History

As anyone who has followed their career closely will be fully aware, BLUR are a particularly multi-faceted band - intensely musical, melodically poppy, teeth-grindingly abrasive or swooningly lush, as the case may be. There is probably only one group in Britain who could have recorded songs as dissimilar as 'The Universal' (from 'The Great Escape'), 'Oily Water' (from 'Modern Life Is Rubbish'), 'Bank Holiday' (from 'Parklife') and 'There's No Other Way' (their second single from 'Leisure'). That group is BLUR and they have now delivered their most surprising, courageous and intimate album to date.
Their fifth album - entitled simply 'Blur' - is that rare feat (so easy to claim, so hard to actually effect): it is a new beginning. You'll hear for yourself. 'Blur' has a completely different sound, approach and attitude to its predecessors. It puts a considerable distance between BLUR and their British pop-and-rock contemporaries, and this is intentional. In the words of Graham Coxon, "I don't think there'll be so much muddled thought about us now. It will set us apart from everybody."

The facts are these. In September 1995, BLUR released 'The Great Escape', the follow-up to their classic 1994 album, 'Parklife'. 'The Great Escape,' which included the hit singles, 'Country House,' 'The Universal,' 'Stereotypes' and 'Charmless Man,' debuted at No. 1 in the charts and took the band's fixation with British culture to its grandiose conclusion.

After the release of 'The Great Escape,' and the tours that followed, BLUR decided on a radical change in their musical approach. Among other considerations, they believed that something of the original spirit of BLUR had been lost. Not everyone in the band was getting along terribly well. There was too much emphasis on fame and not enough trust being given to the instincts on which the band had been formed in the first place.

Gradually these problems were taken care of. In the meantime, the listening tastes of Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon had converged with one another. Bored by English pop, they much preferred the maverick talents of Americans (such as Beck, Pavement and Tortoise). While this might now seem something of a seismic shift on Damon's part - he of Kinks fetish and the grunge-was-shit beliefs - this shared love of American guitar noise and experimentalism actually pulled BLUR back in the direction they'd been heading in 1992, between their 1991 debut album, 'Leisure', and its 1993 follow-up, 'Modern Life Is Rubbish' (many peculiar and excellent B-sides attest to the power of this era of BLUR.)

While ruminating and plotting their next move, the band disappeared from view in 1996, playing only one show in Britain and Ireland (in Dublin on June 22, where two songs from this new album - 'Song 2' (very different) and 'Chinese Bombs' - were debuted). Damon knew that he had reached the end of his "character songs" period, which had taken BLUR from 1991 's 'Mr Briggs' - the B-side of 'There's No Other Way' - to 'Mr Robinson's Quango', 'Ernold Same' and 'Charmless Man' on 'The Great Escape.' He wanted to start with a clean slate. The feeling within the band was that the new record should be unpredictable, if necessary even uncommercial, and reflective of one of BLUR's original house-rules: to be wilful, slightly out of control, and constantly changing.

Therefore, on 'Blur,' there are a lot of things missing from 'Parklife' and 'The Great Escape.' There are no brass sections, no eccentric English characters, no ascerbic social commentaries and, crucially, no pristine pop production. The new BLUR revel in their oddness, without worrying about neatness or facade.

Indeed, with 'Blur', their method of recording was so spontaneous and instinctive as to be arguably un-English, probably closer in procedure to the underground American style. "The way people like Pavement and Beck record is all about freedom," says Damon. "And I know that our demoes sound like that. I wanted our records to sound like that too. I knew it was within us. lt's an attitude: going into the studio, doing it, not worrying about it too much. And once you're in that frame of mind, you write songs that are a little less fussy."

Of the 14 songs on 'Blur', the vast majority are internal and personal. They don't try to be clever, and they end up being all the more likeable for it. "With the lyrics," says Damon, "I just went with my demo instincts. l didn't try to be witty." The lyrics are even, in places, indecipherable. (The artwork will not include a lyric sheet.) And the music is warm, slightly scruffy or "unshaven", as bassist Alex James puts it), occasionally barmy and often lovely.

'Blur' was written and recorded in London and in Iceland. Produced by the band's longterm friend and collaborator Stephen Street, it is described by BLUR as the least stressful record they have ever made, "It's like starting again, really," says Damon Albarn. "It's a new relationship."
The album includes many surprises and treasures. There is BLUR's first venture into what might be called trip-hop, 'Essex Dogs,' the lyric of which Damon recited at the 1996 Poetry Olympics in London. 'On Your Own' was conceived as a cross between Bob Dylan and Happy Mondays. 'Chinese Bombs' is a very abrupt hardcore track. 'You're So Great' was written and sung by Graham Coxon, his first lead vocal on a BLUR album. 'Death Of A Party' is a song BLUR demoed in the early 1990s, which they felt would be ideal for this album.

The album starts with the new single, 'Beetlebum'. Damon: "I'm not sure what a 'beetlebum' is. It was just a word I sang when I played the song to myself. l asked the others if I should change it, but they said no. That's pretty much how we worked on this album. If it felt right, we wouldn't try to tidy it up like we'd done in the past. A few of the songs are us jamming. Vocals were done through tiny amplifiers, and we fucked about with them even after that. 'Strange News From Another Star' has four drumkits playing on it, things like that..."

Graham Coxon: "It's a lot rawer than our previous albums - soundwise and emotionally. lt may shock some people, but a lot of people will really love it. lt's a lot to do with our 'world'. lt's quite intimate in that way."

The history of BLUR can be traced back to circa 1980, when Damon Albarn (b.1968) and Graham Coxon (b.1969) met as schoolboys at Stanway Comprehensive School in the fair city of Colchester in Essex, where they sang together in the choir. Both were drawn to music: Damon, a Londoner by birth (Whitechapel Hospital), was the son of Keith (a former luminary of England's late-1960s psychedelic rock scene that yielded Soft Machine and others) and Hazel (a stage designer for Joan Littlewood's theatre company). Arriving in Colchester in the late '70s, the young Damon began studying music (the piano) and drama.
Graham, who had been born on an airbase in Germany, was the son of a bandsman and he had gravitated to Colchester in 1977. Graham was encouraged at Stanway to learn the saxophone, an instrument which - some 15 years later - he would play for the first time as a member of BLUR on 'Jubilee' (on 'Parklife').
Aged 12, Graham also began to play the guitar.

Alex James grew up in Bournemouth on England's south coast, coming to London in the late '80s to study at Goldsmith's College, where he first met Graham.

Colchester-born Dave Rowntree, the son of a BBC sound engineer and a mum who played piano in an orchestra, "took up" the bagpipes at a young age of "very youthful indeed", graduating to drums not long afterwards.

These four men formed a bizarre, Brechtian art-punk band called Seymour - Damon on vocals (and occasional keyboards), Graham on guitar, Alex on bass and Dave on drums. After playing a dozen or so shows in and around London, they re-named the band BLUR in 1989. BLUR signed to Food Records in late 1989.

The first release from BLUR was the single 'She's So High,' in 1990. The story really began to gather speed with the next single, 'There's No Other Way,' a sizeable hit in Britain in the Spring of 1991. The song saw BLUR working for the first time with the legendary producer Stephen Street (The Smiths, Morrissey, The Cranberries). Street has produced the bulk of BLUR's music ever since, including all but one track on 'Parklife' and every song on 'The Great Escape' and 'Blur.'

'Leisure,' BLUR's debut album, released in August 1991, was an enjoyable collection of songs influenced by Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd, the explosive guitars of My Bloody Valentine and vocal harmonies reminiscent of 'Revolver'-era Beatles. A Number 7 hit in Britain, 'Leisure' was soon outgrown by BLUR, who announced a complete change of attack on their great, 'lost' single 'Popscene' in March 1992: furiously-paced, with blaring horns over punky guitars.

Damon had undergone a major transformation as a songwriter: from reticent by-stander to caustic commentator, and BLUR greedily stockpiled the songs that would make up their sophomore album, the critical break-through 'Modern Life Is Rubbish.' Named after a piece of graffiti scrawled on a wall near London's hallowed monolith Marble Arch, 'Modern Life Is Rubbish' (released in May 1993) was a total sea-change. Flying in the face of fashion, it was a huge pop encyclopaedia of England (from Julian Cope to XTC, from The Beatles to Madness). The album's witty and touchingly parochial songs (variously bolstered by use of string sections, brass sections and cor anglais) aimed for, and acheived, a quintessential English sound not heard since the 1965-68 heyday of the Kinks.

This modern view of urban England was developed on the third BLUR album, 'Parklife' (a number one chart entry in April 1994), which took an analytical, often complex look at England's foibles and misfortunes. The music created by BLUR - guitars, bass, saxophones, drums and insane plastic keyboards - drew from many classic English influences (Kinks, Madness, Bowie, Magazine) to create a palette that was inspirationally fresh and defiantly colloquial. The band won four BRIT Awards for 'Parklife' in early 1995.

Some months ago in the making, the much-misunderstood 'The Great Escape' was BLUR's worldwide coming of age. Its musical reach far outstripped trafitional pop: banjo, mellotron, curdled waltzes and zonked-out keyboards all took a bow in the band's ingenious arrangements. The album would have sounded novel in whichever country it was heard. It spanned every age group (BLUR are the first group ever to receive frontcover stories in the teen mag Smash Hits and the thirtysomethings' monthly Mojo.)

'The Great Escape' shot straight into the British album charts at number one - it sold over 1 million copies in the UK alone - and is to-date BLUR's biggest-selling album worldwide. A tour of British seaside resorts followed, during which BLUR played to small audiences for one last time.

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