Damon Albarn Read online

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  Such was Blur’s apparent self-belief that they waited a full, lethargic six months before putting out their second single, in the meantime spending Christmas and the New Year frequenting London social hotspots and writing material for the forthcoming debut album. When the second single finally arrived, any fears that they may have lost the considerable momentum created by ‘She’s So High’ were immediately obliterated when ‘There’s No Other Way’ hit No.8 in the charts. Again, Food had pre-released some white labels on to the club scene some eight weeks in advance, and the band even started their seventeen-date tour for the single over three weeks before its April release date. The song was Blur’s most blatantly derivative track but so ultra-modern that it was a massive hit in the pop world. The beat itself was bang up to date, and Graham’s snarling riff pieced each stage of the song together well. The infectious melody, superb dance groove and memorable chorus fitted seamlessly into the flow of post-baggy songs that had been riding high in the charts – The Charlatans ‘The Only One I Know’, had initially been taken by many to be The Stone Roses’s new single when it was released just before Blur’s debut. With this new song, Blur were also skirting dangerously on the fringes of baggy parody (more of which later). The track was produced at Maison Rouge in Fulham by Stephen Street (who had worked with The Smiths and went on to produce The Cranberries) after the band met him in The Crown public house in the West End. It was the beginning of one of the most celebrated band-producer relationships in recent years.

  Lyrically, the single was dreadful. At this stage, the developing musical output of Blur was being let down badly by the inferior lyrics. Damon preferred to see this weakness somewhat more philosophically at the time, when he said to NME, “I don’t claim that we are stunningly original, I firmly believe in just writing brilliant songs that have an incisive message. I don’t like using more than ten words in a song if I can help it, and then I can create a little ball of emotion.” Vocally he wasn’t excelling either – for “plaintive vocal” you could easily read “weedy and piss-weak”. Graham grew to hate the song, and some time later he told NME, “it is a monumentally bland record, it’s so banal. Its banality led to its being scrutinised when in fact it is about absolutely nothing. Making that record was like deliberately handing in this strange, crappy essay at school just to see what people would think.”

  The Top 10 success of ‘There’s No Other Way’ earned Blur their debut Top of the Pops performance, about which Damon said, “I have been preparing for this moment for years.” Graham clearly hadn’t – he couldn’t get in and had a toe-to-toe row with a doorman. It was a shambolic, chaotic but endearing performance that exposed Blur to a nationwide audience for the first time. In the weeks that followed, with the single still doing well, Blur also found themselves in many of the tabloids, with hilarious features about their private lives. The Daily Mirror called them ‘Britain’s Brainiest Band’ (obviously they hadn’t seen Damon’s ‘A’ level results) whilst The Daily Star chose to pursue the sex, sex and er, sex angle. Blur shagged, drank, drugged, shagged some more and all before breakfast. Even Dave, the unassuming gent of a drummer, was transformed into ‘The Dark Destroyer’. Whilst slots on the demonic Terry Wogan Show and a feature in Woman’s Own were turned down, Blur did appear on the kids Saturday TV show 8:15 From Manchester and in Mizz, Smash Hits, and many more nationwide publications and shows.

  The teen mags picked up on Blur’s good looks and poppy single and hailed them as one of Britain’s most shaggable bands. The glossy magazines were crammed with useless and often invented trivia such as Damon and Alex’s penchant for starting each day with a bottle of champagne and a shiatsu massage. The band apparently demanded cheese and port for every rider, and had brand new men’s underwear delivered from a top London department store for each gig. The front three rows of their gigs frequently had more legs than hair, and the pretty faces of Blur were soon sellotaped on to many a bedroom wall – even a scattering of weathered Bros T-shirts were spotted at some Blur gigs. It was an important commercial cross-over in the making, and further fuelled the rumours of a pop scam.

  This young following mixed in well with the older audience of the music weeklies, to give Blur’s following a very strange demograph. At their smaller provincial gigs, the venues were filled with unusually young fans, with much screaming and general knicker-wetting excitement. For these fans, the repressed punk tendencies of Blur came as a shock to ears used to hearing their sugary sweet pop singles. At the city shows, such as London’s Town & Country Club, the more sombre, older audience were nevertheless still a sell-out crowd. Blur seemed to be genuinely straddling across many age and cultural groups. Not bad for a band whose lyrics were, to be fair, largely bollocks.

  The single tour itself had to be expanded by another four dates to cope with demand, and was a complete sell-out (as some would say Blur were at this point). The dates were a great success. They toured the UK twice in the next four months and in London tickets were changing hands outside the venue for £50. Inside the gig, the band’s famous ‘Penguin Classics’ T-shirts (aping the front covers of that publisher’s vintage novels) were selling by the crate-load. These dates only had one real hitch. At the Woughton Centre gig in Milton Keynes, the band were banned from performing there ever again after Alex jumped into the crowd with his bass and smacked a young fan across the head, sending him to hospital with slight injuries in an apologetic tour manager’s car. Despite Damon being a professional madman live, he issued a sensible statement perhaps designed to placate the worried mothers across the country: “We’re not a mad irresponsible band. Our gigs don’t usually end up in a blood bath. This was an isolated one-off accident and we’re sorry about it.”

  Damon was always the most talkative in interviews, yet also seemed the most sceptical. Concerning the enormous teen success of ‘There’s No Other Way’, he said to NME, “I think it’s inevitable when you are in our position and you look like we do that you’re going to get seen as teeny idols. It’s not something that we’re keen to cultivate, but what can we do?” Dave was a little more enthusiastic: “I find myself waking up in the morning and realising what’s happening to me and just thinking, ‘This is fantastic!’ I still haven’t properly come to terms with it yet.”

  Dave needn’t have got too excited – with the band’s third single, ‘Bang’, they seemed to be trying to burst their own bubble. Perhaps finishing the debut album with Stephen Street distracted them; perhaps the fact it was written in only fifteen minutes showed; perhaps the lacklustre, strained melodies and weak harmonies suggested Blur might be a flash in the pan after all. ‘Bang’ certainly did little for their cause and barely added to the expectation for the forthcoming album. Its only real plus was a distinct improvement in Alex’s bass work. ‘Bang’ stalled at No.24 in early August 1991, but at least their second Top of the Pops performance was more memorable, with Damon parading around the stage waving a plastic cockerel, comically mimicking the theme of the sleeve art work.

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  In 1992, Ride released Going Blank Again, which critics saw as an unofficial epitaph for yet another dying music biz movement, the awkwardly christened The Scene That Celebrates Itself. This had centred around a hub of bands who frequented various trendy London watering holes such as The Syndrome Club on a Thursday night in Oxford Street, The Powerhaus, The Underworld and The Borderline. The bands were often seen ligging at each other’s gigs – Blur’s studio party in Fulham to celebrate completing their debut album was attended by most of the leading lights of ‘the scene’. The conglomeration of bands included under this umbrella was wide and varied but was generally given to be listless, apolitical and monosyllabic groups who were fairly inactive live and had little to say in their music, which was often swathed in Dinosaur Jr/My Bloody Valentine nostalgic walls of noise, in sharp contrast to the decidedly bland lyrics. It was different to baggy that’s for sure, but it was not exactly life-affirming and eclectic. Bands included in the
alternative monicker of “shoe-gazers” (apparently a term christened by Andy Ross of Food to describe all the bands that Blur were not like) were Moose, Ride, The Boo Radleys, Lush, Chapterhouse, Telescopes, Slowdive and Blur. This was not a new experience to Blur – at the very start of their career, one writer had laughably tried to christen them as the leaders of ‘The New Essex Scene’, whilst another tagged them as the ‘New Glam Lad Renaissance’.

  More often than not, a band’s inclusion was more to do with their ability to share a pint with a music journalist than with their musical affinity to the movement, and in this category Blur excelled. Throughout the spring and summer of 1991 whilst recording their debut album, Blur were infallible regulars in both the trendiest bars and the juiciest gossip columns. One week they were pissed and loud here, the next they were, er, pissed and loud over there. Having not yet escaped the “crap baggy” bandwagon jumping accusations, Blur now found themselves accused of joining this dubious bunch as well, and their reputation as professional music biz liggers (and party animals) somewhat undermined their musical credibility. For many cynics, Blur were the Rent-a-Lush of the current crop. Oddly, Damon often seemed more than happy at their inclusion, as he told Melody Maker: “We have that idea of deliberate vagueness, of saying nothing and having a point to say nothing. It’s that ‘Blank Again’ generation thing that we started and were talking about nine months ago. There’s a whole generation of bands that understand that every musical movement has failed to change anything, so we’re deliberately shallow in order to avoid the embarrassment of it all.”

  After a while, the acclaim afforded to many of these bands began to ebb away and, as it did, their friendly associations often turned into back-stabbing and mutual disregard, as groups desperately tried to avail themselves of the shoe-gazing millstone before it dragged them down with it. Not all of the ‘shoe-gazers’ followed Blur into the charts, with only The Boo Radleys, Lush and Ride enjoying any longevity. Blur managed to survive through a mixture of sheer persistence and their awareness that any scene is of transitory benefit. Once Damon realised this, he was keen to distance Blur from the dying movement, as he told Melody Maker: “Bands like Ride, Chapterhouse and Slowdive had a wonderful pubescent quality, but they were sort of ‘the end of indie’, it had nowhere else to go.”

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  Blur, meanwhile, did have somewhere to go – their debut album Leisure. Interest in the record was fuelled just before its late August release by a superb Reading Festival performance (which was unfortunately over-shadowed by Nirvana’s triumph). Leisure was reasonably well-received and did handsome commercial business, but it was a rather shambolic, unfocussed affair, with two great singles, one poor one, and few other indications of where Blur could go next. They had shown themselves more than capable of storming the singles charts and holding their heads up live, but albums were a different sphere, and with Leisure, Blur fell short. It was their debut to be fair, but so was The Stone Roses, REM’s Murmur and Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced?

  One suggested title had been Irony In The UK, but Blur plumped instead for Leisure, summing up the barely visible theme that tenuously linked the record together. Their celebration of hedonistic youth, the love of life and music, and the self-obsession with enjoyment was something which Blur had shown themselves more than capable of in recent months (perhaps Damon was harping back to his East 15 days of method acting research?!). Lyrically however, there was little clear embellishment of this central tenet. Damon was still producing painfully vague lines; some critics talked of lovelorn angst, poetry and lyrical dreams, but perhaps they were listening to a different album. The I/me focus hinted at the self-centred theme, but there was no real shape, it was all too generalised. Damon himself later admitted that he had actually written most of the lyrics five minutes before recording them – it showed. He told Q magazine that “after Leisure, I had a very hard time, and rightly so, it was a shit album. There were a few good songs but I was an appalling lyricist, lazy, conceited, woolly.”

  Musically, the record hardly broke away from the noisey MBV/Dinosaur Jr fixations of earlier material, often filling songs with sustain and feedback at the expense of the tunes. The first two singles were there in all their pop glory, but elsewhere killer melodies were in short supply. Clumsy tracks like ‘Fool’, ‘High Cool’ and ‘Come Together’ cluttered the record and the lazy beats suddenly seemed acutely dated. Backing tracks were largely done live, but the essence and energy of a Blur gig were absent. On the plus side, Graham added touches of flair instead of masturbatory solos – interestingly the backward guitars on ‘Sing’ were achieved by him actually learning the song backwards note for note. These spatters of psychedelia were everywhere – the backward guitars were joined by phased keyboards and drum samples, which all added an interesting detail. Ultimately, however, you can’t polish a turd.

  Maybe the lack of shape was due to the mix ’n’ match approach to production. Conflicting schedules meant that four separate producers were involved, with some rumours suggesting that Stephen Street was called in to kick the band up the arse and get the lethargic project back on track. Even then, it was still a mish-mash, with several ancient Seymour tracks being used, including ‘Birthday’, ‘Fool’ and ‘Sing’. The latter of these was one of the few more adventurous highlights, a million melancholic miles from what people expected of Blur with its emotionally dramatic solitary piano and climactic harmonies. It was an excellent, even daring ballad. The only other strong tracks were ‘Repetition’ with its waspy guitar and distorted vocals, and the closing ‘Wear Me Down’, complete with sugary threats, heavyweight guitars and strong melodies. Much of the record was swathed in noisey guitars which clashed with Damon’s lethargic, high-in-the-mix vocals. These swerved from Pete Shelley to Mick Jagger to Syd Barrett – intriguing enough maybe, but not when delivered in a weak Home Counties drawl. Leisure was, to be polite, “one for the fans.”

  There were, however, plenty of those. The album sold very strongly, reaching No.7 and selling out the supporting tour very quickly. The £250,000 spent on the record was quickly recouped, a rare feat for many bands. Critically it was warmly received, although those writers who disliked it did so with a passion – Blur were rapidly becoming a love/hate band. Despite the generally strong reviews, it wasn’t about to win any writing awards, but Blur were always very aware of this. Shortly after Leisure, Damon said, “We shouldn’t be judged on those songs and those performances, but in ten years time. We were a fledgling group having a laugh, but we didn’t have a particular agenda.” He also called himself “a dyslexic illiterate.” Graham’s infamous comment that it was their “indie detox album” perhaps sums it up better than anyone. This was Blur enjoying their initial success, not worrying too much about focus, just finding their feet, and in that respect it was engaging enough.

  Blur were already giving early hints that their next album might not be so linear, and that they were plundering their own environment for inspiration: “We’re all products of our backgrounds and environment, so what we produce is a product of that. We’re influenced by adverts and Sunday magazines and slogans around us, things people say in films and certain moments, strange stances and gestures – the madness of human behaviour.”

  Part of the band’s anxiety to suggest they were already moving on was to avoid being dragged down with the carcass of Madchester. With The Stone Roses locked in court room battles and The Happy Mondays about to split, the movement had lost its two leading lights. In the post-baggy vacuum, many bands were accused of jumping on a band wagon that had successfully gelled alternative guitar and dance music and stormed the charts. Blur were seen as one of the main perpetrators, especially with ‘There’s No Other Way’ which sounded distinctly like The Stone Roses ‘I Am The Resurrection.’ Critics said these groups were probably just keeping The Stone Roses’s throne warm during their lengthy sabbatical.

  These new bands were in an unenviable position, but those prepared to change and ad
apt were the only ones with any chance of longevity. Baggy ultimately became a term of abuse reserved for the likes of The Bridewell Taxis, which actually made a mockery of the movement’s original brilliance. Damon was obviously acutely aware of this potential and fortunately managed to distance Blur from it, especially in an infamous article for Select in which he said, “the next album will be the start of an era. This one is the ‘kill baggy’ album.”

  To increase the suspense, Damon also showed sings of a long-term outlook that did not concern itself with the short-term benefits of a smash debut album. “Blur isn’t just a one-album phenomenon; it’s something that has to develop over five or six years before we can get any sort of perspective.”

  Chapter 5

  WEAR ME DOWN

  With a commercially successful, recouping debut album under their belts and a sell-out tour ahead of them, Blur might have reasonably expected a clear road ahead. Unfortunately, by the summer of 1992, the band was a shell of its former self, with in-fighting, drunkenness and indiscipline rife. Between now and then it was all downhill.

  The 13-date album tour was critically well-received and tickets flew out, even for the bigger shows like Kilburn National. The gigs were now much more punk than sugary pop, as Damon told Puncture: “[Live] we’re more aggressive and much more sensual than we are on record. We play the songs about four times as fast. It’s like we have a mixture of tantrums and ecstasies on stage. It’s very violent at certain points, and quite sexy at others.” ‘Blur live’ and ‘Blur on record’ were virtually two unrelated bands at this stage. Some critics hated them, such as Melody Maker writer Andrew Mueller who said, “In a year they will be seen as a Vapour for the 1990s, they really do mark the point at which this year’s collective enthusiasm for the new has gone beyond a joke.” Others loved them, and most agreed the gigs, if musically erratic, were still strangely watchable.