Blur: Classic Or Dud

Oh der blimey. It reminded me of Frank Zappa's contention of:

"In the older days you had old guys who would say "Hey, I don't understand it at all, but maybe the kids do... Let's put it out and see", whereas later on there'd be some hippy dude who would say "Listen, I know what the kids like, and they won't go for this."

Fast forward, and it's "I know what this band should be doing, I was in the Teardrop Explodes!"

http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/9333/tumblrlsx3l5xbyl1qi71lo.jpg

http://www.challenge.co.uk/pointless_support.jpg

"And that's a Pointless Answer!!!"

xp Although he was wrong to resist the new direction on MLIB, Dave Balfe also told them they needed to go off and write a couple more singles. They came back with For Tomorrow and Chemical World. That's not bad A&Ring.

Says something about Damon's skill and ambition that instead of throwing his toys out of the pram he conceded to Balfe's demand with exceptional results. A band led by Graham would have told him to fuck off.

Yeah, I'd like to hear how MLIR Mk1 would have been like. Probably pretty rubbish. Starshaped was going to be a single, IIRC.

'Star Shaped' was gonna be a samba if Andy Partridge of XTC had had his way!

I completely agree that there were some good things that came out of Blur's relationship with Food Records, but the impression I get is that I don't think they truly understood what they had in Blur until Parklife started selling.

The scrapped version of Blur's second album (which was meant to appear in 1992), I imagine would have had some tracks on it that got demoted to B-sides, such as 'Bone Bag' for example.

Dug out Modern Life Is Rubbish for a listen earlier and enjoyed it immensely after not listening to it for a fair while. I love the way that Damon puts his chord progressions together - oftentimes he'll throw a chord in that doesn't seem to quite 'fit', but his vocal melody will make it fit. I always like the slightly uncomfortable way that the chorus for 'For Tomorrow' ends on G major, and the verse starts on C# minor, for example... but it works. Also, those verse chords to 'Star Shaped' strike me as being slightly unusual, as well as the chorus to 'Villa Rosie'...

The chords to Coffee & TV seem to be all over the place

Coffee & TV was not written by Damon, natch.

</pedant>

Coffee & TV was a co-write between Damon & Graham. Damon wrote the chord changes, and Graham wrote the lyrics. I remember Graham admitting as much in an interview around the time Blur did that gig where they played all of their singles in order.

And yeah, 'Coffee & TV' is another one of those where you look at the chord progression and think "this shouldn't really work", but it does! Quite unusual, that one.

Who wrote Best Days? Was that Graham?

god, listened to TGE yesterday at work, and all the sad songs - fade away, best days, he thought of cars, yuko & hiro - slayed me.

watched the doc a couple of nights ago on itv4 - the last hour of it anyway - and thought it was marvelous. loved damon's comment at one point about oasis, that they seemed like bullies, like they'd been in more fights than damon & co had at school, and thought that was a choice observation. and they spoke a lot about how TGE sparked such a backlash. i remember it at the time, and it seemed to me that a lot of that backlash had to do with that record somehow breaking the covenant of pop at the time - they'd made the 'big time', and yet their next LP was a set of songs about how "success" (on various different levels and of various different kinds) can be really alienating and depressing. in context to the destructive effect of the Britpop phenom on music at the time - redefining "success" for indie bands as having to have some kind of commercial success quotient, now that nominally "indie" bands were scoring chart hits - it seemed a pretty potent step against the prevailing trends - like, 'we made you big, how dare you say yr not enjoying it' [thinking specifically 'other people break out in a cold sweat / when you say that these are the best days of our lives'. i really love those songs for that reason, i think, though whether thats because i'm a glum old 'success-has-made-a-failure-of-our-family-home' type glummer i don't know, but there's something vulnerable and wonderful about that record that surfaced only rarely in Oasis, and maybe only in the champagne supernova.

Here's something - Britpop always gets slated as a self-congratulatory New Labour bandwagon, but Labour weren't voted in until '97 - way after Britpop was over and done with. So Cool Britannia's a false collective memory in many ways. Blur had moved on to set their sights on America by '97. So really this goes to prove that the Life trilogy was as much a critique of British life - not the jingoistic celebration bands like Blur often got accused of.

As I remember it, Britpop died when everyone took their copies of Oasis' Be Here Now home on release day in August 1997, put it on their CD player for the first time and immediately went through all the stages of grief.

That's about how it happened for me:*(

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/apr/07/damon-albarn-gorillaz-heroin-blur
Interesting

Sorry, Damon, even taking heroin can't make you interesting.

i don't think taking heroin has ever made anyone interesting, but i thought that was a great feature.

But wasn't that the hook of the story, though? Ooh, Damon went through some kind of artistic epiphany in the late 90s. That's when Damon was taking heroin. Heroin caused the epiphany and made him, y'know ~interesting~. Except it didn't, it just made him self-indulgent in a different kind of way.

I suppose I should just not read interviews with that man, because I am that bitterest thing - the Ex-Blur fan.

the hook of the standfirst isn't the same thing as the hook of the story - for one thing, it was probably written by a sub-editor, and not john harris, and if i were subbing the piece, i would definitely have put it in the standfirst as it is definitely a kinda 'big deal' revelation that's new and news. but yeah, aside from some woolly talk about it 'opening him up artistically' there wasn't much to it.

do you still hate all of em, kate? even lovely wee graham??

Really good interview, I thought. Harris gets knocked here, but I think the problem was that he'd ceased to be engaged by much music long before he'd made the transition from music writer to politics writer. Give him a music subject he's passionate about and he writes a fantastic piece.

1) DON'T. USE. THAT. NAME. You're getting a flag post for that, because I have asked about 50,000 times for people on this board not to use that name so at this point I'm not buying "Oh I didn't know" any more.

2) can't fucking stand that child-man

i'm gonna reserve my observations on Harris for the John Harris RIP thread

Of all the Britpop characters I think I hate Damon the most. Even more than Noel and Liam and their hard lad-isms. Even more than Brett and his bisexual fop act (which he's thankfully dropped). Even more than Jarvis's constant self doubt and guilt. Even more than (non Britpop example) Bono, because at least Bono's still arrogant so I can take his BS with pinch of salt.
We've all met students who've taken a year out to go travelling, and come back just completely full of shit. Damon is like the ueber example of that:

"It's shocking in the sense that you think, 'This is really hard work.' But it's very practical. And extremely honest, and very productive. And if you could translate that humility, and ingenuity – well, there are lessons for all of us."

Fuck you Damon. People trying to scrape a living by sorting through the often toxic and harmful waste generated by the First World is not 'honest' or 'productive'.
For once I would like an interview where Damon stands up and shouts "YES I TOOK HEROIN!!! I WAS BORED AND/OR STRESSED OUT!!! BUT IT WAS A STUPID THING TO DO!!!". The only thing more boring than listening to a junkie is listening to an ex-junkie trying to come up with excuses why he became a junkie. Excuses that somehow skirt around the central point that he decided to take heroin.
And all this 'last ever gig' shit? Trust me, Blur are going to be chugging along like Status Quo. Except nowhere near as exciting.

apologies mb, hadn't read any of the threads where this has come up or i wouldn't have used the name. flag away though, i really don't give a shit.

there's nothing in here that's new is there re the smack phase? there was an Observer piece that Miranda Sawyer wrote way back in 1999 that covered the whole Bettelebum/ 13/ Heroin thing. even in the No Distance.. film the interviewer starts off by saying the heroin stuff is 'well documented'. re Gorillaz; seems he can never be Graham's mate AND Jamie's mate at the same time.

oh really? i wasn't previously aware that damon had done smack too... and i missed the first ten minutes of no distance when i saw it on tv (what a great movie, though.)

i remember reading '3862 Days' (blur biography) around the time of 13 and thinking it gave the impression they were grown up and no longer drank/did drugs. but i guess denial is fairly common w/ addicts. that narduar vid of them from 2003 made it fairly obv. they were off their face.

So, I give him my interpretation of what changed his approach to music: that he had an experience common to a lot of musicians from bohemian backgrounds. For all its grave dangers, that drug – perhaps in moderation, if such a thing is possible – sometimes opens up a side of them that they didn't know existed.

"That's an astute observation on your part," he says, "and I wouldn't disagree with it." For some reason, he then shakes my hand.

tsschhhhhh, what a pair of bawheids

the self titled blur album is quite good tho iirc, probably the only thing of theirs i could listen to

snoball otm

Take your meds, "MB"

I was hoping they might do one last tour, it's a shame. Can't make it to Hyde Park though I'd love to! Canada used to get so much love - alas.

Not OK.

Look, FFM, that is SERIOUSLY not an OK thing to say to anyone. That's beyond offensive, beyond insulting and just seriously, not an OK thing on any kind of a level. How dare you, how ablist, how derogatory, and just generally a hugely asshole thing to do.

You have no right to make the kind of assumptions that you just made in that post. Not OK on any level.

And no, this is not me being "mentally ill" - this is me being genuinely angry that someone, in 2012, can make that kind of a red-flag mental-health-shaming ablist post, about me, or about anyone. I can't even tell you how out of order and out of line that was.

Just based on my own experience, when my Dad decides he doesn't need his meds we all get a lot less "hey could you please not use my name?"s and a lot more ANGRY. TYPING. YMMV of course. You can call me whatever you like, I encourage mentally ill people to take all the advantages given to them.

Cunt.

All you keep doing, when you keep making these kinds of posts, FFM, is exposing your own bigotry.

Your attitudes towards mental illness are clearly what are colouring your perceptions of my actions. About whether I'm annoyed because I'm asking a reasonable request for the 50th time, or if it's because *you* have decided my annoyance is ~clearly~ evidence of mental illness and my need to be ~medicated~ to have my behaviour suit you. You do not have the right to make that diagnosis.

Using your knowledge of someone's disability in order to delegitimise their stated preferences, with a nice side order of condescending insult, that's Daily Mail territory of bigotry and disablism.

That hurt. You might be the kind of person that would be *proud* to know that you had actually caused me to spend half an hour crying and shaking with anger, because this kind of disablist attitude is something that has fucked my life over and again. But that's what happens when you use that kind of language and that kind of disablist attitude casually and carefully. You genuinely hurt people. And that makes you the asshole here.

Not me, asking for the 50th time for people not to use government names on the internet.

You have every right to think I'm a horrible person or an asshole or whatever - but when you start bringing people's disability into it, that makes you a fucking bigot, and this kind of bigotry has no place in this forum.

Boom, I've seen you ask people not to use your name - and I don't. I suppose Stevie hadn't. You overreacted, again. There's nothing logical to debate. I do apologize for the pills comment, it was out of line. But so is your insistence of believing everyone sees every post you make. I don't believe he did that out of malice and I do believe after several years posting under your real name/several aliases between which there is one common thread by which people think of you, and you'll need to exercise more patience in getting your message out.

I'm not sure what business of yours it is, how I talk to my friends (especially as Stevie doesn't seen to have taken offence) and you don't seem to have come on this thread to do anything else except take me to task for not conforming to your politeness police ideas of what constitutes an "overreaction" or not. So you're right. It's not logical of *you* at all to be on this thread except for some beef.

But you have shown your colours, in terms of, all the things you could have said - that I was curt, that I was short-tempered, or impatient, that I might even have been rude, all things that might be true, depending on how you look at it - but you didn't choose to say any of those things. You chose to make a deliberate slur against a disability.

So, having displayed such flagrant bigotry, I hardly think that you have *any* right to lecture me on politeness or how to react to people.

(what's going on?)

(oh i see its one of those things I don't get as i only
look at ilm and not other boards on ilx. okay kids carry on)

McNormal and Chips to thread please

1) DON'T. USE. THAT. NAME. You're getting a flag post for that, because I have asked about 50,000 times for people on this board not to use that name so at this point I'm not buying "Oh I didn't know" any more.

fucking blur thread

fwiw that Grauniad article is hugely worth reading, and shines an obvious light on 13 that tbh I'm ashamed I never picked up before. As an added bonus I didn't know Rocket Juice & the Moon (a) was a thing (b) had been released before seeing that article, so cheers Brutish.

i thought it was common knowledge him and justine had indulged in smack

~as had others in elastica hence the reason one of the band once clean discovered god ~

also, that article just confirmed why i was not overly keen on plastic beach.
i.e. not enough jamie h involvement for me.
this became all the more obvious once a real band was formed to tour the album.
however, as for the videos not working, i would disagree.
the video for the last gorillaz track (the one for the shoes), is a gorillaz trainspotter joy.

McNormal and Chips to thread please

― Morrissey & Clunes: The Severed Alliance (PaulTMA), Saturday, April 7, 2012 10:28 PM (43 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

LOL!!

i thought it was common knowledge him and justine had indulged in smack

y but I didn't consider that 13 would be that explicitly about heroin

Justine F's take, from (yikes!) 10 years ago http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2002/mar/10/life1.lifemagazine4