Damon Albarn

by Martin Roach

  Alongside Damon’s greater stage dramatics, Dave’s drumming was noticeably more precise as well. Having experienced terrible drinking problems on tour in the past, he had now gone tee-total. During the band’s problem days, he often spent day and night drunk, as he told NME: “Mentally I got quite ill, I started to get very paranoid, I was always a miserable drunk and when I got pissed it started to affect me mentally.” One morning after a huge night with Siouxsie And The Banshees at the aforementioned stadium gig in Portugal, Dave decided that enough was enough, and stopped there and then. He had recently got married and felt it was no longer acceptable to survive purely on a liquid diet. Since then, Dave has been taunted habitually by the band for his sobriety. He said to Melody Maker, “I miss things like going down the pub. Do I miss the oblivion? Well, I can’t say I do because I could never remember anything. The reason I stopped had a lot to do with waking up with a hangover everyday for three years.”

  Graham meanwhile seemed to vacillate between disinterested and bored on stage. Being the shyest member of Blur, this demeanour was borne of studiously playing his evermore complex guitar lines, mastering his effects and being too scared to look up. Alex, on the other hand was not so shy. With his ever-present fag hanging out of the corner of his mouth and his lanky body curling round the bass, he was suave and smouldering.

  Backstage, the band were plagued by the press and groupies, but still managed to enjoy themselves. Lager was the drink of choice – this was Essex man on tour, playing mainstream songs about middle and working class people, eulogising in interviews about their manifesto and christening themselves, in Damon’s words, “mythical lager eaters”. Blur were quick to deny any suggestion of drug use however, at least Damon was, as he told Melody Maker, “A lot of people I know take too many drugs. It messes with their emotions and in their quietest darkest hours makes them very unhappy. It certainly has nothing to do with creativity.”

  With Parklife sales showing no sign of slowing down, the Blur steamroller continued. At the Glastonbury Festival, the nation’s current favourites found themselves only on the second stage (and not even headlining that), as the show had been booked before the release of their era-defining third album. They played alongside Radiohead, Inspiral Carpets and before headliners Spiritualized. Damon took to the stage in druid’s robes whilst Graham, for some reason, performed in full combat gear, complete with regulation helmet. Blur were in esteemed company, with Peter Gabriel, Bjork, Rage Against The Machine, Orbital, Paul Weller and Elvis Costello also playing the festival, but as with Reading the previous year, they took the honours.

  The story was not so rosy in Europe for their extensive tour that took in most of the Continent and included many summer festivals. Parklife was the most British album for years, and despite Europe being an open market place the cultural divides still clearly existed. The sheer complete Englishness of people like Tracy Jacks and Damon’s comic park-keeper were largely lost on continental audiences, and much of the media still had Blur down as another Jesus Jones. Shows were well attended and reasonably well received, but there was nowhere near the impact seen back at home. The only other down side to this series of live dates was when Alex went home after the Shepherd’s Bush gig and found he had been burgled. In typically nonchalant fashion, he said he didn’t mind because he never gave money to beggars!

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  Having reduced the pop masses to its knees with ‘Girls & Boys’ it was typically perverse of Blur to release ‘To The End’ as their second single from the album. The lush string soaked ballad could have easily been a James Bond theme, or a John Barry masterpiece. With the Anglo-French lyrical dalliance and the rich campness throughout, this was a turning point for Damon that elevated his writing in the eyes of contemporaries and the record buying public alike. It reached No.16 in the charts in June, but more importantly attracted a whole new audience to the band. Whereas ‘Girls & Boys’ had scooped up thousands of new younger pop fans, this elegant ballad won over countless older listeners, a fact confirmed by the variety of age groups visible at Blur gigs after this single. Blur also found time to appear at the NME film festival entitled ‘Punk Before And Beyond’, where Star Shaped was shown.

  Blur returned to the pop stakes in early September with ‘Parklife’, the third single from the album and the best song ever about pigeons. Phil Daniels’ cameo performance was perfect for the nutty central character, and made Damon’s live version seem rather tame. This appearance mirrored Stanley Unwin’s barmy showing on The Small Faces ‘Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake’. Daniels was in many ways a theatrical parallel to Blur. He had starred as Jimmy, the ill-fated Mod in the legendary Quadrophenia, a film based around a soundtrack by The Who and made at the height of the late 1970s Mod revival. Jimmy entered Mod mythology by driving his scooter over the white cliffs of Dover, an act mirrored in Blur’s ‘Clover Over Dover’. Daniels had also graced several Mike Leigh films including Meantime, which Damon and Graham had been brought up on. Further more, Daniels had always expressed a distaste for Hollywood and the American culture, and whilst many of his contemporaries moved across the water to sunnier and more glamourous climes, he stayed firmly put in England.

  ‘Parklife’ was, of course, a totally ridiculous single, and a considerable commercial success, reaching No.10. Along with ‘Girls & Boys’, Blur had now released the finest brace of pop songs in 1994. In keeping with Damon and the band’s ever-prolific writing, there were two new instrumental tracks included in the package, ‘Supa Shoppa’ and ‘Beard’ as well as a much sought after French version of ‘To The End’. This had been recorded with Francoise Hardy, a famed Parisian singer who had worked with The Beatles but whose career had been prematurely cut short due to chronic stage fright.

  This release preceded Blur’s two biggest ever headline gigs in Britain, at the Aston Villa Leisure Centre on October 5 and the cavernous Alexandra Palace two days later. Their only other planned date in the autumn was a headline slot at Glasgow’s ‘T In The Park’, along with Manic Street Preachers and D:Ream. Preparation came in the form of a warm-up date at Cambridge Corn Exchange – a sizeable gig for many bands but now merely a small quickie for Blur. The Aston Villa gig sold out in hours, and Radio 1 broadcast the performance live as part of their ‘Octoberfest’ season of shows which also featured Suede and Sinead O’Connor. The Alexandra Palace gig had been announced back in early August, the same week that Parklife achieved gold album sales of over 100,000. Blur had worried about their ability to sell enough tickets – after all, the hangar-like venue had not heard a guitar in anger since the Stone Roses had played there in 1989. Yet within three days of the show being announced they’d had enough enquiries to fill Alexandra Palace five times.

  1994 was a year of superlatives for Blur and Damon, and their Midas touch seemed endemic. If any single moment encapsulated everything about their achievement, all that they stood for and all that they had fought against, it was this triumphant Ally Pally gig. On the impressive bill were an infant Supergrass (one of Damon’s favourite bands), Corduroy and the voyeuristic Pulp, one of the few bands who shared Damon’s liking for behind-the-net-curtains Britain, and perhaps the only act capable of supporting Blur with any credibility at this show. For a mere £2.40 extra, fans could buy Blur Rover tickets, which included transport back to Trafalgar Square after the gig. On the night, proceedings began early at 6.45pm, but Supergrass already showed signs of the talent that would send them supernova in the spring of 1995. Corduroy were largely forgettable, but Pulp certainly weren’t – newly crowned sex god Jarvis Cocker held sway with his limp wristed foppery and unique ‘epileptic coat hanger in a suit’ style of dancing. Once Pulp had completed their warmly received set, there was an intermission, where ladies sold ice creams and handed out bingo tickets, which declared the top prize was “A Night Out With Blur.” Shortly after, a bingo caller came on and started reading out the numbers, and gradually every single person in the hall began crossing off all the numbers. When the last number
was called out, 7,000 people had a full house and Blur walked on stage to a Palace full of winners.

  The stage set was a monument to Blur’s peculiar domestic fascinations with huge red lampshades swamping the stage (Blur lost money on this gig because of the operation costs). Launching off with ‘Tracy Jacks’ followed by a soaring rendition of ‘Popscene’ the standard was set early on for what became an incredible event. Everything clicked – the stage set, the brass sections, the band’s musical performance, and especially the Phil Daniels rendition of ‘Parklife’ which sent the audience nuclear. Even the raw egg that hit Damon or the lack of new material other than ‘Mr Robinson’s Quango’ seemed not to matter. Towards the end of the set, Damon hushed the crowd and thanked them for the way they had treated Blur in 1994, and it was delivered with heartfelt and genuine gratitude. All the arrogant and overtly ambitious claims that he had spewed out in interview after interview over the years now made perfect sense. Fortunately, for those not able to get in, the band released a long form video of the gig in February 1995 entitled ‘Show Time’, which committed to celluloid one of the pop year’s finest moments. The artwork was typical Blur, with an old-school painted clown pronouncing “Re-live the thrill of it all – Family entertainment up the Ally Pally”.

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  The band’s success was not universal however – the tour of the USA was only lukewarmly received, reinforcing the gulf between what Blur represented and what the American audience wanted to hear. Damon as a frontman was largely unknown stateside. Such was the absolute failure of Modern Life Is Rubbish in America that most people thought Park Life was in fact the follow-up to Leisure. There was pressure on Blur to succeed stateside – after all, they had pretty much conquered the home market now, so it was the next logical step. Blur themselves did not see it this way, and chose to visit only nine cities including Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco, supported by Pulp on all dates. All of the travelling was done by plane, and everything was done to avoid a repeat of the debacle of their last major US tour. The impact of Parklife was therefore inevitably limited but that was as much to do with the music and subject matter as the size of the tour. Suffice to say, the dates sold out well in advance, albeit in venues of between 1000-1500 capacity. Those that did attend were fanatical, and the band were highly amused to see small collections of Mods on Lambrettas outside each gig.

  Blur rounded off the year yet with the release in November of the fourth single from Parklife, the jaunty pop of ‘End Of A Century’. The record was perhaps most notable for the duo of appalling B-sides written by Alex and Graham. Graham’s ‘Red Necks’ was a laughable comic Country & Western track which accompanied the single, whilst other formats carried Alex’s fantastically titled ‘Alex’s Song’. This suggested that the excellent ‘Far Out’ that he had written for Parklife might well be a one-off, and confirmed Damon’s claim that “Alex only writes a song every two years and they’re all about planets.” The inferior musical package mattered little - by now the momentum surrounding Blur almost guaranteed them hits, so the single reached No.19. They had notched up yet another hit, and it made their travels around an unconvinced Europe at this time a little more comfortable. Inevitably, the inferior B-sides also focused more attention on Damon as the core writer.

  There was no let up for Blur right until Christmas. Damon fronted Top of the Pops and then they appeared on Later With Jools Holland, alongside Stevie Winwood and Ruby Turner. However, the best event of this Yuletide period was definitely the secret gig at Colchester Sixth Form College on December 16. Considering they had just been on a world tour taking in Japan, Scandinavia, Europe and America, Colchester hardly seemed to be the next logical port of call. Nigel Hildreth wanted to raise funds for an orphanage in India, so he called Damon’s father Keith and asked if his former pupil would mind making a personal appearance. Much to his amazement, Damon said that rather than just turn up and sign autographs, he would much rather play a gig at the college, which had now relocated to a site on North Hill in the town centre, just up from the Army Recruitment centre. Furthermore, Damon said he wanted Hildreth’s class to arrange six Blur songs and accompany them on stage with their own 17-piece school orchestra.

  Hildreth takes up the story: “We had a major security problem on our hands now, because Blur were massive and our gym is hardly the size of Alexandra Palace. So we finalised details and gave the students the sheet music, and then on the morning of the gig, I was just talking to the class about some homework and I said, ‘Oh, by the way, Blur are coming in tonight to play a gig in the gym …’

  Damon had said the charity side appealed to him, but also the fact that it was so intimate – they seemed uncomfortable with the big arenas they were now playing. Needless to say, there were outsiders absolutely frantic to get in, but it was a strictly students-only performance, that was the whole point. All the engineers and record company people were fantastic, and during the day they all gave their time for free – Blur seem to have an excellent crew and group of friends around them. I was in London for a boring meeting that afternoon, and I was late getting to the train station to get back to Colchester, so I just dived on the first carriage as it pulled away and there was this big cry of ‘Heh!! Mr Hildreth, over here!!’ I looked up and Blur were sitting there. I went over and had a chat but when the conductor came I had to go to the second class compartment.”

  Hildreth and Damon worked on the musical arrangements right up to the last minute, and they also talked about the school days they had shared. Damon made it quite clear he was grateful to Hildreth’s open attitude, and told Kaleidoscope “He gave me and Graham a real confidence about doing lots of things, neither of us are incredibly proficient, he gave us that confidence to busk it really.” He also privately thanked him for shouting at him all those times his mind had wandered!

  The new school site was built after a disgruntled ex-teacher reportedly burnt the old building down, in an act that could have easily slotted into Blur’s suburban dystopia. Local papers had enjoyed a hate/hate relationship with Blur ever since Damon’s early criticisms of the town such as “There’s an unwritten law in Colchester that says you can talk about it but never achieve it.” They had returned the insult with negative coverage, which now backfired on them as they were all banned from the show, although the gig still made the front page of the Colchester Evening Gazette – fame at last. When the 5pm showtime arrived, Damon walked on to a stage covered in tinsel and fairy lights and said, “Hello, thanks for coming, nice to be back” and launched into ‘End Of A Century’, at which point the 400 strong audience went into mass hysteria for the next sixty minutes. Amongst the songs arranged by the students were ‘Parklife’, ‘Tracy Jacks’, ‘To The End’, ‘End Of A Century’, ‘Debt Collector’ (Simon Exton, the student who had re-arranged ‘Parklife’ later submitted the piece for his ‘A’ level music course). It was a classic night, and for a while there was some discussion of releasing tracks from the show with the orchestra, but the recording quality was not high enough. To cap it all, they raised £3000 for the charity fund.

  After the gig, they all piled into the nearest pub and later Damon and Hildreth went to Colchester Arts Centre, which had been the scene of one of Damon’s first ever gigs all those years ago. Perhaps the best part of the night was when Alex missed his bass cue for ‘Girls & Boys’ whereupon Damon immediately stopped the song: “No! no! no! You’ve missed it. Now, if you’d been taught by Mr Hildreth you wouldn’t have done that. You wouldn’t have dared!”

  Chapter 9

  LONDON LOVES

  By the time of Blur’s pre-Christmas secret gig, Britain was fully gripped by the phenomenon called Britpop. In 1994, there was an inspired renaissance of British music that saw a whole collection of new native bands breakthrough. Previously, against a backdrop of American slacker-driven grunge culture, British music had been largely ignored and in fact derided during the early 1990s, ever since the demise of Madchester. Alongside this American rock
domination, the commercial charts were swamped with one hit wonders, cover versions, novelty songs and old timers.

  Many factors combined to create Britpop. Undoubtedly the arrival of Suede was a key catalyst in 1992, with their highly stylised, romantic London dramas, and Brett’s peculiar camp Englishness. Pat Gilbert, Clash biographer and revered journalist, was a fan of Britpop and he believes Suede were essential to its inception: “Britpop’s genesis has its roots in Suede, who were the first post-indie band who refused to be mulling and wantonly middle class, they didn’t want to recreate three-minute perfect pop songs in the line of the Velvets and the Byrds and they came along with a bit of swagger. Suede were definitely the first time in years that English bands had reclaimed some sense of occasion about what they were doing, and people started looking back at British bands rather than all that American stuff. Suede started all that.”

  Nevertheless, Modern Life was Blur’s first quintessentially English album and many of their British ideas pre-date Suede, including crucially the ‘our culture is under siege’ theory. What Suede had was the commercial exposure and success that gave their ideas recognition. In April of 1993, Select magazine ran a feature not so subtly titled “Yanks Go Home” which featured a whole list of English style bands. With Suede on the cover, there were also features on Pulp, St Etienne, Denim and The Auteurs. Notably, Blur didn’t even get a mention, even though advance copies of the first of their English trilogy albums were already in circulation in the industry. The humourous piece with a prophetic undertone ran thus: “Who do you think you are kidding Mr Cobain? Enough is enough! We don’t want plaid. We want crimpolene, glamour, wit and irony. If 1992 was the American year, then it’s time to bring on the home guard.” Maybe grunge encapsulated a cultural low, that coincided with the economic depression, and perhaps with the recession fading there was a new positivity springing up which brought the resurgence of more optimistic British bands.