How an eccles cake and a chat brought Blur duo together for comeback shows

Damon Albarn reveals how the rift with his bandmates was healed - and his plans to play secret gigs on his home turf of Essex

You can take the boy out of Essex but not, apparently, Essex out of the boy. Damon Albarn has drawn musical inspiration from travels in China, Africa and other far-flung reaches but, as he prepares for the keenly awaited comeback of Blur, he admits that what excites him most is the prospect of going home to the county of Mondeo Man and estuary English.

In an unusually candid interview, Albarn has spoken of a desire to return to his childhood roots in Colchester, Essex, and perform secret gigs with Blur, potentially under their original name, Seymour. And the key to his rapprochement with former bandmate Graham Coxon? A chat over an Eccles cake.

Earlier this month Blur announced plans to re-form for several concerts next summer, culminating at Hyde Park in July and a rumoured headline act at the Glastonbury Festival in June.

Their "Battle of Britpop" against Oasis in the mid-90s made front pages and was billed as a north-south clash between the working-class Gallagher brothers and Albarn's posh boys from Essex.

"Do you know what? The most exciting thing about all this for me is that I haven't been back to Colchester, or Essex, since 1994," he told broadcaster John Wilson in an interview to be broadcast tomorrow on Radio 4's Front Row. "That's a long time. I'm going to get the chance to take my daughter to walk through the meadows I used to walk through as a kid, go to the river I used to fish in, swing on the swings I swung on as a kid. For me that's the most wonderful thing. And I think it's beautifully ironic that with my kind of wanderlust and desire to travel and experience the, some would say, the exotic east, the south, wherever, the thing that excites me next year is going back to Essex. Can you believe it?"

Blur, who had huge success with the album Parklife in 1994, last played together six years ago. Since then Albarn, 40, has taken on an array of innovative projects, including the virtual band Gorillaz, the group The Good, the Bad and the Queen, the musical revue Africa Express and the Mandarin opera Monkey: Journey to the West

Coxon, 39, who was Blur's guitarist, has made solo albums without recapturing the same success, while the bassist, Alex James, 40, has carved a new career as a columnist and cheesemaker, living on a farm in the Cotswolds. The band's drummer, Dave Rowntree, 44, runs a computer animation firm and is the Labour party's prospective parliamentary candidate for the Cities of London and Westminster.

Blur will follow 90s acts, such as the Spice Girls and Take That, in burying the hatchet for a return to live gigs. Coxon, Albarn's childhood friend from Stanway Comprehensive School in Colchester, walked out during Blur's seventh and last album, Think Tank, branding the frontman an "egomaniac". The album was completed without him.

Albarn said he had been "emotionally distanced" from Coxon for 10 or 12 years, but then his old friend "turned up just before I did the Africa Express Koko gig [in Camden Town, part of the BBC Electric Proms season] and we just went for a walk and bought a bun - I think it was an eccles cake - and we sat in a doorway," Albarn recalled. "We just looked at each other said, you know what, it's all over, isn't it? That strange feeling that had come between us had gone. So, shall we play together again?

"It was like, we've got to do this at some point because we never actually split up, we just stopped talking to each other. It wasn't money, or anything like that, it was just two people who really loved each other but who found it impossible to communicate any more."

He continued: "For me it's all about the fact that I've got my old mate back. We used to play in a band together and we're going to play in that band again ... that day, sitting on a doorstep ... we both accepted that we were never going to escape the fact that we were in Blur and that it was better to accept and go forward with optimism and not carrying that bloody heavy burden."

The millions of fans craving a new record will be kept on tenterhooks. "If we get back together and it feels like the hottest band on the planet, then there will be a good argument to make another record. It would be because of the music, but for any other reason, forget it."

When news of the Blur reunion broke, the band's official web forum was receiving 60 hits a second. One contributor wrote: "Tue Dec 09, 2008: a day to be remembered forever." All 45,000 tickets for the 3 July concert sold in two minutes, prompting a second date to be announced. The performances will coincide with Blur's 20th anniversary; they were briefly known as Seymour, but had become Blur by the time of their first hit, There's no Other Way, in 1991.

Asked if they would be returning to a garage for rehearsals and playing gigs under the name Seymour, Albarn said: "Yes, we kind of are, I shouldn't really say too much, but ... yes, probably. We're going to retrace it and then go back to the Midlands, where we got our first taste of what it was like to really capture a crowd. People who haven't been roadies for 10 years are going to come back and be roadies for us, just for this occasion ... It's going to be really beautiful or the most horrific mistake ever!"

David Smith

Printer-friendly version