is a line that keeps recurring throughout the songs, including the closing "Particles". Damon Albarn has never lost sight of the source. Without a doubt, though, Iceland did its part in making it all the more enchanting.

Meanwhile, the Gorillaz adventure shows no sign of slowing down, increasingly taking the shape of a project that looks like anything but a mere side project.

Between 2017 and 2020, Albarn churned out no fewer than three albums under the banner of the planet's most famous virtual band: Humanz (2017), The Now Now (2018) and Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez (2020), paving the way for Cracker Island (2023), the eighth record from the partnership that unites him with cartoonist Jamie Hewlett.

The record was made over the course of 2021, reaching completion in May 2022, thanks to production input from the multi-award-winning Greg Kurstin and from Remi Kabaka Jr., by now a fully fledged member of the team.

This time, the story involving the eccentric quartet of manga monkeys led by Stuart "2-D" – Albarn's alter ego – bassist Murdoc, drummer Russel and guitarist Noodle, tells of their departure from their native London for California, with the aim of instructing all the band's disciples to follow a path that could almost be described as religious, cult-like.

The guest list is, as usual, top-notch. Bassist Thundercat (two Grammys to his name) adds extra shine to the gritty cyberfunk of the title track, a momentum that carries over intact into the following "Oil", which, though stripped of the melodic mould of the opener, is rich in inspired imagery, bolstered by the legendary voice of Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac, whose delivery hints at a feigned indulgence.

Echoes of the '80s surface in the hipster-life tribute "The Tired Influencer", a track whose harmonic arc isn't far removed from "Under The Westway", one of the last singles released by Blur.

The luminous synths surrounding the excellent "Silent Running" (featuring a heartfelt vocal contribution from Adeleye Omotayo, formerly a backing vocalist for Amy Winehouse) and the dancefloor pulse of "New Gold", enriched by the feedback of Tame Impala and Bootie Brown, are strong signs that "Cracker Island" could become a quintessential summer record, drifting through these two tracks, among the best on the entire track list.

At the end of February 2026, Gorillaz release The Mountain. Death, grief, and finally the liberating idea that life, in other forms, goes on. An idea Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett were forced to come to terms with when they lost their respective fathers ten days apart, and which they then translated into music on "The Mountain", the album with which the holograms drop the mask and reveal their true face — a human one, made of emotion, emptiness and redemption.

The image of Damon Albarn arriving at midnight on the banks of the Ganges in Varanasi, the ancient Indian city at the heart of Hindu traditions of pilgrimage, death and mourning, to scatter his late father's ashes, is the snapshot that defines Gorillaz's new work. "What you come to understand," explains Hewlett, who recently lost his mother-in-law during a trip to that very country, "is that there's no better place than India to come to terms with death. In the West, death is final. In India, instead, the sadness comes from knowing you won't see that family member again in this form, but we celebrate the idea that they will begin again."

At the top of a mountain that has never felt quite so enchanted, Gorillaz — on their ninth studio album, the first for their own label, Kong — arrive in the company of plenty of guests, as is now a well-established habit. This time, though, not all of them are flesh and blood: the record is populated by the ghosts of old friends and collaborators, presences that nonetheless feel more real and alive than ever. Tony Allen, an old partner in musical mischief who passed away in 2020, opens "The Hardest Thing" in an ambient cloud that blossoms into a small orchestral ensemble, conceptually pairing with the following "Orange County". The spirit of Dennis Hopper hovers over the title track, the first in a series of songs in which the sitar played by Anoushka Shankar evokes another spirit, that of her father, the great Ravi Shankar. Turning "Delirium" into a dance-pop bacchanal is Mark E. Smith, with his unmistakable, sorely missed style.

Recorded between London and various cities in America and India, "The Mountain" constantly alternates sacredness and lightheartedness, traditional music and pop, explored in the most varied forms. While there's no doubt that India is the primary reference point here, for obvious reasons, there's no shortage of African inflections on "The Happy Dictator", a terrific lead single alongside Sparks already unveiled in recent weeks and inspired by a trip Albarn took with his daughter to Turkmenistan, or the synthetic Middle East of "Damascus", featuring Omar Souleyman and Yasiin Bey, or again the South America echoing through the hip-hop of "The Manifesto", masterfully steered by Argentine rapper Trueno. One recurring presence on the tracklist — among many — is Johnny Marr, joined on the chiaroscuro "Casablanca" by another legend of British rock: Paul Simonon.

Also worth noting is the typically Gorillaz 2-tone groove of "The God of Lying", featuring Idles as guests, as well as the synthetic midtempo of "The Plastic Guru", graced not only by a splendid chorus but also by the presence of a Bollywood choir recruited in Mumbai. And since on this long journey we've returned to India, and more specifically to the borderless universe of Bollywood, we can't fail to mention the presence at the mic of ninety-one-year-old diva Asha Bhosle on "The Shadowy Light", as she intones, like a kind of epithet: “Abbassa la mia barca nelle acque profonde/ E portami dall’altra parte/ Dove non c’è gioia né dolore/ Né vittoria né sconfitta/ Dove l’universo diventa tutt’uno con me”.

"So we can start all over again…" – A guide to Graham Coxon's solo career

If Damon Albarn was Blur's flamboyant, star-struck side, Graham Coxon has firmly carved out the role of the reserved, intellectual counterpart, with just enough boozy dissolution to keep him from being your typical anonymous geek musician. A painter as well as a guitarist (he's also responsible for his albums' artwork), Coxon carries forward Blur's scruffier, more intimate side, the one that seeped through songs like "You're So Great" and "Coffee And TV", reinterpreting it each time through the lens of a different genre. His career, in fact, splits into three strands: the first marked by radical lo-fi rock, a second acoustic period dominated by country melodies, and a pop phase in which he tries to restore some of Blur's melodic splendour, albeit fused with a run-of-the-mill guitar rock. The first of the three bears the imprint of late-period Blur (the records were made before he left the band): half-finished songs, noise, listlessness, and a run of rough, ramshackle tracks.

The Sky Is Too High (1998) sounds like the extreme version of tracks such as "Theme For Retro" and "You're So Great": the song is still there, but it's a song disfigured and scarred by titanic distortion, or else a sketch of a song, strummed half-heartedly and sung with a bored air, all captured at the lowest possible fidelity. Graham, more melancholy and hapless than ever, sings timidly over acoustic chord progressions submerged under torrents of noise ("That's All I Wanna Do"), rediscovers himself as a singer-songwriter on "Where'd You Go?" and "In A Salty Sea", resurrects Blur on "I Wish", and rekindles a punk streak that never really died on "Who The Fuck?". All fairly negligible songs, especially compared to what he'd done the year before with the band, but which in a sense capture a certain strand of alternative rock and a certain Nineties mood.

The Golden D, from 2000, is a worthy follow-up to the debut and pushes its distinctive traits to the extreme. It opens with a garage-punk burst ("Jamie Thomas") and continues with a run of tracks in which melody is increasingly set aside in favour of tape experiments ("The Fear", the jazzy patchwork of "Oochy Woochy") and repetitive, noisy numbers. Even in its more rock-oriented moments, we get at best cold, atonal post-punk tracks ("Fame And Fortune"), when not edging close to no wave (the seven minutes of "Lake" could pass for Sonic Youth). Coxon's nasal, fragile voice, however, suits these songs perfectly, creating just the right mood for listening. Otherwise, we're faced with a somewhat gratuitous slaughter of garage-punk violence (at different volumes, "Leave Me Alone" would qualify as thrash metal); not a great record, then, but undoubtedly the boldest of his solo career and better than the debut.

Crow Sit On Blood Tree, from 2001, is the transitional album between the lo-fi phase and the pop one. Acoustic ballads alternate with rougher tracks, though with more than a glimmer of melody; even though this is his first record of fully realised songs, the melodic side still leaves much to be desired. The fact is that Coxon has always been a skilled arranger but never as great a songwriter as Albarn, and this album lays bare all his shortcomings as a singer-songwriter. "I'm Going Away" is a lifeless acoustic blues, "All Has Gone" a modest fingerpicking exercise, "Too Uptight" his conversion to the gentlest, most intimate folk. The electric tracks are decidedly worse, seeming content to settle for the standard formula of fast distorted guitar plus filtered vocals, with a dreadful, almost grating sound. A record that sounds very American, but written and played by a musician who lacks the ability to absorb such diverse influences (punk, pop, folk) and channel them into good songs; what's left is a handful of lifeless chords ("Hurt Prone").

Kiss Of Morning (2002) is version 2.0 of the previous record, but unlike the album from the year before, it manages to deliver a couple of fine songs. Despite all the limitations of a shrill voice ill-suited to the role, Coxon does manage a few good moments, such as "Escape Song", which lands an effective melody, and "I Ain't No Lie", which apes Beck.

Unfortunately, the creative effort stops there, because Graham seems to channel all his flashes of inspiration into experimental tracks that go nowhere, like "Locked Doors", while neglecting the rest of the songs, which generally sit at the same level as Crow Sit On Blood Tree, with its toothless country ballads and its mediocre rock numbers.

With Happiness In Magazines (2004), the guitarist delivers his first album with any real commercial potential. The songs range from psychedelic ballad ("All Over Me") to Costello-esque power-pop ("Right To Pop!") to the most turbulent glam ("Spectacular"), through to the adolescent punk-pop of "Freakin' Out" and the usual acoustic slow numbers he's accustomed us to. The production improves too – it's his first decently recorded album – achieving a polish comparable to mainstream releases. Yet the greater variety, liveliness and more accurate songwriting don't translate into melodic imagination, and indeed once the record has fired off its best shots, it finds itself backed into a corner, churning out filler like "My Hopeless Friend" when not outright bad songs (the rock'n'roll of "People Of The Earth", the woozy blues of "Girl Done Gone").

Catchy and better than its predecessors, but insignificant next to any Blur record.

On Love Travels At Illegal Speed (2006), Coxon repeats, with diminishing returns, the formulas of the previous album. Compared to 2004, Coxon seems to have converted to that thoroughly classic, overused song-form typical of late-period punk-rock hit singles (Green Day, Offspring and various imitators), alternating these high-school anthems with lukewarm acoustic ballads, resulting in pop-rock singlets amplified by a dose of thoroughly saccharine punk posturing. Not even in the ballads does Coxon manage to match the level of his earlier work here. While "Just A State Of Mind" retains a certain delicacy both in composition and in its string and horn arrangements, "Don't Believe Anything I Say" is just a handful of chords left to fend for themselves (and Graham isn't a strong enough songwriter to get away with it), and on "Flights To The Sea" he tries adding a Jethro Tull-style flute without the result changing much.

And then, in 2009, Coxon goes to live in the countryside and swerves forcefully in a completely different direction: The Spinning Top is a surprising album. It's a concept record (the story of a man from birth to death), played mainly on acoustic guitar, it's long, it's pop-folk, it has an American flavour, it's very '60s. "In The Morning", the first single, is the anthem of this transformation: a sweet, refined ballad where Coxon accompanies himself with fingerpicking in a bucolic crescendo made of ethnic percussion and little bells, never losing sight of a melody that keeps the song grounded, far from psychedelic drift and close to the listener's ear.

Of course, Robyn Hitchcock's collaboration is very much felt, as in tracks like "Home" or "Perfect Love", two pieces of the highest order; while the electric guitar resurfaces, albeit sparingly, on "Humble" and above all on the remarkable "Dead Bees". The resemblance to Simon & Garfunkel on "Sorrow's Army" is striking, even thematically: a track about war with spare lyrics and driving rhythms, almost like a Vietnam War protest song pulled out of some archive.

Sure, there are a few rough patches, and while we have to forgive his vocal limitations because nature can be unkind, the repetitive dissonances of "Caspian Sea" are entirely gratuitous. Coxon has unfortunately always been a rather heavy-handed songwriter, even while making, at the end of the day, pop music. And once again, listening to the whole thing proves rather tiring, as if, despite his excellent technical skills (he almost comes across as a John Martyn with folk influences instead of blues), he can't reach the intensity of Nick Drake or Gary Higgins, by whom he's clearly inspired.

All things considered, amid many missteps Albarn has nailed a couple of excellent tracks, while Coxon has instead pursued a rather anonymous approach, gradually stripping away every trait that once made his style distinctive.

If The Spinning Top opens a glimmer of hope, moving away both from the sloppiness of his debut and the pandering of the previous two efforts, the follow-up A+E, released by Parlophone in 2012, also works. His new toy has turned out well: compact yet multifaceted, fun, danceable, light, demanding only in appearance.

Ten tracks, guitars slung over the shoulder, a pedalboard a mile long, lo-fi pacing, artfully messy sounds, but above all a fine inspiration in terms of harmony and melody that hadn't been heard this well from him since the days of making "13" with the other three. Nothing new under the sun, just an update, a refinement of his own compositional schemes, where everything works well and, indeed, at times comes across as frankly irresistible.

2018 marks the Blur guitarist's return as a solo artist, but this time in an entirely new role: that of soundtrack composer. The opportunity comes courtesy of the Netflix and Channel 4 series The End Of the F***ing World, for which Coxon tackles a double LP that brings together the most varied inflections of his long career: folk and rock, garage, the blues of "The Snare" and "Lucifers Behind Me", and passages that return to the Blur main road ("Angry Me"). The result is a multifaceted, shapeshifting work, an impression amplified by the short running time of the tracks. "Walking All Day" and "In My Room" in fact show a Coxon completely at ease playing the modern folksinger, testament to an enviable stylistic versatility.

A year and a half later, in autumn 2019, the follow-up arrives: The End of the F***Ing World 2. A follow-up not only conceptually, but also in sound. A substantial part of the repertoire continues to revolve around folk-rock, sometimes with rather quirky results (the acoustic chant "Mash Potato" could come straight off some American farm), but it's within the grooves of these twenty tracks, some of them mere sketches, that Graham Coxon shows off his free-wheeling style.

His old fascination with garage-rock resurfaces on "Madder Than Me" and on the superb instrumental "Layby Eyes". The western imagination is tickled by the Morricone-esque echo of "Dining Room Stand-Off" and by the flight into open spaces of "Threw It Away". There's room for the tiptoeing ballad "She Knows", for a Bob Dylan-style exercise like "Why Are You Crying?", and for an old-school crooner number such as "Meaner Than Me".

There's even the more picaresque-than-nuptial little march "Wedding March" and the brief homage to French music in "Bonjour, Monsieur", perhaps – who knows – loosely inspired by the divine Francoise Hardy's "Tous les garçons et les filles". The loping gait of "Bonnie The Kid" and the more driving pace of "Beautiful Bad" represent, in their own way, the boldest, somewhat experimental chapters of this soundtrack, with the English musician grappling with a peculiar blend of guitar sounds and electronic touches.

To best understand who Graham Coxon is, though, the few arpeggios of "Hat" might be enough – a bare yet intense folk track – or the subtle pop-rock crescendo of "I'll race You Home", whose only fault is lasting barely a minute and a half. It's fair to say that not one of these twenty tracks sounds like another, and yet the effect is that of a cohesive work that's never taken to excess.

Because yes, it really does take just a few elements, a handful of ideas and of course that certain something well above average to put together, once again, some great songs.

In June 2026 Graham Coxon releases Castle Park, ten songs he recorded in 2011 during the same sessions as "A + E". A collection in which the British sound of the Sixties echoes and intertwines with the young Coxon's personal memories. From these postcards kindly delivered from the past emerges the most dispassionate, and in some ways sincere, artistic side of Graham Coxon: a musician in love with an era, with a sound, and with the possibility of conjuring it all back up simply by picking up a guitar and standing in front of a microphone.

Overall, the mood is mostly light-hearted and carefree, as shown by the first two singles released, "Billy Says" and "Alright", fittingly placed at the start of the tracklist, legacies of his mod upbringing. Delving deeper into the album, things get a bit more complex and varied: from the rock'n'roll of "When You Find Out" to the shadowy, reflective atmospheres of "Isn't It Funny" and "Forget Today", from the Spanish-tinged gallop of "Dripping Soul" to the naive indie-rock of "There's a Little House", from the soft comfort zone of "Easy", a 100% Coxon-esque track, to the near-modern-classical territory of "Mélodie Pour Christine".

Contributions by Marco Sgrignoli (“Think Tank”), Veronica Rosi (“Love Travels At Illegal Speed” and “The Spinning Top”), Davide Sechi (“A+E”), Fabio Guastalla (“The Magic Whip”, “The End of the F***ing World”, “The End of the F***ing World 2”, “Merrie Land”, “The Ballad Of Darren”, “Castle Park”) and Guia Cortassa (“The Magic Whip”, “The Ballad Of Darren”)

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