Damon Albarn

by Martin Roach

  Other people worried about the dilemma that Blur’s massive success had created – with huge status in the UK and great success in Europe, if America continued to close its doors, what aspirations would Blur be left with? Would they risk self-parody consolidating their successful territories or alternatively release increasingly obscure music and plummet in popularity? Also, The Great Escape had sold well initially in the UK, but its chart life had not nearly matched Parklife and in a world where constant commercial improvement is vital, questions were being asked. Despite exceptional reviews in the vast majority of the press, including becoming only the second band to win two Q ‘Album Of The Year’ awards, the general feeling was that The Great Escape had slowed down Blur’s success somewhat. This fuelled the split theories still more.

  The spring of 1996 was full of such rumours, none of them remotely substantiated. Matters were not helped, however, with several grumpy television appearances, such as on Chris Evans’ TFI Friday where Damon seemed bitter about their lack of success at The Brits and made derisory side remarks about Alex. For some European television shows, Dave, Alex and Graham were replaced by cardboard cut-outs, and much was made of the various reasons for these absences. It was actually all perfectly clear - Alex had booked time off and the TV show he missed was a last minute booking (he was replaced by their bass roadie, also called Alex). Dave was having his wisdom teeth removed and Graham had family commitments. Needless to say, this emerged in the press as Blur on the verge of falling apart. No way, Graham told Melody Maker: “I don’t think there has ever been a time when we felt like giving up. Even during the dark years, we had this feeling it would all come right in the end.” He also doubted that they would stand alone musically, as he told NME: “We can make good music together but God knows what might happen if we tried to make music individually, it’d be shit.”

  Chapter 12

  “DAMON’S GONE TO ICELAND”

  It was then – rather inconveniently for some but with immaculate timing for others – that someone killed Britpop. The finger of suspicion was pointed at Damon Albarn; even if he wasn’t entirely guilty, he seemed more then happy to take the blame. The issue didn’t appear to be a commercial one. By March 1996, The Great Escape had already overtaken Parklife’s worldwide sales figures of 1.8 million, and by the start of April, the fourth album had passed the two million mark. This time around, Blur had cleaned up in Europe, an equivalent sized territory to the USA. Previously, where they’d been asked to play on European festival bills, now they were being asked to headline them. The latest single from the album, ‘Stereotypes’, had eased into the UK Top 10. The Great Escape, despite all assumptions otherwise, had far outstripped the sales of Parklife. But this was about something else, something different from just sales – that was last year’s thing. This was a question of credibility and future prospects. The long game.

  The final single from the album was ‘This Charmless Man’. In the accompanying video, the band are an omnipresent annoyance to a gangsterish figure, the charmless man of the title. Damon manages to do that puppy-eyed look to the top right of the screen he’d perfected in so many of the band’s previous promos throughout the whole video, only seemingly able to engage the viewer with full eye contact on the very last shot. It was almost as if the singer was embarrassed about something. The single reached No.5 in the British charts in May, but it was time for a rethink. Changes were needed and ‘This Charmless Man’ was the first of several nails in the Britpop coffin. The changes that occurred would virtually amount to an airbrushing of history, with Damon Albarn being the artist-in-chief. Never mind modern life … it would be The Great Escape and anything connected with it that would be deemed rubbish.

  Blur’s fanbase and the nature of their appeal was a cause for concern. A favoured Alex James joke of the time was: “What’s forty yards long, has no pubes and goes Aaaaaaaah!? The front row of a Blur concert.” Alex – always happy to give Damon a run for his money in the pop crumpet stakes – had nailed the issue in his own inimitable way. The teen issue was especially galling to Graham, as Damon revealed in an interview with Esquire. “He’d got to the point where he could no longer go drinking at his local, The Good Mixer in Camden, in case people accused him of being in a little kids’ band. Which is fair enough really, because that was the way we were going.” As any student of pop knows only too well – and Damon is a keen student – the transition from teen favourite to long term proposition is the trickiest there is, but Damon seemed to think this could still work to the band’s advantage. “They haven’t been to gigs before,” he told Q when asked about the band’s following of screaming female teens. “But they’ve seen something that isn’t cynical … so in that respect I know it will pay off in the future. Going to see a band is more of a throwaway thing [to older audiences]. They’ve lost that magic of going to their first gig, which a 14-year-old hasn’t.” Drummer Dave Rowntree was baffled, however, about their apparent teen appeal, telling Select magazine: “As far as I was concerned, we were playing left-field, weird artpop, posturing and making a nuisance of ourselves. And yet here were thousands of teenage girls treating us like Take That. It was like going shopping for apples and coming back with a motorbike. It’s very nice to have a motorbike, but it’s singularly inappropriate.”

  Then there was the company the band was perceived to be keeping. Six months beforehand, Damon had been happy to front the BBC show Britpop Now, introducing the ‘cream’ of the movement to a TV audience: Pulp, Supergrass and Elastica. And Menswear. Although an easy target, Menswear are an irresistible one in terms of highlighting what had gone wrong and why the smart money would soon feel queasy about propping up the Britpop pound. By wearing the right suits and kipping on the right floors – including Graham Coxon’s – Menswear had been formed, signed and had appeared on Top of The Pops in the same amount of time most bands take to decide what to call themselves. Their stop-go brand of two chord post-punk – Menswear’s single ‘Daydreamer’ is Britpop’s single most blatant homage to UK new wave pioneers Wire – had aroused suspicion almost as quickly as it had triggered derision. The lowest common denominator is always going to drag the average down and the steady line of bands using Camden Town as their spiritual home and the Cocknernee patter as their chosen language was quickly devaluing the currency.

  Britpop infighting wasn’t helping either. Suede vs Blur. Blur vs Oasis. Oasis vs anyone looking at them in a slightly funny way. It was time someone showed some mettle, took Britpop down to the woods and ended it’s short life. In an article in The Big Issue, Damon started by announcing that Britpop was dead: “Britpop as an idea is no longer valid, it’s no longer challenging.” Elsewhere he told NME, “It’s all over now. We killed Britpop, we chopped it up and put it under the patio long ago. And any band which is still Britpop in a year’s time is in serious trouble.” Bad news for Menswear; and not great for the future prospects of Sleeper, Echobelly and Powder either.

  Damon was so keen to distance himself from the movement that he appeared almost desperate: “I didn’t call it Britpop and I never will,” he again said to the NME. “We didn’t invent anything – we just made British sounding music sell a lot of records.” It was time to step off the Britpop treadmill, which Albarn did in two highly unusual ways: he made a film and he buggered off to Iceland.

  Face, directed by Antonia Bird was possibly not the best film to be in when you are trying to escape accusations of faux Cockneyisms. It was an East End gangster revenge picture starring Robert Carlyle and perennial London landmark Ray Winstone. Clearly crafted as populist yet political, Face tells of an ex-union leader who turns to armed theft, selling out any remaining ideals with a gang who turn on each other when their heist goes wrong. The dimmest of their number is played by Damon Albarn. With a soundtrack of songs culled from The Clash, Paul Weller and Billy Bragg, any unease that may have been generated by its subject matter and potential harm to Damon’s wider plans were offset by favourable reviews for the film an
d the singer’s performance. Time Out called the movie “muscular, raw and aggressive” with “a knockout cast.”

  “I went to drama school so at some point I always felt I would act,” Damon pointed out to The Guardian with that familiar, matter-of-fact confidence. “I had to, really, my mum was very upset when I left drama school. I found it very difficult the first week [on the set]; then I just sort of allowed myself to relax and it was enjoyable after that. It’s a very different thing performing onstage compared to acting on screen.” Good fortune had once again shined on Damon Albarn and the own goal of ‘doing a Sting’ – the heinous crime of being a pop star giving a bad performance in a lousy film – was artfully avoided. Despite the good notices, Albarn decided to quit whilst he was ahead in the film acting stakes, telling Muse.com that “The idea of turning up every day and having to speak someone else’s lines is not for me.” If nothing else though, the experience of Face and of acting on film really taught him something. “It taught me that I didn’t want to do it.”

  His movie career may have been short-lived, but Damon’s relationship with Iceland would prove to be a longer term proposition. With London still in full 1990s swing, Damon and Justine Frischmann – in their honourary positions as Britpop’s most glamorous couple – were fair game for the capital’s paparazzi. Alex James summed up Albarn’s dilemma thus: “It was five years of trying to get into the papers … and five years trying to stay out of them.” Damon was not happy, as he made plain on WTN radio in America. “There are a lot of people who thrive on the sort of media attention I was getting. But I’ve realised I’m just not one of them.” The other person on the receiving end of the media assault had slightly more mixed views. “For a while I found myself being Posh Spice,” Frischmann told The Observer in 2002. “It was really exciting for a while. It was like a mad, surreal experience.”

  Damon decided he needed to get away from it all, somewhere no one would find him: Iceland. However, such was the power of his indie mojo, the decision to make business and property investments in and around Reykjavik led to the Icelandic capital becoming culturally as well as physically … cool. The Kaffibarrin, the Reykjavik bar Damon co-owns with Icelandic film director Baltasar Kormäkur has become a magnet for indie tourists. “The Icelandic tourist board is trying to make out like it’s responsible for Iceland becoming cool,” Kormakur told The Guardian in 2001, “and it’s bullshit. If people come here, it’s nothing to do with guys in suits sitting in an office. It’s the work of Björk, of Damon … maybe even me.” For Damon, the attraction to the country had been instant, “I’d love to live there,” he told Rolling Stone, “but I don’t think Justine would like that. I feel very much like two people sometimes. Half of me is into living somewhere like Iceland and having kids, and being really simple, and the other half likes the wildness of life in a rock band.” There would be another reason Justine might not have liked it. As Damon’s visits to the country increased, one TV comedy show ran a sketch about a population explosion of babies … all called Damon.

  But Damon’s Icelandic discovery was no pop star fancy to be dropped on a whim – his connections with the country would remain a constant, recording with local acts like Ghostigital, taking Blur to play there – the band would perform in September 1996 at the Laugardalsholl venue in Reykjavik – and campaigning on environmental issues, including a high profile protest about the building of a hydro-electric plant in Iceland’s Eastern Highlands. In 2006, he would describe himself to Icelandic TV viewers as “a frequent visitor … a sort of migratory bird.” “I’ve got a house there, so I have to go out there to make sure the central heating hasn’t packed up. It’s really a fantastic place. It’s partly the escape but it also happens to be one of the most civilised places on the planet, which is important when you consider how uncivilised the world we live in is. And as for pressure, I’m still in the spotlight, it just doesn’t feel like I am and that’s the way I like it.”

  Refreshed, Damon returned to Britain to begin work on new material, positive that change was vital if he and Blur were to progress. An acute irony was beginning to evolve with regards to the famous Anglophile’s next musical step. “Nothing in Britain was interesting anymore,” he told Rolling Stone. “We’d always been fans of bands like the Pixies, Beastie Boys and Pavement. [Their music] had more life and intelligence to it than Britpop, and we just began to relate more to those people.”

  Just to drive the point home about how Britpop was having difficulty relating to people, in August of 1996, Oasis played to a combined audience of 250,000 people at Knebworth in Hertfordshire, a very, very big house in the country. A quarter of a million people applied for tickets, many of those who managed to get them complained of poor sound, expensive food and drink, endless queues and grotesque VIP areas.

  Even Oasis realised that things had gotten too big. There was a need for change. Not just in Britpop, but everywhere. After their Dublin show in June, Graham Coxon had stopped drinking, making Blur fifty per cent teetotal as Rowntree had already sworn off the booze. In Coxon’s case, the new leaf would be a temporary one, but it came as a great relief to Damon. “[Drinking] totally wrecked our ability to get on with each other,” Albarn told Rolling Stone. “When he was drunk, he’d be likely to tell a journalist to fuck off, or I’d hear reports of him being unconscious at four in the morning somewhere in London. That was upsetting because he’s my closest male friend.”

  Change in musical direction … change in lifestyles … how much change could be handled? Quite a lot, it would appear. Brixton boy made good, Prime Minister John Major, had seen his powerbase within the Conservative party ebb then flow away that year and was seriously under threat from his own party, as well as New Labour’s rock ’n’ roll friendly opposition leader, Tony Blair, the Edinburgh-born alumni of Fettes College and Oxford University. Blair was openly courting rock stars and the weekly music press as part of his pre-election campaign, but victory was far from a foregone conclusion. The landslide was a distance away yet.

  It’s easy to forget that Tony Blair would become the post-Britpop PM. Mention the word Britpop and it conjures up a rally of images: Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit in a Union Jack bed, Blur up to their eyes in cleavage in the ‘Country House’ video, Brett Anderson wiggling his arse … and, of course, Tony Blair. The bright young things of British pop, hand in hand with a Labour government, led by the first Prime Minister who knew how to handle a Stratocaster. Perfect. But memory can be a convenient deceiver. Britpop has gone down in history as if it was invented by Tony Blair and his right-hand man Alastair Campbell, to make them and the party look good. In fact, Britpop was a fast growing flower of the Conservative years. And the first post-Britpop single of Damon Albarn’s career – the first post-Britpop single full stop – was released when John Major was still Prime Minister in January 1997. New Year … New Blur … New Damon.

  With its simple, downward sliding guitar riff, ‘Beetlebum’ was a love song – albeit an apparently one-sided one – to a lover who does nothing and just gets ‘numb’. It has been widely interpreted as being a song about heroin and the alleged use of the drug by Justine Frischmann. With its doleful verse, and the promise of a brighter future in its sunny chorus, the single was a deserved No.1. In the video, virtually the first thing that Damon does is look directly into the camera lens – straight down the bottle, as cameramen call it – no problem with looking us in the eye this time, unlike ‘Charmless Man’ less than a year ago.

  Far greater change was afoot. The Stephen Street-produced album that followed – Blur – was a genuine departure from its predecessor. It even looked different. The city slickers pictured on The Great Escape had been replaced by photos of a ‘proper’ band, sitting down to concentrate fully on getting what they wanted from their instruments. If ‘Beetlebum’ was a dragon-chasing downer of a song, then what followed was a tune turned into a full-on PCP rush – and in the process single-handedly reinvented Blur in just 122 seconds. ‘Song 2’ was as American
as Blur’s previous output had been British. Although usually credited as a homage to Californian alt rockers Pavement, it’s actually far closer to the “quiet bit/loud bit/really loud bit” model patented by The Pixies and cherished by Nirvana. It’s the second track on the album, it’s two minutes and two seconds long and, just as the country was readying itself for a General Election, it made No.2 in the charts.

  The repercussions of this monumental song were manifold and global. Remarkably, the song took on a life of its own in America – finally giving Blur the US success they seemed to crave. It made No.6 in the Billboard Modern Rock chart. By undermining the very Englishness that had given them their initial blast of success, they had achieved their desire for American profile via a song that took half an hour to create, had meaningless, onomatopoeic lyrics and was only put on the album as an afterthought. “We’re not idiots,” Damon warned Q in 1997. “Deep down we knew that Blur records weren’t tangible to Americans generally. But once you take out the commuter belt and the oompah elements, we stand a pretty good chance.” The ‘Woo-Hoo’ song entered US culture at countless sports venues, as an indie ‘We Are The Champions’ … scored a touchdown/hit a home run/won an ice hockey match? Woo Hoo! ‘Song 2’ was also used to advertise beer and Pentium Intel, though an approach by the US military to have the new Stealth bomber unveiled to cries of “wellafeeleavymedal!” were rejected by the band. Compared to the Stealth offer, the Intel approach seemed the lesser of two evils. “You have to remember that it came in the aftermath of the US military asking us if they could use it, so Pentium seemed harmless after we’d turned them down. Everyone has their own way of justifying getting involved in advertising, but ours was that everything uses the Pentium chip. Pathetic, I know…”