Thanks to a swaggering role in Britpop’s naughty ’90s carry-on, the four men of Blur are haunted by depictions of themselves at their most annoying and cartoon-like. But peer back – into the punky chaos of the pre-Blur Seymour, and back further, into teenage epiphanies aroused by The Jam, The Specials and New Order, into singer/songwriter Damon Albarn’s boho background (his father Keith managed Soft Machine) and apprenticeship in music theatre – and the soul of a fascinating, polymathic pop phenomenon emerges.
As a young indie band on the rise, 1988-91, Blur were rowdy and puppyish. Rhythms were a war between drummer Dave Rowntree’s heads-down flailing and Alex James’ pert, elasto-poppy bass lines. Graham Coxon’s guitars could be relied upon to surprise – his sizzling riffs on Syd-Barrett-goes-baggy single There’s No Other Way were a killer calling card – while his fellow alumnus of Stanway Comprehensive, Colchester, Damon Albarn, wrote the songs and sang with sssibilant esssesss.
They liked to get in your face, often drunkenly, but their big bet, on English-flavoured pop at grunge’s apex, paid off. The subsequent alignment of UK pop culture behind them went to their heads, or did them in, or both, but it’s to their credit that when it came the crash fuelled music that bore the scars, in the scratchy comedown vibe of Blur, the deconstructive urges of 13, and beyond, into idiosyncratic solo projects.
These have included flibbertigibbet James’s footie-song supergroup, Fat Les, and Coxon’s guitar-slashing, Jilted John cris de coeur. Meanwhile, Albarn stormed classical citadels and danced to Afro grooves in Lagos and Mali. Since 2001, his perfectly pitched, imaginatively storyboarded Gorillaz albums have sold over 14 million copies.
In 2023 Blur reunited to playing not one but two nights at Wembley Stadium and released a late career-high with The Ballad Of Darren. Whether we'll see more long player excursions from Albarn, Coxon, James and Rowntree, or if Damon returns to his many extra-curricular projects, more great music is surely set to follow. Until then, MOJO has picked our favourite from Blur and Albarn so far...
10.
Blur
Think Tank
PARLOPHONE 2003
Given the mid-project departure of Graham Coxon (at least he left the vertiginous guitar nuages of epic closer, Battery In Your Leg) this is victory from the jaws of defeat. Recording in London and Marrakesh, with the help of Norman Cook, and with The Clash’s Combat Rock on Albarn’s mind, Blur hosted a multi-ethnic meltdown on their blithest record since Britpop flag-bearer Parklife, with Maroc-punk nuttah We’ve Got A File On You and Black Grapey drug-paean Brothers And Sisters balancing the transfiguring, melancholy pop of Out Of Time. A slightly patched-together, demo’d vibe adds charm but – surprise – it lacks something. That’s it: Graham Coxon.
9.
Damon Albarn
Dr Dee
PARLOPHONE 2012
Albarn’s first album under his own name – unless you count 2003’s vinyl-only Democrazy – is the score for an opera about Elizabethan mathematician/alchemist John Dee and his byzantine political entanglements (rock on!). Melding his own pop aesthetic, Renaissance music forms and contemporary African instrumentation risked alienating highbrow and lowbrow alike, and it didn’t please everyone. But abandon yourself to its incomprehensibility, haunting shades of John Dowland and Thomas Campion, and – especially – Anna Dennis’s vocals and Madou Diabate’s kora on The Moon Exalted, and it’s a headtrip. Englishness, empire, the cosmos and, in the middle, an ill-used genius: what’s Albarn trying to say here?
8.
Blur
The Ballad Of Darren
PARLOPHONE, 2023
With Blur playing two nights at Wembley Stadium shortly before The Ballad Of Darren's release, Britpop nostalgia was clearly a booming business still, yet the looking back that takes place on Blur's ninth album isn’t a cheery hark back to past glories, but a sadness for what’s been lost as the band navigate middle age together. Despite its glammy guitar stomp, and even an ‘Oi!’ from Albarn, St Charles Square paints a picture of the singer broken by fame, hiding from success and succumbing to the fear (and worse), and when Coxon joins Albarn to sing of travelling around the world together on The Ballad it’s a bittersweet acknowledgement of their shared lost innocence. As Coxon told MOJO at the time: “It sounds like Blur, but men.”
7.
Gorillaz
Gorillaz
PARLOPHONE 2001
Albarn’s faceless turn on hip-hop producer Dan The Automator’s Deltron 3030 seemed to have given him a thought: I could do that. And with machines, beats and samples who needed a group? Drafting in ex-flatmate Jamie ‘Tank Girl’ Hewlett to draw the ‘virtual band’ grafted a mischievous mythology and marketing candy to the groovy, minimal music, while Del Tha Funkee Homosapien’s witty rap on loping, bonged-out Clint Eastwood plugged Albarn instantly into the world’s most popular music, though perfunctory song titles – 5/4; Man Research (Clapper) – suggests that mega sales were far from his mind. Fun Boy Three – whom he witnessed on a visit to Top Of The Pops in his teens – may have sowed this seed.
6.
The Good, The Bad & The Queen
The Good, The Bad & The Queen
PARLOPHONE 2007
Albarn’s ability to follow the music, rather than any preconceived formula – everything he learned, in other words, from The Great Escape fiasco – is exemplified here. TGTB&TQ began in Lagos as an Afrobeat exploration driven by Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen and ended as a smoggy, foggy song-cycle about a psycho-historical London dragged along by the tidal bass of Paul Simonon. Anything “a bit Lion King” was purged by producer Danger Mouse. What remained were magical, melancholy moments such as Herculean, Green Fields and A Soldier’s Song.
5.
Blur
Modern Life Is Rubbish
FOOD 1993
Much truer to Blur’s art-punk soul than their nebulous debut, Leisure, this could still have been their last gasp without the intervention of the Food label’s oft-maligned Andy Ross/David Balfe axis. Their demand for singles gave rise to Chemical World and the aching For Tomorrow, Albarn’s first mature conceptions. Meanwhile, Modern Life… looks back, in Colin Zeal’s homage to The Teardrop Explodes’ Went Crazy, and forward, in Starshaped’s pre-echoes of End Of The Century, and Coxon rocks harder than on any Blur album. Bonus: 2012’s two-disc reissue gives you the pivotal Popscene. “Lost on the Westway” was Albarn, not for the last time.
4.
Blur
13
FOOD 1999
In the late ’90s, experimental drug use turned Albarn on to music’s texture, groove and soul, while William Orbit’s mix of the Blur album’s Movin’ On convinced the group of the uses of electronica. Orbit would produce 13, taking the bonnet off Blur and exposing its innards – the raw nerves of Albarn’s split from Britpop consort Justine Frischmann included. Stompy gospel-folk (Tender) and gnarled pop (Coffee & TV) thus met indie-dub (Battle) and opiated prog (Caramel) in a trip into inner and outer space. Sadness and weirdness combine in the devastating closing song No Distance Left To Run and in Trailerpark, the roots of Gorillaz are beginning to show.
3.
Blur
Blur
FOOD 1997
The patient on the cover’s gurney could have been Blur themselves, ravaged by Britpop excess and the Pyrrhic skirmish with Oasis. In its wake Graham Coxon, disaffected by The Great Escape’s overwrought Parklife redux, got what he wanted: a re-indiefied Blur complete with lo-fi scuff and a heart of darkness (his You’re So Great could be Dinosaur Jr.). And yet Classic Blur™ tropes shine through: clever/dumb pop gambits like Song 2 and M.O.R.; Ghost Town overtones in Britpop time-caller Death Of A Party; the Hunky Dory-isms of Strange News From Another Star. Simultaneously Blur’s most fatigued and yet effortless album.
2.
Gorillaz
Demon Days
PARLOPHONE 2005
As flawlessly complete and prescient in its way as Parklife – with its sad-eyed, post-hip-hop soundworld adding lashings of “now” – Gorillaz’ second album drew star collaborators (Dennis Hopper, Shaun Ryder, De La Soul) to serve a kind of Brechtian parable of impending global apocalypse. Every track furthers the action yet speaks for itself: (again!) the Ghost Town flavour of Kids With Guns evokes nightmare visions of West African child gunmen; OutKast-echoing Feel Good Inc is scintillating dialectical pop; the title track a soulchestral epic. A box of infinite delights.
1.
Blur
Parklife
FOOD 1994
Everything haters hate about Blur, with its yob-march title track a kind of pustulant, contempt-attracting beacon. But don’t blame Parklife for the excesses of the era it presaged with its artful brashness and pop-art palette (a bit like Alf Garnett – you saw the cautionary irony, or you didn’t). Admire instead the heady alt disco of Girls And Boys, swaggering ultra-Kinks of End Of The Century and the Elgarian melancholy of This Is A Low: key planks in an accidental state-of-the-nation address laced with brio, stylistic dressing-up and tunes. Sometimes records are successful because they are great. This is one of those.