The big Blur stir - England's pop band

The music of England is making waves all over the world again. And Blur is one of the reasons why. Here we talk with two of the band's members, lead singer Damon Albarn and bass player Alex James

Sumptuous pop stylists Blur are hoisting the Union Jack over a new kind of British empire. This year, a backlash against a recent period of American cultural hegemony in the U.K. has given rise to a resurgence of mod fashions and a clutch of new bands with a wonderfully eccentric English flavor, of which Blur and Oasis are the undisputed leaders. Not content with resisting the Yanks, however, these two groups have been conducting a civil war of their own, duking it out with a ferocity not seen since the Rolling Stones and the Beatles went toe-to-toe in their Chelsea boots. Oasis carries the banner for England's northern working classes; Blur wears the colors of the supposedly softer middle-class south.

Matters came to a head late last summer when Blur - Damon Albarn (vocals and keyboards), Alex James (bass), Graham Coxon (guitars), and Dave Rowntree (drums) - rushed the release of their single "Country House" (its accompanying video directed by necro-realist artist Damien Hirst) to compete with Oasis's "Roll With It." It was Blur who won the battle for pole position on the British charts, capitalizing on the cartload of awards they won for their 1994 album, Parklife.

Writing triumphant, near-vaudevillian narratives, the fawn-faced Albarn loads Blur's songs with nostalgic references that frequently evoke English cinema in the vein of A Taste of Honey (1961), Quadrophenia (1979), and Withnail & I (1987) and that recall often-neglected aspects of the modern British experience. I met with Albarn and James recently as the group was preparing to bring the just-released Great Escape (Virgin) to the U.S., where the question is: Will the band's Anglo anthems bring skeptical crowds to their feet?

ALISON POWELL: Right now it seems you are famous less for having put out great records than for being in direct competition with Oasis.

DAMON ALBARN: At this particular moment, yes.

AP: There were the Stones and the Beatles in the '60s, T. Rex and Slade then the Sex Pistols and the Clash in the '70s, and in the late '80s the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. It's as if the British press is determined to turn pop music into some kind of soccer cup final.

DA: Yeah, I think cup final's the right word. Soccer - or football as we call it - and pop music go hand in hand in Britain. They're the two national obsessions. However, we were the ones who moved up the release date of our single so it would come out when Oasis's did. It was a gamble. We were just raising the stakes, which is what we've always done. What surprised us was the way it gave the tabloids an ideal opportunity to stage a sort of north-versus-south, middle class-versus-working class conflict, and I think they all anticipated Oasis would win. All it illustrated for us is that the idea of class is old-fashioned. I can understand how petty it must seem over on this side of the Atlantic. But in Britain it's a very prevalent, shameful condition that if you use long words and have an opinion other than the very obvious, you're considered to be middle class and therefore not quite as authentic as somebody who has a smaller vocabulary.

AP: Your lyrics have real specificity; they're full of references and observations. What do you think Americans will make of them?

ALEX JAMES: Pop music goes all over the place. Our stuff goes from being very specific to being very camp in general, with big sweeping gestures that are quite comic and then are suddenly toned down to a neurotic Tuesday afternoon on the Bayswater Road in West London.

AP: How do you feel about being lumped together with other bands who are being credited with instigating a mod revival?

DA: That's just unnecessary. Mod only means something to us because we love the Who, the Kinks, and the Small Faces. We've worked with [actor] Phil Daniels, who is the ultimate mod symbol because he was in Quadrophenia. But that's it.

AP: Why do you think mod keeps coming back?

DA: There'll always be a degree of sentimentality about mod in Britain because the mid-'60s were the first time British youth could actively misbehave. I don't think the British were as liberated by rock 'n' roll as Americans, but once mod started, it was all the right things. It was sexy, it was good-looking, and it was fun.

AP: Has the recent dominance of U.S. culture in Britain had an impact on you?

DA: Yeah, we're very conscious of it. During our second American tour I woke up one day in Minneapolis, and I drew open the curtains of my hotel room. It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and there was this sort of futuristic ye olde English Sunday scene with this duck pond and a new church that was built to look like an old church. And in the middle of it there was a respectable Stepford family unit: a slightly overweight father, mother, adolescent son, pigtailed daughter, and a dog. It was almost like a hallucination. But it suddenly made me want to be more British than ever.

AP: Why?

DA: It was just that I saw this scene in Minneapolis and thought, This isn't real for any of us. It's that idea that America has hijacked a lot of nostalgia and resold it to everybody in one form or another.

AP: But isn't there nostalgia in your songs, too?

DA: We're also a by-product of that same condition. That's why when we come over here and I sing about these things, as a sort of once-removed cousin, I'm as pissed off as the Americans are about what's happening. It's our traditional way of expressing our distrust and anger to tell stories that in some way express that.

AP: Do you feel that your role is increasingly to put a hot poker into things?

DA: Yeah, but not to the exclusion of the music. You've got to put out a good album.

AP: What do you think is the currency of English bands in America?

AJ: Actually, bugger all in the last five years.

DA: I can't work out why Green Day are so popular here, why they've sold so many records. They're extraordinarily bland. You think, Well, they're young and energetic, but when I read the lyrics to their CD, I virtually hit my head against the wall. How can people like something so dumb? It's hard to understand because at home we've got such a strong tradition of thoughtful lyrics.

AP: The English literary tradition has always fed into British pop. It's as if a book can influence songwriting as much as other music can.

DA: Certain books give you a feeling. London Fields [by Martin Amis] inspired Parklife. That book changed my outlook on life. I wanted to behave like [yobbish protagonist Keith Talent] had. The songwriters that I love are the ones that create characters like that.

AP: Your music sometimes seems like a soundtrack searching for a movie.

DA: Yes, but I find it very difficult to write for films. The hot British writer of the moment is Irvine Welsh, who wrote Trainspotting. I've just written music for the film that's been made of that book, but I couldn't find the right words. It's so difficult when somebody's already done it.

AP: One thing about your lyrics is that they show the world for what it is, like a lot of American music in the '70s did. Current pop music in America lacks a real perception of the sadness of adult life.

DA: At the moment, American songs are very much about isolated teenage angst. We speak about the whole of experience, and always have, and we never wanted to sing about anything else. But it is strange because our audience is very young. On Top of the Pops [BBC TV's weekly pop-charts show], all the little girls at the front were singing along to "Country House": "Now he's got Morning Glory / Life's a different story / He's reading Balzac / Knocking back Prozac," in a sort of youthful teen-angst way. It was touching.

But no, you don't find that wider perspective very often these days. Our philosophy is to make music that is the equivalent of whistling in the dark.

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