10:58am Thursday 18th March 2010
By Andrew Mosley
MUSIC on television is a drab affair these days.
In the name of progress live performance has all but disappeared from our screens, replaced by, if you are lucky, presenter-free video rotation on Sky channels such as Kerrang!, NME TV and Q. Oh, and Jools Holland.
The likes of The Tube, The Whistle Test, The Oxford Road Show and even Top Of The Pops may not have been ideal, but without them many legendary TV moments may never have happened.
The Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays’ invasion of the Top Of The Pops studio, regular bouts of swearing on The Tube, the absolutely hammered Pogues on The Whistle Test, Nirvana on The Word, the Sex Pistols being interviewed by Bill Grundy and The Smiths on the South Bank Show — many of these programmes were not pre-recorded and liable to the behaviour of unpredictable bands.
Blur appeared somewhere towards the end of all these programmes and featured in the media frenzy of the legendary battle with Oasis for the number one slot one particular week in 1995 when their Country House beat the Gallagher brothers’ Roll With It to the top slot.
Times have changed and so have Blur, back for a reunion last year after going their separate ways amid some acrimony and misunderstanding.
It’s interesting to hear Damon, Alex, Graham and Dave’s take on their time at the top, given a decade or so to reflect. Since the original split, Damon’s produced some excellent solo work and with Gorillaz, Dave decided to stand as a Labour councillor, Graham’s made quite a few solo albums and managed to lose a fair amount of the bitterness he took with him from Blur, while Alex has reinvented himself as a dairy farmer and food writer, living in his very own country house in the process.
The reunion gigs, which included a Glastonbury headlining slot, began at the East Anglian Railway Museum, and gradually each member realised how good it was to be back.
It’s an informative programme, in which Damon reveals the frustrations he went through in the early days while working in a croissant shop to pay for rehearsal rooms, to which his fellow members regularly failed to turn up. “I went back to our house and Alex was sitting there playing Blue Moon on the piano. I was so ****** ***.”
Graham talks about his near-breakdown and frustration at the direction Blur were going around their height of fame Park Life period, attracting teeny-bop audiences instead of the chin-strokers he wished for at the time. I remember seeing them play Exeter University around this time and the audience was packed with people who all left as soon as Park Life had been performed.
The band talk about how their rivalry with Oasis actually annoyed them — especially the working class versus “poshos” argument, given that they weren’t really all that posh.
The old footage is good and time gives you a real opportunity to analyse what was going on. Far from being cocksure Cockneys (they were from Colchester, anyway), a TV interview of 1990 shows them as nervous and insecure, outsiders looking in on the Madchester baggie scene.
In 1992, Damon asks an American audience: “Has anyone here ever heard of the M25?” They hadn’t, but would soon have heard of Blur, whose Song 2 broke them in the States.
It was around then that the boredom of long tours started to kick in, bringing with it excessive drinking and in fighting — Blur were on the way out.
However, Damon railed against the situation and the Nirvana-inspired grunge scene by creating a quintessentially English sound and, by and large, accidentally inventing Brit Pop, a label they did not particularly want to be connected with.
The Modern Life Is Rubbish album was brilliant and suddenly Blur were, well, Mod-ern. Park Life was followed by a darker Blur after the band attempted to change direction, but the wounds that had developed between the members would take a long time to heal.
The reunion gig begins with Damon spotting Will Self near the front and staring intensely at him — “All I could think was that I should string together the biggest words I could think of.”
And of Glastonbury, Alex says: “I think something changed for ever during Tender.”
Damon adds: “As a kind of healing moment, I feel very proud to have participated in that. It was beautiful. ” And it was . . .
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