Graham Coxon on the Blur reunion: ‘Pop doesn’t have to be a fleeting thing’ | Music | The Guardian The Observer Graham Coxon on the Blur reunion: ‘Pop doesn’t have to be a fleeting thing’ The former Britpop superstars surprised everyone by announcing their first album together for 16 years. Guitarist Graham Coxon explains how it began with a chance meeting in Hong Kong … From left, Graham Coxon, Alex James, Damon Albarn and Dave Rowntree of Blur. Photograph: Dave J Hogan/Getty Images Saturday 28 February 2015 19.05 EST Last modified on Saturday 28 February 2015 19.08 EST Share on Messenger Close When a big-name pop band gets back together after a long gap it sometimes counts as more than a music industry event or a news headline. For those people who fell in love with a group during their youth, the reunion can feel like meeting up with their younger selves again. Vocals and sounds that once defined a mood are suddenly back in currency.

So the members of Blur – singer Damon Albarn, guitarist Graham Coxon, bass player Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree – trod very carefully and quietly as they put all the pieces in place before going public with news of their album The Magic Whip , the first they have made as a four-piece for 16 years. In the 1990s their band stood for a cocky, clever sort of dissent and, as Coxon told the Observer, they did not want to say they were back until they knew what they had. “It has helped that we have been able to keep it to ourselves to the last minute,” he said. “We had only just mixed it and mastered it and two weeks before that Damon was still doing vocals. I was very aware the process was fragile right up until the announcement, and I didn’t want to tempt fate in any way.” So Coxon behaved as if nothing was going on, despite his excitement. “I would be leaving the studio every day feeling really good about it, because the recording process is my favourite thing.

But I had to say nothing special was happening .” Whatever the verdict of fans and of critics when The Magic Whip comes out at the end of next month, its release marks a great achievement in artistic and personal understanding between musicians who have been apart for a long time. Four artists with tastes and interests that have only become more distinct over the years, and yet who felt compelled to work together again. Coxon describes their new music as familiar, but different; there is a trademark Blur sound, yet produced with greater maturity through a fresh process. “It is partly because I was in charge for a while, but I was restraining myself. I have a default setting to go to guitar, but this time I tried not to smother it.” The Coxon chords are there, he says, together with a recognisable “strolling tempo and a very cheeky vocal line”, but there are also “moments where it floats off into very fluid bits”. It was Coxon who provided the momentum behind the album, putting his tangled history with fellow band members aside. But he is not daunted. In fact, he says he feels relieved. “I feel less alone and less redundant, even if it is for only one album.

My solo stuff has been just me, and sometimes that is not easy. It is a relief, because I have absolute faith the record is good and I know I did everything I could to make it good and Damon did everything he could.” The Blur comeback brings them closer to Monty Python , Coxon suggests, than to rock veterans like the Rolling Stones. “We can’t take ourselves seriously and we haven’t been afraid to make music that feels a bit foolish at times.” Like all British pop stars worth their salt, interviews last week proved they were still funny together. “We still have the ability to bewilder each other with what we say, and that is important. The scary thing is that we have not come together to make a record as a four-piece for 16 years. Is our sound and what we are saying relevant to anybody?” Musical comebacks are not rare now, but are often uninspired, he admits. “Lots of groups come back and it doesn’t really set the world alight. Even diehard fans are slightly unenthused. Yet it is a weird idea that simply because you are past a certain age you stop. This isn’t the 1950s, the era of the teenager, any more.

I always think of the old blues men carrying on making music and having children until they are 80. Pop music doesn’t have to be a fleeting, age-related thing either.” Pinterest Graham Coxon was determined not to waste the opportunity for a new Blur album. Photograph: Joby Sessions/Future Publishing Bassist Alex James has referred to The Magic Whip as a miracle late baby, something that has “brightened our lives”. Coxon sees it as a happy accident. “It has been a series of fortunate events, because every hurdle I could have come across in making this record didn’t appear.” Even the chance circumstance that first threw them together for five days in a recording studio in Hong Kong in 2013 now looks fated. The cancellation of a festival date in Japan meant they had nowhere else to go. It also meant that “Damon’s overwork and my very bad work ethic” could no longer keep them apart. Then last autumn Coxon became increasingly frustrated about not working. “I kept thinking about the recordings we had made in Hong Kong and remembering how good it felt.

I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if I hadn’t had another look.” On Albarn’s advice he worked on the recordings with producer Stephen Street, relying on his uncanny sense of Albarn’s musical intentions. “Communication between us has got to a point where it is like telepathy. I am comfortable in my role as sonic interpreter of what I think Damon is getting at. Sometimes I get it wrong: sometimes I don’t. I was very respectful of the sounds we had made in Hong Kong and careful that phrases were reappearing as I structured it and added things. I wanted to change the musical environment in such a way that would still support those musical lines. It was a real learning curve for me.” All the while Coxon was dogged by the worry he might be seen as “an upstart”: “Blur, I guess, is quite hierarchical and I am not sure sometimes about my place and what I am allowed to do. But Damon was quite enthusiastic about me taking the recordings and taking it off his shoulders. I still had to think of him at every turn.” The fact that Albarn has since declared that as soon as he heard Coxon’s work he felt unable to walk away is, the guitarist says, “pretty cool”.

Albarn promptly returned to Hong Kong to write lyrics that would fit. The result is a remarkably cohesive take on the city and on the modern world that Coxon describes as a bit “sci-fi”. “The recordings we did during those five days there are imbued with the noise of the tube and the sounds of the street. The electricity is different, the air is different, and we made the studio quite small by crowding in this hot little room and working quite intensely. We didn’t have our usual arsenal of instruments either. I was trying out this new Stratocaster that my road tech Steve had made. We were in a very intuitive, open place, so everything around us was seeping in.” The band members, he believes, have not been creatively corrupted by living rich pop-star lives and, in any case, have always relied on narratives and fantasy to inspire them. “We have never had much interest in singing about lifestyle or aspirations,” he says, adding that his reputation as one of the most talented guitarists of his generation has not affected him either. “I have no trouble keeping grounded. I know my own bad habits on the guitar.” There is a place, he thinks, for a wider range of pop music today and a mature Blur album may help.

Agreeing with old rival Noel Gallagher’s recent comments, Coxon argues against the dominance of what he calls a “self-pitying and lightweight” variety of singer-songwriting at the moment. “I am kind of with Noel on that. I don’t mind a bit of sentimentality, but a lot of it is so commercial now. There needs to be room for beautiful mistakes, that is how the best music gets made.” The Magic Whip is out on 27 April. Blur play Hyde Park on 20 June . TRACK RECORD ■ Blur formed in London in 1988. Childhood friends Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon met Alex James when they began studying at London’s Goldsmiths College. They were joined by drummer Dave Rowntree later that year. ■ In 1994 they released the album Parklife, which defined Britpop and turned Blur into megastars. It entered the British charts at number one and stayed on the album charts for 90 weeks. ■ Britpop reaches its peak in 1995, with Blur breaking a Brits record and winning four awards (best album for Parklife, best single and best British video for the album’s title track, and best band).

■ In 1995 the band released their fourth album, The Great Escape. The album’s lead single Country House outsold Oasis’s Roll With It (released the same day) by 274,000 copies to 216,000, and was Blur’s first number one single. ■ Blur, the band’s fifth studio album, was released in February 1997. Its first single, Beetlebum, debuted at number one in the UK. ■ The band have announced that their new album, The Magic Whip , will be released in April. Blur - Biography | Billboard Blur Damon Albarn Graham Coxon Alex James Dave Rowntree Initially, Blur were one of the multitude of British bands that appeared in the wake of the Stone Roses, mining the same swirling, pseudo-psychedelic guitar pop, only with louder guitars. Following an image makeover in the mid-'90s, the group emerged as the most popular band in the U.K., establishing itself as heir to the English guitar pop tradition of the Kinks, the Small Faces, the Who, the Jam, Madness, and the Smiths.

In the process, the group broke down the doors for a new generation of guitar bands that became labeled as Brit-pop. With Damon Albarn's wry lyrics and the group's mastery of British pop tradition, Blur were the leader of Brit-pop, but they quickly became confined by the movement; since they were its biggest band, they nearly died when the movement itself died. Through some reinvention, Blur reclaimed their position as an art pop band in the late '90s by incorporating indie rock and lo-fi influences, which finally gave them their elusive American success in 1997. But the band's legacy remained in Britain, where they helped revitalize guitar pop by skillfully updating the country's pop traditions. Originally called Seymour, the group was formed in London in 1989 by vocalist/keyboardist Albarn along with guitarist Graham Coxon and bassist Alex James, with drummer Dave Rowntree joining the lineup shortly afterward. After performing a handful of gigs and recording a demo tape, the band signed to Food Records, a subsidiary of EMI run by journalist Andy Ross and former Teardrop Explodes keyboardist Dave Balfe.

Balfe and Ross suggested that the band change its name, submitting a list of alternate names for the group's approval. From that list, the group took the name Blur. "She's So High," the group's first single, made it into the Top 50 while the follow-up, "There's No Other Way," went Top Ten. Both singles were included on their 1991 Stephen Street-produced debut album, Leisure. Although it received favorable reviews, the album fit neatly into the dying Manchester pop scene, causing some journalists to dismiss the band as manufactured teen idols. For the next two years, Blur struggled to distance themselves from the scene associated with the sound of their first album. Released in 1992, the snarling "Pop Scene" was Blur's first attempt at changing their musical direction. A brash, spiteful rocker driven by horns, the neo-mod single was punkier than anything the band had previously recorded and its hooks were more immediate and catchy. Despite Blur's clear artistic growth, "Pop Scene" didn't fit into the climate of British pop and American grunge in 1992 and failed to make an impression on the U.K. charts.

Following the single's commercial failure, the group began work on its second album, Modern Life Is Rubbish, a process that would take nearly a year and a half. XTC's Andy Partridge was originally slated to produce Modern Life Is Rubbish, but the relationship between Blur and Partridge quickly soured, so Street was again brought in to produce the band. After spending nearly a year in the studio, the band delivered the album to Food. The record company rejected it, declaring that it needed a hit single. Blur went back into the studio and recorded Albarn's "For Tomorrow," which would turn out to be a British hit. Food was ready to release the record, but the group's U.S. record company, SBK, believed there was no American hit single on the record and asked them to return to the studio. Blur complied and recorded "Chemical World," which pleased SBK for a short while; the song would become a minor alternative hit in the U.S. and charted at number 28 in the U.K. Modern Life Is Rubbish was set for release in the spring of 1993 when SBK asked Blur to re-record the album with producer Butch Vig (Nirvana, Sonic Youth).

The band refused and the record was released in May in Britain; it appeared in the United States that fall. Modern Life Is Rubbish received good reviews in Britain, peaking at number 15 on the charts, yet it failed to make much of an impression in the U.S. Modern Life Is Rubbish turned out to be a dry run for Blur's breakthrough album, Parklife. Released in April 1994, Parklife entered the charts at number one and catapulted the band to stardom in Britain. The stylized new wave dance-pop single "Girls and Boys" entered the charts at number five; the single managed to spend 15 weeks on the U.S. charts, peaking at number 52, but the album never cracked the charts. It was a completely different story in England, as Blur had a string of hit singles, including the ballad "To the End" and the mod anthem "Parklife," which featured narration by Phil Daniels, the star of the film version of the Who's Quadrophenia. With the success of Parklife, Blur opened the door for a flood of British indie guitar bands that dominated British pop culture in the mid-'90s.

Oasis, Elastica, Pulp, the Boo Radleys, Supergrass, Gene, Echobelly, Menswear, and numerous other bands all benefited from the band's success. By the beginning of 1995, Parklife had gone triple platinum and Blur had become superstars. The group spent the first half of 1995 recording its fourth album and playing various one-off concerts, including a sold-out stadium show. Blur released "Country House," the first single from their new album, in August amidst a flurry of media attention because Albarn had the single's release moved up a week to compete with the release of "Roll with It," a new single from Blur's chief rival, Oasis. The strategy backfired. Although Blur won the battle, with "Country House" becoming the group's first number one single, they ultimately lost the war, as Oasis became Britain's biggest band with their second album, (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, completely overshadowing the follow-up to Parklife, The Great Escape. While The Great Escape entered the U.K.

charts at number one and earned overwhelmingly positive reviews, it sold in smaller numbers, and by the beginning of 1996, Blur were seen as has-beens, especially since they once again failed to break the American market, where Oasis had been particularly successful. In the face of negative press and weak public support, Blur nearly broke up in early 1996, but they instead decided to spend the entire year out of the spotlight. By the end of the year, Albarn was declaring that he was no longer interested in British music and was fascinated with American indie rock, a genre that Graham Coxon had been supporting for years. These influences manifested themselves on Blur's fifth album, Blur, which was released in February of 1997 to generally positive reviews. The band's reinvention wasn't greeted warmly in the U.K. -- the album and its first single, "Beetlebum," debuted at number one and quickly fell down the charts -- as Blur's mass audience didn't completely accept their new incarnation.

However, the band's revamped sound earned them an audience in the U.S., where Blur received strong reviews and became a moderate hit, thanks largely to the popularity of the single "Song 2." The success in America eventually seeped over to Britain, and by the spring, the album had bounced back up the charts. 13 followed in 1999. Albarn stepped out with the hip-hop/pop cartoon group Gorillaz in 2000, a collaboration with artist Jamie Hewlett that soon eclipsed the popularity of Blur internationally. Coxon departed during the recording of Blur's next album, with Albarn stepping in on guitar. One last album, Think Tank, appeared in 2003 but the bandmembers went their separate ways after its release, with Albarn turning toward Gorillaz and other creative projects. Blur wound up reuniting for a tour of the U.K. in 2009, preceded by the career retrospective Midlife. From there, Blur pursued a halting reunion.

They played a number of high-profile gigs in 2009, including headlining Glastonbury, then in 2010 a documentary of the band's history called No Distance Left to Run appeared. Along with it came "Fool's Day," a limited-edition single timed to coincide with 2010's Record Store Day. 2011 turned out to be quiet, but 2012 was a bustling year for Blur, with the band delving deep into their past for the exhaustive box set Blur 21, which contained double-disc reissues of all of their seven studio albums plus four discs of unreleased material and three DVDs. Along with this box came "Under the Westway/The Puritan," a single to support the box and the group's headlining spot at the closing Olympic ceremonies in August 2012. That concert at Hyde Park was released digitally the following week as Parklive; it later came out as a physical release that year. Blur continued to play shows into 2013; one of these included a gig in Hong Kong that was cancelled.

The band used the downtime to record a bunch of material that lay unused until Coxon started working with producer Stephen Street to turn them into completed tracks in November of 2014. Soon, a full album came into shape. Blur announced the release of this record, now entitled The Magic Whip, for April of 2015. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi Related Artists 10 Greatest Albums By Blur (& Co.) YEARS ACTIVE: 1988-2003, 2009-present Thanks to a swaggering cameo in Britpop’s naughty ’90s carry-on, the four men of Blur are haunted by depictions of themselves at their most annoying and cartoon-y. 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; they’d lived in Turkey) 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, puppyish. Rhythms were a war between drummer Dave Rowntree’s heads-down flailing and Bournemouth-born Alex James’ pert, elasto-poppy basslines. 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 – or rather, learned to – and sang with sssibilant esssesss. TOP TEN ALBUMS 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.

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 Parklife, with Maroc-punk nuttah We’ve Got A File On You and Black Grape-y drug-paean Brothers And Sisters balancing the transfiguring, melancholy pop of Out Of Time. A slightly patched-together, demo-y vibe adds charm but – surprise – it lacks something. That’s it: Graham. 9. 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 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. 8. 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’ Sleeping Gas, and forward, in Starshaped’s pre-echoes of End Of A Century, and Coxon rocks harder than on any Blur album. 7.

Graham Coxon Happiness In Magazines TRANSCOPIC | 2004 Love Travels At Illegal Speeds (2006) is slicker, but its rough edges and frantic tone makes Happiness... Coxon’s spiky guitar-punk apogee. The guitarist’s crossness at crass commercial culture (People Of The Earth is an insane-genius denunciation of everything, voiced by garage-punkin’ aliens), horror at his own uselessness, and fixation on footwear are vented everywhere, while The Skids, The Jam, The Fall and Dr Feelgood loom in and lines like “everybody’s slidin’, and slowly suicidin’” suggest time well spent in Coxon’s self-styled “padded shed”. Freakin’ Out is the spittle-flecked keynote, but there’s mournful beauty in Ribbons And Leaves, too. 6. Damon Albarn Everyday Robots PARLOPHONE/ XL | 2014 Having focused on British culture (the 'Life Trilogy'), Elizabethan mystics (Dr Dee and cartoon environmentalists (Gorillaz' Plastic Beach), it was about time Albarn’s gaze came to rest on himself.

With a melancholic musical filter casting thoughtful shadows, Albarn’s lyrics replay a series of mental snapshots including the heatwave summers of his youth (Hollow Ponds), crumbling relationships (The Selfish Giant), narcotic episodes (You And Me)... and, er, a little elephant (Mr Tembo). Albarn is too canny a songwriter to deliver anything so narrowly defined as a confessional, but his angled look at life allows the listener to get closer than ever to the man. 5. 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 No Distance Left To Run and in Trailerpark, the roots of Gorillaz are showing. 4. 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. Proof, too, that even when Albarn isn’t looking for a narrative, it finds him. 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. 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 A 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. 1. Demon Days Gorillaz PARLOPHONE | 2000 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!) Ghost Town-ish Kids With Guns evokes nightmare visions of West African child gunmen; OutKast-echoing Feel Good Inc is scintillating dialectical pop; Fire Coming Out Of The Money’s Head is like Britfunkers Imagination gone evil; the title track a soulchestral epic. A box of infinite delights.

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 their lead went to their heads, or did them in, or both, but it’s to their credit that the crash, when it came, fuelled music that bore the scars, in the scratchy comedown vibe of Blur, the deconstructive urges of 13, and beyond, into idiosyncratic solo projects. “I don’t think it’s ever comfortable being in a band.” Damon Albarn, MOJO, 1995 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 nearly 14 million copies, while last year he finally stepped out from behind the projects and followed Coxon’s lead by sticking his own name on a solo record, Everyday Robots . And Blur live on.

Reunited in 2009 after Graham Coxon’s 2002 exile, they’ve almost semi-regularly staged big gigs in Hyde Park, while a whole new Blur album, The Magic Whip, was carved out of off-the-cuff sessions conducted in Hong Kong in 2013. Time will tell if it secures a place in the pantheon. But No Distance Left To Run? Not on this evidence. For more visit . Biography Biography Biography The new album from Blur, titled The Magic Whip , started life in Hong Kong when the band had an unexpected break in touring in May 2013. It is released by Parlophone Records on 27rd April 2015 - 16 years since 13, the band’s last record as a four-piece. The recordings for the band’s eighth studio album began in Spring 2013 at Avon Studios in Kowloon. Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree spent 5 days jamming together and carried on with their live dates while the recordings were put aside and the group finished touring and returned to their respective lives.

Dave resumed his day job as a lawyer and Alex returned home to his farm in Oxfordshire from where he writes a regular farming column in The Telegraph and hosts the annual food and music festival The Big Feastival with Jamie Oliver. Graham, who has released eight critically acclaimed solo albums to date, continued to work on his own material and, in 2014, Damon released his Mercury-nominated debut solo album ‘Everyday Robots’. Then, in November last year, Graham revisited the tracks and, drafting in Blur’s early producer Stephen Street (Leisure, Modern Life is Rubbish, Parklife, The Great Escape, Blur), he worked with the band on the material. Damon then added lyrics and the 12 tracks on The Magic Whip is the result. Blur were formed in 1989 by Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree and signed with Food/EMI the same year. Announcing their arrival with debut album Leisure in 1991, Blur continued to revolutionise the sound of English popular music with second release Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993).

Five successive UK #1 albums followed - with Parklife (1994) and The Great Escape (1995) helping to propel the band to mass popularity in the UK and beyond. The eponymous Blur was released in 1997 and seventh album Think Tank (2003) was Blur’s first as a three-piece after the temporary departure of founding guitarist Graham Coxon. One of the most successful British bands of the last two decades, Blur have won a total of five BRIT Awards, and were twice nominated for the Mercury Music Award. In 2009 Blur reconvened as a four-piece to play a series of UK shows including two sold out dates at Hyde Park and a historic Sunday night appearance at Glastonbury. A film about Blur No Distance Left To Run was made that summer and released the following year. In 2012 the band received a BRIT Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music and wrote two news songs ahead of their massive sold out show in London's Hyde Park to mark the closing of the Olympic Games. The songs 'The Puritan' and 'Under The Westway' were debuted live on Twitter via a worldwide video stream from a London rooftop.

And twenty one years after the release of their debut album, 2012 also saw Blur 21: The Box , the band's body of work compiled and gathered together into one box. The band embarked on a 30 plus date world tour in 2013 which saw them play to fans around the globe, with shows across Asia, Europe, South America, as well as a headline slot at the Coachella Festival in California. Blur will return to London’s Hyde Park for a headline set on 20th June 2015. Blur reform after Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon 'bury the hatchet' - Telegraph Blur reform after Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon 'bury the hatchet' Blur have reformed after band members Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon "buried the hatchet". Damon Albarn and bassist Alex James at Glastonbury in 1998 Photo: Jeff Gilbert By Urmee Khan 6:59AM GMT 10 Dec 2008 The Britpop group announced they will play a concert in London's Hyde Park next summer.

The full line-up of Graham Coxon, Alex James, Dave Rowntree and Damon Albarn will be onstage together for this first time since their Royal Festival Hall performance in 2000. In an interview with the NME, Coxon and Albarn talk about how they made up. Albarn said: "Ten years ago Graham and I found ourselves very uncomfortable, very over-sensitive with each other, and it hasn't felt comfortable before now." Coxon left Blur six years ago and the band's last album, Think Tank, was released in 2003. Related Articles NME Awards: Blur's Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon reunite on stage 26 Feb 2009 Coxon said that 10 years ago "we were both carrying some troubles, but it was our group and we didn't want to hurt each other's feelings by saying 'Look I need a break'." He added: "It's not that Blur ever stopped, no, we just did other things..." There have also been reports of further dates, including a possible appearance at next year's Glastonbury festival. Albarn promised fans that there were more shows on the horizon.

The band formed in Colchester in 1989, the they have recorded seven studio albums and had a string of top 10 singles including two number ones with Country House and Beetlebum. Blur hit the height of their fame as the poster boys for Brit Pop in the mid 1990s, and were known for their chart battles with contemporaries Oasis. Albarn has since gone on to form virtual band Gorillaz, to huge commercial and critical success. His projects have included supergroup The Good, The Bad & The Queen and the much-lauded Monkey: Journey To The West. Guitarist Coxon released solo work since quitting the band and has collaborated with Pete Doherty. Bassist Alex James swapped his bad boy image to become a Cotswolds cheese maker and drummer Dave Rowntree made an unsuccessful bid to become a Labour councillor last year. The Hyde Park concert will take place on Friday July 3, and tickets will be on general sale from 9am this Friday at All tickets are £45, are limited to six per person, and are subject to a booking fee, according to the band's website.

Damon Albarn | British musician | Britannica.com British musician David Bowie Damon Albarn, (born March 23, 1968, Whitechapel, London , England ), English musician who found fame as the front man for the rock band Blur and as the main creative force behind the pop group Gorillaz but was also noted for his eclectic output as a composer, producer, and collaborator. Damon Albarn, 2010. Mark Allan/AP Albarn, whose parents were involved in London’s creative counterculture, spent his early years in the East End before moving with his family to Colchester, Essex, in 1978. As a youth he learned to play the violin and the piano, and in secondary school he befriended Graham Coxon, with whom he soon began to write and perform songs. Following a brief stint in drama school, Albarn formed a rock band that eventually became known as Blur. With Albarn as lead vocalist and principal songwriter, the group—which also included Coxon (guitar), Alex James (bass), and Dave Rowntree (drums)—issued its debut album, Leisure, in 1991.

Having established itself as clever observers of everyday British life, in the tradition of the Kinks and the Small Faces, on Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993), Blur achieved a critical and commercial breakthrough with Parklife (1994), a winning collection of pop songs in that vein. By the mid-1990s Blur was a chief exemplar, along with fellow melodic-rock revivalists Oasis, of what was called Britpop , and a frenzied media-fueled rivalry emerged between the two bands. Partially in response, Albarn and company shifted course after The Great Escape (1995) and returned with Blur (1997), a garage-rock-indebted record that expanded their American audience, and the stylistically varied 13 (1999). In the late 1990s Albarn and comic-book artist Jamie Hewlett developed the idea for Gorillaz, a “virtual band” for which animated characters drawn by Hewlett would serve as the sole visual component (on record covers and in music videos, for instance) of music conceived by Albarn.

The group’s self-titled full-length debut album (2001) was a colourful fusion of global pop styles, including hip-hop and reggae , that reflected its diverse set of collaborators and befitted its playful avatars. The electronic sounds of Gorillaz filtered into Blur’s next record, Think Tank (2003), but the considerable international sales of the Gorillaz album Demon Days (2005) demonstrated that Albarn’s newer band had become the more-popular act. Gorillaz later released Plastic Beach (2010), which promoted a message of environmental awareness, and The Fall (2010), while Blur largely fell silent. Much of Albarn’s other work in the early 21st century cultivated an interest in African music and culture that had sparked in him during an Oxfam -sponsored trip to Mali in 2000. On the recordings Mali Music (2002) and Kinshasa One Two (2011), he produced and collaborated with musicians from Mali and the Democratic Republic of the Congo , respectively, and in 2006 he founded the Africa Express, an initiative that fostered cross-fertilization between African and Western performers.

Albarn joined with Nigerian drummer Tony Allen (formerly of Fela Kuti’s band) on the albums The Good, the Bad & the Queen (2007), recorded by an ensemble that also featured former Clash bassist Paul Simonon, and the eponymously titled Rocket Juice & the Moon (2012), which employed the Red Hot Chili Peppers ’ Flea on bass. Britannica Stories Blur: 'We used to take it in turns to punch each other' | Music | The Guardian The G2 interview Blur: 'We used to take it in turns to punch each other' Back in Hong Kong, where they recorded their album The Magic Whip, Damon, Graham, Alex and Dave talk about falling out and making up, the state of British pop music and why 90s Britpop was a wasted opportunity Blur in Hong Kong.

Photograph: Inga Beckmann for the Guardian Thursday 30 July 2015 14.27 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 11 November 2015 10.13 EST Share on Messenger Close Hong Kong in July can be a disorientating place for outsiders: the suffocating humidity, the density of human bodies, the mind-jarring collision of east and west. Perhaps the last thing you need when you’ve arrived there, brain fuddled with jetlag, is a conversation with Damon Albarn in full manic flow. One minute he’s talking about refusing to leave the stage after a five-hour gig with Africa Express (“Am I addicted to work? Clearly”), the next he’s revealing his passion for picking wild flowers. Then he starts talking about fairies ... “I’ve a house that’s built on a piece of land which was a recognised fairy community,” he says, with a straight face, when we meet backstage at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, where Blur are due to play that night. “We had to get a fairy lawyer in. When people come and stay at my house, they go and give them an offering just to keep them happy because we’ve built on their land.” Hang on ...

are you saying you believe in fairies? Albarn grins, possibly imagining the headlines. “Let’s say I believe in the presence of other things. But have I seen a fairy? I’m not going to tell you ...” Hong Kong might be fairy-free, but it’s a magical place for Blur. It’s the city they were stranded in for five days in 2013 when the Tokyo Rocks festival they were due to play was cancelled, leaving them with nothing to do but spend a week jamming together on the demos Albarn had knocking around on his iPad. The end result was The Magic Whip, Blur’s first album in 12 years , and one which was almost entirely inspired by the city, from the neon ice-cream artwork to the lyrics concerning overpopulation (There are Too Many of Us) and the recent pro-democracy protests (Ice Cream Man). Walk around the city and you’ll spot traces of the record: right outside the Landmark hotel, where the band are staying, I spy the entrance to New World Towers, which Damon walked past right when he needed a four-syllable title for his song about modern-day loneliness.

Damon came back to Hong Kong to write the lyrics the day after authorities had scrubbed clean the protestors’ graffiti following the island’s “umbrella revolution”. “I know that for people here it means quite a lot that I mentioned it,” he says. “Because it’s difficult to talk politically here. That’s why they like this record. It’s done abnormally well here. There will be a lot of people here tonight who were at the protests, so it will be interesting to see the reaction.” It’s an album of serendipity and spontaneity. It’s also an album Albarn has described as “the last piece of the jigsaw of us getting our friendship back together” – a statement of unity from a band of old friends whose frazzled, turbulent relationship almost came to and end when guitarist Graham Coxon, fresh from a spell in the Priory for his drink problems, was asked to leave the band in 2002. Coxon responded by describing his time in the band less than favourably, saying he was “dragged around the fucking world on [Albarn’s] megalomaniacal trip”.

He rejoined the band in 2008, but save for a handful of songs , they’ve existed largely as a brilliant nostalgia act, wheeling out the Britpop hits to rapturous response. Bassist Alex James says it was a miracle this new album was ever made, but in a way, it’s a miracle Blur ever existed in the first place, such are the wildly different personalities in the band. There’s Albarn, the intense workaholic who will collaborate with anyone from Malian kora players to cartoons; Coxon, the cripplingly shy guitar nerd who couldn’t cope with the band’s gigantic 90s fame; James, the party animal who subsequently reinvented himself as a gentleman farmer; and drummer Dave Rowntree, about whom people still know so little that they describe him as the “everyman” or “normal bloke” despite the fact he works as a criminal solicitor, has a pilot’s licence and stood as the Labour party candidate for the Cities of London and Westminster , which doesn’t seem very everyman.

Blur: The Magic Whip review – friends reunited for a beautiful comeback Read more My first encounters with each band member (they like to be interviewed separately) highlight just how different they are. Where Albarn greets me with a theatrical zombie walk and a cry of: “I bet you’re thinking, ‘Why the fuck have they flown me all the way here?’”, Rowntree is a bit guarded and suspicious (he frets that the headline will end up being “Rowntree says ...”, which, without wanting to be rude, sounds like the words of a man who’s never read a Blur headline). Before those two encounters, I meet James and Coxon in their respective hotel rooms. Coxon is nervy and awkward and barely acknowledges my arrival, whereas James opens the door to the sound of blaring hip-hop and jumps into action as the perfect host – making me coffee, telling me to sit anywhere, saying I can have as long as I need. He’s a charmer. “I’m like a little boy again,” James says of the band’s current position – rave reviews, sold-out shows. He never wanted Blur to stop, knows he was born to do this.

“I remember rehearsing in this horrible theatre in Elephant and Castle, in London,” he recalls. “And the first time the lights came on I caught sight of my silhouette, with a bass, and thought: ‘Yep!’” Coxon is an altogether more complex character. He might struggle to make eye contact and shuffle around the sofa nervously, but he knows how to be cutting: “Ask some stuff that people haven’t asked and people don’t know,” he says at one point, bored by my line of questioning. Coxon’s relationship with Albarn has long been the focal point of the group, and Albarn addresses this relationship on the new song My Terracotta Heart . “I don’t know if I’m losing you again,” he sings in that instantly recognisable melancholic tone. What did Coxon think when he first heard it? “I thought: ‘Oh shit, he’s writing about me again ... What’s he saying?’ It’s odd because it’s pretty bittersweet. It’s not a statement of certainty. Maybe his head was still pretty confused.

Because it’s all very well going on stage and having good fun, but brotherly relationships are deeper than people imagine, and it does take time.” Coxon says things are always going to be delicate between them. “You can’t ever go back to being 28 and resolve what was happening then. So even for the last few years, the second-guessing about whether our relationship was OK was still there. But I think with this record we don’t have to worry about it any more.” Why does your friendship matter so much to other people? “It’s a stupid soap opera for them. It’s obsessed people writing fan fiction and spinning it into some bullshit on the internet, when actually they don’t know anything about it at all. It’s some weird thrill for them. In the old days, they probably wrote it in a letter and it went into a big sack that was never looked at by the band. Now we have to read all that shit ... Well, you don’t have to, but sometimes you click a button ...” Albarn offers a different perspective. “I think bands need to have that dynamic, whether it’s the Smiths or the Stone Roses or the Pixies.

There’s less of that nowadays; you sense that relationships aren’t as important in electronic pop music.” He says his relationship with Graham is “as good as it’s ever been”. “The most important thing was that Graham took the reins entirely by himself,” Albarn says, of Coxon’s decision, 18 months later, to revisit the Hong Kong recording sessions and stitch them into The Magic Whip with longtime producer Stephen Street. “This was him very clearly saying: ‘I want to be a creative partner again.’ And that was the reason I took it seriously as a proposition.” Pinterest Blur in the 1990s. Photograph: Brian Rasic / Rex Features Of course, there’s another relationship in Blur that has become increasingly fascinating of late – that of James and Rowntree. Musically, they’re in partnership, as the rhythm section. But while James has become something of a cartoon Guardian hate figure thanks to his connections to the Chipping Norton set, and a notorious photograph of him hanging out with Jeremy Clarkson and David Cameron at his Harvest cheese festival in 2011, Rowntree is a Labour councillor, quietly concerned with campaigning and knocking on doors. He’s devoted to the party, and is backing Liz Kendall for the leadership.

“We were short on leadership, and Liz would make the best leader. You have to win elections – there’s no benefit being right if nobody is going to put what you’re saying into action.” He’s also open about his frustrations with the party’s general election campaign. “Even on the doorstep it was hard to articulate what our vision was for the country,” he says, after a massive sigh. “When people said: ‘What are Labour going to do?’ it was unclear even to the activists exactly what Labour’s vision for the future was. You look at the Ed Stone – that was our core message, and it was vague, wishy-washy, aspirational. It wasn’t an inspiring call to arms.” Given all this, he must surely feel annoyed when he sees James embedded with the enemy. Pinterest “No, nothing about Alex annoys me,” he says, with the skilful swerve of someone who, well, works in politics. “He’s one of my dearest friends, but I don’t know what Alex’s political views are. We do music, not politics. We’re not a four-piece political act. So whether we agree or disagree is neither here nor there.

Besides, I don’t surround myself with people who agree with me. Where’s the fun in that?” I feel bad asking James about the picture with Cameron and Clarkson, partly because he has been such good company – leaning back in his chair, regaling me with old Blur tales with a flourish of cigarette smoke – and partly because I see his face drop when I mention it. “Oh, God. How long ago was it? Four years ago!” he says, before grimacing: “That picture will be on my fucking obituary, won’t it? I knew you were going to ask me about that fucking picture. Haven’t you fucking moved on? Jesus Christ ...” He says he doesn’t regret the prime minister coming to his festival – Cameron is his local MP and he wanted all the big names there – and doesn’t understand why people assume he has turned Tory. “I’ve also spent the last 28 years as one-half of a rhythm section with a Labour party candidate ... and nobody assumes that means I’m a Labour voter.” So did he vote Tory? “Ummm ...” he gets up and paces the room. He sits down, then stands up again. He goes to make another coffee.

“I really don’t want to talk about politics. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that, for anyone with a media profile, party politics is just completely toxic.” He allows himself a smile: “I remember speaking to [the band’s publicist] Regine after that photo was taken, and I said: ‘It’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it?’ and she said: ‘No, Alex, it’s a single-edged sword’ – it’s just bad. But I think the Guardian has had enough fun with that photo over the years and there are other things to talk about now.” Were the band annoyed by it? “No. Not at all. Dave and Graham were there when that picture was taken!” Did he speak to Clarkson after he was dropped from Top Gear for punching a producer ? James continues to squirm, muttering something about the show’s producer and how they’re all brilliant at what they do, while the coffee machine whirs at volume. Then he says, out of nowhere: “It’s a shame really. There was one tour in America that I had two black eyes. One from Graham and one from Dave. And Damon broke my nose once. But you know ...

there was never any question we would split up. We were tighter than ever.” I can’t tell if this is a reference to Clarkson’s punch or just an attempt to blurt out something that will move the conversation on, but we leave it there. “Dave used to play this game called the Punching Game,” he continues. “We all took it in turns to punch each other. I remember playing it with the bass player from Dinosaur Jr ... he was fucking massive. Taller than me. He lumped the shit out of everyone.” Rowntree remembers the game, too. “It wasn’t playful, it really hurt,” he says. “We’d sit on chairs in a big circle and everyone would punch the person to their left as hard as they liked in the head, and it would go on round. Generally it wasn’t too bad. You rarely fell off your chair from being punched in the head too hard, mainly because we were always too drunk.” The game emerged during a gruelling American tour in 1992, when the band were forced to play their Anglocentric songs in tiny venues to bewildered crowds while they tried to pay back debts racked up by their previous manager.

Coxon remembers the culture shock: “We ended up being chased out of one radio station by people with shotguns,” he says. “Just because we cussed on air.” Those were the days when Blur were so broke that they would spend their downtime back in London hanging around Matrix Studios, because the owner would buy them pizza and cigarettes. They’d go there “just so we had something to eat”, Rowntree says. “Although we got pretty good at sitting down and chucking around ideas.” Pinterest They never forgot those days, so when they got their chance to spend a few days jamming together in a Kowloon studio as cramped and scuzzy as Matrix had been, they felt at home, feeding off each other’s ideas and sprinkling Albarn’s song sketches with the Blur magic. Though Albarn was the galvanising force behind getting the band into the studio, Coxon was the most determined to do something with the results, and pull the album over the finishing line. “I guess I wanted to show some form of commitment to fans or friends in the group,” he says.

“And I really, really thought – with each passing day – that it contained something really brilliant.” You imagine Albarn might once have struggled with handing over the reins in this way, but a decade of working with Africa Express , Gorillaz and a multitude of other projects seems to have taught him the value of loosening a grip on things. “You mean ever since I became a pathological collaborator?” he says, smiling. Is that how he feels? “I don’t, but I’ve seen it put like that. There was a Viz cartoon about me making bands with anyone ... at one point I went into the toilet and ended up making a band with the toilet duck.” If Albarn is a changed man, then so is Coxon. He says in the past he was always fighting with himself on records, “blocking everything up with guitars”. This time, he was conscious of leaving space for his bandmates. “I was bearing Damon in mind an awful lot,” he says. “Damon likes trains, so for me these songs had to each be a train journey in which I imagined him looking out the window. And I didn’t want a brick wall of guitars as his view.

So the rhythm section had to have horizon, the sky and landscape had to be one he wanted to enter. And all the elements had to move and reveal other things behind. It had to be deep and have a sense of parallax. I’m not so insecure these days, I don’t feel like I have to impose things as much as I once did.” When Coxon talks about insecurity, he’s mostly referring to the 90s and the height of Britpop , a period he found pretty much unbearable. Did he enjoy any of it? “I suppose there was good times, but at the time I wasn’t allowing myself to enjoy it. I was ruining it for myself. So I can’t look back and change that now. I just felt like I was very immature. I left home and within two years I was playing at the Marquee, then suddenly earning all this money to pay off massive debts. I didn’t really know what the hell had happened. Mentally, I wasn’t even a teenager, I was still pre-teen. Life doesn’t seem long enough for me to catch up with my real age.” Lack of concern for his personal wellbeing isn’t the only thing he regrets.

“I think the 90s was a massive wasted opportunity to make good music,” he says. “Most of the decade was full of groups boasting that they’d made Revolver and I didn’t think that was the point of music. The Revolver the Beatles made was good enough for me.” He sighs, then mutters: “Radiohead never seemed bothered with making Beatles records.” Pinterest Albarn during Blur’s Hong Kong concert. Photograph: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images The state of pop might have depressed him back then, but he doesn’t seem any more satisfied with it now. “Really, the whole music business is shit, isn’t it?” he says. “We need more groups that have a bit more passion or sexiness or politics or something going for them. Instead, it just seems like a splurge of shit all over the internet. And it’s just so boring – people in too much makeup with session musicians.” I cite Kanye West as an example of a mainstream musician doing interesting things, which proves to be a mistake. “He’s a fucking idiot, isn’t he? Does he even make his own albums?” There’s another sigh and he scrunches up his eyes.

“People aren’t interested in learning instruments and putting effort and time into it. They want it immediately. It’s McDonalds, isn’t it? It’s convenient. But all I hear is a loop starting, some bloke starts to sing or rap, and the loop finishes. There’s no shape to this stuff. And the lyrics just seem to be idiotic.” Whether or not you agree with his assesment, Blur’s shared musicality, forged through years of playing together, is what makes them such a unique proposition. Despite their diverging characters, it’s the one trait they all share. “For 15 years we were on a massive rags-to-riches caper,” says James. “But we spent all those years playing together. That’s a precious craft that we developed together. Maybe you don’t get that now. The big acts today are singers with session musicians. We played with Pharrell on the Isle of Wight , and I love Pharrell, but it’s weird because it’s all smoke and mirrors really. There are musicians there but it’s mainly backing tapes. And that’s because it’s fucking hard – it takes years to fucking develop into a band that can really fucking knit together like that.

And I think that’s why we were able to miraculously make a record in five days, like how they did it in the old days.” Albarn agrees, and thinks the band’s past – through good and bad – is why the fans connect: “You get something with a real history to it. It’s an accumulative thing, everything we’ve ever experienced is played out again each night. And by not doing a huge amount of shows you do get a wonderful sense of occasion.” Pinterest There’s been talk all day about the nature of Hong Kong audiences, whether or not the atmosphere will be too reserved, especially in a seated venue that looks like a conference hall. But such fears are misfounded – the chairs get abandoned in a stampede to the front the second the band walk onstage. “We’re going to play some songs about your town,” announces Albarn, to huge cheers as he sprays the front row with water. “Your very wet, rainy town.” Earlier on, Albarn told me that the show was going to be emotional. “Because I’m coming back to sing about my experiences here.

And when there’s an alignment between what I’m singing and what I’m feeling, that’s when I get emotional.” He frequently does, solemnly staring into the crowd, even while James – completely oblivious to the gravity of the situation – turns his back to the crowd and wiggles his bum. The night’s most infectious moment comes when a bunch of fans join the band onstage to sing Parklife – at least that’s what they’re supposed to be doing, but they’re more interested in hugging Albarn, or asking for photographs. “No, no, it wasn’t the deal that we did loads of selfies!” beams the frontman, before agreeing to one massive joint picture. While all this is going on, Coxon keeps his head down, occasionally kneeling for a puff on his electronic cigarette, but largely happy to just lose himself in the noise. Watching Blur interact onstage it seems crazy to think that such a tight group probably wouldn’t even exist any more if it wasn’t for a festival in Tokyo being cancelled. That’s fate for you. Even now, James admits that, with all their hectic schedules, the band’s existence remains on a knife’s edge. So are we witnessing the last chapter of Blur?

Rowntree thinks probably not; Albarn says it doesn’t concern him if it is or it isn’t; James says he hasn’t got a clue, he just treats every show like the last. Only Coxon answers with any certainty: “I think it probably is, yeah.” And would he be content with that? “Yeah, I think so.” And why not? After all the black eyes and misjudged photographs, they have worked out a way to tie up loose ends and make things work. You could call it a fairytale ending. If, that is, you believe in fairies.

Question: Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree were members of which pop group?
Answer: 'BLUR'