人気ブログランキング | 話題のタグを見る

A hard day's night (part 1)


By David Cavanagh, Mojo magazine, November 2000

Soho House is a media drinking club hidden behind a doorway on Greek Street in London's West End. It was here that Blur met on August 20, 1995 to celebrate their victory over Oasis, when Country House entered the singles chart at Number 1 ahead of Roll With It. Tensions were running high that Sunday evening: guitarist Graham Coxon, unhappy about the direction Blur's music and videos had taken, threw champagne around in a fit of drunken pique before attempting to exit the premises via a second-floor window. His journey to the pavement would have been a brief one. Blur's domination of Oasis was not to last any longer.


Five years later almost to the day, Blur are back in Soho House. This time they're downstairs in the library, drinking bottles of mineral water. When their lunches arrive, they prod at them for a while and push them aside, unfinished. If the four musicians are enjoying being in each other's company - an event somewhat rare this year - they are doing a pretty good job of disguising it. Damon Albarn once or twice rolls his eyes at an indiscreet remark from bassist Alex James. When Alex announces that he thought Country House should have been a B-side, Damon ripostes: "This is coming from a man who every time we do a gig says, 'Oh, can't we please play Country House?' I find that comment absolutely extraordinary." Graham, meanwhile, is still an antsy individual, but he is at least planning to travel home on his skateboard this afternoon, not in an ambulance.


These days, the members of Blur lead separate lives, which seem to become more separate as time goes by. Damon and Graham each have a young daughter and both have made music outside Blur within the last three years. Damon is a film music composer in considerable demand, while Graham has released two solo albums, The Sky Is Too High and The Golden D, promoting the latter this summer with a touring band that included Blur's drummer Dave Rowntree. Alex, who these days is flushed and jocose like Peter Cook on a mid-'80s chat show, was part of Keith Allen's Fat Les project and has ventured into film music himself on the new Robert Carlyle movie There's Only One Jimmy Grimble.


Although they performed one London concert this year on July 2 at Scott Walker's Meltdown festival, Blur have not toured in two years and appear to have only a hazy idea about what each other has been up to in private. Rumour has it that they formally agreed in 1999 to put the band on ice for a year, but Graham insists this was never discussed at any great length. "We're recharging," he declares, "Recharging and thinking."


"Things have definitely changed," explains Alex a few hours later when MOJO visits his five-storey home in Covent Garden. "When people start to have families you cease to be a four-man gang. You're not The Beatles in Help! any more, are you? You're not going to be recklessly hurling yourself over a horizon when you've got a family at home. The goal-posts have moved. Of course they have."


Of the four of them, Damon has matured the most since MOJO last interviewed Blur in 1995. An even-tempered 32-year-old, he chooses his words advisedly and gives the appearance of being unruffled by the world around him. He is careful not to crow over the problems Oasis have faced this year (which would have given him a great deal of satisfaction once upon a time), merely making the observation that their stick-in-the-mud musical policy was bound to backfire on them sooner or later. And if few could have foreseen in 1996 that Blur's off-centre art-rock would have the stamina to see off the Burnage challenge at the end of the millennium, well, Damon is not about to rub anyone's nose in it now. He hardly needs to reiterate that Blur's durability is founded on movement and change. Their William Orbit-produced 1999 album 13, which many consider their best, was recorded with none of the clean precision of previous records, and surprised even long-term fans with its often atonal experimentation and emotional rawness. It is a tribute to Blur's hard-won musical freedom that no one really knows what they will do next.


Since his "rock divorce", as he wryly calls it, from Justine Frischmann two years ago, Damon has been sharing his life with a new girlfriend and has travelled extensively, recently taking his melodica to Mali to play with - and learn from - the kora virtuoso Toumani Diabate. "You can become very insular in a band when you're only playing with the same people," Damon says. "It's not healthy. You have to see how wide the world is. You certainly get a feeling of how wide it is when you're in Mali."


The son of a one-time manager of Soft Machine, Damon grew up in a progressive household - first in the East End of London, then in Colchester - where he had access to many different kinds of music. But he wasn't as open-minded then as he is now. "When I was growing up, my parents' music was old blues, Indian ragas and African music. And a bit of gospel: Mahalia Jackson. There was Atom Heart Mother and Rubber Soul, but there was nothing else really [in the pop/rock area]. It was mostly indigenous music and I didn't really like any of it. It's been there in me - latent - for such a long time and it's just coming out now."


Since everything about Damon in the autumn of 2000 seems to want to draw a line under the past and move on, it is fitting that EMI have chosen this as the ideal moment to release a Blur greatest hits album. Containing 17 of their 23 singles to date (including the latest, Music Is My Radar), Blur: The Best Of also finds room for an album track from Parklife, This Is A Low, and is twinned on early pressings with a CD containing 10 songs recorded at Wembley Arena last December.


To be released on October 30, the 77-minute Blur: The Best Of will reintroduce the subject of the long-gone "chirpy" Blur of 1994 to a nation that may lately have found them downbeat on such lachrymose singles as Tender and No Distance Left To Run. It will also probably fill a few Christmas stockings. According to Alex, EMI is banking on it selling two million comfortably. The tracklisting was market-researched by the label with the help of focus groups.


Alex: "I've never seen anything so brutal, but it was very illuminating. Apparently, when these people think of Blur, the first thing they think of is Damon's eyes. Among other things, it came across that we were a fully integrated band. People didn't perceive us as different personalities. They perceived us as straight-down-the-line musicians."


The research was commissioned to ascertain whether October 2000 would be the optimum time for a Blur greatest hits album. The answer was a resounding affirmative. Graham: "They all said they'd buy it apart from four blokes in Yorkshire." Damon (laughing): "There was a seething dissent in southern Yorkshire for some reason, which we can only put down to the fact that they haven't forgiven us for what happened with Oasis."


More than any band that came up in the early '90s, Blur have had an equivocal relationship with the single, and this can be read between the lines of Blur: The Best Of. Not every track was their preferred choice of A-side at the time, and many were released purely because one of their albums needed its profile maintained by a third or fourth single. If Blur: The Best Of has a subtext, and it does, it is the fluctuations in importance of the pop single to a band like Blur in the last decade - from the bashful courting of Radio One in 1990-91, to the ripe commercial prospects of the perestroika years 1994-95, to the post-Britpop reorganisations and clean breaks of 1997, to the singles-are-a-devalued-irrelevance-so-we-might-as-well-put-out-a-weird-one viewpoint that prevails among groups of Blur's stature today.


"The important thing is that we're looking forward, not back," says Damon. "We sat down with Can - the great Can - in, where was it? Düsseldorf or somewhere, and had high tea with them. They said to us, 'Look at it like this. Your whole career up to now has been college - a very public college. Now you're graduating and going out into the real world.'"


Five years ago, Damon would have been incensed to be so patronised. ("Oh yeah? And how many hits have you had, grandad?") Now he takes Can's words as a profound compliment. Graduating from college is a potent image, it seems, to a man once caricatured by the Oasis camp as a university-educated dilettante. It's funny how what goes around comes around.


Jesus Jones are so seldom mentioned nowadays that it's easy to forget they ever existed. In 1989, however, this brash five-piece from Wiltshire, Surrey and Devon were seen by some commentators as the future of the four minute pop song - a song in which rock guitars and techno rhythms would not only co-exist but prosper, making dancers out of hitherto reserved indie fans and creating hit singles from a man-and-machine coalition as accessible as it was forward-looking. After three mid-charters, Jesus Jones burst into the Top 20 with their fourth single, Real Real Real, in May 1990. The ensuing bullishness at their record company, Food, was to have far-reaching effects for a rather eccentric young band it had signed in March.


Seymour had come to London from Colchester and Bournemouth, knowing little about the cliquey scenes that made up the capital's indie fabric in the late 1980s. At a time when The Velvet Underground remained the primary influence for the majority of new London-based guitar groups, Seymour were a peculiar mixture of the provincial, the cultivated and the arcane. Singer and keyboard player Damon Albarn loved American scream-rockers the Pixies, but was equally interested in the works of Brecht and Weill. Guitarist Graham Coxon was a Johnny Marr fan who'd paradoxically spent several years in his teens listening to Van Der Graaf Generator. Both he and Damon were classically trained.


"When I moved to London I was pretty under-educated about a lot of music," Graham says nevertheless. "I used to go out with friends at art school [Goldsmiths' College] to see groups in places like Deptford. The chart music of the '80s wasn't that different to what it is now. I've always liked guitars, so the only place to go after The Jam and The Smiths was to indie music. Isn't Anything by My Bloody Valentine was a big album for me. The guitars sounded like rusty Mellotrons."


Seymour were not quite a stereotypical 1989 indie band, much as a tomato is not quite a banana. Damon, a former drama student who had dipped into the shock tactics of Artaud's Theatre Of Cruelty, would hurtle dangerously around the stage during the fast numbers, occasionally disappearing behind Dave Rowntree's drum-kit to be sick. At other times he would sit at a piano. Seymour's intro-piece The Opening, a Damon-written instrumental, would begin like something from the Kit Kat Klub in Cabaret and gradually get faster and faster, eventually galloping around like a punk hornpipe. "We were trying to find our feet," says Dave. "We didn't really know what we wanted to do, but we knew how we wanted it to feel. It was about thrashing around and acting a bit mad."


Food - the record company Seymour signed to in March 1990 after changing their name to Blur - was not a bona fide indie label, as it had been receiving funding and distribution from EMI since1988. Unlike indies such as Creation and Rough Trade, moreover, Food had only a small roster and was circumspect about adding to it. It took all of seven gigs to convince label boss Dave Balfe that Seymour were worth a record deal. An unwritten condition of that deal was that they would consign their Kurt Weill art-school excursions to B-sides, if not the outtakes pile. The A-sides would highlight the 22-year-old Damon's flair for melody and would be arranged and produced in such a way to bounce Blur straight from the indie pub circuit into the Gallup hit parade.


For a band so untrammelled on-stage, being obliged to compromise in the studio was surprisingly not a controversial issue. Not to begin with, anyway. For all his rough edges, Damon wanted to be successful and had made one or two attempts in the '80s to launch a mainstream pop career, namely as one half of a synth-pop duo called Two's A Crowd. Like his Blur colleagues, he accepted that Balfe, an erstwhile pop star in Teardrop Explodes, probably knew best. "We knew from the outset that singles were supposed to be a kind of carrot," says Graham. "A bit of cheese on the mousetrap." Ironically, for their debut single, Blur returned to the very first song they had rehearsed as Seymour.


As Blur recorded the undulating, psych-inflected ballad She's So High in the summer of 1990, they were excited to learn that the studio (Battery in Willesden) had been used by The Stone Roses for their breakthrough hit Fool's Gold. The substantial sales of Fool's Gold and the Happy Mondays' Madchester Rave On EP, and their resulting exposure on Top Of The Pops on November 30, 1989, had been key factors in opening up the singles chart to bands that had longed for years to gain ingress. Primal Scream's dance-rock crossover track Loaded had made the Top 20 in March 1990. While Blur were in Battery, The Only One I Know by Stone Roses soundalikes The Charlatans was making its way into the Top 10.


Yet each new dance-rock crossover hit served only to refine the genre's template. Loping bass lines, funky drum loops and languid vocals were now prerequisites for every aspiring hitmaker, and for Dave Balfe this meant not so much giving Blur A&R guidance as taking them to the tailor's to fit them with the right suit. When She's So High peaked at a lowly 48 in the autumn, a dismayed Blur allowed the makeover to begin in earnest.


Pressured by Balfe to deliver a more uptempo song for their second single, Blur obediently embraced the genre now being dubbed by the press "indie-dance". Dave: "Compared to The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, we were minnows struggling very hard. We hitched ourselves to the indie-dance bandwagon, with much prompting from Balfe. If there was a 'Changing Rooms' for bands, indie-dance would be Carol Smillie coming in and turning your nice song into (Scottish accent), 'Ooh, great, a bit of an indie-dance feel.' Staple it on and it'll fall off next year." It was a ruthless time. On one aborted session, the producer would not allow Alex James to play bass on the track.


In the first week of January 1991, Blur recorded a Damon tune called There's No Other Way with Stephen Street, who had engineered and co-produced albums for The Smiths. Manacled by Street to a sampled drum loop, There's No Other Way was a sort of decaffeinated See Emily Play put through a beatbox. It at once made all the right noises and hedged all its bets. Damon was thrilled by it. "I felt quite exhilarated that we had something in our hands that sounded like it would take us all the way up the M1."


There's No Other Way became Blur's first proper hit, taking them into the Top 10 in May. But as much as they played to packed houses and posed for music press front covers, there was a feeling that their commercial success had been store-bought. In interviews, Damon tirelessly predicted a glittering and protean future for Blur, sidestepping accusations that they were suppressing their multi-faceted musical education for the benefit of their short-term career. But it scarcely helped that the indie-dance genre sounded every bit as opportunist as it was.


Dave: "Does any of that music have value now? Think of all the '60s bands who had one hit - not even Freddie And The Dreamers-size bands - and their one hit gets wheeled out once a week on Radio Two. That's the fate of the indie-dance bands in five years' time. It was a pretty cynical thing to do. But the music industry was cynical then. It was run by people like Balfe who thought that record companies knew what good music was, and all they had to do was manipulate the bands into making it. Then everyone would go home happy."


On their B-sides, and on certain songs recorded for their 1991 debut album Leisure, Blur would reveal a darker side, a more bilious temperament and Graham Coxon's increasing fascination with My Bloody Valentine. That said, Leisure was for the most part a light-hearted pop record in a year when other albums - MBV's Loveless, Primal Scream's Screamadelica and Nirvana's Nevermind in particular - were three-dimensional adventures in sound and texture.
by scummy | 2008-01-20 03:00 | interview

memo


by scummy

S M T W T F S
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31

検索

カテゴリ

全体
日記
∟Archive
MANSUN (D)
BLUR
MANSUN
占い
memo
Last.fm
shoutbox
english
LE
interview
CNN
Level 1
Level 2
Level 3
FreeRice
CPE
CAE
FCE
MW
BBC
未分類

タグ

(343)
(128)
(109)
(106)
(89)
(74)
(48)
(27)
(21)
(19)
(17)
(14)
(12)
(10)
(8)
(8)
(7)
(6)
(6)
(2)

以前の記事

2010年 05月
2010年 04月
2010年 03月
2010年 02月
2010年 01月
2009年 12月
2009年 11月
2009年 10月
2009年 09月
2009年 08月
2009年 07月
2009年 05月
2009年 03月
2009年 02月
2009年 01月
2008年 12月
2008年 11月
2008年 10月
2008年 09月
2008年 08月
2008年 07月
2008年 06月
2008年 05月
2008年 04月
2008年 03月
2008年 02月
2008年 01月
2007年 12月
2007年 11月
2007年 10月
2007年 09月
2007年 07月
2007年 06月
2007年 04月

その他のジャンル

ファン

記事ランキング

ブログジャンル

画像一覧