MOJO, november 2000

SOHO HOUSE IS A MEDIA DRINKING CLUB HIDDEN behind a doorway on Greek Street in London's West End. It was here that Blur met on August 20,1995 to celebrate their victory over Oasis, when Country House entered the singles chart at Number 1 ahead of Roll With It. Tensions were running high that Sunday evening: guitarist Graham Coxon, unhapphy about the direc direction Blur's music and videos had taken, threw champagne around in a fit of drunken pique before attempting to exit the premises via a second-floor window. His hourney to the pavement would have been a brief one. Blur's domination over Oasis was not to last any longer.

Five years later almost to the day, Blur are back in Soho House. This time they're downstairs in the library, drinking bottles of mineral water. When their lunches arrive, they prod at them for a while and push them aside, unfinished. If the four musicians are enjoying being in each other's company -an event somewhat rare this year -they are doing a pretty good job of disguising it. Damon Albarn once or twice rolls his eyes at an indiscreet remark from bassist Alex James. When James announces that he thought Country House should have been a B-side, Albarn ripostes: "This is coming from a man who every time we do a gig says, 'Oh, can't we please play Country House?' I find that comment absolutely extraordinary." Coxon, meanwhile, is still an antsy individual, but he is at least planning to travel home on his skateboard this afternoon, not in an ambulance.

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These days, the members of Blur lead separate lives, which seem to become more separate as time goes by. Albarn and Coxon each have a young daughter and both have.made music outside Blur within the last three years. Albarn is a film music composer in considerable demand, while Coxon has released two solo albums, The Sky Is Too High and The Golden D, promoting the latter this summer with a touring band that included Blur's drummer Dave Rowntree. James, who these days is flushed and jocose like Peter Cook on a mid-'80schat show, was part of Keith Allen 's Fat Les project and has ventured into film music himself on the new Robert Carlyle movie There's Only One Jimmy Grimble.

Although they performed one London concert this year on July 2 at Scott Walker's Meltdown festival, Blur have not toured in two years and appear to have only a hazy idea about what each other has been up to in private. Rumour has it that they formally agreed in 1999 to put the band on ice for a year, but Coxon insists this was never discussed at any great length. "We're re-charging," he declares. "Re-charging and thinking."

"Things have definitely changed," explains James a few hours later when MOJO visits his five-storey home in Covent Garden. "When people start to have families you cease to be a four-man gang. You're not The Beatles in Help! any more, are you? You're not going to be recklessly hurling yourself over a horizon when you 've got a family at home. The goal-posts have moved. Of course they have."

Of the four of them, Albarn has matured the most since MOJO last interviewed Blur in 1995. An even-tempered 32-year-old, he chooses his words advisedly and gives the appearance of being unrumed by the world around him. He is careful not to crow over the problems Oasis have faced this year (which would have given him a great deal of satisfaction once upon a time), merely making the observation that their stick-in-the-mud musical policy was bound to backfire on them sooner or later. And if few could have foreseen in 1996 that Blur's off-centre Art-rock would have the stamina to see off the Burnage challenge at the end of the millennium, well, Albarn is not about to rub anyone's nose in it now. He hardly needs to reiterate that Blur's durability is founded on movement and change. Their William Orbit-produced 1999 album 13, which many consider their best, was recorded with none of the clean precision of previous records, and surprised even long-term fans with its often atonal experimentation and emotional rawness. It is a tribute to Blur's hard-won musical freedom that no one really knows what they will do next.

Since his "rock divorce", as he wryly calls it, from Justine Frischmann two years ago, Albarn has been sharing his life with a new girlfriend and has travelled extensively, recently taking his melodica to Mali to play with -and learn from- the kora virtuoso Toumani Diabate. "You can become very insular in a band when you 're only playing with the same people,"Albarn says; "It's not healthy. You have to see how wide the world is. You certainly get a feeling of how wide it is when you 're in Mali."

"The son of a one-time manager of Soft Machine, Albarn grew up in a progressive household -first in the East End of London, then in Colchester- where he had access to many different kinds of music. But he wasn't as open-minded then as he is now. "When I was growing up, my parents' music was old blues, Indian ragas and African music. And a bit of gospel : Mahalia Jackson. There was Atom Heart Mother and Rubber Soul, but there was nothing else really [in the pop/rock area]. It was mostly indigenous music and I didn't really like any of it. It's been there in me -latent- for such a long time and it's just coming out now."

Since everything about Albarn in the autumn of 2000 seems to want to draw a line under the past and move on, it is fitting that EMI have chosen this as the ideal moment to release a Blur greatest hits album.. Containing 17 of their 23 singles to date (including the latest, Music Is My Radar, which comes out this month), Blur: The Best Of also finds room for an album track from Parklife, This Is A Low, and is twinned on early pressings with a CD containing 10 songs recorded at Wembley Arena last December.

To be released on October 30, the 77-minute Blur: The Best Of will reintroduce the subject of the long-gone "chirpy" Blur of 1994 to a nation that may lately have found them downbeat on such lachrymose singles as Tender and No Distance Left To Run. It will also probably fill a few Christmas stockings. According to Alex James, EMI is banking on it selling two million comfortably. The tracklisting was market-researched by the label with the help of focus groups.

James: "I've never seen anything so brutal, but it was very illuminating. Apparently, when these people think of Blur, the first thing they think of is Damon's eyes. Among other things, it came across that we were a fully integrated band. People didn 't perceive us as different personalities. They perceived us as straight-down-the-line musicians."

The research was commissioned to ascertain whether October 20 would be the optimum time for a Blur greatest hits album. The answer was a resounding affirmative. Coxon: "They all said they'd buy it apart from four blokes in Yorkshire." Albarn (laughing) : "There was a seething dissent in southern Yorkshire for some reason, which we can only put down to the fact that they haven't forgiven us for what happened with Oasis."

More than any band that came up in the early '90s, Blur have had an equivocal relationship with the single, and this can be read between the lines of Blur: The Best Of. Not every track was their preferred choice of A-side at the time, and many were released purely because one of their albums needed its profile maintained by a third or fourth single. If Blur: The Best Of has a subtext, and it does, it is the fluctuations in importance of the pop single to a band like Blur in the last decade -from the bashful courting of Radio One in 1990-91, to the ripe commercial prospects of the perestroika years 1994-95, to the post-Britpop reorganisations and clean breaks of 1997, to the singles-are-a-devalued-irrelevance-so-we-might-as-well-put-out-a-weird-one viewpoint that prevails among groups of Blur's stature today.

"The important thing is that we're looking forward, not back." says Albarn. "We sat down with Can -the great Can- in, where was it ? Dsseldorf or somewhere, and had high tea with them. They said to us, 'Look at it like this. Your whole career up to now has been college -a very public college. Now you 're graduating and going out into the real world."

Five years ago, Albarn would have been incensed to be so patronised. ("Oh yeah? And how many hits have you had, grandad?") Now he takes Can's words as a profound compliment. Graduating from college is a potent image, it seems, to a man once caricatured by the Oasis camp as a university-educated dilettante. It' s funny how what goes around comes around."

JESUS JONES ARE SO SELDOM mentioned nowadays that it's easy to forget they ever existed. ln 1989, however, this brash five-piece from Wiltshire, Surrey and Devon were seen by some commentators as the future of the four-minute pop song -a song in which rock guitars and techno rhythms would not only co-exist but prosper, making dancers out of hitherto reserved indie fans and creating hit singles from a man-and-machine coalition as accessible as it was forward-looking. After three mid-charters, Jesus Jones burst into the Top 20 with their fourth single, Real Real Real, in May 1990. The ensuing bullishness at their record company, Food, was to have far-reaching effects for a rather eccentric young band it had signed in March." .

Seymour had come to London from Colchester and Bournemouth, knowing little about the cliquey scenes that made up the capital's indie fabric in the late 1980s. At a time when The Velvet Underground remained the primary influence for the majority of new London-based guitar groups, Seymour were a peculiar mixture of the provincial, the cultivated and the arcane. Singer and keyboard player Damon Albarn loved American scream-rockers the Pixies, but was equally interested in the works of Brecht and Weill. Guitarist Graham Coxon was a Johnny Marr fan who'd paradoxically spent several years in his teens listening to Van Der Graaf Generator. Both he and Albarn were classically trained.

"When I moved to London I was pretty undereducated about a lot of music," Coxon says nevertheless. "I used to go outwith friends at art school [Goldsmiths' College] to see groups in places like Deptford. The chart music of the'80s wasn't that different to what it is now. I've always liked guitars, so the only place to go after The Jam and The Smiths was to indie music. Isn 't Anything by My Bloody Valentine was a big album for me. The guitars sounded like rusty Mellotrons."

Seymour were not quite a stereotypical 1989 indie band, much as a tomato is not quite a banana. Albarn, a former drama student who had dipped into the shocktactics of Artaud's Theatre Of Cruelty, would hurtle dangerously around the stage during the fast numbers, occasionally disappearing behind Dave Rowntree's drumkit to be sick. At other times he would sit at a piano. Seymour's intro piece The Opening, an Albarn-written instrumental, would begin like something from the Kit Kat Club in Cabaret and gradually get faster and faster, eventually galloping around like a punk hornpipe. "We were trying to find our feet," says Rowntree. "We didn't really know what we wanted to do, but we knew how we wanted it to feel. It was about thrashing around and acting a bit mad."

Food -the record company Seymour signed to in March 1990 after changing their name to Blur- was not a bona fide indie label, as it had been receiving funding and distribution from EMI since 1988. Unlike indies such as Creatin and Rough Trade, moreover, Food had only a small roaster and was circumspect about adding to it. It took allof seven gigs to convince label boss Dave Ealfe that Seymour were worth a record deal. An unwritten condition of that deal was that they would consign their Kurt Weill art school excursions to B-sides, if not the outtakes pile. The A-sides would highlight the 22-year-old Albarn's flair for melody and would be arranged and produced in such a way to bounce Blur straight from the indie pub circuit into the Gallup hit parade.

For a band so untrammelled on-stage, being obliged to compromise in the studio was surprisingly not a controversial issue. Not to begin with, anyway. For all his rough edges, Albarn wanted to be successful and had made one or two attempts in the '80s to launch a mainstream pop career, namely as one half of a synth-pop duo called Two's A Crowd. Like his Blur colleagues, he accepted that Ealfe, an erstwhile pop star in Teardrop Explodes, probably knew best. "We knew from the outset that singles were supposed to be a kind of carrot," says Coxon. "A bit of cheese on the mousetrap." Ironically, for their debut single, Blur returned to the very first song they had rehearsed as Seymour.

As Blur recorded the undulating, psych-inflected ballad She's So High in the sumrner of 1990, they were excited to learn that the studio (Battery in Willesden) had been used by The Stone Roses for their breakthrough hit Fool's Gold. The substantial sales of Fool's Gold and Happy Monday's Madchester Rave On EP, and their resulting exposure on Top Of The Pops on November 30 1989, had been key factors in opening up the singles chart to bands that had longed for years to gain ingress. Primal Scream's dance-rock crossover track Loaded had made the Top 20 in March 1990. While Blur were in Battery, The Only One l Know by Stone Roses soundalikes The Charlatans was making its way into the Top 10.

Yet each new dance-rock crossover hit served only to refine the genre's template. Loping bass lines , funky drum loops and languid vocals were now prerequisites for every aspiring hitmaker, and for Dave Balfe this meant not so much giving Blur A&R guidance as taking them to the tailor's to fit them with the right suit, When She's So High peaked at a lowly 48 in the autumn, a dismayed Blur allowed the makeover to begin in earnest.

Pressured by Balfe to deliver a more uptempo song for their second single, Blur obediently embraced the genre now being dubbed by the press "indie-dance". Rowntree: "Compared to The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, we were minnows struggling very hard, we hitched ourselves to the indie-dance bandwagon, with much prompting from Balfe. If there was a Changing Rooms for bands, indie-dance would be Carol Smillie coming in and turning your nice song into (Scottish accent), 'Ooh, great, a bit of an indie-dance feel.' Staple it on and it'lI all fall off next year," It was a ruthless time. On one aborted session, the producer would not allow Alex James to play bass on the track.

In the first week of January 1991, Blur recorded an Albarn tune called There's No Other Way with Stephen Street, who had engineered and co-produced albums for The Smiths. Manacled by Street to a sarnpled drum loop, There's No Other Way was a sort of decaffeinated See Emily Play put through a beatbox. It at once made all the right noises and hedged at its bets. Albarn was thrilled by it. "I felt quite exhilarated that we had something in our hands that sounded like it would take us all the way up the M1."

There's No Other Way became Blur's first proper hit, taking them into the Top 10 in May. But as much as they played to packed houses and posed for music press front covers, there was a feeling that their commercial success had been store-bought. ln interviews, Albarn tirelessly predicted a glittering and protean future for Blur, sidestepping accusations that they were suppressing their multi-faceted musical education for the benefit of their short-term career. But it scarcely helped that the indie-dance genre sounded every bit as opportunist as it was.

Rowntree: "Does any of that music have value now? Think of all the '60s bands who had one hit -not even Freddie And The Drearners-size bands- and their one hit gets wheeled out once a week on Radio Two. That's the fate of the indie-dance bands in five years' time. It was a pretty cynical thing to do. But the music industry was cynical then. It was run by people like Balfe who thought that record companies knew what good music was, and all they had to do was manipulate the bands into making it. Then everyone would go home happy."

On their B-sides, and on certain songs recorded for their 1991 debut album Leisure, Blur would reveal a darker side, a more bilious temperament and Graham Coxon's increasing fascination with My Bloody Valentine. That said, Leisure was for the most part a light-hearted pop record in a year when other albums -MBV's Loveless, Primal Scream's Screamadelica and Nirvana's Nevermind in particular- were three-dimensional adventures in sound and texture.

Having let themselves be enticed into a scenario where chart positions were the benchmark of a band's true value, Blur badly needed another Top 10 hit with their third single. They came: unstuck with Bang, a poor relation of There's No Other Way, which climbed no further than 24. Had it charted 20 places higher, one wonders whether Bang might have sealed Blur's fate as an indie-dance nine days' wonder like The Soup Dragons or Flowered Up. Its comparative failure was, in retrospect, one of the best things that could have happened to them. Albarn: "That's an interesting point, actually. What would have happened? We would have been given a lot more encouragement. The album [Leisure] would have gone in higher. l'm very glad it didn 't. l'm very glad that we fucked it up big-time. "

The setbacks soon multiplied. A fourth single, Popscene, came out in April 1992 and fell short of the Top 30. Full of wounded pride and bloody-mindedness, Blur were now at logger-heads with Balfe and with each other. By May, they were 60,000 in debt and in complete disarray on a 44-date tour of America, promoting a remix of Bang they had not been told about. Drinking themselves insensible, they duly came to blows and pined piteously for England. For some reason -homesickness, perhaps, or because he fancied filling in a few gaps in his knowledge of '60s music- Albarn listened to a Kinks tape throughout the tour.

APRIL 1993. A YEAR HAS elapsed since blur last released a record. unbeknown to the public, their second album Modem Life is Rubbish, produced by Stephen Street and finished in December, has been rejected twice -first by Food and then by the band's American record company SBK. Concessions having been made to both, the album now has two extra songs and is a significant step forward from Leisure.lt features brass, strings and woodwind and a new style of writing from Albarn that uses poignant humour and Ray Davies characterisation to investigate the dreams, traditions and prejudices of suburban England. Blur's soon-to-be-released fifth single, For
Tomorrow, has been written by Albarn after a slanging match with Dave Balfe, who worries that Modem Life Is Rubbish sounds too parochial and may kill Blur's career.

Then again, what career ? Utterly eclipsed in the press by American grunge groups and by glamorous English newcomers Suede (a band that once included Albarn's girlfriend Justine Frischmann), Blur are the forgotten boys. Still experiencing fall-out from their disastrous tour of the States, they appear to be on a mission to rid Britain of grunge single-handedly. ln this context, the overtly English-sounding Modern Life Is Rubbish is virtually protest music.

Rowntree: "We had got past the Seymour point of knowing what we wanted it to feel like but having no idea how to get there. We then had some idea of how to get there, but no idea why we wanted to go there. And then after that awful American tour, we figured out what it was all going to be for." This is what Albarn tried to get across to Balfe: that Blur had found their musical identity -and that there was a chance, if they were given their head, that they might bring about a full-scale English pop renaissance. Balfe thought this was ludicrous, Rowntree: "I saw both sides of the story Damon was saying that the so-calIed American invasion had run out of steam -the bands are shit, the music is lacklustre and grunge has just become a fashion accessory- and that there was the potential for an untapped wealth of English music to be successful again. And he also meant that we could be the band to do it. But Balfe's point was, 'How do you know? You're asking me to stake my company on that. "

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