by Martin Roach
However, the problem came when the band were nearing Bournemouth. Oasis had originally been booked to play the same night, and there was great excitement at the prospect of another great battle. Unfortunately, some took this a little too literally and there were soon rumours of marauding Oasis fans planing to ruck with Blur supporters, whose ranks were apparently going to be swelled by scores of Wolverhampton thugs down for the fight. The situation could have been very nasty, and Oasis and Blur’s offices swapped worried phone calls in search of a solution, their concern fuelled by the police’s refusal to put extra officers on duty. Eventually Oasis were forced to change their date and were furious at Blur’s intransigence. Blur were disappointed for slightly more trivial reasons. They had planned to shine their logo Batman-like on the walls of Oasis’s venue, and even hoped to have a huge inflatable ‘No.1’ floating in the sky above. At least the whole ‘Blur vs Oasis’ thing never got childish, eh? With the 20/20 power of hindsight, even Alex James admits that pop rivalry will never again reach such heights of silliness: “It’s hard to imagine the whole country getting galvanised by two bands calling each other wankers,” he told Red magazine in 2007. “I often wonder if that was pop music’s last great hurrah.”
During this winter schedule, Blur signed copies of their official Blurbook photo collection at Books etc in Charing Cross Road on November 14. Over 2000 kids queued for up to nine hours, but only about 750 books were signed as Blur had to rush across town for another appearance on Later With Jools Holland. The period was so busy that a proposed long-form video entitled B Roads had to be postponed from its original December 1995 release date until spring 1996, by which time it would include all of their world tour. The tour footage would be complemented by interviews with road protesters, a one-off Blur show for Eastbourne pensioners, ‘kinky’ housewives and international storyteller Taffy Thomas.
By the time these cleverly selected seaside dates were complete, Blur’s planned arena tour had swelled to fourteen dates. Two additional Wembley Arena dates meant that by Christmas Blur would have played to over 180,000 on this leg of the tour alone. At one stage the media were suggesting that Blur should play Wembley Stadium, although the band made a statement distancing themselves from this spiral of bigger and bigger concerts, with Damon saying: “Wembley Stadium is for wankers! That’s my last word.”
Damon felt that Blur were ideal for the arena stages as he told NME: “We made the step up at Mile End, that was the best gig we’ve ever done. These shows will be like that, except they’re indoors so it won’t rain. We feel quite comfortable in those venues, they seem quite intimate to us.” The stage set itself was an amusement arcade right from one of the seaside venues they had just played, complete with flashing lights, silver disco balls, and neon decorations. During ‘The Universal’, a giant Prozac tablet was lowered from the ceiling and opened to shower the audience with thousands of fake tiny pills. To coincide with the resurgence of easy listening, Blur were supported by an unnamed MOR orchestra (whose members changed each night) who played fantastic cover versions of songs by Pulp, Oasis and Supergrass amongst others. With the fuller stage personnel, the renditions of mostly Parklife and Great Escape material were impressively accurate. Damon took to the bigger stage with consummate ease, using all his acting abilities to provide pure theatre to match the musical excellence. The best night was reserved for Wembley Arena’s last show, when they were joined on stage by Ken Livingstone for ‘Ernold Same’ and Phil Daniels for (yet another) last-ever performance of ‘Parklife’, where both he and Damon dressed up in full pantomime regalia for that added Christmas feel.
The mellower band was now living more healthy lives on tour and this showed in their vibrant performances. A vegetarian Damon was into jogging, and all of them except Alex were taught Tae Kwon Do before each gig. Alex saved his energy for the bottle of champagne he sipped on stage at each show. Also, the band rule of ‘no drinks thirty minutes before a show’ was now firmly established. Blur also seemed much more mature personally, as Damon told Melody Maker: “It’s that sense of everything being normal and levelling out that’s changed us. I used to spend so much time thinking the whole world revolved around me, that I was destined for great things, but not anymore.” He publicly declared that he regretted things he had said about Suede and felt they were under-rated and mistreated by the press. Even his normally arrogant statements were now injected with a dash of humour. “By 1999 we will be the most important band in the world … and also the moon. And maybe Mars.” Despite this far more laid back approach, the new Blur couldn’t always be on their best behaviour – one top London hotel banned them after riotous, drunken behaviour left one guest fuming. “Nobody in the place knew who they were and they were just scruffy and noisy.”
This arena tour confirmed that Blur were now mega-stars in the UK, capable of filling the nation’s biggest sheds and playing a two-hour set full of classics. The presence of both the teenage front rows to the thirty- and forty-somethings at the back – and the spread of reviews for each show – confirmed the absolute cross-over the band had made between teen/alternative/mainstream media. Even John ‘Mr Spock’ Redwood, one time Tory leader candidate, wrote about Blur in The Guardian and TV comic Harry Enfield ridiculed them in his “Oi! Albarn!” Hula Hoops advert. This was indeed sheer mass appeal.
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The foreign dates for The Great Escape were lengthy and comprehensive. Starting with a few gigs in America, they moved on through Europe to Japan, then back to Britain for the Christmas shows, then Brazil for a one-off festival and finally back to America and Europe, finishing at Amsterdam’s Paridiso Club on March 22, 1996. This policy paid rich dividends in Europe, with The Great Escape being better received than any previous Blur album. Although people had as much difficulty relating to Blur’s peculiar Englishness on the Continent as they did in America, they seemed more willing to try. In fact, sales were so high in southern Europe that each gig was sold out in advance to an average crowd of 9000 people.
The historically difficult American dates were marred right at the start when Damon was threatened at gun point. He and Alex were in a car heading for The Black Cat club in Washington DC when the singer gave the beady eye to a passing car. This was something he had always done – Melody Maker used to run a feature called ‘Each Week Damon From Blur Causes The Rest Of The Band To Have Seven Shades Of Shit Beaten Out Of Them.’ Unfortunately in American, the stakes were a touch higher than in Camden – the car’s occupants were fully tooled up. One man pulled his gun out, pointed it at Damon’s temple and said ‘Pow, pow’, then the car screeched away. When Damon took to the stage later that night, four songs into the set he introduced ‘Top Man’ and said: “This next song is about blokes who go out getting pissed and being naughty. Until four hours ago this seemed like a hard song, but now it seems soft.”
The posters for this small tour announced ‘Be prepared for a shower of Evian’ in the wake of Damon’s previous Stateside troubles. Attendances were high, although the venues were small, and the crowds clearly knew the material well. The internet was covered in gig reviews throughout this tour and the response was ecstatic, including one site which listed “Twenty Reasons Why Blur Are The Best Band Ever” which featured ‘they don’t have a song about walls, and they all have two eyebrows’ amongst the prime examples. Blur were now on Virgin Records (like SBK a division of multi-national EMI) and although success was still limited, the band/record company relationship was much stronger. Unfortunately, throughout the lengthy album tour, the band suffered a series of setbacks with their health, which for a change were not excess related. Graham began to suffer from repetitive strain injury on his hands, a condition which had allegedly forced Elastica’s bassist Annie Holland to quit her band completely. Dave contracted gastro-enteritis before the band’s Belfast King’s Hall show and briefly had to go to hospital. At that evening’s gig, Damon stepped on a piece of broken glass and lacerated his foot, causing him to attend the MTV award cere
mony with a walking stick. Despite all these difficulties, no gigs were cancelled and Blur’s momentum continued ever forward.
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At this point, it’s worth mentioning Blur’s continued failure to crack the huge American market, and the growing sense around this supposedly triumphant time, that the band were on a downward slide. Their difficulties in the USA are well documented from the time they first set foot on that disastrous 44 date tour to the above mentioned gun incident. It seemed that Blur’s habit of success in the UK simply could not be replicated across the Atlantic. History is not in their favour. Although The Beatles obviously took the States by storm, since then there have been several huge UK bands who have completely failed to translate their success. Obvious exceptions include Whitesnake, Pink Floyd, Def Leppard, freakish, short-lived triumphs by the likes of Wang Chung, Right Said Fred and Jesus Jones, and latterday triumphs by The Prodigy and, of course, Radiohead. However, several big bands from T Rex, Slade, The Jam, Madness, later the likes of Suede and Blur and more recently The Darkness have all failed in a territory that represents 40% of the world’s market, making it a costly nut not to crack. What these bands have in common is a distinct fascination with their English culture and environment, and whilst America seems happy to export tales of Seattle, Broadway, Detroit, New York and so on to us – and we happily involve ourselves in it – the reverse is rarely true. Mention Primrose Hill or Camden and suddenly all interest dries up. Blur fitted into this litany of great British bands who struggled in America, and in many senses were doomed to fail unless their central themes changed. For example, David Bowie had won a small Stateside following for his gender bending, space age early material, but he did not really cross over into the mainstream until his 1975 album Young Americans album. Like Marie Lloyd’s Music Hall shows, in America playing to the gallery can really pay dividends.
Another problem is that British bands often do not tour long enough – The Cranberries had to tour for twelve months before eventually cracking the market on a massive scale – and they are Irish. Bush, a British band who have enjoyed great Stateside success actually based themselves over there for the same reason. For The Great Escape, Blur toured three times, but each series of dates was only a month long. Other British bands openly mock the country when they arrive – Suede infamously derided the States on their debut tour there and were sent packing pretty quickly, complete with a change of name. Brett’s sexual dalliances and gender bending was just not acceptable to America, and his apparent distaste for the US made this worse. Damon frequently and aggressively said America owed Blur a chance, and coupled this with vicious public criticism of their culture: “I just feel physically unwell when I’m in America. I can’t help that I have this Americaphobia, I just find it difficult to adapt to the scale.” Many Americans see this as tiresome whinging. With talk like that there’s no way Blur would ever make it in the States …?
Then there’s the language barrier. Slade’s colloquialised titles such as ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’ were hardly understood by people outside of the Black Country, let alone 5000 miles away. One of the more simple factors that contributed to the utter failure of Modern Life was the title. The word ‘rubbish’ is unused in American culture, and this simple semantic clash was perhaps indicative of Blur’s problems. Modern Life Is Trash would not have been the same. Blur were not alone. Whilst Britpop bands flew the flag at home, the majority of their parochial pop was ignored in America. Only Elastica and Oasis enjoyed any sizeable success, both through heavy touring, with the latter finally reaching the Billboard Top 5 in early 1996 with their second album. Meanwhile, Blur’s chart-topping The Great Escape barely dented the Billboard Top 200 and left after only one week. Modern Life was so unsuccessful (a paltry 33,000 sales) that even most Blur fans over there hadn’t heard of it. Leisure sold more than Parklife, but neither topped 100,000. Damon’s statement that ‘The only thing we have in common with Oasis is that we are both doing shit in America’ turned out to be painfully incorrect. For the time being at least.
Oasis had American tastes on their side. Quirky English pop tunes do not fit easily into the MOR rock radio programming which dictates much of what succeeds there.
The Burnage boys straightforward rockaboogie is easier meat to digest. One source at Virgin Records claims that a memo was circulated to all independent radio pluggers early in 1996 to completely forget Blur and concentrate on Oasis, even going so far as to suggest that this was because Blur might not be around much longer. Even grunge was acceptable as guitar-based rock, whereas a song like Blur’s ‘Intermission’ was unlikely to get them any attention. Older Brits such as Rod Stewart, Phil Collins and Eric Clapton have enjoyed success largely because their more recent music ‘sounds American’. The best selling CD in the USA in 1994 was Ace of Base, so a parky singing about pigeons shagging had hardly had much chance.
There were, however, some positive signs on the second American leg of the Great Escape dates in January and February 1996. Although record sales were still very low, the attendances at live shows was disproportionately high, with venues of 2000-3000 selling out well in advance. Also, some of their gigs were broadcast live on radio in various states. Damon was more realistic this time around when he told Melody Maker: “America feels good this time around, but only time will tell if it’s a fad or something that’s gonna make sense to people there.” He was also not about to give in either, saying, “We don’t like chickening out of something. It’s a challenge.” He also said, “It vaguely annoys me when people say we’ve never done anything in America – we went four months touring there with Leisure. We’ve gone there every year, we sell out 3000 venues across the country and songs like ‘Girls & Boys’ go Top 50.” Also, in April 1996, they played at the opening of the New York Virgin Megastore, the world’s biggest record shop, and Damon was quick to point out that their venues were the same size as those played by Radiohead, a band who were already being hailed as a US success story, even before OK Computer.
However, it remained an uphill struggle for Blur. Mike Shea, publisher of Alternative Press, the most respected alternative magazine in America was quite clear about Blur’s failure to translate in his home country by 1996: “‘Girls & Boys’ did well in the clubs but was seen over here as a novelty song, and people just never got the whole English 1960s/Kinks background. Blur’s style doesn’t work over here – the catchy, cute, accessible music and English themes just aren’t universally accepted. Even though Blur were here first, it appears that Oasis cracked America. In the midst of all The Beatles reissues, the mainstream rock ’n’ roll fans in the US bought into Oasis, their sulking, pouting rock [was] infinitely more palatable to Americans. People [took] Oasis as the only Brit band, but that’s it, they didn’t want anymore. If you turned on any alternative commercial radio in 1996 you [would] hear Oasis forty times a week minimum and you’d be lucky to get Blur ten times.’
This sense of frustration in America added to a growing, nagging feeling that all was not well in the Blur camp. Some observers ridiculed their continued failure in America and this stigma was now suffocating. This was compounded by Oasis’s success there and at home. Since the ‘Battle Of Britain’ and Noel’s AIDS comment, Oasis had ironically leapt ahead. Exactly the opposite of what everybody expected … had happened. Their second album, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, was tepidly received by the critics but paradoxically loved by the public. It sold 350,000 in its first week alone, the biggest sales since Michael Jackson’s Bad and was the No.1 album in Britain for months. After a slow start in America, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? reached the Top 5 in the Billboard album charts, making the Gallagher brothers the pop world’s most mouthy millionaires in the process. A trio of Brit awards and two nights at Earl’s Court for the country’s biggest ever indoor gigs confirmed that Oasis were now the biggest band in the country, despite all their personnel problems. It was an astonishing triumph.
Blur meanwhile were plagued by press rumou
rs of a split, with many fingers pointing at Alex’s growing distance from the other members of the band. He still loved the pop star life, the Groucho Club, the champagne and the fame, and there were media intimations of alleged escalating drug use. Alex himself bragged that he drank for six days solidly then had one day off to clean up. Graham told NME that he resented this: “I hate a lot of the things that Alex stands for. I don’t want people to think it’s what this band is about. All that Groucho Club bollocks and him going on about birds and boozing all the time, I hate that.” He also admitted he had come to blows with Alex over this. He told one magazine the factors he thought might split the band would be “death, or if we made another Parklife. I don’t think we could carry on if one of us left … unless it was Alex.” Damon was now so famous that in many people’s eyes he was Blur and, inevitably, this rankled. Graham tired of the way people always assumed Damon’s views were his when he told NME: “If he goes on about football and Page Three girls that means we all get associated with it. I hate football and hate Page Three girls, but people always want to hear Damon’s opinion.” With Graham unfairly tagged as ‘the unofficial strangest man in pop’, his frame of mind was always open to intrusive media speculation, and his drinking habits were often cited. When one journalist approached him during a quiet pint and said, “Aren’t you Graham out of Blur?” he answered, “Only when I’m working.” There were suggestions that Damon and Alex were also not getting on, and that Alex felt the singer and guitarist were siding against him. For his part, Damon said he was tired of the excesses of some of his friends, telling Q magazine: “There’s a blizzard of cocaine and I hate it.” Some even suggested that Dave was tiring of the lifestyle, and being well into his calmer 30’s was finding it increasingly difficult to leave home for each tour.