Original subtitles

You have probably heard that Blur,

the rock band from Essex, is getting together again.

After years of speculation,

it's been confirmed that Britpop legends Blur are reforming.

Damon and Graham finally buried the hatchet.

How long is it since they last played together?

Blur fell apart seven years ago,

but have been preparing to reclaim their place at the top table of rock.

All the original band, including guitarist Graham Coxon, will play Hyde Park...

What was the problem between the two of them? Musical differences?

- Something like that? - That's a long stoy.

Far too long for the midday news, I have to tell you.

It was something I'd longed for, really. I'd thought about it every day.

All I really needed...

was to get in a room with the other three and play the songs.

I didn't really care if anyone was watching or not.

Getting my friends back, that's what I needed

more than, kind of, approbation of an audience,

more than cash, more than anything.

Needed my friends back.

I had missed Damon quite a lot.

But I started to miss the side of him that made me laugh.

I really hadn't thought about that an awful lot,

because I thought, "Damon's just bloody angy with me."

Two days before, I was listening to Radio 4,

and on the radio came the Police's drummer,

Stewart Copeland, who said that the Police had got back together again.

He said, "When a band gets back together again, the thing is,"

"you've all changed in the intervening years,"

"and it's like you've got this jigsaw puzzle"

"but none of the pieces quite fit any more."

And I thought, "Shit. If that's true, we're in real trouble."

All that rubbish on both sides seemed to have evaporated,

and at that point, it was like, "OK. Come on. Let's..."

"Let's get the band back together one more time!"

- We're the only news for today. - You're my only news for today.

Bruce will be doing lots of... Bruce?

And this is Damon, the final member of the band we haven't filmed yet,

behind you there.

Hi, Damon. I'm Steph.

- Nice to meet you. - Hi. Hello.

- And this is Bruce my cameraman. - Hi, Bruce.

We thought you'd like to do it all together so then it was quicker.

The quicker the better.

Have I got to be really wildly enthusiastic.

No, you can be...

Yeah! Hot pop!

It's a good six months, maybe eight now, since you said,

"We're gonna play together again."

How much have you been able to get together and rehearse

and has it just come straight back, has it felt different?

The first one was fun because

I got here and I was like, "Oh, gosh, am I the first one arrived? Who's here?"

And I poked my head round the door and Dave's drums were there,

and my amp was sitting next to it, and then Alex's bass.

It was like, "Crikey." Made me go a bit "ooh".

- It was funny seeing all the instruments. - Like being back at school?

No, it was just nice, a nice feeling to see all the instruments together.

It was so familiar, you know.

It's got louder and louder though.

- You were playing really quietly. - I was. I don't know why.

Very quietly.

They kept telling me to turn it up, which used to be the other way round.

We all come from families with one sister and no brothers,

and we kind of became each other's surrogate brothers, really.

I remember those days.

Oh, yeah!

That means we can all push each other's buttons quite easily.

But it means we relied on each other a lot as well, in the early days.

We became quite close...

quite close and quite distant, simultaneously,

in the way that only brothers can,

I imagine, cos I haven't got any.

When we're playing, it's just the same.

All I can hear is the echoes of all the times we've played in the past.

It's like going back to where you were born, or something. It felt like that.

Streets that you haven't walked for ages, triggering...

bizarre flashes of forgotten moments.

I lived in a place outside of a town in Essex.

I had absolutely no idea what London was like,

apart from, in my imagination it was a place a bit like New York,

where you'd get shot if you walked down to get some milk.

You know, our milk was delivered,

you know, blue tits sat on the top of it and pecked the cream off the top.

I didn't know anything about anywhere else.

When I lived in London, until I was nine,

I went to a very mixed school in Leytonstone.

We moved to the countyside,

and that summer, I went to Turkey for a few months.

And I came back and went to this little primay school outside Colchester,

completely white, at that point, 1980,

there were no black families, didn't see them in the whole of Essex.

It was one of those burgeoning, kind of, Thatcher experiments.

They were building lots of, kind of, small estates.

With Colchester being a mere 50-minute train ride from London,

commuters have moved in.

These new Fairclough houses on the old RECHI site

are ideal for folk, right on the doorstep of the railway station.

I didn't really fit in with the politics of the place.

First time I saw him was in a school assembly.

He was doing the song from West Side Stoy,

I don't know whether it's called Gee, Officer Krupke or just Officer Krupke.

But he was the main boy of the gang, singing that.

You know, "I got a social disease!" and all that stuff.

And I couldn't quite believe the gall of him and the confidence.

I definitely immediately thought,

"My gosh, what an amazingly confident performer "

and also, "Gosh, what a show-off."

Wakey-wakey!

It was the end of the 2 Tone and mod revival thing.

Brogues and white socks were in,

and you could either get the very expensive leather-soled brogues,

which Damon had, of course, and a black trench coat.

He approached me to tell me that my shoes weren't as good as his.

Graham, obviously, still holds that against me.

"Your shoes aren't as good as mine. Mine are the proper kind."

And checked himself out in the...

in the window of the Portakabin outside the music block, and flounced off.

Me and Damon became friends because I was playing the saxophone.

He'd written this song and he needed a saxophone solo,

and I was the only boy who could play the sax, I suppose.

He just seemed different, made from different stuff.

I was really unpopular at school. Graham didn't have that sort of...

He was much more mild, whereas I just seemed to irritate a lot of people.

We used to spend our lunch breaks

in this little Portakabin outside the music building.

We had a great laugh together. We were both really into music.

- Nice to meet you. - Thanks.

I'm a journalist, of course I have a conceit,

and that is, what I find interesting is that,

you know, obviously you started off as a band in the classic tradition.

Now, you're all back together in the same room playing music again,

but in the intervening time, you've all done completely different things,

then reconvened as a kind of collective of evolved individuals.

So rather than being this kind of symbiotic mono-band,

you are these four evolved individuals.

Now, you're all back together in the same room playing music again.

- So it's almost a new band, even though... - Yes.

..it's the same band.

What did you say? We've become...

Kind of like more of a collection of evolved individuals.

Yeah.

It always starts off feeling like a gang band. That's what it is.

And I think you all start off sort of tying to agree with each other.

You know, it's a sort of united front.

But I think what's interesting about Blur is that,

as the years have gone by, we've all...

become quite different from each other,

four very different personalities, really.

Does that look like me, though, Tery?

Does that look like me?

I need to look at the rider with you guys, dressing-room rider.

So do we want a bottle of red and a bottle of white for guests?

- Family, friends? - And a bottle of pop.

- Bottle of fizz? - Shloer. I like that.

- Apple Shloer or grape Shloer? - Coca-Cola?

- I've got some Red Bull, here. - Shloer, red grape one.

I've got Red Bull, I've got assorted sodas, and a case of Cokes.

Coke, lemonade, ginger beer.

All right for you?

Get a couple of Crunchies?

I sort of wanted to be in a band with Graham from the moment I first saw him, actually.

And he was the very first person I saw when I got to London.

He was getting out of his parents' car holding a guitar,

and I knew, that instant, that he was going to play a major part in my life.

I went to Goldsmiths because I thought I had to get to London, really,

if I was gonna do anything musically any more with Damon.

My tutors were kind of pessimistic about getting in.

They said, "Look, by all means have a go, but..."

"if you don't get in there, it's Scunthorpe for you."

I didn't know what Scunthorpe was.

It was the best art school in the county.

Damien Hirst was there, and Sam Taylor-Wood.

I was kind of maybe not ready for how seriously people were taking themselves.

The rendering of certain images

allows that greater formalistic space to occur throughout the whole painting.

And I just thought, "Oh, no, these lot are rubbish."

I went to drama school when I left Stanway,

and I didn't fit in there, really, either.

We did make a promise to each other that we'd include each other

if anything was happening musically.

That's something we said to each other, so I suppose...

Even if it was just me playing the tambourine, I had the job.

Graham talked about him a lot, you know.

He's always been somebody that people talk about, Damon.

I just assumed they'd be really similar.

You couldn't meet two more different people.

I think Dave was there. Cos Dave was leading this double life...

working for Colchester Council programming computers...

sporting a mohican.

It was more of a mohawk.

It was a very Colchestrian difference,

the mohican was thin, the mohawk was thick.

There were various incarnations of people in bands,

before we settled on the line-up of the four of us.

In fact, the first time I played with Damon, Graham wasn't even in the band.

The guitarist dropped out and Graham came in,

and it was infinitely better, straightaway.

Graham introduced me to Alex, and I think we'd done a demo

and I played it and he said it was shit.

lt was too drama college, and it needed to be more art college.

That comment, knowing Alex now, was typical, really.

Then I think Dave sacked the guitarist and bass player two weeks later,

and Graham said, "Wanna have a go?"

So we became the group then, I suppose, that we are now.

I think we wanted to revisit, with going back,

you know, the train shed.

and that viaduct that Damon and I used to muck around on, you know.

And I think we wanted to almost emotionally pr�cis our journey,

do a few things that would just feel good.

and sort of, historic, remind ourselves of our roots in some way.

'90s pop group Blur are performing tonight

at the East Anglian Railway Museum near Colchester.

They're kicking off quite a tour, in actual fact.

Tonight, it'll be for an exclusive audience of invited guests.

Joining us from the East Anglian Railway Museum

is trustee Ian Reed.

- Ian, good morning. - Good morning.

You're used to your steam trains, of course, making a bit of a racket.

but do you have a lot of live music there?

20 years ago, when we'd first restored the goods shed,

we had a music club who met regularly,

and one of the bands that were playing then

was an unknown group called Blur.

It was their first public gig, was here, actually at the museum, 20 years ago.

From the East Anglian Railway Museum, hosting Blur's comeback gig tonight.

What a great local stoy, hey?

I think we just liked the resonant emotional stuff.

We appreciate the symbolism, I suppose, of going back

and revisiting those places.

He says stall them, cos he can't find a cab.

- We can't stall. - I think he's joking.

We're this well-oiled machine.

- How's it been remembering all the lyrics? - I've got them now. I think.

Damon, can you just put your arm over the top of Graham's shoulder?

That's it. That's nice. Nice, nice, nice, nice.

Alex, don't get lost. Come out a little bit.

- That's it. - Alex, come out.

That's it.

It's great fun, you know, being in a band. Great.

- Brilliant. As far as I'm concerned, job done. - Great.

- No, no. Hold on, hold on. - Are we doing more?

She told me it was one shot!

Our shows were pretty crackers.

We had a mad little audience that would faithfully follow us around.

Most of our gigs ended up with the equipment going over,

Damon being sick behind my amplifier or whatever.

He would start to get Alex onto his shoulders.

They would sort of fall on me and everything would become unplugged.

So although we had something like ten songs by that point,

we'd normally only get through four before it was all over.

Thank you very much.

I'm lucky that I was in a group with Damon.

He was ambitious for the group, which is good, you know.

He was the terrier, forcing us onto the bill all over the place.

I'd booked a studio, a rehearsal studio, for a certain time, and no one turned up.

Dave turned up, bless him. He'd driven from Colchester.

But they hadn't turned up at all.

And I was so fucked off that I got on the Tube

and I went all the way down to New Cross to their halls of residence.

And they were in the midst of a big party.

I literally opened the door, so I just sort of kicked the door in,

and I was just standing there, fuming.

And he was playing Blue Moon on the piano,

and I was not amused, you know.

I was working in the croissant shop, and I didn't have any cash,

and I'd paid for the rehearsal studio, and it was like...

I had nothing else...

This was all I wanted to do, was make this band work.

In music news, it's all about secret gigs in town tonight.

After their first gig in nine years in Colchester on Saturday,

Blur are gonna play another intimate gig in London tonight for just 1 70 people.

I've done a few in-stores in my time.

I just hope they've made sure people know it's here.

Have you got any spares?

Cos Si is outside and he ain't got a ticket or nothing.

- You enjoying it? - Yeah!

- It's wonderful. - It is.

- It's a marvellous thing, isn't it? - Yeah.

I've realised my Alzheimer's isn't as bad. I can sing every note.

Better than me.

- I'll see you. - See you. Cheers.

- See you tomorrow. - Have you got a deck with you?

We got our record deal pretty quickly, which was good and bad, you know.

It's distinctive. It's brave.

I mean, anybody who can do all that,

I've got a lot of respect for, cos you believe in what you're actually doing.

We were about 20, 21 , you know.

Part of you's certain and part of you's completely unsure.

Hello, we're Blur,

and I'm Damon and I'm the singer.

I'm Graham and I play the guitar.

I've got a big, big, big, big bass guitar and I'm called Alex.

I'm called Dave and I play the drums.

What do you know when you're 20? I didn't know what a record deal meant.

"Wow, a record contract." I'd never seen one.

I wish we'd listened in those meetings, cos we're still in that contract now.

I think it'd be true to say that we're a stereotypical English thing.

But that's what we are, and I think that's what we want to be.

Our first record...

was very tightly controlled by the record company.

Food Records were just tying to make a record

that fitted in with what was happening then.

Choice of songs for the first album...

some of the kind of imagey we used, you know.

Thank God that was a time when you could still make a record that wasn't right

and not be kind ofjust sort of discarded the next minute.

They live on the edge, they come from outer space, or is it Colchester?

They are a four-letter word. That word is Blur.

There's No Other Way got to number eight. We were pretty overjoyed.

It sort of crawled up the charts like songs used to in those days.

Our tour manager took us to one side and said,

"You'd better grab sleep while you can,"

"because everything's gonna go mental."

Up until that point, we'd get a call from the radio plugger saying,

"Your record's gonna be on Mark Goodier on Thursday at quarter to eight "

and we'd all go round to one of our houses and listen round.

But suddenly, with There's No Other Way, that changed, and it just went into the ether.

- What are they? - They're looking very sort of...

..Californian?

I'm a man of many moods.

Been reading all about English melancholy this morning.

- Oh, yeah. - Was it a Blur review?

- Yeah! - What do you want to know about it?

We've all...we've had it since hundreds and hundreds of years.

- Course we have. - It's in our natures.

- It's a grand tradition. - Yeah.

It's... That's what we do.

- We mix in just the right amount of wit. - Yeah. Exactly.

This song is about people who live on islands. And you don't.

Obviously, I want to see America, really.

So much of our culture is sort of American culture now,

and it would be... I think it's important to make a connection.

Our first manager either stole or bungled the money.

I was convinced that, in this modern world,

all the music-business sharks must be well-known by now,

and surely there was nobody still ripping people off,

cos that would be ridiculous.

So anyway, we signed to this manager who promptly ripped us off.

So we got a new manager, and in order to raise some cash,

some T-shirt company had given us enough money to pay out debts back,

but the condition was we had to go on this huge tour.

From little club to little club, full of people who'd never heard of us.

We just started drinking, and drinking and drinking and drinking.

Anything to escape the realities and the drudgey of it were welcomed.

One day we woke up and, in the night,

Graham had smashed every piece of glass on the bus.

All the plates, all the glasses, the doors had mirrors on, he'd smashed all the mirrors.

It was just grim.

It was very...it was kind of difficult, for me, as well.

I was very homesick.

We were getting more and more depressed doing this pointless tour,

and seeing our career in the UK going down the toilet, really.

So that was when we started fighting.

I remember giving Alex a black eye.

There was one point where we all had a black eye from each other.

Eight weeks into a tour where I was drinking beer for breaMast, it just...

You know, alcohol just eventually, it's just...

Sometimes it's easier to thump someone than...

tell them to shut up.

While we were in the States, the music industy focus had shifted completely,

we were no longer relevant, and nobody was interested.

Nirvana and that whole kind of disgusting movement

that came over from America.

I mean, Nirvana were not disgusting,

but in their wake was just the most awful shit.

I think the effect it had on Damon...

made him sort of defiantly British.

I don't know, it just made us think about who we were.

British popular culture was being pushed aside in exchange for American.

The unpleasant American tour, plus the Americanisation of British pop music,

gave us something convenient to kick against, cos we always needed that.

Britpop was 1000/o Damon Albarn's idea.

We were recording Modern Life Is Rubbish,

and I remember the record company coming down,

in the middle of a bass take, actually, for Star Shaped,

just saying, "You're mad. You're absolutely mad. British pop... You're mad."

"How can you predict the future? How could you know?"

Damon said, "You've gotta trust me."

He said, "I'll trust you for one album. Prove it to me, then."

Gosh. I suppose we should think about getting...

Yeah, shall we go? Shall we get on?

Right, everyone, we're starting.

We did a lot of touring on Modern Life Is Rubbish.

We played around with some really strange sets.

So we were really doing stuff our own way.

Not one music editor thought it was worth

even having a look at our new record.

That was sort of...up shit creek.

But we did have a paddle, and we kept on paddling.

Slowly, we kind of felt there was a real movement starting.

You know, we played in Italy and kids'd turn up on mopeds,

the mods arrived, they were like a strange cavaly.

It was the classic thing, it just got bigger and more intense.

That was really the birth of us turning into the kind of modern Blur.

I remember playing Reading, headlining the tent there.

It had got to fever pitch by that point.

Suddenly, it clicked. The performance clicked.

I remember, in the hotel aftemards, sitting in this chair,

and there was the editor of the NME and the editor of Melody Maker and...

and they were all sitting down.

I was sitting on this chair, and I was going,

"That was a good day's work."

It's going to be slightly strange, because it's not a full Brixton, it's, you know...

Yeah, I don't know how to pitch it. You know what I mean?

Not an awful lot of people...

Don't know if I'm rehearsing or performing.

- I don't think there is... - Is there a distinction?

Good afternoon.

Welcome to this...

friends and family...

concert.

Thing that really put me off was having Will Self at the front,

just looking at me like that.

- Yeah, he was like that. - Oh, no!

- No! - From the beginning.

I know, and that's the first person I noticed, was Will Self, cos he's taller than everyone.

But he had that expression that...

- And I was thinking, "Oh, no." - No.

"I have to really string my sentences together."

"Ty and use big words."

"The longest words I've got."

"You can do this."

And the more I thought about it, the more confused I got,

and tongue-tied, and...

For those out there who were not born when we last played,

let alone when we started,

we're playing songs from all...ten years, were we?

1989...

12...1 1 or 12 years that we were sort of functioning properly.

Or...you know.

Good morning. Tour bus.

- Yeah. - Tour bus. On tour.

Tour bus! Oh, fuck.

Thank you.

It never ever feels like you've really arrived.

People always wanna know what it feels like to have had a hit or had a number one.

There's never any sort of sense of arrival.

lt's just constant sort of fomard momentum.

Before Parklife came out, the sort of... the tide was starting to turn.

There was a sense that there was something happening,

that we were developing.

Word got out that we had some good songs.

It had gone up a notch.

The voice of London on 97.3 FM...

Kids today wouldn't even understand what it was like,

but at that point, there was no such thing

as a left-field indie band that were that commercial.

And I think everyone had accepted that it was never going to be like that.

lt's very important that I win something.

Hello. Can I have a fiver on number one?

Number one!

Just as Damon had predicted, the mainstream of music did change.

Everything about indie disappeared and indie became the new pop music.

It was quite a relief that British music was suddenly being appreciated again.

Oh, fantastic!

Piss all over every other band. Nothing anywhere near 'em.

- There you go. - Spat in my drink and everything.

Music now was quite important again, and that was positive.

It wasn't just us that did it, I think it was the coincidence of us making a great record

and Oasis making a great record.

But they put this sheen on it, and waved flags, and called it Britpop.

If there's two bands doing it, there's a scene, and we can write about it.

Britpop.

I didn't like being called Britpop.

Or pop, or Brit. Or PopBrit.

Or however way you wanna put it.

The winner of Best British Single as voted by the One FM listeners

goes to Blur, Parklife!

It all happened on that one night of the Brit Awards.

Blur, Parklife!

Blur! Oh, yes!

People knew who we were, then.

Damon was quite statesmanlike,

he said we should have shared an award with Oasis.

I think this should have been shared with Oasis.

Oh, God.

What did I do that for?

I mean, I go past Goldsmiths every time I come back from Kent.

I always look at the student union and wince a little bit.

It's a great student union, though.

That's where I used to go and have a disco on a Tuesday night. Indie disco.

I remember this place being kind of cavernous.

I remember, like, running around like an excited kid when there was music on.

Just...it's a lot smaller than I remember.

Thank you very much.

- Give us a kiss. - What?

I like you too, Damon, you know?

You like U2. We all like U2, don't we?

We were very fond of U2 when we were younger.

- What? - We were very fond of U2,

- when we were younger. - Then what happened?

Not Simple Minds. What d'you mean, you don't like Scotch?

Irish whiskey.

- Did you get that? - Yeah.

Pretty special, weren't it?

And it just happens to be the best fucking wine...

- Bite your fucking nuts off. - Best fucking wine in the world.

Good boy.

Yeah, it was nice, that. I played like a complete prat.

Yeah, but it had spirit.

- It had spirit. - It had spirit.

- I put in my all. - Spirits from the minibar, I think.

No! Not at all!

Not at all.

- What? - Liar. Liar.

We're not laughing at you, we're laughing with you.

This is the brink. The brink. And this is Graham.

Being in a band was like getting on an old-fashioned transatlantic flight.

You know, record deal was basically signed in a pub,

all the meetings were conducted in a pub.

The whole thing happened in pubs and clubs and bars.

I used to always play with a bottle of wine. I'd have a few swigs beforehand,

then during the show I'd have a swig.

By the end of the show, I'd have about that much left.

Whether the audience liked it or not, I didn't particularly care.

I was already in a nice little fuzzy world.

So that was sort of how I used to protect my feelings.

Just say, at this point,

a really huge thank you

to Stu, Smog and Alex,

who have been our friends from Wolverhampton

since the first time we played here

and especially Stu and Smog,

who have kind of...

over the years, really encouraged for us

to get back together and play these gigs,

so I just want to say thank you!

For me, Blur is an indie band, really.

You know, and you get on the rollercoaster or whatever,

you have no clue where it's gonna go, or how you're gonna feel about it,

but you're on it, and there's not an awful lot you can do about it.

You may not start out wanting to be famous...

But it is quite addictive, that sort of success.

We had no idea at the time...

how famous we were, or what people thought of the music,

or thought of us, we had no idea, really,

what it looked like from the outside.

Are Blur the biggest band in the world?

No. Biggest band in Britain. But not the biggest band in the world.

Got a lot more hard work to do.

So having had one big smash hit record,

that had made us household names,

the new record had to be great.

- What's the new album? What's it called? - The Great Escape.

The Great Escape? The great escape from what?

From...

Escape from the tyranny of conscious thought.

We were getting a lot of awards for Parklife, and then going back to the studio.

We didn't, we never stopped recording. We just carried on.

We were quite doolally and hungover quite a lot.

And at times, I was kind of quite unable to function.

It felt weird.

It felt odd that we were getting a new and different kind of attention.

They started off as a reasonable indie band.

They've become a huge teenybop band. The reverse to what the Beatles did.

It's great to have fans, but I was getting a bit disgruntled that they were...

that they were so...so young, I suppose.

A teenybop audience.

I couldn't see beyond the first two rows of any shows,

and see that there was chin-rubbers there, as well

and people that would appreciate our music on many different levels,

and not just screaming their head off all the way through the gig.

I find the me then a little bit ridiculous,

and crikey, if I'd have been in a group with me then,

I would have had a right good go at myself.

Said, "Just bloody enjoy it."

It was a very odd year.

It felt like our world had gone a bit berserk.

All the rules had changed

and we were no longer making the rules.

And that's quite an unnerving feeling.

We're not gonna spend ages and ages...

- No. Not ages. - ..doing lots and lots of these.

- No, you're not. - Cos it's soul-destroying.

Hello, I'm Alex, the stupid one from Blur,

and you're watching M�s M�sica.

Little Saturday?

Hello, I'm Alex, the big one from Blur,

and you're watching Little Saturday!

Stop eating whales, you cunts.

Hello, I'm Alex, the nice one from Blur,

and you're watching Sunday Music Express on ATV.

Hello, I'm Alex, from Blur,

and you're listening to Alvin Wong on Commercial Radio.

I think it took us all a while to realise

that pop stardom wasn't the thing we were after.

Maybe it was what I was after.

I quite liked it.

- Drop more in there? - I don't have too much.

- Drop more in there? - Just clink, clink.

Chin-chin.

I lived in a small flat in the West End,

and I never wanted to go home,

and it was a never-ending party.

Actually, I think Damon suffered most from being famous,

cos he was the most famous.

Crowds of people outside his house,

paparazzi chasing him down the road with his bag of carrots and loaf of bread.

He and Justine were the king and queen of Britpop.

I think it's been well documented

that I was going through hell at that time.

I had panic attacks.

You know, it's nice going to groovy parties like that,

but the people are so annoying.

I don't see what...

I know there are a load of girls walking around that sort of look like spiders,

and talking crap.

I don't see why that's such a nice thing.

I think what Graham struggled with was just the sort of bullshit of it all.

I just got very browned-off, I suppose,

and decided that all these record company people,

all these journalists and other groups,

all these pretentious twanners that are in management, agents,

they can all just piss off,

because they're so boring, vacuous,

and all up their own arses, you know.

I prefer to talk to painters and decorators in the pub,

get a more real experience, get a more interesting conversation

out ofjust a painter and decorator down the Crown & Goose, or something.

And I suppose that's when, you know,

I was hitting the pubs a lot more in Camden.

Thank you.

We were getting quite clever with it, really,

but sometimes, a bit too clever, perhaps.

And we were in danger, by that point,

of becoming a bit caricaturish.

The only reason County House even came into...

We played at Mile End,

and we tried out this new song at the end,

and everyone went insane.

And, in a way, the last straw was when

we sort of publicly disowned County House,

after it had all...the shit had truly hit the fan!

If you can tell an Oasis from a Blur, you should be on tenterhooks this evening.

The battle of the bands is reaching its climax.

Two of Britain's most popular pop groups

have begun the biggest chart war in 30 years.

Blur and Oasis released singles on the same day.

On Sunday afternoon, one will go to the top of the charts.

Will it be Oasis from Manchester, or Blur from London?

Neither the groups nor their record companies are available

to speak to us about the battle or the success.

I think everyone needs adversaries.

I think some people are better at making them than others.

Damon and all of us loved it when we would kick out against somebody,

and they would kick back, it was just fun.

I think we've gotta get back to rock and roll,

not Chas & Dave chimney-sweeping music.

You know, by the very nature of being in a band, you're always quite competitive,

and you wanna come top, really.

Yeah, he's very competitive, Damon.

And I still really don't know who moved their release date

to coincide with anybody else's release date.

It was probably...it was probably Damon.

I thought that's what it was about.

And that's probably why, you know, so many people for so many years

were very, very suspicious of me.

But, you know, Noel chose to kind of take the piss out of me, constantly,

and it's OK, but it really hurt me at the time,

and I felt very, very vulnerable,

because, you know, Oasis, in many ways,

were kind of like the bullies that I had to put up with at school anyway.

They gave the impression that they would...

that they'd been in a lot more fights than you and it came down to that.

I just found it very cheap, the whole attention that was put on it.

That sort of focus, that sort of "Battle of Britpop",

"Working-class Northerners and shandy-drinking Southerners, you know..."

"battle it out for the number one slot."

Come on, do us a favour.

In just six days, both singles have sold almost a quarter of a million copies.

It's the biggest week for pop singles since the mid-'80s.

I loved the idea of a number one, but I just wanted a really decent number one,

without all the...without the BS, you know?

I wanted a number one that bands had when I was a teenager.

I think we were all quite at sea the day that number...

that County House got to number one.

We were all meeting up at Soho House to listen to that.

The rundown.

The champagne corks will be popping in London tonight,

because the number one song, the highest new enty,

is Blur's County House.

It wasn't a very nice night, because Graham...

He tried to jump out of a window at one fucking point.

I just thought that me doing that would remind a lot of those people

that there was sort of human beings involved,

and it wasn't just business and backslapping.

You know, it was...

You know, what was I? 25 or something.

You know, just a kid. We were just kids.

We didn't really hang out any more.

Well, Dave was kind of sort of at the end of his relationship,

and entering an awful divorce.

Graham was...was an alcoholic.

Alex was...

tr�s glamorous

in the West End.

And I was kind of in a sort of...

strange permutation of Performance.

We lived in totally different parts of London,

and we had totally different friends, you know?

And that was it, really.

We went from being the coolest band in the county

to, I suppose, you know, really, the uncoolest,

in, like, in one single.

This is not an exaggeration.

It didn't matter what street I was in,

if someone saw me from a house,

they'd open the window and put on Oasis.

And every single shop I went into,

as soon as I walked through the door, it would... Oasis.

They'd be, like...

You know, a little bit of kind of excitement,

and Oasis would come on, didn't matter where I went.

We kind of seemed to manoeuvre ourselves into a position

where everyone hates us,

from, really, everybody loving us.

And it's at that point that we're at our best, I think.

Graham was in his own personal... bad place.

I think I'm in a kind of...

mid-life...mid-pop-life crisis.

Just maybe felt he was, like, "God, am I in the right band?"

Pop makes me very sick.

Communication had got kind of weird between everybody,

and this is when I was talking to a lot more painters and decorators in the pub.

I wrote Damon a letter. Something about the music

and everything being...getting a bit, "We're tired, we need a rest."

"I wanna make music that scares people again."

People talk about this trilogy of Modern Life Is Rubbish,

Parklife and The Great Escape,

and we didn't plan it that way,

but I suppose after The Great Escape, we...

I did feel the need...that we needed to go somewhere else.

You know, I guess we put some sort of spiritual distance between ourselves,

and the old whoopsie-daisy, la-di-dah, gor-blimey.

It was a sort of new cycle after that, you know.

Blur was...

"When did those guys grow balls?"

We're one of those bands that has a lot of different sides to us,

and, you know, we just wanted to make visceral,

straight from the heart, straight to the heart, fucking rock music.

I kind of wanted to make a jazz record, but I'm not...

I'm not good enough at it yet.

That was kind of a turning point for me, probably,

in my whole development as a musician or whatever, guitar player.

We decided to give Graham a much freer hand

with that record.

I was getting influenced by a lot of American guitarists, because they...

American guitarists like Steve Malkmus were doing really interesting stuff

and I needed to be nourished, I suppose, as a guitar player,

and there was none of that happening in English music.

Although English music was now very popular

and flavour of the year or whatever.

I had gone over to the States

and was listening to a lot of stuff that was on the smaller labels.

I kind of got drawn towards what Graham was listening to,

then got into different parts of it.

I think Graham was much happier as a result.

It was a much more aggressive record, in many ways,

or emotional record, maybe.

I think the music we're making now is the music we've always wanted to make

but got distracted from, in a way.

If you bear in mind that the sort of front 15 rows

of the gigs that we were doing on The Great Escape

were 14-, 15-year-old girls,

it was a fucking big balls move

to go, "I don't need that. What I'm interested in is this."

And, you know, that's what really saved our bacon.

I'm really fond of that record. I think it's one of our best.

Damon's songs at this point were revealing more to me than him.

When Damon sang me the songs on acoustic, like he normally does,

there was the same kind of melancholy songs,

and then we hear some of his little home demos,

and he was obviously gone off his head a little bit more.

What's Beetlebum about?

If it's common knowledge, I don't need to talk about it, do I?

Oh, God. What's it about?

Well, that whole period of a lot of people's lives was fairly...

was fairly muddied by heroin, for a lot of people.

And it's sort of...it's in that place.

And a lot of stuff was, at that time.

- Read it out. - "Look carefully..."

"Look carefully, and you'll see this lot all over town today."

"Fixed grins, tired limbs, and the embers of excitement still flickering in their eyes."

"Yep, they were the lucky so-and-sos at the Blur gig last night."

"Blur are the thinking music fan's national treasure for good reason."

"While Britpop floundered into Britplop,"

"the Essex four-piece..."

- "..beat combo..." - Excellent. Does it say "beat combo"?

No, it doesn't say "beat combo".

"..Essex four-piece were always ahead of the game,"

"changing styles and cracking America with ease."

Blur have put out their sixth album, 13,

which marks at least two departures.

In the past, songwriter Damon Albarn has written biographical songs

telling stories about London characters.

But these are autobiographical, many inspired

by the end of his eight-year relationship with singer Justine Frischmann.

The jaunty Britpop style has also been replaced,

under the supervision of a new producer, William Orbit,

by more sophisticated electronic sounds.

You know, I think you have to keep changing.

That sort of thinking was sort of...

key.

I found it real, you know, and it's a hugely creative album.

It was a different way of working.

It came out of a lot of...

jamming.

You were recording all the time.

Making a record became more of an editing process.

There must have been, God knows how many weeks' worth of sound to go through.

Hours and hours and hours and hours to construct these songs.

What's great about recording an album like that

is you don't know what you're doing until it's been organised.

It was as close as you'd get to hearing your own group without...

without being part of the process that really gives the game away to yourself.

It was really full of magic, you know, listening back to that stuff.

But we didn't really make it together. We made it in bits.

When I listen to them, I hear what was going on at the time,

and hear how I was feeling at the time.

I loved it at the time, and I loved taking it on tour.

But I as getting more and more kind of unbalanced, really.

The trouble with 13 was things were starting to fall apart,

between the four of us.

It was quite a sad process, making it.

People not turning up to the sessions,

or turning up drunk,

being abusive and storming off.

I was really out there, around 13,

which made for some pretty great noise,

but I was probably a bit crap to be around.

I didn't have much of a clue that things were going wrong

with Damon and Justine,

although, you know, it was probably easy to guess.

That relationship just absolutely crashed.

I mean, you know.

It really was a spectacularly sort of sad end.

Singing about characters was a kind of device,

but it seemed like there was a shift away from sort of artifice, on 13,

that he was genuinely singing from the bottom of his heart.

No Distance...

It became pretty apparent when we were listening to the lyrics of that.

And again, it was a reminder at that point for me

that Damon wasn't just a ruthless careerist maniac, you know,

who had no feelings.

He was actually flesh and blood and was hurting quite a lot, and, yeah.

I... That... You know...

That sort of thing makes me fall in love with him all over again, in a way.

That, "Crikey. He is actually like me, he just does it in a different way."

When they were collaborating well, it was better than ever, on that record.

Like, Tender is probably their most collaborative ever tune.

Graham wrote one bit, Damon wrote another.

I can't quite believe

what an important song that is, now, you know?

It's a very difficult thing to balance.

How to keep yourself in a reasonable state of mind,

and still...and still do the work.

I suppose Damon was always pretty good about being a man about it,

- if you know what I mean. - Yeah.

Like, "All right, let's..." you know,

he's very good at putting anything of that about himself aside.

You know, we were all going through things, but I just showed it more.

- It just always... - Your emotion?

..flying out of me, but Damon would always be able to...

I don't know whether he buried it or whether he was able to just put it over there,

because he had something to get on with.

"This is the fucking job."

But I was just a bit more of a...

Dramarama.

- Every band needs one of them. - Yeah.

Let me ask you about Graham, cos Graham's not in the band any more.

- No. - I know he's done a couple of solo things.

Do you know why he left? What actually happened?

You've got lovely eyes, you know.

Maybe Graham just didn't want to be there any more.

Or needed to do something else.

Damon needed to do something else, and he did it.

And then he needed to do Blur again, and when it was...

And then Graham didn't turn up.

I needed some...someone to step in, but no one was doing it.

Except when a friend stepped in and did it in the end.

But... So I got locked away for a month,

which was, you know, brilliant.

And then I came out and I knew it was going to be sort of tense in the studio,

I was there for a couple of days...

I'm not quite sure. Maybe it was three or four days.

And the atmosphere was kind of weird, you know?

There was a lot of resentfulness about the fact that I'd...

And a lot of miscommunication, I think,

about why I'd gone into the Prioy, really.

I think the group were under the impression, really,

that I was being deliberately destructive,

but I wasn't, I really didn't have any choice.

We said something to our manager, who said something to Graham,

and God knows how, but what got said to Graham wasn't what we were intending,

and then that made it even worse.

I'm sure it wasn't our manager's fault.

Emotions were running high at the time,

so it could easily have been our fault.

And there was a lot of cying and a lot of...

Yeah, it was an unpleasant time.

I don't think he was told to leave, it was...

it was...just told to come back when he'd sorted himself out.

lt's like your girlfriend saying, "Look, I'm not chucking you,"

"but I don't want to see you for a bit, and, you know..."

Yeah. Make of that what you will.

Listen, you've got to understand that...

I hadn't particularly wanted to make another Blur album,

because I had Gorillaz,

and I was sick of it, and I just wanted to get on with my life.

But I'd made a commitment...

to start another album.

And I felt I would be terribly letting everyone down

if I just said, "I've just sold seven million albums, thank you very much,"

"I don't need this."

So I got back into the kind of saddle,

you know, and then he just didn't turn up.

And I was just, like, "Well, from my perspective, young man,"

"not only did I not want to do this,"

"but I'm doing it because I felt the commitment to us,"

"because, you know, we're like brothers,"

"but also, you just haven't turned up."

"And you didn't even tell anyone."

And I was just, like, "Well, you know what? I really have had enough."

I went into the loo, right, and I... It was odd.

I looked at myself in the mirror, and I was like,

"This is just like Behind The Music."

I was like, "Oh, no. It's happening to me."

Well, I thought a kick in the face might actually sober him up.

And it did.

But having watched the Metallica film,

they kind of wait for their singer to be ready.

And maybe, I think, you know...

Maybe we should have waited, but there was...

maybe we would have been waiting forever.

We didn't know at the time.

The Think Tank.

- We should just write on the wall. - Yeah.

Think Tank was a good record,

but it wasn't the same live without Graham, and it wasn't the same dynamic.

You know, I missed him. He's my best friend.

The Blur years were sort of over.

I went on such a fantastic voyage of discovery with my partner Suzi,

who had been travelling through the whole of the '90s

and who was oblivious to Britpop, had no idea what had been going on in Britain.

I saw the world, and I spent a lot of time in Africa,

just hanging out, getting to know people,

getting very, very stoned.

And it just...

It no longer seemed to be that important any more, you know?

Purely because I'd just seen the world from many perspectives,

and realised that, you know,

this little island is,

which I love so deeply,

is, in fact, a little island in the northern hemisphere.

I didn't plan to make solo albums, necessarily,

I just planned to spend time with my kid,

be a bit more domestic, get my head together,

and sort of relax, really.

Wean myself off the painter and decorators, and just be a normal bloke.

But these songs came out, and that was it.

So I toured again with another little group.

I kind of had a mid-life crisis in reverse.

Most merchant bankers think they're wasting their life,

and why on earth didn't they become a rock star?

I decided...

for reasons known only to me,

what I was born to do was to become a lamer

or an MP or something a bit more worthy.

I didn't know what the hell to do. I got married during Think Tank,

and everything changes then.

That was kind of the end of rock and roll, really,

when you get married.

It's the start of something else.

The idea of bumping into any of them was terrifying, as well,

because, you know, things were being misreported and said in the press,

and I was being a little bit resentful and silly,

saying daft stuff when I should have just shut up.

I remember seeing Jamie and Damon at London Zoo,

and I spent my whole afternoon at London Zoo hiding from Damon!

Absolutely ridiculous. And he knew I was hiding.

And it was just silly.

I just wasn't really ready...

ready to see them, I don't suppose,

on a stage, personally or on the telly, so...

So, Glastonbuy coming up.

That's sort of as big as it gets.

Do you still get nervous?

Or do you get to a point where you're just not nervous any more?

I just know what... I know how much...

how much...

effort has to go into it to make it...

to get it to that level where it feels as it felt like last night.

So there's always a sense of...

anticipation before...

an hour or so before, I just know how much we've got to do.

I know I've got to work really hard for two hours.

You have to psych yourself up for that.

- And you really... - It's like running a race.

If you want to even finish a long race, you've got to really...

You were running a race at one point. You were...

Yeah, I am running... I'm not running a...

I am running.

- I don't know where I'm running to. - You were running on the spot.

I don't know if I'm running away from anything, but I'm definitely running.

I like that.

I never ever really thought I would get a chance to say this,

but the hottest ticket throughout the United Kingdom in the near future

is Blur headlining Glastonbuy.

Surely the important thing about Glastonbuy in particular

is its very clear connection with...

with kind of very ancient rites that were performed in that vicinity.

And although human beings have changed so much since...

since the druids, for example,

but there's still a kind of sort of...

deep need inside of us all to commune with something.

I think we all really needed to be very public about this healing process.

And the music was a big part of the healing process.

I think we thought people would have a good time,

but we didn't realise just quite what an amazing time,

and how amazing it would feel.

They were singing, "Oh, my baby"

that bit that I sort of dreamt one morning,

in half-sleep,

and sort of wrote down,

and in the studio, said, "I've got a bit that'll fit with that song, Damon"

and that was my little bit in that song.

But to have that sung back like that by thousands of people

was really unbelievable.

I think something changed forever during Tender.

Take care! Good night.

Playing Glastonbuy this year was

as beautiful a memoy as I'll ever have.

And as a kind of, sort of, healing moment,

I feel very, very privileged to have been able to participate in it.

It was beautiful.

Blur are getting ready to play their first of two giant gigs

in London's Hyde Park tonight.

The band say they're going to put their heart and soul into the performances tonight.

We'll have reports from the concert tomorrow on 6 Music BreaMast.

I did miss everyone, and it was several events

that made me want to talk to them,

or have some sort of nostalgia

that made me think about my old friends in a different way.

It seemed to me like the most fantastic stoy...

I'd ever heard, while it was happening,

and I always wanted to write it all down.

The more I started thinking about it and writing about it,

what a wonderful journey it seemed it was.

I didn't feel any kind of bitterness towards anybody.

And Alex's book kind of made me...

It was lovely to read that.

It was a good reminder of everything we've been through.

I was very grateful to Alex, because he was so affectionate towards me in that book.

I had no idea that...

Graham didn't know that I thought that about him anyway.

I didn't think it was gonna happen again. I was driving up to Northumberland

last November, November 8th,

and my phone went and I saw it was Blur's manager,

so I picked it up.

And he started telling me. He said, "Damon and Graham have met each other."

And then I lost the reception.

We met up, and I... You know, it was pretty immediate.

I had missed Damon quite a lot.

But I started to miss the side of him that made me laugh.

I really hadn't thought about that an awful lot,

because I thought, "Damon's just bloody angy with me."

It was impossible to think of him being unintentionally hilarious.

And the first thing he did was buy an Eccles cake,

which he broke in half with his hands, you know,

shoved one in my...

and then spilt coffee all down his chinos and swore.

Well, I was quite... You know, I was very excited that it had all...

All that rubbish on both sides seemed to have evaporated,

We sat on this doorstep and we were having a little chat,

and he was like, "Well, it's all right, innit?"

I was like, "Well, yeah, it's all right. It's all right, innit?"

And then these two lads were like, "Oh. Fucking hell!"

"Wow. We live there. Would you mind... That's our doorstep."

"Oh, sory." And they were looking at us, like...

Then we went round the corner and we had a big hug,

and knocked around the idea of doing some gigs.

Yeah, I was on a total high, though, after that.

I knew it would make me happy to get my friends back and everything,

but I really was grinning from ear to ear for days and days,

it was absolutely brilliant.

I've got lots ofjobs, but that definitely wasn't one of them,

being in Blur, doing those gigs.

It didn't feel like work, it felt like play. It felt like it did at the very beginning.

I think Damon is possibly closer now to when I first met him.

I think we all are.

I feel almost a lot more innocent now than I did during my 20s,

when I just was feeling so much resentfulness and cynicism.

I feel a lot more pre-mid-'90s these days.

We've made mistakes, like everybody else has made.

And I just wanted to show the best of Blur.

At the end of the day, what we have done,

which so many bands who split up didn't do,

is we managed to come back, intact,

and do the best gigs we've ever done.

And, you know, that, for me, is what is different about us,

the fact that we did that, I think, is a testament to our original friendship.

That was my reason for doing it in the first place.