Safe in the knowledge there'll always be a bit of my heart devoted to it: In Praise of Blur

“I always think there are two routes to Blur. The high street route and this other route round the back, which is a little more interesting.” – Graham Coxon, NME, 2009

So spoke Graham Coxon when quizzed about the setlist for the gigs that saw him return – after a near decade-long absence – to the band he’d started at Goldsmiths College some twenty years prior. In a sporadic but occasionally exhilarating fashion, it’s a reunion that has continued to the stage where Blur can celebrate the twenty first anniversary of their debut album Leisure with the release of a career-spanning box set, Blur – 21: The Box, as a proper, functioning band, one handed the honour of closing the London 2012 Olympic Games atop a bill that sees them lauded higher even than established national treasures like New Order and The Specials.

Coxon’s ‘high street / route round the back’ analogy is handy when trying to reconcile why it is records by Blur are as likely to exist in collections of those who own around twenty CDs as they are in the vast libraries of fellas obsessively dusting their alphabetised Sonic Youth vinyl. What the box set ably demonstrates is that there’s more to both sides of the band than anyone other than its members could possibly have guessed before. Street’s masterful remastering work on what amounts to nigh-on their entire studio recordings not only hangs fresh bunting on the Blur high street, but the wealth of demo versions, alternative takes and rare live footage featured in Blur – 21 points out not only the route round the back, but also the window left slightly ajar on the second floor, the basement lock that gives way if you just jiggle it a bit, and the bookcase that opens up to a secret vault if you gently pull out Damon’s copy of London Fields. It’s this close to just being, well, a bit much really.

A preface – this article is the work of one whose critical faculties when it comes to Blur are, in honesty, completely shot to shit. If you told me Damon Albarn would be farting in a box somewhere in the UK, I’d ask you for a presale link. As such, it’s not really your standard review of Blur – 21, more of a retrospective, or exploration of the darker corners of a discography that contains some of the brightest moments in British guitar music of the Nineties. Maybe we’ll all learn something, or maybe I’ll prove incapable of containing my fanboy tendencies and go off on one about the audacity of folk referring to this as a ‘complete recordings’ when there’s no sign of any studio take of ‘Day Upon Day’, leaving us still only with the live version recorded at the Bath Moles Club in 1990. That, friend, is just the risk we’re running here.

Anyhow, obsessives, haters and the ambivalent alike cannot fail to have noticed that Blur are back. Well, they kind of are. And also they’re not. There are new studio recordings, interviews conducted as an amiable four piece, gigs both small and massive. What we’ve not got however is a new album. But with the release of Blur 21, we’re provided with what pretty much equates to a good few records’ worth of never before heard material not just culled from their last Coxon-less fumblings around the North African desert, oh no, but a snapshot of a band at the peak of their powers. It’s enough music for a few new Blur LPs, a fair chunk of it culled from that most purple of patches around Modern Life Is Rubbish, Parklife and Blur. Which is arguably better than anything they’re going to come up with now, right?

A studio version of ‘Day Upon Day’ aside (dude, let it go…), Blur – 21 is so comprehensive that it even includes a wealth of material from the band Blur were before Food records sat them down and suggested the name ‘Seymour’ was ‘too student’, imploring them to pick something from a provided list that was more of the times (like, ‘Ride’ or something). That band was formed of childhood friends Albarn and Coxon and the latter’s Goldsmiths pal Stephen James on bass, who insisted on being called by his middle name Alex upon his arrival at art school. Joining them for all things drums was Dave Rowntree, who’d previously played in bands with Coxon in Colchester, Essex.

Seymour’s music can accurately be described largely as a bunch of students pissing about; songs very rarely stick to one tempo, the recordings range from lo-fi to lower-fi, and you could either call the lyrics Dadaist or puerile depending on how generous you felt like being. For much of it, there’s a ramshackle, on the edge of destruction quality that’s oddly reminiscent of the Butthole Surfers if they were smashed on lukewarm lager as opposed to hallucinogenics, the Stone Roses-esque bagginess of their debut album Leisure almost wholly absent. Much of it, though a hell of a lot of fun, is musically a dead end. But there are early versions here of songs like ‘Sing’ and ‘Birthday’ that were the reason that Dave Balfe and Andy Ross at Food clocked that, with a bit of guidance, there might just be something special going on after all.

With Blur – 21 including a ten minute-long Seymour rehearsal jam of Blur’s debut single ‘She’s So High’, it’s possible to actually pinpoint the moment when the one band morphed in to the other. Though only intermittently in tune and seemingly pretty aimless, this thoroughly trying listen for anyone whose interest in the band could only be described as passing is at least of historical importance – it’s the exact recording on which Blur became Blur. Simplistic though it may be, the final version (thanks largely to Coxon’s gorgeous guitar riff) has stood the test of time better than much of Leisure, an album Albarn deems something of a missed opportunity. Superior tunes such as ‘Inertia’ and ‘Explain’ were condemned to b-side status at the time in favour of a contemporary, baggy flavour that, though preferred by their label, never really suited the band beyond glorious anomalies like second single ‘There’s No Other Way’. That number was to propel the band in to the top ten, on to Top Of The Pops and, for a few months, make them a fixture of the high street in such a manner that had indie purists doubting whether they’d put in the ground work – where exactly was the route round the back?

Blur toured the hell out of Leisure, and though the experience nearly killed them, it eventually led to a regrouping and the formation of a gang mentality that would see them produce their first great works. The failure to capture the attention of enough of the public to propel the now-classic ‘Popscene’ single further up the charts than number 32 led to it not being included on the band’s second record (“if you didn’t want it then, you’re not having it now”, remarked Coxon), despite it now being a staple of any Blur set. But it did see Blur’s confidence in their own abilities grow immeasurably, perhaps bolstered by the fact that they were now sharing US bills with the likes of Dinosaur Jr and My Bloody Valentine rather than Jesus Jones and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin back home. Coxon in particular would start revealing just how closely he paid attention to such American guitar bands in his own playing, and in combination with Albarn’s increasingly Anglocentric lyrical and melodic focus, drawing from The Kinks and David Bowie, it all still sounds remarkably fresh.

The record in question, of course, is Modern Life Is Rubbish. Though again ignored by the high street Blur fan – in fairness, there barely was such a person matching the description left in 1992 – it was a work of which the band were, and remain, justifiably proud. Though a calculated attempt at creating a ‘Big Hit Rock Record’ by getting a fresh-from-Nevermind Butch Vig on board was mooted, the band stuck with Stephen Street (responsible for the finest of Leisure’s sound) for an album that sees Blur displaying the diversity of their capabilities for the first real time. Anthemic explorations of the London and its effect on the minutiae of human relationships (‘For Tomorrow’) and punky pop culture romps like ‘Advert’ sit alongside songs where characters deal with contemporary life by either becoming obsessed with the details (‘Colin Zeal’ looking at his watch to find “he’s on time yet again”) or get driven mad by the pointlessness of it all (the ‘Pressure On Julian’ of “pushing trolleys in the car park from B to A and back to B”) over music as curiously forward thinking as it is nostalgic for some kind of golden era of songwriting.

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How different, though, it might have sounded. The biggest revelation to Blur – 21 is the inclusion of the Andy Partridge sessions. Though many demo recordings and studio outtakes have been leaked on to the Internet to be discussed by rabid Blur fans in recent years – the Parklife demos, also included here, are old news to a lot of the very people most willing to pay £130 for a Blur box set – these have been kept under strict lock and key, reportedly due to the band being pretty unhappy with the outcome of their time spent with the XTC mastermind and Partridge himself being equally miffed with allegedly not being paid for his albeit discarded efforts.

Whilst the better versions are undoubtedly the ones you know and love, these alternative takes are still fascinating. The emphasis to a song like ‘Coping’, which you’ll know as a guitar-lead rampage, is here placed instead on masses of vocal layering, with Coxon buried under so many effects he’s barely audible. ‘Sunday Sunday’ offers the most surprises, finding itself lead not by an oompah band but by acoustic guitar and piano until an unrecognisable, totally bananas brass section comes in towards its all singing, all dancing finale. It’s the most successful of the Partridge experiments, though why a song as good as ‘Seven Days’ was also left on the cutting room floor for quite this long is a question for a person with more insider knowledge than myself (especially considering that, every time I play MLIR, ‘Turn It Up’ is still bloody on it).

Clearly thriving off the freedom of the period (b-sides like the superb ‘Young & Lovely’, ‘Bone Bag’ and ‘My Ark’ suggest they were able to churn out the good stuff at will), the end of the Modern Life… era is also the last point at which the spotlight is ever off Blur. Every decision they make from here on in is either a conscious one to embrace the high street, or a deliberate left turn away from it once they arrived, with individual band members occasionally taking different routes to the same eventual conclusion. But their next move was a deliberate attempt to capture a zeitgeist. If the demos for MLIR are a big step on from Seymour’s inebriated thrashings (with Albarn’s solo recoding of ‘For Tomorrow’ revealing it to be more indebted to Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ than you’ll ever have noticed), the material they brought to the studio ahead of laying down Parklife was truly a giant leap for Blur-kind.

The demos featured on Blur 21 see Parklife numbers arrive all but fully formed, and as such might be less interesting than the aforementioned preparatory material for the listener, but play an excellent explanatory roll in the tale of how little old Blur became huge, huge Blur. Bar some placeholder lyrics on ‘Trouble In The Message Centre’ and ‘Clover Over Dover’, there’s certainly nothing as surprising as the Partridge sessions to the Parklife back story – but, if you ever wanted a version of the title track with Damon handling the spoken word sections instead of Phil Daniels, well hey, Blur -21 delivers. (Note: far from a ‘mockney’, Albarn was born in Whitechapel).

The story of the resulting album barely needs telling. ‘Girls and Boys’ goes top five, lurid tales of an indie A-list romance between Albarn and Elastica’s Justine Frischmann hit the tabloids, and a trip to the Brit Awards sees the band in such cocky form that Dave Rowntree responds to Prince appearing with the word ‘SLAVE’ written on his face by scrawling ‘DAVE’ on his cheek as they picked up an unparalleled four gongs. It’s an album I’m so familiar with, I sometimes think I never need to listen to it again. But then, upon giving it a spin for whatever reason, I’m always surprised by just how much life there is in it, the range of emotion, the depth of the song writing… Parklife’s lofty status remains deserved.

Where had they to go from there? For better or worse, Blur courted even greater success with The Great Escape. Quickly lauded as the best record ever upon its release, then dismissed as the worst record ever as bitter rivals Oasis consolidated their place as the nation’s favourite outdoor festival Britpop band, in truth it was neither. Though Albarn’s lyrics now detailed characters with far less grace than they were granted on previous LPs – ‘T.O.P.M.A.N.’ sees ‘Colin Zeal’ grow up to become a bit of an arse, ‘Globe Alone’ follows a ‘Jubilee’ type character from being an adolescent loser on Parklife to a mid-twenties loser on The Great Escape – time has actually been pretty kind to the darker corners of this funny little record. The ‘route round the back’ to The Great Escape is again quite revealing – ‘Cross Channel Love’ is another previously unheard demo, and rudimentary though it might be, it’s amazing to hear what is eventually the melody for ‘The Universal’ eke its way out of these creepiest of beginnings. Forget not that it’s also the album of ‘Best Days’, ‘He Thought of Cars’ and ‘Yuko and Hiro’ – heartbreaking ballads every one, and not too subtle a suggestion that the band’s flirtation with the mainstream was turning out to be not quite as rewarding as they might have initially hoped.

Whilst many, rightly or wrongly, perceived Albarn to be thriving on the attention brought by number one singles and another few years of magazine front covers, the effect on the rest of the band took a toll in various different ways. Whilst Graham Coxon seemed increasingly marginalised in proceedings – he maintains, with my support, that the guitar parts on both Parklife and TGE should be much louder – Alex James embarked on what he would later confess to be a million quid coke and champagne binge, whilst Dave Rowntree set up an animation company and probably got an early night. Something had to change.

It’s at this point that the very idea of change becomes integral to the band. Coxon, in the midst of a debilitating battle with alcohol and increasingly cynical towards whole Britpop phenomenon they’d helped create, wrote a letter to his boyhood pal Albarn, on the brink of packing it all in completely, stating that he wanted to “scare people again”. The leap from Albarn’s scratchy four track recording of what would be their eponymous album’s lead single ‘Beetlebum’ to its eventual number-one claiming incarnation shows just how much of the record’s sonic vision was left to Coxon, who relished in making both some truly terrifying noises (‘Theme From Retro’, ‘Essex Dogs’) and some gorgeously heart-on-sleeve ones (his first solo turn on a Blur record, ‘You’re So Great’). Whatever indie credibility was shed through wooing the high street was recouped tenfold; Blur’s rougher sound is often attributed to a blossoming friendship with Pavement, but there was also at the time a collaboration with the Silver Apples, an invite to perform an album launch in John Peel’s back garden, and remixes coming courtesy of everyone from Tortoise to Thurston Moore (who, one would imagine, wouldn’t have been so keen at hacking away at the likes of ‘Stereotypes’).

Those versions curiously aren’t featured in the Blur -21 box set, the remix being a medium through which Blur songs have never really shone (though Cornelius’ take on ‘Tender’, which is here, is probably the most successful). Perhaps the band were never particularly comfortable with the idea – “It’s like giving someone your dog to take out for a walk, and they bring back a different dog”, said James of the Pet Shop Boys’ take on ‘Girls and Boys’ – but one man’s work on ‘Movin’ On’’ from Blur was deemed impressive enough for him to be offered the role of producer on its follow up, in an emotional ending to a relationship with Stephen Street that dated back to 1990.

He was Madonna producer and electronica/classical music fence-sitter William Orbit. Perhaps sensing that he was working with a band who had – after topping the charts with a record that featured the sounds of vacuum cleaners and tuneless drones alongside (finally!) a U.S. hit that just went ‘woo hoo!’ for a couple of minutes – arrived at the stage of being something of a national treasure, Orbit’s approach to recording them was markedly different to how they’d worked before. Instead of demos, songs were brought to the studio either in fragmented fashion or worked through by a process of editing down long, exploratory jams. The box set treats us to what happened in Albarn’s 13 studio (which would gift the record its title) when Orbit had left the tape running for ‘Battle’ and ‘Caramel’, these experiments hinting at the endless directions these two fan favourites could have taken in a manner devotees will delight in getting lost in. Though lyrically the record is at times very literal in its description of Albarn’s breakup from Justine Frischmann (see ‘No Distance Left To Run’), there’s more to 13 than heartbreak; ‘Tender’ affirms love to be the best thing since sliced bread, as I believe the lyrics go. But it’s moments like the aforementioned duo of ‘Caramel’ and ‘Battle’, alongside Coxon’s career-best showings on ‘Coffee and TV’ and ‘Trimm Trabb’, that make this probably the most rewarding Blur record to revisit in this entire collection.

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Though embracing change had lead to triumphant, momentum-driving results on the previous two records, the post-13 shifts were ones which saw the gang mentality dissipate. Albarn found that commercial success both home and abroad was easier to come by when you had a Peter Pan-like cartoon fronting a band rather than a bunch of men in their mid forties, and subsequently focused his attention accordingly on Gorillaz whilst embracing work on film soundtracks and the music of Mali with equal vigour. It appeared that Albarn’s gaze was moving away from the band that made his name, leaving the rest of Blur to dabble in often-great solo records that drew upon a love of post punk and traditional English folk music (Coxon), novelty football songs (James) and careers in law and politics (Rowntree).

So what were Blur to do now other than head without their guitarist to the Moroccan desert to try at recording an album with Fatboy Slim? Yeah, dwell on that a minute…

With Graham Coxon’s struggle with alcohol reportedly causing tensions at the beginning of the recording of Think Tank, depending on whose account of the story you believe, he was subsequently either sacked after recording just the one song (the gorgeous album closer ‘Battery In Your Leg’), or simply stopped turning up to the studio. It’s likely there’ll never be a coherent, agreed upon, public answer as to exactly what happened at this point, and nor should there be – frankly it sounds like a very private issue that, especially given that it’s subsequently been resolved by the four friends at its centre, shouldn’t be of anyone else’s concern.

Focusing instead on the music of Think Tank rather than the inter-band politics surrounding its creation reveals it (the sub-‘Song 2’ abomination of ‘Crazy Beat’ aside) to be a very good record, on which Albarn’s sense of wistful melody flourishes bravely against a backdrop of the most tumultuous period in the band’s history. Though Norman Cook’s bizarre bleeps and bloops sound as unbefitting now as they did at the time, Ben Hillier’s work on the likes of ‘Out Of Time’, ‘Good Song’ and ‘Ambulance’ coaxes out of Albarn some of his most touching performances, with the demos included here mirroring the elegance of their on-album counterparts – yes, even the one with the incongruous title of ‘Sir Elton John’s Cock’ (tee hee).

Although Think Tank was more than decent, the Graham-less tour to support it (which included headline spots at Reading and Leeds) was a thoroughly peculiar one, with The Verve’s Simon Tong brought in to handle guitar duties despite the fact that he clearly hadn’t even bothered to learn how to play ‘Trimm Trabb’ properly. It just served to prove that though a combination of Albarn, James and Rowntree can make some great music, without Coxon, it certainly wasn’t the same Blur. And so, it had to stop; there was no announcement of a split, just a near ten-year period where all routes to Blur, high street or otherwise, lead to a dead end. Cheese making, cartoon bands and running for government took priority, with talk of a reunion becoming quieter and quieter as the years passed.

Their out of the blue 2009 regrouping yielded little in the way of new material, but arguably their best ever shows at Glastonbury, and a Hyde Park double header. New recordings were limited to Records Store Day 7” ‘Fool’s Day’, with it clear that carefree nostalgia was more the order of the day – or, more accurately, the need to draw a line under something brilliant instead of it allowing it to fizzle out. And, as anyone who attended any of the shows that summer will attest, if it were to have ended then, complaints would have been non-existent.

Now it seems that Blur are either underlining things once more just to be sure, or carrying the line on a little bit further in to the unknown. Just when it seemed that they and their fans alike had gotten closure on a two decade long history, here they are again, back in Hyde Park, back with the traditional warm up shows in run down seaside towns, back with another limited edition seven inch single (the dazzling hymnal ‘Under The Westway’) – and a mammoth box set, of all things. Summer 2012 seems to find Blur in the mindset that they’ll do what they want when they can be bothered to do it, and if they can’t be bothered to do it, they won’t do anything.

The warts and all Blur – 21: The Box grants you as much insight as you could possibly want in to the formative stages of their records at each part of their career; where they went, where they could have gone, and why they chose to go the way they did. What we can be sure of is that their quality control is of a level that, if they were to head back in to the studio for a full length, we can be damn certain that it won’t suck. And if they don’t, there’s enough here to get lost in for years to come. The fact that brilliance, flaws, genius and incoherence are all things that can be found on Blur -21 are exactly the reasons its creators endure. And whilst Graham’s correct about the “route round the back” being the more interesting path to appreciation, it’s not a stretch to say that as bands on the high street go, Blur are as good as it’s ever likely to get.

Blur – 21 : The Box is available now through EMI.