by Martin Roach
Back with the album tracks, and a barrier of brushes, a stand-up bass, Jew’s harp, wibbling guitar lines and odd creaking noises are erected in between the band and the listener to put them off the scent of ‘Country Sad Ballad Man’ – it doesn’t work because it’s the perfect comedown after the sectionable insanity of ‘Song 2’. It’s apparent that someone programmed the running order of the new album very carefully. To prove the point, ‘M.O.R’ is next. Clearly a touchstone to keep existing fans on message, it’s a straight-forward rocker with a Bowie glint in its eye. Interestingly, when it was released as a single, ‘M.O.R’ only managed No.15 – perhaps the audience didn’t need to be thrown a bone from the band’s previous stylings to keep them interested after all. Singalong glam protest song ‘On Your Own’ is next, all electronica and guitar tics; Albarn sounds remarkably like Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel as he sings of The Ganges, psycho killers and gorillas. The fairground organ opening of ‘Theme From Retro’ gets you ready for a potential knees-up scenario, but instead delivers a tonal poem, the kind of ‘soundtrack to a lost film’ piece that The Specials used to do so effectively. ‘You’re So Great’ is back on Bowie territory, with vinyl crackle sound effects, acoustic strums, slide guitar and very little else. The organ is whipped out again for ‘Death Of A Party’, the album’s explicit Britpop Is Dead track as Albarn charts not only the demise of the good times, but also of the teenager – lyrically offering to hang himself in a distinctly Morrissey-esque fashion just in case anyone thinks he’s faking. ‘Chinese Bombs’ is an 84-second palate cleansing punk rock moment – it really is all in the scheduling of these tracks – before its time to loosen up again, get the wah-wah pedal, the megaphone vocal effect and the ‘Hey Joe’ Hendrix riff out for ‘I’m Just A Killer For Your Love.’ ‘Look Inside America’ starts a touch like Parklife’s ‘End of a Century’ with it’s string-laden tale of life on the road. Damon makes his peace with the country that he had seemingly disparaged in the past: America, in his view, is now alright – if you look hard enough that is. ‘Strange News From Another Planet’ is stripped down acoustica save for some blips and beeps – Planet David Bowie is again the world that’s being visited with ‘Space Oddity’ the obvious reference point. You almost expect that ascending Rolf Harris Stylophone solo to pop up at any time. ‘Movin’ On’ is another scheduled back reference – it’s the kind of XTC dischord and two-finger synth playing that’d be familiar to anyone who’d bought The Great Escape. Final track ‘Essex Dogs’ – there must have been some rows about using that title; could it be more Parklife? – but it’s another mood piece, a tonal poem with Albarn painting low-life word pictures with a cinematic air. Coxon grinds away on his feedback heavy guitar as Rowntree and James lock into a dubby groove. It wouldn’t be out of place used as montage music to Antonia Bird’s film Face. Plus it’s eight minutes long. Take that, pop kids. That enough to shake you off our tails?
So, just as New Labour were taking over the reigns at 10 Downing Street after the May 1997 general election, then New Blur had taken over as the post-Britpop leaders of a more grown-up musical direction. Mission impossible had become mission accomplished. ‘Song 2’ was the obvious nucleus of the chain reaction but the album as a whole was complicit. The musical and cultural umbilical cord to all things 1995 had been decisively cut. But Damon’s satisfaction at the time might seem cynical to some. “Our audiences have got a lot more adult again, not so distressingly teenage,” he reasoned to Q magazine. “It didn’t preoccupy us because we picked them up accidentally.” If you were unfortunate enough to be female and aged between 13 and 19 when ‘Boys & Girls’ was released, you might even consider Damon’s pleasure to be offensive. Either way, the deed had been done and the scene had been put to bed and smothered with a pillow. Britpop was a done deal, moved out, just as Tony Blair was moving in.
So, who – or what – killed Britpop? Was it the end of Conservative rule in Britain. With nothing to rebel against, what have you got? Perhaps that sliding guitar motif of ‘Beetlebum’ and loose-limbed psychedelic fun of the Blur album did it. Oasis live at Knebworth, perhaps? Was it the heroin, or the whoo hoo? Perhaps it was something simpler. As straightforward as a glass of champagne. In July 1997, Noel Gallagher, with his then-wife Meg Matthews, accepted an invitation to 10 Downing Street by the new Prime Minister Tony Blair. Damon had been invited but refused, claiming that he had become a communist, but urged comrades Noel and Tony to “enjoy the schmooze”. The event was just weeks before the release of Be Here Now, the album that marked the end of Oasis’s run of true credibility and perhaps indicated where the “blizzard of cocaine” that Albarn had mentioned the previous year had drifted to. Although it sold 350,000 copies on the first day of its release, the album’s contents – a sonic mugging of excess and din – means there’s little mileage to be had in comparing Blur and Oasis from here on in. They part company at the point of the album’s release. Everything had changed.
There had been concerns about Gallagher behaviour before the event, as revealed in the diaries of Number 10 spinmeister Alastair Campbell published some ten years later. “TB [Tony Blair] was worried that Noel Gallagher was coming to the reception tomorrow. He said he had no idea he had been invited,” wrote Campbell. “TB felt he was bound to do something crazy. I spoke to [Creation Records boss] Alan McGee and said can we be assured he would behave. Alan said he would make sure he did. He said if we had invited Liam, it might have been different,” recalls Campbell. Blair’s press man remembers the Prime Minister’s children being “pretty gobsmacked” when Noel Gallagher walked in and that the guitarist thought that that 10 Downing Street was – and I quote – “tops”. “[He] said he couldn’t believe that there was an ironing board in there,” reported Campbell. Meg Matthews was offered a tour by Cherie Blair. “She and I had one of those girly chats about how grotty the place was and what she wanted to change,” Matthews later told Grazia magazine. “It amazed me that they seemed like such a normal family. One of the little boys’ beds was unmade, there was a bottle of ketchup on the kitchen counter and in the master bedroom, Tony’s guitar was leaning against the wall next to an Oasis CD.” How convenient.
Back at the party, it’s claimed that Blair cracked a gag to Gallagher about the different ways the two of them managed to stay awake till the morning on election night. Snaps are taken – and for all-time an image is preserved of Gallagher, his eyes crinkly with pleasure, smiling at Blair. The wild rocker from south Manchester apparently tamed by the wannabe guitarist from Westminster. Gallagher would later report that the second the picture was taken, Blair made himself scarce. It appeared that when it came to Blair vs Oasis, Noel came off second best. Nearly a decade after that party, Gallagher has had time to reflect on his support for Blair and the effect that party has had on how the Oasis man is perceived. “Tony Blair came along and it was like: ‘Ah, he’s gonna outsmart all of these public schoolboy cunts.’ But we all got carried away in ’97” he told The Guardian in 2006. “Once the veneer wore off – even taking the Iraq debacle out of the equation – we’ve all just given a massive shrug. I think the Labour party’s crowning achievement is the death of politics. There’s nothing left to vote for.” It’s to Noel’s credit that he can look back and reassess his role in the musical and political landscape so candidly.
… And his reward for bigging up Blair on the run up to the election? It’s there in Gallagher’s hand: a glass of champagne. The second the camera flash ebbed away from that picture of Gallagher and Blair – and Tony Blair had got what he wanted – Britpop died.
Chapter 13
SUZI
What do you do with a set of fractious individuals, prone to occasional mood swings, drinking bouts and acute musical differences that have been to the edge of disarray and only just avoided going over it? It’s obvious really. Put them on a world tour for the best part of a year. The road was Damon Albarn’s home for most of 1997. After a low key start in the UK, it was on to America, Germany, Scandinavia
, Spain and Italy before some island hopping: Thorsaven in the Faroe Islands, Damon’s beloved Iceland and even Greenland. The singer described the country as mesmerising, in Select magazine: “Greenland was pretty insane. There were only 1200 people there but considering there’s only about 45,000 in the whole country and it’s the size of Australia, that’s quite a good turnout. They had bleary eyes. It was like, ‘Leave your rifles and harpoons outside.’” Leaving the islanders behind, they returned to America, toured the Far East, went south to Australia before returning home for a British arena tour. Although Damon had gone to great lengths to shed Blur’s following of any hint of teeny squeal, he would prove indignant at any suggestions that this had been achieved at the expense of the band’s popularity. The core fact is that, despite its harder edge, the new album was a commercial peak. Backstage at the Cardiff International Arena he told music journalist Peter Kane: “I know it’s perceived [as less successful], but it’s unfair because we’re still playing the biggest stadiums in the country; 10,000 last night in Manchester, for instance. I don’t see that as any great alienation. I’ve said it ad infinitum but, just to ram the point home yet again, Blur is our biggest selling album to date.”
Meanwhile, Justine Frischmann – who’d managed to tour America with Elastica seven times in the space of the previous 18 months – had returned home to London. The title of a key Elastica track says it all: ‘Never Here’. Justine’s work rate and success totally belied the image of her as second fiddle to Damon: Blur Indoors if you will. The relationship broke down. “It was very difficult,” she would explain to The Observer about the complex reasons behind the pair ultimately splitting up. “It’s actually very taboo to stop and say, ‘OK, I’m in a band and I’m really successful and my boyfriend’s a pop star and he’s really handsome and lots of girls fancy him, but I don’t want to be with him.’ I was just thinking: ‘This just isn’t the life I want.’ There’s something very unromantic about being with someone that hundreds of thousands of teenage girls fancy. There really is.”
According to Frischmann, one of the first questions that Damon asked her when their relationship started was if she wanted children. She revealed to Q magazine just what a deal-breaker the issue was: “Damon said, ‘You’ve given me a run for my money, you’ve proved you’re as good as I am, you’ve had a hit in America – now settle down and let’s have kids.’” Albarn confirmed that the matter of a family became huge to him. “I started to resent Justine massively. I kept thinking, ‘Why the fuck don’t you want a child with me? What’s the matter with you?’”
While Damon was on tour, Frischmann invited an old, platonic friend to stay at the Notting Hill home she shared with Albarn – Loz Hardy, former singer with Kingmaker, someone she describes as being the closest she’s ever had to a brother. The move caused a ripple of appalled excitement among the young fans who spent their lives camped outside Damon and Justine’s house. There was worse to come, and if anything was likely to press Albarn’s buttons, this would be it: Justine rekindled her friendship with Brett Anderson. She began to appear at Suede gigs and the two even went away (as friends) for the weekend to Dublin. “We’ re just really cool friends,” Anderson told Select when the issue became a talking point on the London scene. “I hate the thought of investing all this time in someone and they just disappear and all that time just slips down the drain. They remain in your memory … you should stay friends with them because there’s obviously a bond there.” There were also rumours of another bond. In the alarmingly candid official Suede biography, Love and Passion, drummer Simon Gilbert recalls a backstage incident during this time. “I remember walking into the dressing room and Justine was there,” he told author David Barnett. “And there they were, doing a bit of smack together.” Since the 1990s – and in the wake of ‘Beetlebum’ and its tale of someone who gets nothing done and just gets numb – Frischmann had been repeatedly pressed on the subject of heroin. “I had a dabble,” she confirmed to Q in the year 2000, but has since gone further, using the word “junkie” to describe the 1996-98 period. “It’s impossible to get anything finished as a junkie,” she would later tell NME with admirable honesty. “You have lots of great ideas but you don’t have the capacity to actually finish them off.” By 2002, she was in a more philosophical mood for The Observer: “I think the problem with hard drugs is that they get you when you’re most vulnerable. They hadn’t really been a problem until we were at rock bottom and we were all very unclear about who we were, what the fuck we were doing with our lives. You get home and you don’t really feel like it’s home. At that point, doing hard drugs is very dangerous.”
“It was horrible,” Damon recalled to The Face when asked about the period. “It was absolutely hell. I felt … quite alone. Had a few of those misery-defining moments there. I was still holding on as strongly as I could. When you’re in love with somebody … you’re in love with them, aren’t you? It was just a very, very protracted and painful separation.”
Another separation was on the cards too – this would be a painful one as well. Damon decided that another umbilical cord needed to be cut that connected Old Blur with New Blur – this time with producer Stephen Street. After a peerless run of albums, and a recording relationship going back to ‘She’s So High’ in 1990, they parted ways. “Yes, it was difficult,” Damon confirmed to writer Danny Eccleston. “He’ll be forever part of what we are and, ironically, he gave us the tools we needed to go it alone. I had to do it.” “It wasn’t my choice,” Street later diplomatically confirmed to Sound On Sound. “I just think they wanted to stretch out a bit more and, having made five albums with me, the best way to do that was to work with someone different who would approach the project in a different way. I understand that perfectly and certainly wasn’t offended. I did five albums with the band and I must admit I thought each one would be the last because they were bound to want to try something new.”
Meanwhile, the singer was about to be on the receiving end of more change himself … from Justine Frischmann. Elastica were inert, wasting money on studio time that seemingly went nowhere and had picked up a reputation as a drug band. With her life and band seemingly in similar states of suspended animation and sensing a need for change, she separated from Albarn. “We were together for eight years,” Damon told NY Rock. “Eight years [is] a long time, a very long time. Especially if the relationship is as public as our relationship was. I went through a phase where I thought I’ve got to justify my feelings, everything I invested in that relationship. As a musician, usually music is your way out.”
Domestically, the way out was a move away from the home he’d shared with Justine to the even more boho Westbourne Grove, sharing a flat with friend and comic artist Jamie Hewlett. Hewlett had known Damon since 1990, after he’d interviewed Blur for Deadline magazine, home of his most revered creation, Tank Girl. Blur would even pop up in the strip itself from time to time and the rise and fall of the publication – it finished in 1995 – seemed to mirror the fortunes of Blur and Britpop. “Arsey” and “wanker” were the words Hewlett used to describe Damon at the time of the Deadline piece, although the two had mutual friends. “They told me he was a cunt,” Hewlett sagely informed Q. “And they told him I was a cunt.” Both heading for thirty, they created their very own Men Behaving Badly world at the flat – albeit one surrounded by designers, galleries and groovy restaurants. “Damon’s place … whoooo!” was Alex James’s warning to journalist Sylvia Patterson, when asked about the singer’s new living arrangements. “Large house, The Danger Zone, bachelor pad mayhem.” “We’re both recovering romantics,” was how Damon fantastically described his friendship with Hewlett. “It’s been really great having loads of parties and have a laugh. I’m sure it has its own mythology already. We’ve had a lot of people round.”
In fact, everyone from Radiohead to the Spice Girls, Kate Moss to All Saints were attendees at the flat – Damon was, according to one tabloid rumour, squiring a member of both aforementioned gi
rl bands – and there was a celebrity waiting list to get through the doors. Damon recalls answerphone messages from David Bowie and Pete Townshend – both left on the same afternoon – asking when the next shindig was. Tales of escalating excess spread across London – often involving cocaine, it was claimed: “I did have some amazing parties in that place,” Damon told Esquire when the accusation was put to him. “Parties where I managed to get Pavement and the Spice Girls hanging out with each other. They were good parties, but that is a gross exaggeration about the cocaine … Jamie and I always thought we’d make that place legendary for nine months and then bale out.” True to their plan, the Westbourne Grove wildness ended – and the last blacked out limo was turned away – for one simple reason … during this spell of partying, Damon had met someone who would change his life.
Suzi Winstanley was already one half of a partnership. An artistic partnership that had already existed for more than ten years whereby she and collaborator Olly Williams literally worked together. They first met at Central St Martins College of Art in 1987 and had decided to operate as a single unit. Their signature wildlife pieces, created by painting together – ‘hand over hand’ – had taken them around the world in some of the most inhospitable conditions, coming face to face with some of the planet’s most fearsome animals. “Our work is still a collaborative, mutual response to the wild,” Olly described to The Times. “But we’re starting to be intrigued by the people who live on the peripheries of the wild, and who hold the survival of the wild in their hands. They are the ones who subsist in the bush and are at one with it. We’re intrigued by the fact that there are men who feed their families by hunting with eagles or living off the forest.” The artistic pairing had faced tigers, orangutans and tarantulas; they’d smeared a painting with fish guts and blood in South Africa to encourage a shark to bite it and become part of the canvas - this would be good preparation for when Suzi first got together with Damon and had a glimpse into his very different world. ‘It was funny when I first met him,’ she recalled to The Times Magazine. “We were in my flat in east London, and we had to go west, and I said, ‘Oh, it’s really quick from here. Just jump on the Central Line.’ He said, ‘No, I don’t think we should go on the Tube.’ I had literally just met him, and I said, ‘What are you talking about? It’s twenty minutes. It’s the quickest way.’ Anyway, we went down to the Tube, and there were all these people shouting, all these girls running around, and I suddenly thought, ‘I don’t like this.’” At first, the relationship was kept very low key, with Damon dropping hints that he had met someone new, but that they were “not famous.” That’s the way things would remain. No more Posh and Becks for Damon Albarn.