Damon Albarn had a special hobby as a boy. He shut himself in the room, turned off the lights, turned on the record player, put a cheap synthesizer on his lap. And while he was trying to play it, he watched himself in the mirror. He dreamed of being famous like David Bowie.
At that time, in the early 1980s in the English county of Essex, he was 13 years old. “I looked in the mirror / And I saw so many people there,” he sings about that episode today the fifty-five-year-old on the recently released album of his band Blur. The color of his voice and the structure of his songs remind him of Bowie several times. And of course he’s famous for a long time.
Although Blur, formed 35 years ago, never broke up, they have now released only their second album in two decades. Just since the previous The Magic Whip from 2015, Brexit, the coronavirus pandemic and war in Europe have happened. Nevertheless, the new song called The Ballad of Darren made its debut again at the top of the British charts. The group confirmed their comeback with two sold-out concerts, each for 90,000 people, at the English national stadium in Wembley. At the same time, Blur did not even play there at the height of their fame in the 90s.
So Damon Albarn could easily sing that he did it. Nevertheless, the song about the mirror called The Narcissist is not celebratory. On the contrary: he warns against how the development of creative abilities can make a person drunk on himself. “I couldn’t break away / I got addicted to her,” the frontman sings about fame. In the chorus, he promises that next time he will resist the temptation of his own ego.
How it ended then is illustrated by a literal crescendo: electric guitars add to the distortion until it ends with a disjointed, shapeless sound. Apparently a metaphor for a state where one gets lost in one’s own glory.
The return of Britpop
“That’s when I became a narcissist,” he remembers in the 1990s, a musician whose lyrics are often autobiographical. This is also true of the single The Narcissist: the transcendence that Damon Albarn sings ambiguously about is transcendence, but at the same time it is name his childhood synthesizer. The second stanza about taking drugs describes the course of a real party from early adulthood.
The song portrait of a young artist is also meant to be a warning for the present. “We live in the most narcissistic stage in history. Today you can watch yourself 24/7, whereas before you didn’t have anything to take a selfie with every two minutes.” compares Albarn, who does not own a smartphone.
Of course, narcissism wasn’t the only characteristic of the music to be labeled Britpop in the 1990s. In addition to Blur, the marketing slogan accompanied the bands Oasis, Pulp or Suede, for some time the last era of island guitar pop-music. Just before the massive expansion of the Internet, which then brought a steep decline in album sales, some young Britons experienced a weaker echo of Beatlemania from the 60s.
As well as narcissism, she was also hedonistic: Blur bassist Alex James calculated in his 2007 autobiography that he had spent a million pounds on champagne and cocaine. And Britpop was also characterized by competitiveness or arrogance.
Because the path to fame was still guarded by influential music magazines at the time, stars insulted each other, cheated and got drunk just to get written about. “The press decided whether you were a celebrity. And your status rose and fell with how much a line was devoted to you. That’s why we were constantly on top of each other,” he remembers in NME magazine, drummer Dave Rowntree, how his Blur feud with the better-known Oasis began.
Damon Albarn doesn’t own a smartphone, doesn’t use social media, and doesn’t listen to podcasts. | Photo: Profimedia.cz
In August 1995, at the height of the Britpop wave, both groups released a single on the same day and competed for the top spot in the charts. Blur with a song Country House won over Roll With It by Oasis, although they then dominated in the following years.
The fact is that Blur were not perhaps adventurous in pop music, but still a bit artistic. They began under the influence of the fashionable shoegaze style, after which in 1992 they experienced a disillusionment on a tour of the USA. On the one hand, they didn’t like the sound of then-popular American grunge, that is bands like Nirvana or Pearl Jam, on the other hand, they got the feeling that American culture was beginning to displace the British one. “I wrote those songs about the fact that by blindly imitating everything American, we’re actually buying an empty dream,” interpreted later Albarn their 1993 breakthrough album Modern Life Is Rubbish.
It was followed by excellent records such as Parklife or simply called Blur from 1997, where they partly imitated American indie rock. Blur said goodbye to the millennium with the original album 13, which they worked on with electronic music producer William Orbit and which was very free-form in places.
But they did not develop any further. In the following years, they had a falling out, guitarist Graham Coxon left for a while. Both of their records from the new millennium are more complementary. Pop music also went elsewhere: Radiohead, clearly influenced by America, put an end to Britpop. And British radios were dominated by pure pop, from the Spice Girls or Robbie Williams at the time to today’s Harry Styles or Ed Sheeran.
Single The Narcissist from the new album Blur. Back are Alex James, Graham Coxon, Dave Rowntree, front Damon Albarn. Photo: Reuben Bastienne-Lewis | Video: Parlophone Records
Like from Bowie
Still, the English are experiencing a bit of a Britpop renaissance this year. Both Pulp and Blur started touring again, and in addition to returning to the stage, they released the album The Ballad of Darren. It is full of unexpectedly beautiful ballads, in which guitars, keyboards, synthesizers or Hammond organ are complemented by a string quartet and a brass section.
Damon Albarn points out in interviews that this is the first they’ve recorded together as a band since 13. But perhaps there is also another connection: on the album from 1999, the frontman reflected on the breakup with his girlfriend at the time. The British tabloids relate the unprecedented frequency of new ballads to the claim that Albarn separated from his partner after a quarter of a century. “I was very lost and sad while writing. But that’s okay. You can’t live to be fifty-five and not experience something sad.” comments the singer
To the German newspaper Augsburger Allgemeine he saidthat when in a new song Barbaric he sings about breaking up and warming up soup in the dark of winter, referring to “one very lonely Christmas of mine recently”. He dates another composition to the evening when he had to sleep on the couch in someone else’s apartment. In yet another song Avalon it tells how he moved to the countryside after two decades in London.
Even according to guitarist Graham Coxon, the lyrics are full of references, from musical to autobiographical. Knowing the connections can help to understand: a straightforward rock single, for example St. Charles Square, which Blur immediately began playing at concerts, mentions the real London address where Albarn used to go to buy drugs from a dealer. And that when it screams “Tesco Disco” it’s not rhyming nonsense, but the name of a now-defunct nightclub under a department store on Portobello Road. Allusions form the backdrop of an internal battle, during which a person feels trapped and something dark weighs on him.
Details stand out on repeated listens: the song features two drums, Graham Coxon’s electric guitar creates an attractively chaotic reverb using an effect called slap-back echoAlbarn’s voice is colored by an echo.
Not only this song is remotely reminiscent of the work of David Bowie, who died in 2016. His late era is again approached by songs Goodbye Albert a Russian Strings, in which Albarn’s baritone voice also has a similar color. “I suppose you can clearly hear my relationship with Bowie,” he admits to the inspiration.
The second of the news concerns the Russian war in Ukraine. However, it is not primarily political: Russian Strings tells about escapism, people emotionally and physically disconnected from reality, longing for a touch or a hug in a world that is increasingly virtual and where, in the face of war, they feel more insignificant than before. “It’s about how we can be so closely connected on the one hand, and yet so unable to understand each other,” the singer declared. The central motif at least plays with a double meaning: the strings of the Russian balalaika instrument also represent the imaginary threads that connect us on the web.
The cut end
The introduction also contains a successful figure The Ballad, where Albarn is joined by the voice of guitarist Coxon and the typical sound of a Precision bass guitar, played by Alex James with a pick, is heard a few times. “When a ballad comes for you, it’s gonna look like me,” the Blur frontman sings ambiguously, before reversing the perspective. “When a ballad comes for me, it comes like you,” he adds. It can be a metaphor for separation, aging and death.
They are the most abstract The Everglades dedicated to Leonard Cohen, in which an acoustic guitar strums arpeggios with thumb and fingers. A song without a chorus seems to represent an emotional withdrawal: words and music describe the transformation of a kind of reconciled plea into unwavering defiance. It emphasizes the sound of electromechanical Mellotron keyboards, guitar with a fuzz effect, and especially pathetic strings. Nothing foreign in Blur’s discography, the band is first she used roku 1993 na albu Modern Life Is Rubbish.
The album cover features a photograph by Martin Parr depicting the recovery of a man learning to walk again after a serious accident. | Photo: Parlophone Records
In contrast, the news is dominated by a nostalgic mood. The Ballad of Darren is probably really a breakup album. But it is also a testimony of one life after fifty. Try to take over where a person has taken it with some weight and find meaning in the things or people they have lost along the way.
“Writing these songs helped me to release a certain burden,” explains Albarn. The final song should have a similarly cathartic effect The Heights, which follows the pattern of A Day in the Life by the Beatles, with a massive wall of sound. Maybe those repressed emotions that come to the surface.
The Beatles added a full stop to their explosion: A Day in the Life it ended a magnificent major chord played on several pianos, further embellished in the studio for effect. Blur cut their sound explosion in the middle. The album ends as cut. Maybe one day it will continue.
Album
Blur: The Ballad of Darren
Parlophone Records 2023
