Blur

August 1995: Blur are at the peak of their success. They've just won the so-called Battle of Britpop against Oasis (even if, as is well known, they'll go on to lose the war) and are celebrating "Country House" hitting number one. And yet their guitarist, Graham Coxon, is on the verge of ending it all. While the record label has thrown a party to celebrate the success, he's about to jump from a sixth-floor window. The one who talks him out of it is singer Damon Albarn, with whom he's been on the outs for some time.

Within Blur, the leadership of the ambitious and extremely competitive Albarn had never been in question. During the sessions for "The Great Escape", though, something starts to crack, especially in his relationship with Coxon, who up to that point had been not only his right-hand man but also the perfect counterweight to his excesses. If Damon, who represents the band's more artsy, intellectual side (without ever giving up a strong pull towards the stickiest kind of pop), is usually the one who kicks off a project and comes up with most of the ideas, Graham, the indie soul of Blur, is the one who sees it through to completion. Even in temperament they're polar opposites: as exuberant and self-assured as the former is, the latter is just as reserved, shy and awkward - practically the embodiment of the bespectacled nerdy guitarist. Coxon particularly struggles with media attention, disgusted by the fact that he's become everything he never wanted to be, namely one of those pop stars whose posters end up on teenage girls' bedroom walls. Albarn, on the other hand, doesn't mind being adored by the public and seems far more at ease playing the sex symbol - though perhaps it's all just an act. Having met back in college, the two will reach such a breakdown in communication that for a while they'll only manage to talk to each other through letters. The other two members of Blur aren't doing much better either: drummer Dave Rowntree is grappling with a marriage in crisis, while bassist Alex James has pushed his hardened playboy lifestyle too far, fuelled by parties awash with sex and rivers of cocaine.

Trusty Stephen Street would be the one to reconcile the four members, helping them mend their relationships and focus on the new album: a role the skilled producer had already played a decade earlier with another great English band, the Smiths. The undertaking, unsurprisingly, isn't without its difficulties. It's a matter of piecing back together fragments that keep refusing to fit together (anymore).

Even a seemingly innocuous choice like where to shape and record the new material becomes a source of friction. Albarn wants a change of scenery, to step outside national borders, to seek fresh inspiration elsewhere. He's already found the right place: Iceland, where he's decided to put down roots. Whatever happens, for Damon what matters is that the album gets recorded in Reykjavík. Needless to say, Coxon takes an entirely different view, his own weariness stemming in large part from constantly living life on tour. For Graham, the band needs to stay in London for once, and James and Rowntree seem to agree. It's Street who finds the compromise: the vocal tracks are recorded in the Icelandic capital, while all the instrumental parts are laid down between Maison Rouge and Mayfair Studios in Primrose Hill, a stone's throw from the new house Coxon has bought near Camden Town.

“Blur” is thus born out of a compromise between Albarn and Coxon: neither is meant to overshadow the other. But it's clear that the guitarist is granted plenty of leeway, and that this time it's he who steers the band's sound: for one thing, he's allowed to fold hefty doses of American alternative rock into Blur's signature sound. He, after all, had made himself clear: “Compared to the past, there need to be fewer horns and orchestras and more distorted guitars.” The end result is indeed the record Graham Coxon had always dreamed of making: finally free to indulge in distortion, feedback and assorted noise, he got his way in some sense. And so the new Blur now look to America. It seems almost like a provocation: a band that until then had been so proudly British, standard-bearers of a new British aesthetic and a symbol of Cool Britannia even before the term was coined, ends up recording an album with blatantly American sounds. Hard to believe. And faced with accusations over this stunning about-face, Damon Albarn defends himself thus: “I'm full of contradictions...”

Back at the time of “Modern Life Is Rubbish”, Blur had crafted a convincing musical response to the dominance of grunge (and of American culture); ironically, four years later they produced a bizarre parody of the genre, known simply as “Song 2”, destined to become, over time, their most famous song by far, propelled to great heights by endless airplay on TV and radio, use in commercials and as the main theme for video games and so on. As is often the case, “Song 2” is a song born by chance, out of messing around during sessions, while the band was waiting for equipment to arrive in the studio to record other tracks.

In the other punk track of the bunch, “Chinese Bombs”, Blur crank the volume up even further, venturing into near-hardcore territory. Pavement, the record's chief stated influence, come through most clearly on “Country Sad Ballad Man”, a lopsided track that also nods a bit to Beck, where the typical indolence of the slacker generation comes to the fore. The lo-fi aesthetic reaches its purest form on the melancholic “You're So Great”, Coxon's finest hour, which he even recorded onto a cassette tape and treated himself to singing in his own voice, effectively marking the start of his future solo career. Also bearing Coxon's stamp is “Movin' On”, a garage-blues number that would soon become something of a personal trademark. Also interesting is the experiment carried out on “M.O.R.”, which draws on Berlin-era Bowie's “Boys Keep Swinging”, speeding it up with a sonic build worthy of Sonic Youth. Britpop in a more classic form returns in just one track, “Look Inside America”, which recounts Blur's conflicted relationship with the States, one that began with the disastrous 1992 tour and continued with their frustration at never quite managing to break through in the US.

“Blur” opens with the crooked, repetitive riff of “Beetlebum”, a one-of-a-kind track whose chorus reveals Beatles-esque echoes; chosen as the lead single, it would top the British charts. But it's above all the lyrics, inspired by the singer's heroin addiction and that of his then-partner Justine Frischmann of Elastica, that reveal a shift in perspective in the songwriting. Having grown tired of describing what was happening around him in a caustic way, Albarn starts digging inside himself and opening up in his lyrics as never before, exploring his own weaknesses. A more personal, introspective songwriting thus takes the place of the satirical vignettes in the style of “Parklife” that had made the band's fortune. Further confirmation comes with “Strange News From Another Star”, a moonstruck ballad featuring lines like “I don't believe in me/ All I've ever done is tame”, the last thing you'd expect from someone so often portrayed as a swaggering loudmouth.

The record, remarkably varied, also features a long string of darker, more experimental pieces that make it a one-off not only within Blur's discography, a band that has always resisted sticking to one particular sound, but within britpop as a whole. “Theme From Retro” echoes, spectral and unexpected, in the middle of the tracklist, driven by an old organ soon joined by drums, over which Albarn's voice booms in the distance, almost off-screen. A wild, chaotic, disorienting track. Not far removed from these results is “Essex Dogs”, a post-rock nightmare in which Damon's voice delivers a first-person, autobiographical monologue: the line “here comes that panic attack”, for instance, refers to the panic attacks he actually suffered in the wake of the massive success of “Parklife”.

“Death Of A Party” returns to a proper song structure, complete with a chorus that's anything but forgettable, but continues along a minor-key path once again dictated by the organ. With self-deprecating irony, Blur sing the funeral rites of the britpop scene, from which they feel increasingly distant, and at the same time of the Nineties as an era in its own right, with the lyrics making specific reference to AIDS and the fears and constraints it inevitably brought with it at the time. The most curious aspect of the track, in hindsight, is its reggae-dub groove, which only becomes apparent when you listen closely to the rhythm section. This is perhaps Albarn's greatest contribution to the album as a whole, not least because the Gorillaz experience isn't so far off on the horizon.

Two clues make a case, as someone once said, and the second clue is precisely “I'm Just A Killer For Your Love”, with its swaying gait underlined by wah-wah pedal, bursts of noise, deliberately lo-fi atmospheres, and overlapping vocals creating an unsettling effect. Albarn describes it as a track in which “Sly And The Family Stone meet Black Sabbath”, even though the title nods to T. Rex's “Jeepster” (“I'm just a vampire for your love”).

The third clue, so blatant that Damon openly admitted it, essentially citing it as one of the earliest Gorillaz songs, is “On Your Own”. Not just for the blend of Coxon's guitars with an increasingly dominant electronic element, but also, and perhaps above all, for Albarn's flow, which for the first time dives headlong and unabashedly into full-on rap territory. It's like listening to a genetically modified “Girls & Boys”: the imagery is the same, but the era and the mood had changed, forever, within the space of a few years. The public, in any case, approved: the single reached No. 5 on the UK Chart.

Released in February 1997, “Blur” debuted at number one in Britain and number seven in Italy. The iconic orange cover, with its blurred image of a nurse rushing a hospital bed along under a ceiling of neon lights, seems to capture in a single shot both the emergency from which the record was born and, inevitably, the creative urgency that drives it.

A pivotal crossroads in the London band's artistic journey, it represents the other side of the Blur coin, the dirtier, noisier one, and ushers in the second chapter of their career, defined by experimentation and exploration. But above all, perhaps better than any other album, it distills the Nineties as seen through an indie rock lens: it contains almost every major trend of the decade (filtered, naturally, through their own personal lens), from the last remnants of britpop to a grunge parody, by way of lo-fi, trip-hop and even post-rock. The whole of the decade just gone is in there, but so too is a window opening onto the future, especially where Damon Albarn is concerned, who from that point on would move his pieces in literally every direction, geographically and musically.

With this alternative turn, Blur prove above all to be a band allergic to repetition, capable of endlessly reinventing themselves. And their metamorphosis wouldn't end there: having put an end to the baggy movement, invented britpop and taken up the cause of alternative rock, with the subsequent albums “13” and “Think Tank”, Blur would go on to embrace still more sounds, ranging from electronica to world music. Because, after all, as they put it on the penultimate track of “Blur”: “This is the music/ And we're movin' on.”

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10/07/2022