Damon Albarn

by Martin Roach

  Alex could have taken any subject at Goldsmiths but he opted for French. On his very first day there, he saw Graham getting out of his parents’ car with a guitar case under his arm, and went over and introduced himself. They became good friends, helped by the fact that their rooms were directly under one another in the Camberwell halls of residence.

  For some reason known only to himself, Graham plastered his bedroom walls with hundreds of Pixies lyrics on bright pink paper. Alex meanwhile initiated his own school of thought called ‘Nichtkunst’ into which he dragged Graham – it was an odd clique which largely involved staying up all night and drawing weird pictures, getting increasingly stroppy with each other as the sleepiness swept in and trying to convince themselves they were a movement to rival the Bauhaus era. They weren’t, but it was a laugh.

  With Damon frequently on campus for his part-time course, it was only a matter of time before Alex was introduced, which was at that party when Alex told him Circus were shit. After this, the group of friends got through loads of gigs, beers and the occasional recreational drug – one show which stood out in all their minds was a legendary performance by The Happy Mondays at London’s Astoria. Damon remembers this time well: “I used to go to loads of parties and when I got there Graham was always lying on the ground like a human doormat.” One time, a night of especially copious drinking followed a show of Goldsmiths students’ work – Alex woke up early the next morning in the middle of a field in Kent, whilst Damon blacked out after two bottles of tequila and fell asleep in Euston Station. The police saved him from a some tramps and slung him in Holborn police cells to sober up, where he was brought round by a Nepalese soldier in full uniform. The tramps had stolen all his money so he had to walk home.

  The Circus album had been recorded in January 1989 and by the spring term Eddie and Dave Brolan had left to form The Shanakies. Damon knew Alex played a little bit of bass and that’s why he asked if he fancied playing. Alex later said, “I thought Damon was a bit of a wanker but he had these keys to a studio, so I joined.” With the completed line up came a new name – Seymour.

  Chapter 4

  SING

  Much confusion and uncertainty seems to surround Seymour’s first gig. Many have said it was at that Goldsmiths show where their drunken debauchery put Damon in a cell for the night, but at this point Eddie was still in the band. There has always been some mention of a gig at a railway museum near a village outside Colchester, but this was before the Goldsmiths fiasco, so again Alex would not yet have been on bass. What is clear is that the actual line-up that eventually became Blur did not finally come together until the early summer of 1989, during Alex and Graham’s second year at Goldsmiths. Uncertainty also reigns about the infamously bad monicker – perhaps it was taken from one of Damon’s fictional characters, or indeed from a Salinger story of the same name. Perhaps the latter is the more probable option as many of Salinger’s characters, such as Holden Caulfield, are put-upon, alienated teenagers, who remain ever-popular with the entrenched mentality of aspiring art students.

  Seymour’s life was short, sweaty, but successful – within a year they had signed a record deal. Damon was churning out songs all the time and with a few regional shows under their belts they booked their first gig in London. They were supporting the excellent New Fast Automatic Daffodils and Too Much Texas at Camden’s Dingwalls, and in anticipation they plastered the underground with Seymour stickers. It was a fashionable bill which had attracted many music press and record company types, but the show ended badly for Seymour. After finishing their shambolic set, their drunken high spirits and a friend’s willy waving unnerved a bouncer sufficiently for him to panic and spray mace in the band’s faces. They stumbled out into the street, smarting from the self-defence spray and ended the night in hospital having their eyes checked. To add insult to injury, Music Week’s positive review was incorrectly spelt: “This unsigned and unheard of Colchester band played a blinder which swiftly endeared them to the Dingwalls disaffected. There could well be a gap in the goofy market and Feymour have the charm to fill it.”

  After this ignominious start, they gigged sporadically around the capital, including a support slot to the Swiss technomeisters The Young Gods and third on the bill at The Lady Owen Arms to a band with a worse name – Dandelion. At first, the only feedback was from Graham’s guitar. At a Brighton Zap Club gig, Seymour even dabbled in performance art with odd-shaped boxes on stage (the support band for the night was an infant jangly Suede, complete with Justine Frischmann on rhythm guitar). At this point, there was nothing to suggest that Seymour would evolve into the musically complex Blur. Graham was firmly immersed in a My Bloody Valentine/Dinosaur Jr fixation and noisy walls of sound smothered everything. Damon was hunched over a second-hand keyboard adding to the racket, occasionally getting up to spiral wildly around the stage. Alex and Dave chipped in with some odd, funky dance rhythms, which made Seymour sound like a weird cross between The Wolfhounds and Sonic Youth. It was shambolic, unfocussed, but not without promise. Damon loved it, and later told Sky magazine, “We just worked and worked on making ourselves brilliant. It’s great being in a band when you’re that age, thinking about what you want to be, doing manifestos, thinking about your image.”

  One record company man had tried to catch Seymour at Dingwalls, but couldn’t get in because of the fashionable nature of the bill. Andy Ross was Head of Food Records, a nascent off-shoot of EMI and home to dance groovers The Soup Dragons and American success story Jesus Jones. The word was round that Seymour was a good live band, and Ross had already received a demo which showed some promise. Amongst the demo tracks were ‘Tell Me, Tell Me’, ‘Long Legged’, ‘Mixed Up’, ‘Dizzy’, ‘Fried’ and ‘Shimmer’ but it was the stand out song, ‘She’s So High’, that grabbed Ross’s attention.

  Still doubling as a journalist at Sounds magazine, Ross finally got to hear Seymour at an Islington Powerhaus gig in November 1989, and he was suitably impressed, as he told Record Collector: “They were crap but entertaining. Two better tracks on the demo showed that they had a clear grasp of the facets of simple songwriting. Everything was in the right place and in the right proportion.” One thing Ross could not deny was that Seymour was something to watch live – the music may have been ramshackle but by now the band were a live dynamo, and Damon in particular was like a man possessed. Ross saw Seymour twice more and then decided there was enough substance to offer them a contract. When they finally signed to Food Records in March of 1990, Seymour had only played a total of ten gigs.

  The deal was simple – Food would put the band’s records out and give them a £3000 advance, and in return all Seymour had to do was sign a deal for worldwide rights, change the sad anorak name and burn the grubby pyjama bottoms which Dave always wore at gigs. The first one was done with four signatures, two of which prematurely ended Graham and Alex’s nearly complete degree courses – their finals were only two months away but they never went to college again. The second matter was a little more protracted. A proposed list of names discussed in a West End pizzeria included The Shining Path, Whirlpool, Sensitise and Blur. That decision was relatively easy though, especially as one option was a group of Peruvian revolutionaries and another was a brand of dishwasher. Ironically, a few weeks after signing, it became apparent that a band called Blurt already existed whose second album was comically called Kenny Rogers Greatest Hits: Take 2, but enquiries could not track them down and a possible name clash was avoided. All that was left was for Dave to vow never to wear his beloved pyjama bottoms again on stage. Record companies expect so much from young bands nowadays.

  * * *

  The spring of 1989 had heralded the beginnings of ‘Madchester’ when the Mancunian corner of the music world once again provided a plethora of bands revolutionising the rock and dance format, following in the tradition of Joy Division, New Order and lesser known acts such as A Certain Ratio. The Stone Roses led the way with The Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets following closely
behind, as ‘baggy’ music swept the nation up in a tide of flares, long-sleeved shirts and Joe Bloggs clothing. There was a general air of apathy around these bands, the drugs, the inactivity and the apolitical and abstract dismay towards life which came with the innovative musical territory. By the end of the next year, ‘baggy’ was creatively dead with the foremost proponents, The Stone Roses, locked in bitter courtroom struggles, spending all their time in the dock rather than the charts. For now though, 1989 was theirs, and Madchester was a genuine and far-reaching phenomenon. It was impossible for contemporary bands to ignore these surrounding events. Even though the creative death knell of baggy had largely been sounded by the time Blur signed to Food, the repercussions continued for some time to come.

  For now, Blur set about making a name for themselves. Initially, the band had wanted to release a single immediately after signing, but Ross convinced them it would be more beneficial to hit the road first to develop a groundswell of support. In July 1990, they headed out on a four-week tour, taking in medium sized venues such as Walsall’s Junction 10 and London’s Tufnell Park Dome. During this month on the road, the live recklessness that had made Seymour such an attractive band to watch was even more frenzied. Damon’s stage antics had become increasingly dangerous. Jumping off speakers had graduated to climbing up lighting rigs and flaky ceilings, and his apparent care-free abandon seemed to border on the suicidal. The word spread and several promoters refused to book Blur, concerned about the legal repercussions should Damon come a cropper. Conversely, the ticket buying public could not get enough of it, as Damon said: “During this tour, I think a lot of people came to see us just in case I killed myself.” Musically, Blur was much more accessible than its previous incarnation, as Alex told the press at the time: “Seymour was the more radical, non-bite sized, unfriendly face of Blur.” Damon admitted that this transition to a more user-friendly sound was quite deliberate: “Seymour was our obtuse side. I didn’t think we’d do well with our obtuse side, so we made less of it. Half our personality is latent.”

  Damon’s destructive abandon set them apart from most of their baggy peers, but many of the songs had that feel to them, which meant Blur were inevitably tagged as succeeding off the coat-tails of baggy. The Stone Roses comparisons were clear, and the legacy of Graham’s My Bloody Valentine fixation was also strongly apparent. However, Blur were unimpressed by these parallels and complemented their live shows of the summer with an arrogant and brash press campaign that certainly got them noticed.

  Their first public announcement was that they would not release a single until they had secured the front page of a weekly music paper. Their second was that they had no intention of slogging around the toilet venues of Britain for five years, and that their time was now. Their third announcement was about their debut album – when asked if this would happen soon, a spokesman for Blur said, “We’re going to be huge anyway, so why hurry?” Such a volley of opening comments made it crystal clear that Blur were not short of confidence. Damon in particular was always ready to mouth off about just how unique it all was, as this extract from NME shows: “I’ve always known I’m incredibly special, and if I didn’t think we were the best band in the universe, I wouldn’t bother.” He was particularly dismissive of the baggy scene which Blur were being lumped in with: “The difference is that Blur are going to be hugely successful.” With the benefit of hindsight that sounds prophetic, but it is worth bearing in mind that Blur had yet to release a single, and for many people this pretty face was just another self-important upstart shooting his mouth off in the music press for easy headlines.

  Whatever the truth was about Blur, it seemed to work: their gigs during the summer were all heavily attended; reviews were frequent and glowing (although littered with various musical comparisons); T-shirt sales were high; and enquiries to Food about the debut single were steadily increasing. In the first week of July, less than four months after signing their record deal, Blur won their first weekly front cover, when Sounds heralded them as one of Britain’s best new bands alongside the grossly under-rated Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and the musically versatile Senseless Things. The combined effect of this excellent press coverage and compelling live shows fuelled Blur’s rapid progression from tiny venues like Sir George Robey to a headlining slot at ULU to 1000 people. This big autumn gig made Blur the first band to top the bill there before they had a record out. It was a flying start.

  During these dates, Blur had been visiting Battery Studios (where The Stone Roses recorded ‘Fool’s Gold’) in Willesden to begin work on the debut single. The sessions were lengthy, often taking up to 18 hours a day – the best track for release was a choice between ‘She’s So High’ and ‘I Know’. Interestingly enough, in contrast to many fledgling bands, Blur were looking for something very different from their records, as Damon told one magazine, “We have no intention of duplicating our live sound, the record should be something great, while live is more of an exhilarating thing.”

  The choice was eventually made and ‘She’s So High’ nominated as the debut single. Six weeks before its October 15 release, some white label promos were given to select club DJs to whip up underground interest in advance. Produced by Steve Power and Steve Lovell (the latter having worked with Julian Cope), there was some studio friction caused by doubts about the band’s musical ability – it took over a week to record just this one track. Power had grave doubts about Alex’s playing and on one track he insisted Graham play bass, the ultimate insult to any musician. Damon sympathised with his band mate’s predicament: “Us three were as good as classically trained, so that puts Alex at a bit of a disadvantage, as we have that experience of sitting in orchestras and being shouted at and Alex doesn’t.”

  Once released, ‘She’s So High’ was a worthy debut. Very much a product of the time, its languid dance feel and mellower tempo was in stark contrast to Blur live, with the punk edge of their shows being relegated behind treacle guitar effects and sugary sweet harmonies. Graham had written some of the lyrics whilst Damon had been sunning himself on holiday in Spain, and the original nucleus of the song was inspired by a jamming idea of Alex’s. As such, this track remains the most democratically created Blur song of all. It showcased much more of Blur’s pop side, and this greater accessibility was reflected when it hit No.48 in the charts, despite a relative lack of radio airplay and a critical drubbing by Jonathan Ross on Juke Box Jury. Word of mouth was on Blur’s side.

  The music papers were more impressed than the record buying public, with several ‘Single Of The Week’ accolades, although Sounds writer Leo Finlay was a little over-zealous in saying that “regardless of production, ‘She’s So High’ stands comparison with anything of the last five years, Blur are the first great band of the 1990s.” The B-side, ‘I Know’, was more reminiscent of Seymour and lyrically both tracks were nonsensical, although there were some vague references to drug culture and clubs in the lead tune. The vacuous banality of Damon’s early lyrics is something that is curiously at odds with his latter day reputation as a wordsmith of undoubted repute.

  Interestingly, much of the attention for the single centred around the sleeve artwork. It was designed by Food’s regular collaborators, Stylorouge, a design house who almost exclusively worked on record sleeves, such as those for Jesus Jones and Simple Minds – it was the start of a long relationship that produced some of the most stylish and idiosyncratic band artwork of the period. The cover of ‘She’s So High’ caused something of an outrage. The central image of a naked blonde sitting astride a hippo had been taken from a 1960s painting by American pop artist Mel Ramoff, (who Blur eventually met) but the idiosyncratic style was lost on many people, who took exception to the sexist overtones. During their 21-date tour of universities and polytechnics to promote the single, Blur were frequently bombarded with protests about the sleeve image. At Coventry Polytechnic, The Steve Biko bar banned anyone wearing the corresponding Blur T-shirts, Warwick University students even attacked the band’s m
erchandise stall, Hackney Council complained to Food and, in Brixton, feminists ripped down Blur fly-posters. Some observers saw this as an indication of a much wider scam. With the name change, the designer ethos of Stylorouge and the fashionably lolloping rhythms, they claimed that Blur were just a prefabricated Jesus Jones and that a shoddy hype machine was cleverly whirring into action.

  This was understandable, but did not allow for the extensive touring which had put Blur in that position in the first place, nor the continued gigging that followed the release of the debut single. The promotional tactics might have stifled a lesser act, but Blur’s live show at this time was their saviour – gig after gig was lauded by a largely enthusiastic press. Damon’s frenzied performances belied an intrinsic discipline and musicality within the band – Blur appeared always to be on the verge of collapse but they never actually imploded.

  The lengthy single tour was topped off at Christmas by a support slot to the fleetingly successful Soup Dragons at the cavernous Brixton Academy. Although Blur had only been together for less than a year, the band took this huge 4000-plus capacity gig in their laid-back stride. The stage magnetism that Damon’s teacher spoke of was now equipping him well for Blur’s escalating profile. It was a highly fashionable bill, maybe dangerously so, but Blur’s punk rock performance was so strong that one music paper only reviewed them, choosing to ignore the headliners. This show was a fitting end to a strong opening year.