(#565: 22 February 1997, 1 week)
Track listing: Beetlebum/Song 2/Country Sad Ballad Man/M.O.R./On Your Own/Theme From Retro/You're So Great/Death Of A Party/Chinese Bombs/I'm Just A Killer For Your Love/Look Inside America/Strange News From Another Star/Movin' On/Essex Dogs (incorporating Interlude)
I was maybe too close to things - or possibly too far away from things - at the time really to appreciate how violent and vituperative a gesture the fifth Blur album represented. Its cover was a stock image of a patient being rushed into Accident and Emergency - that's me just over one month ago, then - which was supposed to represent "an anaesthetic dream." Or perhaps the anaesthetic block had begun to wear off.
Blur, the album - or, like blackstar, it may well be that its, or the band's, name doesn't need to be capitalised - still sounds like the virulent aesthetic opposite of everything its makers had hitherto been erroneously assumed to have stood for. It is scarcely a surprise that Blur should pursue that latter path; no doubt after The Great Escape they could have gone further in the direction of Theatreland, with a cast of thousands, high-kicking dance troupes, the London Symphony Orchestra and a twelve-ring circus, but (as Keith Tippett also did after turning from the enormous caravan of Centipede to the minute explorations of Ovary Lodge) the group opted to re-evaluate themselves as a group; all the music on Blur, the album, is performed by them, with no horn or string sections and no guest narrators, and largely played live in the studio (mostly at London's Mayfair Studios, although the vocal tracks for four of the songs were recorded at the Grettisgat studio in Reykjavik, the nearest faraway place).
The band considered staying and evolving together infinitely more important than ensuring they remained part of the dwindling Britpop circus. Britpop was, by early 1997, largely burned out, bisected by the twin forks of Girl Power and dance music. Its headlines were spent, and Blur in particular had been severely bruised by the "war" with Oasis, in which they were identified as middle-class fakers as opposed to the honest, working-class Gallaghers; identified, ironically, by a rapacious British media largely run by people who went to public school and Oxbridge. Morning Glory was The Voice Of The People, The Great Escape a Mister La-dee-Dah Gunner Graham sneer at them.
This helped to intensify the band's own generally wretched state. Damon Albarn was hooked on heroin, Graham Coxon on alcohol. Coxon in particular was feeling increasingly alienated from the rest of Blur and was possibly on the verge of quitting. Anxious to save the band, Albarn assured him that he would be given considerably more input than on their previous two albums (where his role had essentially been that of licensed wayward lead guitarist). Furthermore, the showbusiness exhibitionism was to be dropped. Only Blur appear on blur. There are no guest speakers, no horn or string sections, and no wry character studies. This was where Damon was going to come out from behind the masks of Tracy Jacks and Ernold Same, and write and sing about himself, his own life, his personal state of being.
Coxon took that assurance as a challenge. Already a keen fan of American indie music, particularly the group Pavement, he determined to channel its influence into the structures and shadows of the album's songs. This is especially evident on the record's lead track (and lead single), "Beetlebum," where his playing suggests intimate familiarity with Pavement's work on the equally raw, spontaneous and unplanned Wowee Zowee.
The song is introduced by a rhythmic chop from Coxon’s lead guitar, as though desperately trying to restart a demolished Ford Cortina, following which its melody gradually unfolds and lead vocal, bass and drums are added one by one. Comparisons were inevitably made with White Album Beatles, especially “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” (“She’s a gun, now what you done?”) but Albarn’s distressed slouch of a vocal, coupled with the general bleariness of the backing track, also suggests one of Robert Wyatt’s anti-signifier pop songs from the Matching Mole era.
A drug song by any measurable standard of metaphor – “Just get numb, now what you done?” – it nevertheless bursts into reluctant light when Albarn’s echoplexed “And when she lets me slip away” provokes the group to harmonise and swing (albeit very slowly) to reveal the elusive umbilical cord to all that we had previously recognised as Blur, over which Albarn pours acidic baths of sweetness (“She turns me on and all my violence gone”), before the regretful minor coda of the bridge descends back into the trudge of the verse-cum-chorus.
The premature summer shadows fall back into purple-grey nocturnes of ascending confusion as Coxon’s massed atonal guitar choirs and random “I Am The Walrus” radio tunings drown the final refrain of “He’s on, he’s on, he’s on it” (which sounds slightly like “Piss off, piss off, he’s alright” if you turn the volume up really loudly) before the song, now engulfed, abruptly cuts off with the pressing of the stop button on the cassette recorder and a final vocal grunt which sounds not a million miles away from the word “shit.” Which of course “Beetlebum” isn’t. Far from it.
The worry was that the band's record label would listen to the album, complain about the absence of singles and refuse to release it. It was a benign worry for the band themselves, who went on to compose and record what they believed was their most extreme musical statement to date, 121 seconds of post-Nevermind tick-tock-quiet/ICBM-LOUD punk rock with deliberately "stoopid" (as opposed to "stupid") lyrics.
But "Song 2" turned out to be the biggest song of Blur's career; the Parlophone executives loved it and it finally got them noticed in America. It seems a merry and deliberate stamping on any cor-blimey vaudeville tracings...and what a great band performance, too, with doubled-up drums and Alex James' bass going into sinister unison with Coxon's guitars after the first chorus, and Albarn's vocal cheerily not giving a sprig about pleasing the parents. It is truly the best single of 1964 that could only have been released in 1997.
It is only after a couple of listens that you realise that "Country Sad Ballad Man"'s subject matter is identical to that of "Country House" and one could satisfactory call it Coxon's revenge on that alleged Moment of National Unity. The song stumbles blearily but purposively towards its sardonically shattering payoff of "I'm done and I'm fucked," and again the Pavement influence shimmers into audibility; indeed, something like “Sensitive Euro Man," recorded by Malkmus and company in 1994, is practically a blueprint for this post-Britpop Blur with its drooping guitars, semi-shambling beats, use of space and general air of knowing melancholy.
"M.O.R." plays with the chords of "Boys Keep Swinging," with a smattering of references to "Fantastic Voyage" - Bowie and Eno got co-composer credits - and is a gleeful and noisy subversion of Blur's recent past ("Here comes a low") with a particularly thrilling climax where the band seemingly hammer their "legacy" into shards with noisily-liberated guitar and piano (and that high-speed staccato piano you hear at the song's beginning predicates LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends" by two decades). Try singing along to this, they seem to be suggesting.
Actually, that description is seriously underselling things. "M.O.R." sees Blur merrily stamp upon and stamp out everything you ever imagined to be "Blur," as does "On Your Own," a drugged-up account of a forlorn rave pilgrimage to Goa which sounds like "Country House" scrunched and pushed through a rusty mangle, complete with Roland TR-606 Drumatix programming and noise guitar from Coxon which really does not sound like anything readily attributable - not even Arto Lindsay or Sonny Sharrock. Britpop being smothered with grey-tipped graffiti. Nevertheless, one should note how firmly Albarn's increasingly distended and irreverent vocal is pointing the way towards Gorillaz, his unexpected second act.
"Theme From Retro" is a largely instrumental - save occasional vocal samples ("the horror!") - organ-driven elegy somewhere between 1968 Pink Floyd (more Saucerful than Piper, I'd say) and 1979 Wire, which leads to "You're So Great," essentially Graham Coxon on his scratchy and ironically jolly own, akin to Guided By Voices threaded back to the Cavern Club. Due acknowledgement should be paid to stalwart producer Stephen Street - yes, these songs may sound like demos at a distance, but the mixing is artful and cleverly avoids any Achtung Baby muddiness.
There are clear precedents in Blur's back catalogue for "Death Of A Party" - in particular "He Thought Of Cars" - but the exhausted sadness of this, the album's highlight (or lowlight), is not really precedented. The ice rink organ implies a continued Jerry Dammers influence but the song's spaces are so empty and metallic that one imagines the Britpop circus tent to have been entirely dismantled and stripped. The song was actually written in 1992 but was radically reworked for this album. In it, Albarn, as sad and tired as he has ever been heard, sings of the metaphorical party being over, with people dying of Aids through unprotected sex. "Go to another party and hang myself - gently on the shelf," he sings, but that get-out clause fools nobody. It is as though he has stared directly at the essence of Britpop and seen nothing but a hollow, vacated shelf. Musically this sounds nothing like your average eager-to-please-xFm indie wannabes. Flags are at half-mast rather than being waved. This song marks the death knell for something we aren't quite sure ever truly lived. All the people - so few people now left.
Momentary relief comes from the quick (84-second) punk blast of "Chinese Bombs," a Bruce Lee tribute which isn't quite Ash's "Kung Fu" (though doesn't aspire to be as such). But "I'm Just A Killer For Your Love," complete with what sounds like Coxon trampling with guitar through a clogged-up swamp, is detuned glam-rock which may be masking a swipe at Suede.
Possibly the album's most illuminatory moment, however, may be "Look Inside America," in which Albarn finally overcomes his previous prejudices and learns that the nation, flaws and all, can and must be embraced, or at least guardingly accepted (despite his repeated "she's alright"s, the singer remains fundamentally cynical about the place). There's a charming synthesised string section which doubtless left Parlophone anticipating a real one. Not this time around; we'll manage by ourselves, thanks.
But blur then turns more despondent, in ways which had hitherto eluded the band. "Strange News From Another Star" takes its name from the titular short story of Hermann Hesse's 1919 octet collection. That story concerns itself with someone living in the actual world, as you and I would recognise it, and dreaming of a second, idealised world, much like our own but with all the mistakes ironed out. Which is real, which is fantasy etc. Albarn's ideal as expressed in the song, however, would appear to be oblivion - "All I want to be/Is washed out by the sea" - while the song's music wanders between Thomas Dolby's "Airwaves" and Nirvana's "Something In The Way" before settling on a sad early Bowie chorus. "Give me all your stuff/Until I can't get up" could be a heroin reference or equally that anonymous A&E patient on the cover, begging the anaesthetists for final relief and deliverance. Finally there is some rueful reflection on Albarn's own work: "All I've ever done is tame/Will you love me all the same?/Will you love me though it's always the same?" There follows a "Space Oddity" orbital lift-off and the rhythm section enters, active but purposely muffled, as though they are not quite within our grasp.
Coxon's guitar car can't rev itself out of the ditch as that song segues into "Movin' On," an intentionally garish and parodic distortion of everything Blur were perceived to be about. Albarn seems to be gleefully trampling the song into the mud with his hugely sarcastic and occasionally scary vocal - yes, we're supposed to be moving on from all of this, but The Man won't let us, as evinced by Coxon getting stuck in a reverse loop at song's end.
At the beginning of the final track, the guitarist endeavours to get (re)started, but to no avail; his tyres have probably been punctured. There follows a harsh, dark chamber of hellish catacombs down which Albarn - now narrating or reciting rather than singing, much, as I now realise (having just listened to Saint Etienne's The Night) Sarah Cracknell is in the habit of doing - describes the hospital nightmare reality behind the ruddy front of laddism, oi-oi, up for it; it is a landscape of murder, graffiti, puke and piss (why do I think of the Special A.K.A.'s "The Boiler"?), drunken squaddies and, crucially, stilettos; this could be Colchester in the seventies then as vividly as the nineties now. The music, as such, grinds joylessly with a whining dentist's drill of a car siren, newly stripped of driver, boring into one's head more or less all of the time. Strip the airs of ironic modernity from the "popscene" and you are left with the familiar picture from a generation before.
There is neither hope nor exit in this music. "This Is A Low" at least suggested a horizon, an escape route. "Yuko And Hiro" saw two lovers divided by economic happenstance. But "Essex Dogs" focuses on the mind, which never left home, being methodically dissected and dissolved. It is another superb band performance - you can tell that all four musicians are working exceptionally avidly to render the piece effective - but ultimately the piece can only but render itself into shards, or composites of The Shard. After an interval we hear the ironically-titled "Interlude," another loop of can't-get-started-or-finished guitar and electronica (Stephen Street used some then-new technology which enabled him to loop and restructure elements of the band's jam sessions - and yes, unlike the We Must Write A Hit laboratory techniques previously applied to their songs, Blur came in and played together as a foursome, jamming until something became apparent) and I am reminded of the sounds and minute shuffles that the patient is apt to witness in Dignitas (see Ute Lemper and Scott Walker's "Lullaby (By-by-by)" for further exploration of the latter).
And yet, even if the record had been designed to kill off "Britpop," blur does bear clear signs of hope. The fly-by-night "fans" were free to flee; the album only went single platinum, as opposed to The Great Escape's triple platinum and Parklife's quadruple platinum - but it was the survival of Blur, the band, that was the record's real priority, to dig themselves a tunnel out of gaudy Britannia Rules Again hell (the stylistic similarity of some of "Beetlebum" to the work of The Auteurs did not pass unnoticed). For Damon Albarn it was an opportunity to lay some of the groundwork for Gorillaz, while for Graham Coxon the record was an ultimate vindication of his demands to be noticed and acted upon. For Blur it perhaps provided proof of who the real visionaries of Britpop turned out to be. Me? I came to in the recovery room and was more than happy to munch on a tuna-and-mayo sandwich, having been brought back to life, and all that.
