Damon Albarn

by Martin Roach

  In addition to their own album tour, they performed on the Radio 1 Roadshow in Skegness in front of 20,000 kids and nine million listeners, they did PA’s on several kids TV shows and then rounded the year off with their slot on the Food Records Christmas Party at Brixton Academy, alongside Diesel Park West, the label-named Sensitise and Whirlpool, and headliners Jesus Jones. The first 2000 punters were given a free tape with two tracks by each band, including Blur’s demo version of ‘Resigned’ and a re-mixed ‘High Cool’. Special guest on stage for keyboard duties was Natasha of The Bikinis, and Damon managed to badly bruise his shoulder with his customary hands-behind-his-back human pinball routine.

  There were also a handful of debut dates in America, where the USA were briefly flirting with ‘Madchester’, and some French and Japanese gigs as well. Damon was not about to get carried away, however, as he told Sky magazine: “All you need to be mobbed in Japan is to have blonde hair and be more than five feet tall. Being mobbed is so … unrefined.”

  Blur’s live reputation was acknowledged in the New Year of 1992 when they were offered a slot on the so-called ‘Rollercoaster’ tour. This was the brainchild of The Jesus & Mary Chain, based on Perry Farrell’s hugely successful Lollapolooza tour in the USA. The American predecessor had seen a rich diversity of bands such as Jane’s Addiction, Nine Inch Nails, Ice T, Living Colour and The Butthole Surfers on the same bill along with performance artists and campaign stalls. The ‘Rollercoaster’ idea was somewhat more limited, with just four bands and no peripheral activities, but the motive was the same – put on a superb bill of bands for the price of most normal shows.

  The Jesus & Mary Chain’s first choices were Blur, Dinosaur Jr and My Bloody Valentine, which in retrospect limited the musical variety immediately, but there was still no denying it was probably the most attractive touring line-up for years. Blur were delighted and accepted straight away. Damon told Melody Maker, “Without wishing to sound really crap, I think Rollercoaster is the most exciting thing we’ve done. We usually look to the next two weeks on the road with a sense of dread and loathing, but none of us can wait to get on this tour.” He also said, “To be honest, I’m a bit star-struck by it all. I’m delighted that we are gonna be playing with them, even though we’re very different to all of them in our outlook and the way we try to present ourselves.”

  Blur were a relatively lightweight pop band on a rock bill, and several eyebrows were raised at their selection, even those of MBV’s Kevin Shields. Nevertheless, Blur’s slot also conferred on them a degree of levity and respectability that forced people to listen to them again. The gigs were massive – Birmingham’s NEC, Manchester’s Apollo and London’s Brixton Academy were all sold-out. This was the Mary Chain’s first UK dates for two years and all four acts were capable of pulling a sizeable crowd.

  However, despite three of the bands being seminal acts, the ‘Rollercoaster’ quickly became something of a doom-fest. The Mary Chain headlined each night, with the other three bands rotating. This meant that if Blur came on first, the crowd was then subjected to a prolonged blast of Dinosaur Jr/MBV/J&MC, enough doom to out-gloom even the most morbid of music fans. Some dates were all seated and this stultified the atmosphere still further. Also, Blur were the only band seemingly willing to party backstage, and there was always a polite awkwardness between the four groups. Add to that the lack of an agenda, with none of the bands proselytising like Ice T might have, and the dates assumed an air of lethargy, of little historical significance other than value for money. Harshly, this was no new rock dawn. Damon remained buoyant nonetheless and told Melody Maker, “I think Rollercoaster is really important, the best thing that’s happened to British music in a long time.”

  During the dates, Blur had been the subject of something of a press backlash, with most reviewers seeing them as superficial pop that was grossly out of place, and Damon’s perceived arrogance continued to rub writers up the wrong way. He had only recently said, “We’re a band who could completely and utterly change everything. The scale that we are working on is so enormous, we’re trying to reach absolutely everybody.” At this point in time, this sounded ludicrous. During this tour, Blur also started to plan their first long-form video, a documentary about provincial England to be directed by Storm Thorgerson (who had provided footage as a stage backdrop for each Blur song during the tour). He had conceived much of Pink Floyd’s early visual effects along with Syd Barrett, and Blur were delighted to be involved with him. They planned to show the piece on Channel 4 but the actual video never materialised. Within weeks of finishing the ‘Rollercoaster’ tour, Blur could now see that it had probably done them more harm than good.

  * * *

  When a band are playing well and the crowd is lapping it up, constant drinking and debauchery is romanticised into ‘partying’; when a band is playing dreadful gigs night after night and arguing all day, it is called self-destructive abuse. When Blur hit the United States in May 1992 for a colossal 44 date, state-by-state tour, their drinking was already dangerously way out of control, and things just got worse.

  When they had played The Marquee the previous autumn, Blur had been well-received but in the ensuing six months, America had passed through its minor Madchester fad. Blur were now just a British oddity, and a drunken one at that. Since their last visit, an infant grunge phenomenon had taken hold and Nirvana’s Nevermind had sold nine million copies – slacker culture was everywhere. Seattle, grunge, Eddie, Kurt, Hole and Sub Pop were the words on everybody’s lips. To millions of disenchanted American kids enlivened with the new teen spirit, Damon’s cockney charm and Blur’s English sound seemed utterly pointless. Blur were about as akin to grunge as Brett Andersen is to weight lifting.

  This universal indifference exacerbated Blur’s drunken indiscipline such that they became a band just waiting to implode. Three gigs in and Damon’s water throwing antics caused the owners at The Venus De Milo theatre to pull the plugs after just three songs. A small scale riot ensued with the band escaping out of a back door, followed by angry fans and even angrier security men chasing them down the street. A sense of impending doom began to suffocate the tour bus, and in-fighting erupted among the friction. Within one three day spell, each member of the band had thumped the other, even Damon and Graham. Damon said to one journalist, “We don’t really go into big violent moods with each other, but we’re incredibly cruel to each other all the time, non-stop. We are cruel to the point where most people can’t believe how awful we are to each other, just vicious, spiteful, it’s mental torture, psychological warfare.”

  This was rapidly becoming an American nightmare. Graham was unwell, with recurrences of the ulcers and bleeding he had suffered on tour before, and Damon was constantly dragging on his high tar banana skin and clove Caravan cigarettes. Even on their way to the now-hallowed grunge capital of Seattle, Blur’s tour van broke down and they ended up spending hours in a run-down greasy spoon cafe called The Potato Shop.

  Their paranoid state was worsened by their American record company’s approach. SBK were determined to break the band state-by-state, and only gave them a meagre two days off in 44. Even when Blur played well, the American press ridiculed them as yet another post-baggy Manchester band well past their sell-by date. The cumulative effect of the drinking, the American public’s indifference, the media’s ridicule and the record company’s exhausting work ethic was disastrous. By the end of the dates, tension in the band was high. Graham was told to lay off alcohol for six months and some rumours even alleged that he had to be committed to a hospital to recuperate. Throughout the tour, most of the band came close to being, or actually were hospitalised. On their return from America, Blur were a pathetic shambles. Damon told NME he was bitter about the way some had tried to trivialise their terrible experience: “It makes me laugh when people describe that as rock ’n’ roll behaviour. It wasn’t an affectation with us. When things area going well, I don’t behave like that.”

  The saving grace in this m
ess should have been Blur’s fourth single ‘Popscene’, released in March 1992, a song which had been debuted back at the Manchester Apollo the previous year. It was the first fruit of their post-Leisure sessions and was produced by Steve Lovell, as Stephen Street was reported to be out of favour with Food’s Dave Balfe. It is rather easy to see the brassy, horn-driven chorus, the blazing fast melody and decidedly English feel of ‘Popscene’ as a long lost sign of great things to come. It was certainly a change in direction. The twitching riffs, choppy dynamics and energy were indeed highly charming, and Blur’s first use of a brass section was a distinct Britpop precursor. One could also read in certain native reference points as a hint of Blur’s imminent Anglophile preoccupations, with clear similarities to The Teardrop Explodes and the Sex Pistols amongst others. The dog on the cover, taken from Horse & Hounds magazine, the lyrical slight on the British music business and the sense of nostalgic Englishness were all there. ‘Popscene’ was miles away from the ambient abstractions of shoe-gazing or the dated rhythms of baggy. It was a very 1990s song, a big departure, and very possibly one of the first Britpop songs.

  However, the single is now mostly remembered because back then it was largely forgotten. Much was made of ‘Popscene’ in the aftermath of Blur’s massive success, but it is important to remember that at the time of release it was absolutely and almost universally reviled. To a press and public similarly fixated with grunge, a ‘kill baggy’ combo’s new single was completely uninteresting and the record was given short shrift in the papers, such as Melody Maker who said it was “a directionless organ-fest in search of a decent chorus.” Nirvana had just signed to Geffen and grunge was now a worldwide phenomenon – ‘Popscene’ was lost in the fashionable sea of lacerated vocals and serrated guitars. Blur were not the first to suffer such a fate. The Who had the fantastic but unsuccessful ‘Allegal Matter’, and even Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ reached only No.48 for one week before plummeting out of the charts (only to re-enter when it was used to cover the moon landing).

  At the time, the general critical indifference that met ‘Popscene’ could probably have been tolerated, but the commercial failure of the single was a devastating blow. It was Blur’s first single for nearly a year, coming of the back of a Top 10 album and yet it stalled badly at only No.32 and crashed out of the charts after only two weeks. The band and Food Records were stunned. Well-laid plans for the poppier ‘Never Clever’ to follow up ‘Popscene’ were abandoned. Worse still, the band had an album almost ready for release on their return from the US dates, but in the face of such indifference, Food said it would now have to wait. Had this album been released, it would have been the majority of the eventual Modern Life songs, with some B-sides that finally surfaced on future Blur singles such as ‘For Tomorrow’. Damon said to NME, “We knew it was good, we knew it was better than what we had done before. We put ourselves out on a limb to pursue this English ideal and no-one was interested.” The single’s failure coincided with the dreadful American tour and, demoralised, Blur slipped lower into depression. Their media contribution was reduced to lurid tales of Bacchanalian antics in the gossip columns. Having said that, Dave was convinced ‘Popscene’ was a crucial track: “It was completely ignored by the press, but I think it was the point we realised we weren’t going to listen to anything anyone else was saying. We knew then we were capable of making great records.”

  Despite their disappointment at the time, both the refusal of Food to put the album out in 1992 and the failure of ‘Popscene’ were very possibly blessings in disguise. Had the second album come out as a total exception to the grunge domination, it may well have lost all its impact and Blur would not have been able to establish the groundswell of support that provided the vital foundation for Parklife. Hindsight is however, a very powerful thing – at the time Blur were devastated.

  Their misery was compounded by severe financial problems – blamed on one of their inner circle of advisors – that drained most of the funds from Leisure. Blur hardly had enough money to pay the rent. Bankruptcy was only narrowly avoided. The Jesus and Mary Chain/Midge Ure manager Chris Morrison was brought in at the last minute, and he secured a Stateside merchandise deal that just about kept the band’s heads above water.

  There was worse to come. While Blur had been boozing their way around the States, back in Britain Suede had arrived. Heralded by an infamous Melody Maker cover announcing ‘The Best New Band In Britain’, Suede were critically lauded and plastered over every music magazine and paper. While Blur were disastrously flying the flag abroad, Suede had sneaked in and usurped them as the next big thing – it was the start of a long rivalry between the two bands. Blur felt Suede’s Cockney slant and camp charm was plagiarised from themselves. There were personal frictions as well, with Damon’s girlfriend Justine Frischmann having been both a former rhythm guitarist with Suede (some say she invented the name) and an ex-girlfriend to Brett Andersen, the “bisexual who hasn’t had a homosexual experience”. Slanging-matches disgraced the music press, with Bernard Butler quoting lyrics from ‘Bang’ as his worst ever, and Damon constantly ridiculing Brett. Graham said Bernard Butler stole his style of guitar playing and that “he spent hours crying on my doorstep for us to take him on tour as a roadie.”. Alex said “Brett got his impetus from Damon coming along and nicking his bird, now he had an axe to grind.” A source who worked closely with Suede at the time confirms this: “Many of the songs on Suede’s debut album were about Justine and Brett’s relationship, that split-up was a big spur to him. ‘Metal Mickey’, ‘Animal Lover’, ‘Moving’ and ‘To The Birds’ were all highly focussed on that situation. ‘Pantomime Horse’ was as well, but that has been dramatically misunderstood and misread. Most people see the lyric, ‘Have you ever tried it that way?’ as some kind of homosexual reference. It wasn’t, not at all. It was about looking at losing his girlfriend to Damon and looking at it from the other side of the fence. That central theme did dominate the early work. As far as Suede’s material goes, it was miles better once Justine had left, no comparison.” Brett Andersen came to personify Blur’s difficulties, but that did not excuse Damon’s later accusations of Brett’s alleged heroin use (whether correct or not), which took this rivalry to a new low.

  To his credit, Damon later regretted this statement, telling NME, “Every time I got drunk I got very nasty about Suede, I just couldn’t see the woods for the trees because of Justine.” For now, however, he hated them and his frustration continued to grow and soon encompassed any band who were selling more records than Blur, which at this point was the majority.

  To make matters worse, it was a no-contest. Suede were winning all the honours and Blur were just a band in dire trouble. Suede were soon to be NME Brat award winners, Brit award nominees, Mercury Music Prize winners and a Glastonbury highlight. Blur were nominated for nothing and were often so pissed they did well to turn up at some gigs. When they did show, as Damon recalls, “it had got to the stage where we were drinking so much we could hardly play our instruments.”

  The downward spiral could not continue much longer. Things had to come to a head, and they did at a July ‘Gimme Shelter’ charity gig at London’s Town & Country Club. In one night, the tour problems, the drinking, the arguing, the S**** word and ‘Popscene’s failure burst in one big zit of a fuck-up. Blur shared the bill with guitar noise-mongers 31/2 Minutes, pop tune-smiths Mega City Four and the dreaded Suede. The socially motivated gig should have been Blur’s comeback, snatching their crown back from the rival upstarts but things did not start well when Suede played a blinder. Backstage, Mega City Four were waiting to go on after Brett’s band when Damon walked in to their dressing room uninvited, swigging drunkenly from a bottle, whereupon he sat down and started mouthing off. MC4’s late, lamented genius of a singer, Wiz recalled, “he was really pissed and going on and on about what it’s like to be in a band, but especially about how shit America was and how it was great to play the bigger venues there ’cos you are miles away from th
e punters. He just kept saying he hated the place, he thought all Americans were wankers, and he fucking hated gigs, and he was trying to get us to agree. We just sat there listening, and I remember thinking, “we are not from the same planet as you” and then one of our band just opened the door, pointed him towards his own pissed-up dressing room and shoved him out.”

  Blur had been drinking copious amounts all day and matters deteriorated when Damon walked on and said, “We’re so fucking shit you may as well go home now.” A few songs into Blur’s poor set and many people did. The band made matters worse for the casual observer by playing several B-sides and weird demo tracks. Those that stayed were treated to the morose spectacle of a band seemingly committing public suicide. While Brett’s hammed-up, gender bending Bowie-isms had been rapturously received, all Damon could manage was to pretend the mike was his dick and to bang his head on the speaker. He even got into a scuffle with a security guard – he looked like a prat, and the band played like novices. Blur’s arrogant statements of the last two years now seemed to have caught up with them to embarrassing effect. Keith Cameron in NME summed it up as “Carry On Punk Rock”.

  The next morning, Damon was reportedly awoken from his drunken slumber by an angry Dave Balfe of Food Records, who arranged to have lunch with him that day. Balfe told him had seen it all before with his band The Teardrop Explodes, the in-fighting, the excess, the over-indulgence, the bitterness. In short, he thought Blur were over. He gave the band a month to sort themselves out or they would be dropped.

  Chapter 6

  GETTING SNARLED UP IN THE SUBURBS