Thinking Men / Blur Interview ­ Back to School Issue 2003

THINKING MEN.

They have survived 14 years, 7 albums, the loss of a guitarist and, perhaps most impressively, the rise and fall of Britpop. They are, of course, BLUR and with the release of the sunny, funky Think Tank, they reclaim their position as one of the most fascinating and evolutionary bands in the world. T. Cole Rachel catches up with Damon Albarn, Alex James and Dave Rowntree poolside in sunny Palm Springs...

So, at this point in your career, how do you approach getting back together to make a new record? What was your plan this time around?

Alex: The only real way to make music is just by plugging in your instruments, sitiing down, and just doing it. I don't think there's really any way to plan an approach, really. We just turn up on day one and hope that Damon has done some songwriting first. We turn up, plug things in, and we go.

In the context of your previous records, would you say Think Tank is the hardest record you've ever made?

Damon: Oh yeah, but probably also the easiest. I mean, it took a year to make and it was a long, long journey, but there's an ease and a playfulness to the recording that we haven't really had since we the very first recordings that we ever did. It was all very back to basics. We essentially built the studio that we recorded this record in and it enabled us to kind of start from scratch, as it were, and also become total control freaks.

You've had a long and rather thorny relationship with America over the years. How is it being here now?

Damon: God, well, it's been a long arduous journey, but it really feels like it's the right place to be now. It always felt so incongruous being here and being so...british. At the time, to our sensibility we weren't all that "british" seeming, but I can see in hindsight now that we really were. . .we were british on an almost "monty python" level.

I saw you in 1995 in a tiny club in Texas just after The Great Escape, right at the height of international Blur mania, and I was thinking how weird that must have been...

Dave: Oh no, that tour...

Alex: Fuck me, come on...that little place in Texas?

Damon: Oh yeah, that was a bit odd. You know, to be playing stadiums in one place and come over here and just play small clubs. I think now we've just learned to become oblivious to the environment we're playing in. We've become more introverted, really, so it's more about the quality of the music at any given moment and not so much the environment. I don't really care less about what size venue were playing anymore. I think we finally got over that kind of, you know, "young mans ego" sort of thing about how big a place you need to be playing in...

I remember that show in Texas as being really, really fun...

Damon: Yeah, absolutely, but I'm sure we resented it at the time, having to play such small venues. But, like everything else,doing all that made us what we are today, all of those experiences. And since we started there have been many, many bands who've made us say, How have they managed to crack America? How are they playing in huge arenas and we're still playing little clubs in Texas? How is that possible? You just never know about these things. It's like the old Aesop fable about the hare and the tortoise...

Alex: ...but we are the hare and the tortoise

Dave: ...and Aesop

(laughter all around)

It's interesting to me that so many bands of your era seemed to fizzle out eventually for one reason or another, while you have pretty much been able to do whatever you want, right? It's to your credit that you managed to make records that were interesting and relevant and all somewhat different from each other. How difficult has that been to do?

Alex: Well, you know, everybody gets to do decide whether they're going to do what they want or just do what they think is necessary. Obviously, you do make certain sacrifices and possibly you pay for it in certain ways by not always doing the most obvious commercial thing, but....well, for example, that means that we had to spend 1995 with the record we wanted to make, which happened to be about a very big house in the country, and playing that around America to people just going , What the fuck?

Damon: Oh, that song, that song....well, it was supposed to be. . . .

Alex: It's fucking brilliant!

Damon: Well, it was supposed to be a kind of "nightmare vision."

And people totally missed that?

Damon: Yeah, and I think we totally missed it as well because of the arrangement that we ultimately put into it. It was the idea that fame and celebrity is just the most incredibly confusing thing to experience, and it's an incredibly confusing song. It was actually derived from sort of the dark recesses of my psyche, but it came out as this very odd, kind of defining or deadening moment for British music, and it's just frustrating that it was also at the moment that Oasis kind of became Oasis...right on the back of one of our least focused tunes. If you had put them against one of our other tunes and they wouldn't have stood a chance. It's true. And we were really at a particular point and we'd been going at it a lot longer anyway and it was at this weird point where we were kind of trying to work something out, it was like an experiment really, whereas they were very much in full flow. And at the time there was this kind of insane judgement passed on us that we were in some way kind of from a different planet or something, especially from their perspective. It's really taken a long time and a lot of hard work to get to a point where . . . where it's all kind of self-evident, or whatever, and I don't really have to say anything more about it. Thank god, because the last thing I want to spend the rest of my life doing is justifying myself in the context of Oasis. Do you know what I mean? After a while, it's just ridiculous.

So, it's been about 14 years now that you've been doing this. How does it feel to still be in Blur and making music together?

Alex: God, it's impossible to answer, really...

Damon: Hmmm....

It must be terribly satisfying, right?

Alex: Oh, no it's not. (laughing,)

Damon: Yesterday I went and bought a pedal steel and a bass piano, today I woke up and went for a walk under some palm trees, listened to some lovely music... I really can't complain, can I?

Dave: It's lovely.

Given that that there has been so much NOT to love over the past year, what have you really, really loved?

Damon: I've loved watching my daughter grow up . She's three and a half and does these funny dances, moves her hands a certain way, puts little moves together...I really have loved that.

Dave: Well, I do find myself having a strange urgency towards social interactions as of late, especially with the way the world is going. I'm more interested lately in meeting all sorts of new people.

Alex: What do I love? . . . big... easy... silences.

T. Cole Rachel