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'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
Typed up by Veikko's Blur Page
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