Few bands would seem to encapsulate all the things that Americans are traditionally suspicious of in U.K. imports better than Blur. If there's one thing that gives the American listening public more pleasure than ignoring Britain's most-hyped bands (Anyone for Suede? What price Happy Mondays?), it is embracing those groups - Bush and the Cranberries spring to mind - that the English have spurned like rabid dogs. "Spoiled," "cocky," "image-obsessed" - the litany of familiar moans about visiting Britpoppers strangely echoes the distrustful reception accorded snappily dressed GI's on the other side of the Atlantic half a century ago. Indeed, it would be possible to make a case for a permanent breach in Anglo/American understanding on this basis, were it not for the fact that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the people of Britain share your concerns.
"Insular," "bandwagon-jumping," "class-fixated" - these are just some of the kinder things muttered about Blur on this side of the water. When the band's last album, The Great Escape, came out in a blizzard of hype in the fall of 1995 - erroneously hailed in usually reliable quarters as "a masterpiece," but actually, to all objective ears, a music-hall version of the emperor's new clothes - loathing of Blur reached almost pathological levels in certain circles. Gangs of anti-Blur activists set up guerrilla-training camps in ancient forests. A revolutionary army of plucky resistance fighters swore eternal opposition to Blur leader Damon Albarn and all his teachings. It is these people who are now struggling to come to terms with the fact that Albarn and his cohorts (shy but mercurial guitarist Graham Coxon, foppish bass player Alex James, and sturdy drummer Dave Rowntree) have just made a great record.
A few months back, when the British music press first started to publish carefully worded statements to the effect that Blur had changed direction - they weren't old-fashioned cockney barrow boys anymore; now they were into Pavement and Kraut rock - skepticism reigned. Blur had started a fight it couldn't finish, and having had its nose bloodied by Oasis in the reluctant battle of the bands, was now running for cover in a spurious attempt to play up its art-rock heritage. Then came the first single, "Beetlebum." Given the obvious starting point for any successful repositioning in the Beatles-saturated late-Britpop landscape was distancing yourself from the legacy of the sainted Liverpudlians, it was hard not to admire the cheek of that title. And any song that could recall both Nirvana at its quietest and John Lennon at his feistiest in the space of a few bars had to have something going for it.
Listening to the band's latest album, question-beggingly titled 'Blur' (what band would wait until its fifth album to flirt with the eponymous?), there's no denying that an extraordinary transformation has taken place. The musical broad strokes and lyrics full of annoying cartoon characters are gone. In there places are strange, jagged, personal-sounding songs of real depth and intrigue. The unruly energy that had always been the band's - especially Albarn's - hallmark is still there, but allied to a new intelligence and desire to innovate. And Coxon's knack for blending infuriatingly catchy hooks with thrilling squalls of dissonance has never been heard to better effect. Sure the band's notorious magpie tendencies are still in evidence, with particularly brazen references to David Bowie and Mott the Hoople's spiky British glam heritage and the contemporary Americana of Beck and Sonic Youth, but the overall sound is Blur's and Blur's alone. It has been a long time coming, but at long last Blur's true talent seems to have come into focus.
How Blur went from a state of aesthetic and emotional bankruptcy to being able to create it's best record ever is just under a year is a compelling story of hubris and humiliation, of milky tea and tae kwon do. The man to take it up is the band's very blue-eyed singer and main songwriter Albarn, who has the beguiling be-on-your-guard aspect of a naughty angel. Eating a bowl of soup after the sound check for Blur's initial gig of a short British tour, he gives no indication of the nerves that might be expected before introducing an unprepared (the album release is still three weeks off) and neglected (this is Blur's first British gig in well over a year) fan base to the most challenging material his band has ever recorded. He also shows no sign of living up to a lorryload of bad expectations. (This is the same man who once knocked my girlfriend off her feet in a bar and did not apologize; who tore up a struggling band's gig flyer as he proclaimed, "Do you seriously expect to impress me with this?") He seems so very charming, and about 15 times more intelligent than he has ever looked on TV.
So, Damon, what went wrong with The Great Escape? "It was just a really difficult record for us to make as a band - it was a time when none of us were particularly healthy," Albarn says. In what respect? "In any respect. What had been a very specific thing with Parklife [the rollicking, bittersweet cockney-exploitation album that made the members of Blur superstars in the U.K. in 1994] just splintered into a thousand pieces. The Brits [the U.K. equivalent of the Grammys, at which Blur swept the board in early 1995] just turned it into something else. We no longer had that balance of being kind of alternative and against the establishment, and it all looked a bit odd after that. You get to a point when you really are top dog, when you start to think everything in the culture revolves around you."
Albarn seems touchingly aware that the band's last album is more likely to be remembered as a testament to success-addled egotism than as a musical landmark. "It’s really complicated", he observes, suddenly anguished. "If you can write songs and you can write songs well, it's not as simple as just sitting down and doing it. Even when I’m really f***ed up I know I can sit down and write a great pop song that can be commercially successful, but it won't be a song that I'll necessarily like. I don't want to write that album off. If I'd have written those songs for a musical on the West End stage, they would have been perfect, but it's just not good angst-rock [laughter]. The irony was, I was more full of angst then than I am now."
A large part of that angst stemmed from Blur's bitter rivalry (and believe me, this thing makes Courtney vs. Kathleen Hanna look like a walk in the park) with those old-fashioned English gentlemen in Oasis. The roots of this antipathy are now deeply buried in leaf mold, but they had a lot to do with that most complicated and tedious of all British obsessions, class. As middle-class suburban southerners, the members of Blur, with their fondness for playing games with their social identities, inevitably rubbed the northern hard men the wrong way. All Albarn & Co. were really doing in appropriating the mannerisms of working-class Londoners was celebrating the art-school tradition of social mobility that gave the world the Beatles and the Who; they were just coming at it from the other way around. But in the ensuing war of the tabloid newspapers, Blur came off worse.
"The whole thing," Albarn observes ruefully, "this great big soup, just got boiled down to this...stock, which just wasn’t us." He laughs. "We were the soup and they were the stock." Either way a nasty taste was left in the public's mouth, and as Oasis set its sights on the stratosphere, Blur's star went dramatically into the descendant and, for almost a year, the band withdrew from public life.
How did they set about putting it all back together? Albarn grimaces. "It was a matter of putting ourselves back together, really, not 'it'." Coxon stopped drinking. Albarn forswore the chemical high life and resorted to the iron discipline of the martial-art tae kwon do. The novelty of taking his tae kwon do exams in a school hall in the middle of the Wiltshire countryside - having to call a roomful of five-year-old classmates who recognized him off the TV - seems to have been entirely beneficial. Mention also has been made of Albarn having gone through an obscure Native American cleansing ritual in Iceland (where he owns a flat and half a bar). "It's like a sauna in a teepee," he enthuses. "It’s about three hours long, and heat’s generated from hot stones. You do a lot of singing - calling on new spirits and sending off old ones."
Drastic measures, sure, but drastic measures were called for. "This time last year, as far as I was concerned, we were about to split up," Albarn says. "It looked that way, you know, but thank god for us I started writing these songs, which I assumed were going to be my first solo record because the band wasn't going to be happening. But as I got more into doing them, I just thought they'd be great for Blur. I thought they were songs Graham would be able to relate to and do his stuff on, because I'd got my sanity back. So even though things were still really bad between us, I invited Graham 'round to play them to him, and he liked them."
What was it that he liked about them? "I think it was the fact that I always used to believe that the ultimate in songwriting was the David Bowie or Ray Davies school where you become somebody else, and I seemed to have moved on from that." Albarn is still not ashamed to borrow from these two masters - especially not the former. Blur's "Strange News From Another Star" is pure Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie, with a dash of 90's eco-child thrown in, and the deliriously insidious "M.O.R." recycles - to great effect - all the bits of "Boys Keep Swinging" left over after the band's first attempt at recycling it on the triumphant 1994 hit "Girls & Boys."
Albarn laughs. "That is what it is, actually. It's embarrassing when people notice things like that, but I've always loved that song - I love those [Brian] Eno answer vocals!" The great thing about the new Blur material is that it doesn’t just sample from a broader musical spectrum; the eagle-eared might also pick up hints of Joan Jett’s immortal "I Love Rock n' Roll" and Maceo and the Macks' chunky funk landmark "Across the Tracks" alongside the blatant Bowie steals. But if you removed all the ingredients borrowed from other people, there now actually would be something left.
The perfect example of Albarn's newly heartfelt songwriting is "Look Inside America." This is a classic tour reminiscence in the Ian Hunter mold - "A nasty bruise on my neck/How it got there I don't know/But we played last night/It was a good show" - which somehow manages to say something quite warm about Blur's historically troubled relationship with the land of the free. Can we surmise from this that Albarn has finally gotten over his notorious antipathy towards all things American? Given that his cunning manipulation of simmering antigrunge resentment in 1993-'94 was the foundation stone of the already crumbling edifice that is Britpop, this would certainly be a significant development.
"Oh yes, ages ago, ever since we started making friends there really," he says. "It was just that things went so horrendously the first few times we went there. We were on a record label [SBK, a subsidiary of EMI] with Jesus Jones, Vanilla Ice, and the Mutant Ninja Turtles. I remember they loved stickering records. Slowdive [low-grade Creation records castoffs] had one that said, 'Like a hallucinogenic drug without the danger'." He grimaces. "And ours was, 'The most shaggable band on the planet.' You can imagine how well that sort of thing went down. We did two tours, lost all our money, and had a f***ing awful time, and that was the whole reason I was so antagonistic to America and American music - because the only Americans I really knew were wankers at our first record label."
Can he understand why dyed-in-the-wool Beastie Boys-liking Pavement fans - English ones, never mind the American - might be annoyed at him moving in on their territory five years on? Albarn laughs. "Well, f*** 'em. Steve Malkmus is my mate, not their mate."
Ah yes, Stephen Malkmus. Before Christmas, Malkmus came over to record a track for the soundtrack to the film Suburbia with Elastica's Justine Frischmann. He stayed overnight at the house she shares with Albarn in swinging Notting Hill Gate. In the course of the meeting, Malkmus was unnerved and amused in equal measure by Albarn's suggestion that, "We've talked you up in Europe, maybe you could do the same for us in America." When this exchange was mentioned in an interview with the other members of Pavement, they seemed horrified. Does the Englishman understand why such a brazen calculation might run counter to the American-underground way of thinking?
"Oh yes," he says with a broad smile, "but it was quite tongue-in-cheek. And anyway, even your most stalwart indie rocker thinks a f*** of a lot about their music - they may come across blank, but that’s just because they’re so preoccupied with not losing their cool. I think that's the thing that will gall people most about our new album - the idea that someone can do an album like this and it can be a good move."
In a British musical landscape awash with sub-Oasis Beatles-rip-off bands (mentioning no names, Cast and Kula Shaker), does the title "Beetlebum" carry a subliminal message, namely, "I can do the Beatles as well as anyone else, even though the Gallaghers think I'm a bohemian slacker"? Albarn nods, grinning. "To be honest with you, I've always felt we're much more in tune with the spirit of the Beatles than Oasis - the late Beatles anyway [a mischievous pause]. I think Oasis are the early Beatles and we're the late Beatles [laughter]."
There's a real echo of Nirvana as well, which is doubly appropriate, given first, how important the Beatles were to Kurt Cobain, and second, how unworthy Albarn's reluctance to acknowledge the Seattle band's greatness seemed the first time 'round. Albarn looks appropriately shamefaced. "To be honest, I only really got into Nirvana when the Unplugged album came out. That was the first time I could really hear his voice as it truly was, which is beautiful. I'd been on my anti-American trip before that."
It's nice to see this particular circle being squared, as it acknowledges the fact that when you get down to the nitty-gritty of musical appreciation, there really is no Atlantic divide - rock n' roll genius respects no borders. "I always tried to espouse that position," Albarn says, nodding earnestly, "but sometimes" - his face cracks into a grin again - "it's been difficult, ha ha ha."
At this point someone working at the venue comes in to ask for an autograph ("My boss is too scared: Could you put, 'To Gemma'?"), and as Albarn signs it, the validity of his claim to being an artistic bohemian is underlined as never before. He is left-handed. That explains it, then.
Coxon could hardly contrast more sharply with Albarn if he tried (and if the received wisdom about their turbulent relationship is true, he frequently has tried). His slight frame and shy, self-effacing manner give little clue to the robust muscularity of his guitar playing. Furthermore, he is currently suffering from a headache so severe as to demand attention from a passing ambulance attendant. This has nothing to do with the sonic dust devils he was summoning up at the sound check - "I've always been hideously noisy onstage: that's where I get my own back" - and everything to do with watching Toy Story on a small TV in the tour bus on the way to the venue.
When talk turns, as it swiftly does, to Albarn's sudden infatuation with music that's slanted and angular instead of corny and obvious, Coxon has the perplexed air of someone who has gotten his way, but doesn’t quite know how or why. "He does still love that music," Coxon says of the broad, theatrical style Albarn seems, for the moment at least, to have left behind. "I think he still wants to do a hugely grand record at some stage," he says, shaking his head, "but I just don't think I'm growing out of that adolescent love for noise."
Coxon has long been known as the member of Blur most likely to be found listening to Big Black on his Walkman. If Albarn's sudden conversion to the virtues of the American underground doesn't quite stretch that far, Coxon clearly is surprised to find him even espousing the joys of Pavement. "I am slightly confused as to why he's suddenly into that sort of thing," he admits bemusedly. Perhaps because he can see it's a good idea for the group? "But that’s never made him change before!"
It must be strange for the guitarist not to feel himself pulling in the opposite direction of the rest of the band. "It is, really," Coxon says. "On the one hand I feel like, if they're not pulling so much, that'll make me pull a lot more. On the other, I do think this is our best record, and I can't be so selfish as to expect everything my own way, otherwise it's pointless being in a group."
Watching the fury - hatred even - with which Coxon pummeled his instrument in the Great Escape era, it looked like he was fast coming to that conclusion. "We were just getting tired of playing jolly, soulless music - we wanted to kick the shit out of everything," he says. "The whole thing was, Blur as a plant needed repotting. We always used to talk quite a lot about what our band was gonna be like, and suddenly that all went out the window - there was hardly any time for dreams. It just seemed like business, and when we'd done that, we just wanted to be on our own and out of it and apart - that was the really sad fact about being successful."
What was the turning point? "I just got a letter from Damon that he’d written at four in the morning when he couldn’t sleep," Coxon relates. "Damon and I are very different, in that he is more of a dominant character - and I don’t think he likes experiencing anyone’s vulnerability - so I was really happy to get this letter, because it meant that he was showing a more sensitive side. When we were touring, we'd have some pretty horrible digs to the point where we basically felt that we hated each other. But when we started to make the record, we just found that there was a lot of fun to be had."
It's funny that the more superficially "up" sound of the other Blur albums isn't really the sound of Coxon enjoying himself. "That's true, yeah. We weren't really having a royal knees-up," he says. "I really wanted to scare people at the record company again. I was always frightened by music when I was young, by stuff that had imagery a little bit bigger than the mind you have when you're small. I can still remember trying to get my head around 'Strawberry Fields Forever' when I was very, very young. That kind of tripped-out language really fits the imagery you have as a kid." Coxon laughs. "'Nothing is real' - I took that very seriously."
How old was he at this point, exactly? "I'm not sure, but it was certainly before I could read," he says. "I just used to look for the Apple on the record. The whole problem was sometimes I'd get Mary Hopkin when I wanted 'Revolution'. I'd be listening to 'Turn! Turn! Turn!' and I'd be really frustrated - 'Why am I getting this little soft song?' More than 20 years later, you'd be going onstage to have exactly the same experience. It's funny how primal trauma repeats itself."
It must be strange after years as a pop-chart renegade to have suddenly done an album that might be accepted by... "The most radical D.C. hardcore kids?" Graham says, smiling lopsidedly. Well, at least to have done one that the Beastie Boys (to whom Blur's cheeky ersatz-punk flurry "Chinese Bombs" likely is a thinly-veiled tribute) might not hate. "That would be nice, yeah. I don't know how people like that will receive it, though - I know I shouldn't care, but I do, because people like Adam Horovitz are heroes of mine. I was pleased that [Sonic Youth's] Thurston Moore was quite happy to remix 'Essex Dogs' [Blur's very odd, part-spoken word, part-industrial-machinery closing track]. We wouldn't force people to do remixes against their will. I can take no for an answer if it's someone I respect."
Hearing Coxon wax lyrical about sharing a stage with Dinosaur Jr on the 1992 Rollercoaster Tour - a one-off, small-scale British Lollapalooza that also featured My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain - it is hard to believe he could ever have shared Albarn's anti-American prejudices. "I did for a while, I have to admit," he says. "It was basically being forced to do things we weren't ready for. I know this will make us sound like big babies, but when we did our first U.S. tour, we couldn't really deal with three-day-and-one-night drives across the States in a van. It drove us a bit insane, to be honest. Then, when we got back to Britain, the climate was completely different just in that two months. Suede was huge; my girlfriend told me to f*** off and I blamed America. I was very naive."
All this has changed now. Coxon is more confident that America will take to the new record's exhilarating twists and turns more than Britain will. "As soon as we started to make friends there it was apparent that the kids who were coming to see us were very intelligent about music - old British pop, new American alternative, hip hop, you name it, they knew about it," Coxon says. "Whereas a lot of the fans we picked up at home after Take That split might be a bit nonplused by Blur."
Needless to say, the teenage screams that greet Albarn, Coxon, Rowntree, and James' arrival onstage in the small venue an hour or so later do not turn to cries of rage. The great thing about Blur is that it is not one of those fan-hating, let's-punish-everyone-for-making-us-so-successful-and-make-all-the-little-girls-cry albums. Live, in a vibrant set spanning its career, from the debut-album standout "Sing" (recently featured on the soundtrack to Trainspotting) to the spanking new and utterly irresistible "On Your Own," Blur never once let slip the shameless pop sensibility that makes the band's new determination to create interesting, complex music such an intriguing development.
After the show, Albarn modestly admits that he "wouldn't mind selling a few more albums in America." If any Blur album can make that happen for him, this is the one. And the final, delightful irony is that, if Blur fails in this endeavour, the band that made it can always carry on being the sort of authentic underground sensation in the U.S. that it can never be at home.
