Blur: A Short History of The Band

When Blur were called Seymour, back in 1990, the only label that would touch them was Food Records, owned by ex-Teardrop Explodes man Dave Balfe. He was interested in what he called "weird pop", meaning music that was not mainstream but still made the charts. Image was of course important to such bands and the band that became Blur has struggled to overcome the constraints of image-led alternative pop due mainly to the sheer quality of their output and have successfully shaken off the constraints of stereotypes that come from mainstream chart success. They do things their own way - a luxury reserved for bands that have simply made it and can dictate their own terms.

Seymour were an arty noisnik pop band with added jazz. This, as you would expect, led to image problems. Labels weren't interested in bands that were difficult to package. So Food Records came along and said they'd sign the band if they changed their name, to Blur, and went into the studio with a known producer who would take one of their songs and add a looped dance beat to fit in with the prevailing baggy scene. So they sold out from the beginning. They sacrificed their "art" for success. And it was the best decision they ever made. The result was the track "There's No Other Way" and it became a big UK hit. It was followed up with the Top 10 album "Leisure". They became a phenomenon in Japan. This led them to being retained by Food as baggy started to self-destruct. But Blur leveraged this selling-power to insist on making a second album, one that flew in the face of current music trends. The album was called "Modern Life Is Rubbish" and it was the start of the band's love hate relationship with the changing nature of modern Britain. The music surrounding them was grunge, shoegazer, sonic monotony. Blur became more direct in their song writing. They, unknowingly, redefined what it meant to be a Mod and as they did they killed the nuances of Mod subculture. They took Mod iconography and subcultural values and ticker-taped it across the whole of Britain.

"Modern Life Is Rubbish" was, as the title suggests, about the tedium of social and cultural life in post-Thatcherist Britain. The album was the first of their All-things-English Trilogy. However, their songs were misunderstood. They sold well as people saw them as celebratory vignettes of modern life. Yet, in reality they were cultural critiques on mundanity and modernity, they were packed with irony, and ultimately criticized the lives of the very people who couldn't get enough of the band - the mainstream, the likely-lad culture, the class system, marriage, tradition. Tradition. The bedrock of modern living. Not the usual themes for a pop band. The tunes were so good Blur could get away with anything. Albarn has said "I don't think anybody understood the irony, Modern Life Is Rubbish and Parklife were angry records. The Great Escape was cynical, too cynical... being cynical isn't enough. Music is something that should speak for itself, straight from the heart. It took me a long time to understand that." A harsh assessment of a wonderful canon of songs. Yet it does point to the reasons why the band shifted from the middle of the pop road to the sonic experimentalism of their subsequent albums.

Their fifth album, the self-titled "Blur", looked towards British and American indie music for its inspiration. Bands like Pavement, Sebadoh, Guided By Voices - the very bands that the members of Blur were actually listening to. Its guitarist Graham Coxon who comes to the fore. His fingerprints are all over the next batch of Blur albums. He's been called the most underrated guitarist of his generation, but maybe he's just the best guitarist of his generation. Always innovative, always experimental (even during their heady pop days of Parklife there were squalls of sonic innovation), and always understated. So the band went leftfield. Of course, they could afford to having made a fortune as stars of the mainstream. This, inevitably led to decreasing record sales, and ultimately led to the tensions between the headstrong Albarn and the band's new artistic director Coxon. It was at this time they had their biggest US hit with the written in 10 minutes punk pop gem "Song 2". The irony was still there looming large. They followed "Blur" with the album "13" which was full of sad, noisy, and sometimes beautiful songs fueled by Albarn's breakup with long-term girlfriend Justine Frischmann. Then the Blur bubble burst. Coxon left the band as work started on the 2003 album "Think Tank". The media speculated it was due to his heavy drinking and subsequent eractic behaviour. The album sounded as though someone had forgot to add the guitars when mixing.

A lot is written about the effect Nirvana's "Nevermind" album has had on the world of pop. Mainstream music was never the same. Labels began looking further afield for new talent, the boundaries of what would sell had shifted. Blur influenced things differently. They showed it was possible to subvert the industry from within, to criticize and attack the luxury of apathy that is modern life. And its simple how they did it. They were just a great pop band. A great weird pop band.