Blur | Spex – September 1995

Translated by Sindy and Mary (thank you!!!)

England’s dreaming! Blur

Is this really just a case of a nine days’ wonder? While everyone, their dog and us is wondering what has become of the great tradition of The Who, Kinks and The Beatles, Roxy Music and David Bowie to The Jam, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and The Smiths, a new generation of bands is celebrating the reestablishment of British pop culture.

At a time when sales in the music business have long been ahead of the ailing steel industry, “Melody Maker: or” New Musical Express “exaggerate current events with nationalist slogans – and the flagship of the revived British self-confidence is called Blur. MARK TERKESSIDIS spoke to singer Damon Albarn about the square made of pop, class consciousness, New Ladism, post-Fordism and initiates a discussion that will keep us busy for a long time.

Damon Albarn takes up his seat on the sofa with his legs wide apart. He looks great. Although he is not exactly muscular, there’s nothing shapeless about his body. He obviously enjoys inhabiting his body. With a certain professionalism, he constantly manages the best mix between his natural elegance and the sometimes exuberant awareness of this elegance. If he swings in the direction of arrogance, even that looks charming and ironic. Surrounded by an almost otherworldly aura of eternal boyishness, he deeply enjoys being looked at. This apparently endows him with androgyny, which ultimately highlights his active masculinity even more clearly. His voice is full and his English is very English. He can’t stand it when PJ Harvey sings gasoline instead of petrol.

Damon Albarn clearly feels comfortable with his success, in the expensive hotel and in his language. Not a hint of uncertainty runs through this lush life. They met Shaun Ryder yesterday, he tells me. David Bowie came into this room two days earlier. Damon had just taken off his trainers and the room was reeking of his feet. “Imagine meeting David Bowie and the first thing I have to say is: Sorry David, my feet stink.” Then he laughs a downright bacchanal laugh. It also tells you with a wink: Man, how many people would give their right arm to be in a room with my sweaty feet.

There it’s sitting, the battleship of the new English pop confidence. Damon Albarn’s sense of wellbeing is currently the sense of wellbeing of the whole English pop culture.The empire is shaken. “Britpop” just saw the light of day (I know, we’ve been calling it that for a long time): Oasis, Suede, Pulp, Supergrass, Elastica, Boo Radleys, Radiohead, Gene, Ash, Echobelly, The Verve, Shampoo, Black Grape, Menswear, Heavy Stereo, Marion – and whatever they’re called – are an endless source of joy and self-confidence for the British.

“Something is happening in the UK right now,” Damon says. “I was at a concert last night and saw Black Grape, the Pet Shop Boys, Take That, Leftfield, and Tricky. Afterwards, everyone sat together and celebrated and smoked dope at the BBC: it’s never happened before. I’ve never seen anything like it. Usually, everyone keeps to themselves. This summer, there’s a feeling running through this country that we’re definitely doing it again … as a culture, as a pop culture. “

“There currently is no country in the world with as many new releases as the UK, there’s loads more than in the States. America is tired, they have to start all over, just like we had to start all over again. Now we feel a great optimism here. All the old household names are interested in new music again. I spoke to Ray Davies a few weeks ago and he told me how much he loves the new Supergrass album, Elastica as well. And then there’s David Bowie. God, I know that is some nasty name dropping… “

SUMMER 1982 REVISITED

The big-mouthed rhetoric of the battleship and the English music press, together with the undisguised anti-Americanism everywhere, bring the summer of 1982 to mind. Punk rock had just swept over tired America and pop bands considered “post” punk England the home of artificiality, postmodernism, humour, control and restraint, camp and broken identities, while the US of the 1970s and the subsequent Reagan era stood for such rotten and disingenuous things like authenticity, identity, roaring out.In addition, practically all bands of 1982 were left wing Labour, peace-loving and represented the leftist anti-imperialism common at the time. Imperialism was by no means wrongly located in the dominant power of the post-war period: the US were synonymous with levelling and colonization. And nationalism (as was the case with Labour) could also mean being against retrofitting and wanting to leave NATO. In the new wave of Britpop, the entire universe of lines of former arguments can be found relatively unbroken.

One is fed up with grunge, the dominance and constant repetition of American “authenticity” roaring, the virility of the actors, pop stars who take themselves too seriously and lack humour. Damon Albarn thinks Americans are “emotional hamburgers”.

Politically, the consensus amongst the members of the new English pop bands is to align themselves with left-liberal thoughts. They support Labour and want nothing more than the end of the conservative era. Damon Albarn was even invited to a talk about the future of English youth by Labour “innovator” Tony Blair, whom he considers to be a “very bright and intelligent man”. Now, I’m not exactly a friend of the mainstream US underground rock of the past few years, I hate Neil Young, and this magazine has consistently delivered criticism on the myth surrounding authenticity or schmock guitar playing. But even if, for example, Faith No More are today’s Genesis of the late seventies and many of the allegations apply, to me, the new English pop does not seem to be either solution to or salvation from these evils. Apart from a few top players, its musical qualities are neither convincing nor are the arguments of 1982 equally important in today’s context.

While pop back then were following the legacy of punk rock and finally replaced a corrupted US hippie generation with their sold utopias, today there seems to be no significant difference in visions between grunge and Britpop.
Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker or others don’t sing on the BBC like Kevin Rowland did 13 years ago: “The only way to change things is to shoot men who arrange things.” The radicalism was probably more on the part of Kurt Cobain. In addition, the US are not very suitable as a general enemy in a time of increasing anti-American cultural pessimism and nationalism. Labour? No more than a Tory branch since slick Tony Blair. Pop music for a man who helped passing the Criminal Justice Bill? What are the reasons for significant parts of the history of the 70s and 80s repeating themselves at the beginning of the 90s in a condensed form without adapting to the changed context? Ultimately, the two “movements” are not dissimilar in their exaggerated confrontation emanating from England. The bands consist of white, mostly male, mostly middle-class (ugh) twenty-somethings, which draw from set pieces from American rock history and English pop traditions using traditional guitar / bass / drum outfits in an encyclopedic and deliberately unoriginal manner. Both times the history of these traditions is rewritten and contrast with the other.

Ex-SST promoter Joe Carducci provided the most coherent superstructure for rock at the time, while today NME – and above all Melody Maker authors cobble the superstructure for Britpop. Carducci insisted on the unity and independence of rock, on the band, the guitar, the physical and the jam.He loathed pop, tin-pan-alley, vocals, songs, arrangements, looks, personality. In England exactly these elements are being emphasized and the history of pop is brought into a seamless continuity: from The Who, The Stones, The Beatles, Small Faces, The Kinks in the sixties to glam to the Sex Pistols and The Stranglers, then to The Jam, Madness, 82, The Smiths , Manchester to today’s Britpop. All roads lead to Camden, the new Seattle. The ‘Melody Maker’ wrote in a special about Britpop that in recent years there has always been a desire to get a band like the Stone Roses again, “who would reunite a music scene blasted into myriad orbits”. However, one would not have expected a dozen to arise. In retrospect, the whole story becomes a unity of English music. Canonisation is hip: “Purity,” as Britpop “theorist” Taylor Parkes calls it. The gestures of rock and pop that have become autonomous apparently float home into the national tradition and into the cultural competition, accompanied by a nostalgia that has become sound and without any vision of a better life. Can that be all? Now what about Blur?

THIS IS THE MODERN LIFE

Blur’s music is based on Damon Albarn’s biographical experiences to a considerable extent, which in turn have exemplary qualities. Damon comes from a Bohemian family (“It was the sixties, man…”, bacchanal laughter). Both parents worked in theatre. While his mother was designing avant-garde stages, his father was well acquainted with Soft Machine and involved in the visual designs of psychedelic experiences that were just emerging. Until the age of 10, Damon and his family lived in Leytonstone, a somewhat rougher part of London. Then they moved to Colchester in Essex. “I went to hell,” says Damon. “Essex… If Leytonstone was like the spiritual home of the 60s, Colchester was that of the 80s. As is well known, Thatcher came in 1979, and her vision of the world was that everyone could get rich quickly. A whole new culture developed and old England died away. A brave, new world emerged. When I moved to Colchester back then, it was still a pretty quiet little town. But in just a few years there were huge shopping palaces, new houses. The American shopping malls landed in England, first in Essex. It was just awful to look at, like a spreading cancer, but it was similar all over Europe. Much of the inspiration for my songs comes from the idea of ​​characters living in this environment.”

Bassist Alex James can hardly restrain himself during this story: “Essex is a completely narrow-minded, bigoted, right-wing, racist, homophobic, xenophobic Shithome. Something to kick against. ”When asked if he thought the development in Essex was that of decay, Damon said he absolutely did, and added that it had become uniform. When I then asked whether it hadn’t been uniform before, he smells the accusation of cultural pessimism and emphasizes that he doesn’t want to go back to the idyllic old days, but only points out the violent nature of the transition. Blur’s first album, Leisure, was a somewhat undecided thing. Damon admits that the desire to become a pop star was based on the Manchester scene, which was at the forefront at the time. Blur finally became Blur with the second album, which broached the issue of the Colchester experience: Modern Life Is Rubbish. A train is depicted on the cover, the eternal metaphor of unstoppable progress. Apparently, the experiences of the Colchester world were still too fresh on “Modern Life” to allow distanced behaviour. The humour and campy theatrics, elements that they claim to have been born with, were only beginning to be recognisable. Only Parklife, the comedy version of Modern Life Is Rubbish, as Damon himself says, was (in an English sense) sufficiently over-the-top: an instrumentation from vibraphones to violins and clarinets to crazy plastic organ sounds met grandiose melodies and landscapes of Britishness influenced by The Kinks / The Who / Small Faces. Add to that mod-attitude, cockney and pictures of the band at the dog race (by the way, Pete Townsend already prepared this concoction on the obscure The Who single “Dogs”). Nick Terry, author for the British magazine The Lizard, has a nice and apt name for it: “Postmodernism á gogo”. Albarn thinks the new record, The Great Escape, is more thoughtful, and was based on the experience of good record sales, becoming famous and worldwide tours. Blur have finally found their concept, and their approach to pop is more and more similar to The Kinks’ method. Albarn calls this “geographical music”. He believes that the Stones were pornographic, the Beatles were demographic and the Kinks were geographical: navigators through places, people, stories.

In each of the pieces on the new LP, the Modern Life, the life of the new middle class, is embodied in characters that Albarn describes or into which he slips. The Great Escape tells of a world in which people are “Top Man” (“He’s Hugo and he’s Boss”), “Charmless Man” (“He knows his claret from a Beaujolais”), “Mr. Robinson” (“ Dirty dealer, expensive car ”), “Ernold Same” (sung by the old Labour lefty Ken Livingstone) or “Dan Abnormal ”(“ Dan is just like you, you see, he’s the meanie leanie”). The caricatures are drawn almost over-the-top and overly clearly, whereby the lyrics are subject to an unmistakable cultural pessimism.Blurs cabinet of curiosities is home to people who see nothing, don’t want to hear anything, sleep, stumble around with the wrong words, slowly become weaker with a sold future, are lonely, bored in the television world and armed with goods to the max. Nietzsche’s “last people”, if you will, with a “little pleasure for the day and a little pleasure for the night”. The Great Escape is a record like a Robert Altman movie, like “Short Cuts”: All these lives are described and all these lives are shit.

Damon Albarn: “But I actually have a very loving look at these characters and am sympathetic to them, even if it seems a little pessimistic. They live a very worldly life, but in the songs it becomes the stuff of fairy tales. Or real jokes. My characters know no less than I do. I write about experiences that I translate into characters.”

You don’t take the point of view of a cynical observer?

“No, I don’t look at them cynically. There’s always something in them. You know, I find melancholy to be quite funny. That’s also the difference between us and the Americans, that we can find sadness funny. They might be capable of taking pleasure in other things, but when it comes to sadness, they get bloody well sad. What I have in mind are frightening, almost apocalyptic characters and simultaneously happy and upbeat melodies. It’s both sad and happy at once. That’s what distinguishes us from that brutal type of sadness of Nirvana. We have more control and intelligence. The tension lies in the melody. It’s not that kind of roaring BWAAAARGH. Restraint.” (hums “Mack the Knife” by Weil/Brecht).

Is there a vision behind your songs?

“Yes, there is. We want to create exactly that type of atmosphere.”

What exactly is the accompanying vision?

“It’s… the vision of a world that is both a very frightening place and all the while one conquers that fear with… (long pause) whistling, it’s like whistling in the dark (bacchanalian laugh). Yes, it’s like whistling in the dark.”

That’s it?

Alex pipes up: “I’ m so glad that that’s finally out.” “Yeah” Damon agrees. “It took me a while to get that out.” 

Do you feel relieved now?

“Yes, definitely.” (laughter)

It’s a nice experience for me.

With “Country House”, the successor of “Boys and Girls”, Blur celebrate their “vision” in the most attractive manner. A “city dweller, successful fella” has had enough of his life and goes to the countryside to revel in nature’s embrace and read Balzac. Blur contrast a very uplifting melody, Damon Albarn’s voice that shifts from being restrained to practically tumbling head over heels. and beautifully arranged background vocals (“Blow me out I am so sad I don’t know why”) with sudden bursts of the city dweller’s latent fear of life that remains a constant presence. The part of the song that I like best is: “For the faint at heart, a new start.” Hoohoo. Who wouldn’t like that? Blur are perfect at it. Even old Ray Davies is taken with it. He emphasises that he has always written about “Englishness” (which for him involved a “class orientation” back then). Ray Davis likes Blur, just as Damon enjoys the lifestyle magazine “Don’t Tell It” – which just ran a feature on the sixties as a stronghold of everything that Is good and important – because of its sense of humour. America on the other hand “is completely different”, because – who would’ve guessed – “they have no sense of irony”.

ERNOLD SAME

What also accompanies the new English pop revival and what Blur absolutely represent is a revival of the British Lad. The Boy Babes of Britpop look fantastic across-the-board and exude the heady aroma of the androgynous Bowie-charm. The Face printed the phrase “Lad U Like” on the cover of their August issue next to such a boy-babe and thus commemorated a changing of the guards within the realm of male beauty ideals. Inside, the “new androgyne dandy” is celebrated, and Jarvis Cocker, Albarn, Menswear become ideals of the “fey boy”, a “deeper and more male narcism mainstream” that definitely orients itself by mod masculinities, but isn’t built on the safe sexual terra firma of traditional gender roles. The new lad is a “changing man, built on shifting sands.” In that respect, Albarn also feels misunderstood by US-Americans. To him, football and lad-culture enter an indestructible symbiosis in England. When he then adds that all English popstars had been football fans, Wolfgang Tillmans, who was present at the interview as a photographer, correctly notes that Boy George, the true “effeminate male”, never cared much for it. Guys like the Boy cross the line for these new lads who supposedly play with gender stereotypes. On the one hand their new self-confidence distinguishes itself from Morrissey’s or Brett Anderson’s theatrics, whose “fey seemed but a front for fear and self-loathing”, on the other hand they differentiate themselves from the unshaven macho men of the eighties, as photographed by Bruce Weber. Tillmans is also of the opinion that the “effeminate male”, who does attack any believed naturalness with a fair bit of confusion and anxiety, disappears once a similar, but less ambiguous role model enters the stage: Suede aren’t as popular anymore, since a clean, hetero replacement has been found with the new lads. The damning of the Bruce-Weber men cannot be separated from the fact that these men had been gay icons. Likewise, The Face shifts heterosexist stereotypes onto gays and lesbians: “Look in ’95 who is peddling the extreme gender stereotypes: the lip-gloss lesbians teetering on the stilettos of feminine glamour, the stalwarts of the proud-to be-gay Old Compton Street (London’s best known cottage, MT) crew struggling with the bar-bells of manliness”. Without taking any risks and in order to reproduce and support one’s own heterosexuality, one takes on “androgyny” and shifts “old” gender roles onto those people who are confronted with them the most and whose parodies precisely are not risk free. True battles, no matter how they are fought, are “old”. It’s about the lad’s new found fun in “a post p.c. age”. Need it be mentioned then that Blur hate Courtney Love? Ladism, pop and football: a similar amount of pages is dedicated to the entirely new interest in women’s underwear as to the subject of “new lads” in the same edition of The Face – though not as uninterrupted (?). Who is allowed to play with stereotypes?

POP AND POSTFORDISM

In the past year, more money was made by the pop industry than by the steel industry in England. This is not meant to give occasion to lament the fact that the music industry is a cutthroat business. These statistics merely reflect an interesting shift that tells us a lot about the function of pop and how it has to be thought about. When pop came into being in the fifties it stood in opposition to steel, that is, if you read steel as a metaphor for a society that was based around production and where everything was organised in a factory like manner. In the post war era, the cultural protective cover that surrounded traditional ethics still functioned relatively perfectly: work, career, competition, performance, possessive individualism and the ideology of a private family and home still set the agenda. But when society entered its more progressive and corporate stadium of consumerism, those values had to be partly replaced. Instead of thriftiness, capitalism now demanded consumerism, instead of frugality, it demanded stylishness, instead of durability, disposable products, instead of delaying wants, it demanded gratifying them instantly. This break was pushed the fastest within youth culture: at first amongst working class youths, and finally amongst middle class youths. Pop was positioned in the midst of this break between work ethics and hedonism. When Blur nowadays make fun of “Modern Life” by reappropriating the mod-attitude, which originally stood for youths from the proletariat and lower middle class benefiting from their new prospects in a hedonistic and rebellious manner, then they stand in the midst of another break. Because after all, pop itself is an integral part of that “Modern Life” and the vanishing of the old steel world. The relevance of pop and the relevance of shopping-malls are inseparable.By now, pop is an inherent part of the indispensable specialism of “cultural mediation” – as are media, design, architecture, art. Such makers of symbols -this ,too, is indicated by the statistics on steel and pop- gain a similar strategic significance for the cultural definition of globalised capitalism as finance- and business-oriented contractors or the STEM cadre. The new English pop of the nineties wants to regain the sentiment of the sixties (when pop doubtlessly was part of social upheaval); without the upheaval, however. It’s about “uplifting”, emotionalisation (“Child, how the veins are pumping” as Taylor Parks wrote in Melody Maker), “fun” and a dull facade of rebellion. That is why Blur can talk about decay while firmly emphasising that they aren’t hidebound. Britpop is a well-made reproduction of pop myths, just like grunge (not Nirvana) was a well-made reproduction of rock myths: for an age during which pop music remains the undefeated established culture. The battle between the Brits against America thus also becomes the battle between products, that require a culturally (and nationally) assimilated set of values. Pop as an international means of communication for the youth, who exchange ideas on the next great vision of the future, turns into a cultural rat race that aims to break the US hegemony over definitions. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that Blur aren’t really good and furthermore I don’t know what they might be able to accomplish for a teen. Secondly, that doesn’t mean that pop isn’t able to articulate anything else anymore. It’s just that Britpop can’t. There’s a reason why the Lads don’t take any issue with supporting a politician who prosecutes the hedonistic hippie ravers with the help of the Criminal Justice Bill. Their reckless hedonism crosses the line of government decreed consumerism once again. On the other hand, the bigmouthed rhetoric of the British press and the basic bias that almost every article seems to have about whatever stupid band is very telling of the confusion that reigns over the halls of pop music. One doesn’t really know anymore what the whole thing is supposed to be. Issuing a judgement over single bands is made difficult, because the standards are all jumbled-up. I’d argue that one of the most important and biggest controversies around pop in the post-war era is taking place. In the USA, this controversy is playing out between “Alternative Nation” e.g. around Spin and the leftist, culture industry approach of the “Baffler”. In England it’s a fight between the NME and Melody Maker, the “social” observations of Savage and Kureishi and the not by any stretch apolitical formalists at The Wire. In Germany, the pop discourse is still somewhat underdeveloped and thus this discussion effectively only takes place between the authors of this magazine. Now, if the new Britpop question focussed solely on whether I’d prefer to drive a Jaguar or a Chevy, I’d pick the Jaguar. If push came to shove I’d even pick a Rover. Blur, on the other hand, are a Rolls Royce, and if that is all one wishes for, then one is well served. If that were everything this magazine wanted – a matter of taste, really – then we could begin shutting up shop. On that note, I’d like to conclude with a lovely quote by the previously mentioned Nick Terry: “’Hitherto’, wrote a little known philosopher called Karl Marcus in conjunction with his literary collaborator Friedrich Savage, ‘the music critics have only interpreted the scene in various ways; the point is to change it’. “