'We Assume We Were A Massive Cultural Force From Day One'

To celebrate the release of their 'Best Of', Blur's Graham Coxon and Alex James talk us through 10 of their key moments. Including the bit where 'the f***ers' put some brass on their songs.

hat noise do you think a frog makes?" says Graham, and hits the frog. You'd expect it to emit a startled "ribbit" and hop to safety. But when Graham hits the frog it gives a deep satanic rasp, a terrifyingly distorted lo-fi froggy roar. "What noise do you think a chicken makes?" Graham giggless, and hits the chicken. The chicken clucks like a chicken prison bitch being gang-banged in the showers by a goggle of chicken daddies. Graham laughs. "And listen to this one," he says, "the cat's really scary."
    In a dusty attic room atop Coxon Towers in Camden, Graham, Alex James and The Maker are gathered around the kiddie's educational toy designed to each Graham's young daughter what various animals would sound like if Kim Gordon tried to play them. And, having amused ourselves with this most Urusei Yatsura of playthings, we turn The Maker's magic bag of Blurness. For we are here, on the occasion of Blur's "Best Of" album release, to present Alex and Graham with a series of artefacts from their tumultuous past and wallow in the memories they spur forth. Nervous, Graham?
    "Not really," he squirms. "I have faced my past."
    Onwards then, and baggywards...


1 FIRST MAKER COVER SESSION (1991)

AROUSED by this mentalist Colchester tornado of My Bloody Valentine T-shirts, bored whining and epilepsy, we forced Blur into a photographic studio in London and told them to strip. The results frightened children and small dogs across the UK, as Damon stared out from newsstands like a deranged, hairy proto-Brett.
    Alex: "Herherherher! Look at that rug!"
    Graham: "Look at Damon! Isn't he beautiful? This is Damon in heavy Julian Cope style. Bloody hell, Alex! Who's the girl at the back?"
    Alex: "We were all living in squats then, so we probably only had one pair of trousers. Those ones I'm wearing. No wonder we had to take our clothes off, we didn't have any others. They were innocent days, but we were arrogant little f***ers."
    You claimed to be out to kill baggy, but we submit these photos as conclusive evidence to the contrary! You bloody well were baggy!
    Graham: "Quite baggy. But that's only because we were so thin. Those are normal-sized clothes."
    Alex: "We had almighty ambitions. Like most novices, we wanted to completely dismantle the structure of everything."
    Graham: "I was happy if I looked anything like Colm from Bloody Valentine. That was all I wanted out of life. I mean, look."
    If you could go back in time and give these young whippersnappers same advice, what would you say to them?
    Alex: "Get your hair cut, you look like a girl."
    Graham: "Don't let the f***ers put brass on your music."


2 'POPSCENE' SINGLE (1992)

THE first time the f***ers put brass on Graham's music, they pretty much got it right. Trouble was, just as Blur were releasing their best single to date, the world was drooling over some stubble-infested dreary bastards from Seattle.
    Graham: "Cwooor! Look at that! You don't see these very often. Smell the vinyl. I tought it was genius."
    Alex: "We were doing the Rollercoaster tour, which was the drunkest collection of people ever."
    Graham: "I wasn't expecting it to be so rock'n'roll."
    Alex: "You'd get to the hotel. Jim and William [Reid, The Jesus And Mary Chain] would be in the bar. We'd go swimming and they'd look at us like we were weird. You could see the swimming pool from the bar."
    Graham: "We were gambolling around splashing each other like kiddies and giggling. And they'd sit there frowning at us from the bar."
    Alex: "It was slightly homoerotic, probably."
    Graham: "I was playing bowls with Debbie and Bilinda from the Valentines and J Mascis was scoring. That's my favourite bit of my whole life, that night."
    Alex: "Jim Reid was absolutely twatted on vodka and he swung the ball and didn't let go. It dragged him down the thing, bang!"
    Graham: "He kept saying it made a good scene. That was the best tour ever."
    Sadly there were more superguns sold to Iraq that year than copies of "Popscene".
    Graham: "I don't think we cared, because we were so up on this record and we were making music that was a bit more back to Seymourish stuff."
    Alex: "It was a renaissance really, wasn't it?"


3 'STARSHAPED' VIDEO (1993)

THEY felt star-shaped, but looked like shit most mornings. With a disastrously drunken gig at London's Town & Country Club (now The Forum) and a fraught US tour behind them, Blur released the masterpiece "Modern Life Is Rubbish".
    Graham: "We did just have a great big party all the time and we were loving every minute of it. The gigs were fantastic because we were burning like maniacs. We were young enough to be able to career through it all just abusing ourselves and still playing, still jumping, still having..."
    Alex: "...Boundless enthusiasm."
    Graham: "Because Damon was jumping around so much, it made him look pretty mad and it made him sick and everything. He looked like a panda."
    Everyone was confused by "Modern Life Is Rubbish" at first.
    Graham: "I didn't know what the hell was going on then, because I thought 'For Tomorrow' would do well. We were being so profilic. We'd go in the studio and make about six songs in one day. 'Resigned', 'Oily Water' and 'Miss America', along with others, were all done in one day. We did them off our heads and I think those are the best songs on the album, because there's no producer on them."
    Alex: "We had no money at all, that was another incentive to go to the studio because we used to get a bun."


4 'GIRLS & BOYS' SINGLE (1994)

FROM starvation to superstardom. With grunge's brains blown across the garage wall of history, the herd conga'd down to Greece with our cheeky Mockney Blur boys and caught a serious dose of Britpop.
    Alex: "We demoed that really quickly after 'Modern Life Is Rubbish' was released, so we knew we had a big f***ing hit single. We were all quite confident, because we knew where we were going. We were doing a photo shoot the day that it got to Number Five and Food sent down some champagne."
    Graham: "Was it Moët? Nice gesture. That was when Dave stopped drinking, that week."
    Alex: "It was when he was dancing on the table in Portugal with Siouxsie And The Banshees, wasn't it? That was the final straw."
    Did you have any idea of the cultural import "Parklife" was to have?
    Alex: "I think we'd been assuming we were a massive cultural force since day one. Our opinion of ourselves was... we were very arrogant. But success never feels like a surprise. Failure is always very jarring, but success always fits."


5 ALEXANDRA PALACE TICKET AND BLUR BINGO CARD (1994)

BLUR'S Spike Island, Ally Pally was the first meeting of the Grand Council Of The New Music. Jellied eels and bingo cards and glitterballs? Oh, yes, indeedy!
    Alex: "We went to see Alexandra Palace and it looked like this huge thing. But it was us and Pulp and Supergrass, it was a pretty good bill. It really felt like something was happening then."
    Graham: "That felt like a huge risk for me. I thought we'd never fill it and we'd look like idiots. But it was alright in the end. the euphoria of the accasion kinda overtook the quality of the sound. Everyone feels good afterwards, no matter what happened."
    That was the dawning of Britpop: The Movement
    Alex: "I suppose it was the start of the Nineties."
Graham: "That was when I was going to Blow Up all the time. I used to love Blow Up. I was noticing people at Blow Up becoming a mixture of casual and mod, Adidas and ties. Groups like Echobelly and Menswear."
    And The Weekenders and Sleeper and Catch - you invented an awful lot of shite bands, didn't you?
    Graham: "Yeah, but that's what I call Britpop, a load of shit."
    Alex: "I remember we went into our publisher's office and played our single 'Girls & Boys', the new Suede single and the new Primal Scream and we went, 'Which one's best?' He didn't know, but he says, 'Alright, here's a demo of a new band I'm gonna sign' and he played us the Oasis demo. We went 'Nahhhh! What do they look like?' And he went, 'One of em's good looking.'


6 MILE END TICKET, SETLIST AND BLUR BEERMAT (1995)

BLUR'S, er, Knebworth, Mile End was the elevation of Blur into the superleague and the blasting off of Britpop: The Phenomenon.
    Graham: "Look at that beermat. We were celebrating lager. Terrible. And how long is that setlist? Flippin' 'eck, 23 songs?!? No way! This is 23 songs!"
    Alex: "That was so massive. For a lot of people, it was the first time they'd been to a gig. Glory days. Marvellous."
    Graham: "I remember looking like a darts player at the gig and having a picture taken of me and it going in the paper, saying I'm the weirdest man in pop. I remember Damon coming on in his really old man costume to 'Debt Collector'. I can't even remember how that goes any more."
    Alex: "It was a big old production. I don't think we made any money on it. But we had a lovely day. At this point, we were getting chased down the street, getting mobbed everywhere. It was silly."
    Graham: "We did feel like the kings."
    Alex: "But then we had to go and play in a pub in America two days after that."


7 BLUR FILOFAX (1995)

AN incredibly tacky diary-cum-address-book-cum-flammable-piece-of-cardboard bedecked with Blur fizzogs, the Blur Filofax is a totem to the madness that followed the Blur Vs Oasis twattery.
    Graham: "This is ace! Is there anywhere you can actually write stuff? Oh yeah, in Dave. Oh, and on me. We should've done dolls. We should do that now, but how we really look like, old. It's totally Boyzone, this."
    It reflects the cheesiness of the whole "Country House" farrago.
    Graham: "The seaside tour! We all went a bit loopy then, doing seaside tours and celebrating ice cream and donuts and going to places that were a bit boring."
    Alex: "We'd get the bus to stop in some funny little town, get out and go, 'Come on!' and everyone would go mental! But what were we doing taking 'Country House' around America? It was insane! Just blind optimism. Hurhur! It was never gonna happen, was it?"
    Do you look back at Damon starting the Blur/Oasis rivalry and want to smack his teeth in?
    Alex: "Well, we had to up the ante. It was great - 'Let's have a record war!"
    Graham: "I was having to deal with all that crap in the Mixer. It was a load of old bollocks. But I did think 'Roll With It' was absolute piffle. And although I liked 'Country House' as an album track, I never wanted it as a single. It's just wittier, but the oompah thing... as soon as we put brass on it, it did go Chas'N'Dave. Oasis were absolutely right."
    It seemed like the ultimate arrogance.
    Graham: "They were asked who was the Stones and who was The Beatles and they said they were the Stones and The Beatles. Hahaha! I was like, 'No you're not, you're just ELO!"


8 BLUR TAKE ON AMERICA COVER (1997)

BARRICADING the studio gates against the f***ers and their brass, Graham took the reins for "Blur", a filthy great splatter of grunge and gurning. Britain, as one, went, "Eeeuurgghh! What is this racket?!?"
    Graham: "That's exactly what we wanted them to think. I didn't want people to like us any more. I wanted them to leave us alone to get on with what we wanted to do. I didn't want to get bagged down in all the BS. My guitar was trying to lose fans."
    And then "Song 2" makes you bigger than ever. What a pisser, eh, Gra?
    Graham: "But for a good reason. It's a much better pop song than 'Country House' was, because it's not taxing, you can just jump up and down to it."
    Alex: "It was really important to do something in America at that point, because everyone had said we'd never f***ing do anything in America, and they were right, not with 'Country House', 'Beetlebum' and 'On Your Own' were great singles too."
    How do you feel about it now?
    Alex: "Smug."


9 READING COVER (1999)

HALF a million samackers per gig and still they played most of the new album, "13", and Damon intimated from the stage that Blur may soon be splitting up. Crowd-pleasing? As napalm.
    Graham: "I think Damon is so nervous about the kind of crap he has to do between songs to try to keep audience vibed up. He gets himself into holes and says daft things, then tries to wriggle out of them and makes it worse."
    Alex: "The splitting-up stuff was just all speculation. It was great last summer. You've got to remember, in 1991, we were punching each other! I had two black eyes at one point!"
    There was no falling out at all, then?
    Graham: "This intern at our American record label, she was only about 18, had to deal with us having a fight in her car! We had this fight in a car park and then she managed to get us apart and get us in her car and we had this two-hour drive and we were just fighting in the car. She must've been so scared. Before the show everyone was so happy and jolly and she was taking us out to get more Converse. Then after the show, suddenly we'd downed loads of booze and were fighting and crying! Poor girl! Sorry!"
    "13" was widely regarded as your weakest album.
    Graham: "William Orbit said that when we released 'Tender', Robbie Williams would be kicking himself that he didn't release something like that. He'd be crying himself to sleep."
    Alex: "Hurhurhurhur!!! He was doing 'Song 2' in his live shows! He'd go on before us and end with it. C***."
    Graham: "How cheeky is that? Dancer. It probably is our weakest album, but it's a bloody good one."


10 BEST OF ALBUM (2000)

WHICH brings us to the present day, the "Best Of" and the funkadelic, mutant Beta Band new single "Music Is My Radar". Are you doing a Radiohead on us?
    Graham: "We were going to, but they got in first. Probably bits of it might go that way, but we're more into the nice intensity of creating music and capturing that and playing around with it, rather than fussing around and getting things in order."
    Have you gone up your own arses?
    Graham: "Oh yeah. I think we went up our arses a long time ago, but we're heading towards our mouths."
    And never underestimate the music-shifting capabilities of a man that can make a frog sound psychopathic.


Mark Beaumont

© 2000 Melody Maker

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