The history of blur can be traced back to circa 1980, when Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon 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 hugepop 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 out stripped 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. The self-titled album 'blur' released in 1997 reflected a new awareness of left-field American rock particularly on Graham's part and a new found love of the empty beauty of Iceland on Damon and Alex's. Also, there to be heard quite clearly is a growing dissatisfaction with English pop music and the nature of stardom as epitomised by the facile feud with Oasis. 'blur' is an abrasive but oddly attractive record that added some great new songs to the blur canon, not least the anthemic Song 2 and the mysterious Strange News From Another Star as well as a first solo foray on a blur album from Graham, the cracked and melancholy You're So Great. Since the release of 'blur', the individual members have busied themselves with a variety of projects. Alex has become a pop star all over again with the curiously unfathomable Fat Les combo, Dave Rowntree has immersed himself in computer animation and the two of them have become keen flyers and are backing the 2003 British Unmanned Mars probe. Their Sixth Album. 13 represents a break with the past in many ways. It is the first album on which the group haven't collaborated with Stephen Street. "We've done some fantastic work with Stephen in the past and we've the greatest respect for him but we had reached the stage where we wanted to challenge our own way of working". The new way of working involved lengthy improvisations around song structures which Orbit and his boffins would painstakingly record and edit. The result is a sound at once abstract and yet crowded with detail and inspiring moments. 13 also has it's roots in all kinds of changed personal and emotional circumstances, the sound of a group maturing into a fully realised musical whole, making the music that best expresses them from Tender, an epic hymn of consolation described by Alex James as "one of the best things we've ever done, the one that's going to fucking knock people out" to the anguished yet hopeful blues of No Distance Left To Run, from the lo-fi pop cool of Graham Coxon's Coffee and TV to the alluring strangeness of Battle and Mellow Song. Trailer Park, originally written for the South Park album, is a splendid Kraut Rock/mutant hybrid of a type few others in British pop are currently attempting. It's th e sound of a group in the happy and enviable position of inhabiting a soundworld that is utterly their own, although on 13 from time to time you may find yourself reminded in illuminating flashes of a whole range of talents from The Fall to Faust to Nick Drake to Pink Floyd to The Staples Singers to Wire to Augustus Pablo. 13 is, confusingly, blur's sixth album and marks their ten years as a band. Graham has formed his own label Transcopic as an outlet for the music he loves and on which he released the acclaimed solo album The Sky's Too High in August 98. Damon has followed up his acting debut in Antonia Bird's Face by co-composing, along with Michael Nyman, the music for her latest venture, Ravenous. A new-found sense of well-being has emerged within the group "things have never been healthier between us as a group. We've acknowledged that we are different people, which ironically has made us realise how much we have in common and why we formed a group in the first place. We respect each other and we're remembering how much we love each other's stuff". Out of a tempestuous few years has come an album of great strength and individuality, an album that is light years ahead of what passes for alternative music right now, an album that, truthfully, could only be blur. |
