DAMON Albarn bounces into the room in EMI's offices in Ailesbury Road, but before he takes up his usual seated position (basically legs up on the chair, knees practically up his nose the lead singer of pop's most unashamedly British band peruses a map which charts the worldwide sales of EMI's number one artist, Garth, Brooks.
Damon points to a number of territories on the map where Brooks has achieved gold, silver and platinum status. "Got that, got that, got that haven't quite got that," he muses matter of factly. He switches to some more obscure places where the charms of country music have been slow to catch on "Pissed on that, pissed on that," he declares triumphantly. I point to Garth's gargantuan sales in" his home country, and inform Mr Albarn that his band, Blur, definitely haven't even dribbled on that.
"Only in America," he insists. "It's the only place where we haven't... " he trails off somewhat wistfully, then rallies his sales troops. "I mean,, everywhere else we've sold, almost quadrupled what we sold on any earlier record. In Spain, for example, we sold 10,000 of Parklife, and 100,000 on. this one."
"This one" is Blur's fourth album, last year's The Great Escape, which seems to have done the business for them right across the board, but which has once again stalled at US rock's Customs and Immigration. Why is it, I ask Damon, despite a consistent rise to prominence over the past seven years, that the second biggest Britpop band still hasn't got the burger eating hordes of the New World shouting"give us it"?
"It's one of those weird places everywhere else in the world, if you go there and you play good gigs, and you do good interviews ... and you have the records you get bigger and bigger and bigger. In America that just isn't the case, because it's such a big place, and because there's such opposition to bands like us. You know, slightly arty British bands, forget it in America. Forget it."
This opposition to Blur's very arch, English style of pop probably has its roots in America's ongoing obsession with so called "real" rock'n'roll. You could never accuse Damon Albarn of being "rockist" he's the ideological opposite to Noel Gallagher's (of Oasis, rival band in the Britpop battle) cliche heavy, common denominator style of retro in the land where Bruce Springsteen keeps rolling along the highway, and salvation is still found in three chords and the truth, Damon is the anti rock man, who clings to his art pop identity amid a desert storm of generic styles and well worn stances.
"I've never really felt I've had a blatantly British identity, I just have an English accent and I'm interested in talking about things other than the music as some sort of ethereal, nondescript thing that you talk about if you're into rock'n'roll. I don't really know what that is. I know about the components of pop music and I'll talk about them, but I don't know about the music, man."
As he intones those last three words, one can detect the stirrings of a vaguely sarcastic Manchester drawl. So far during this interview, Damon has managed to avoid using the 0-word, but as he continues his ribbing of "rockism" it's easy to spot the euphemistic allusions towards They Who Shall Not Be Named.
"I think what vagely annoys me about bands who will always do that is that they're not being honest, because if they've got any nous, and a lot of them have, they do think about the components, and they do quite cynically put them into effect in the music and in the way they present themselves, but when it comes to actually talking about it, it's all kind of put under this veil of this mysterious `feelgood' that they've got, and that's just bollocks. I just wish people were more honest about it. In America, especially, if you're honest about that side of it, they just don't trust you one iota."
What seems to get Damon's dander is not rock music per se, but this prevailing belief that it must be loaded down with the baggage of rock history to make it seem authentic.
"That's exactly what it is over there. And I want that as well, obviously. I want that authenticity, because records that I love have it. A good Beatles record for example. But don't ever tell me The Beatles didn't painstakingly think and discuss what they were doing. For God's sake, George Martin is an intellectual, he's not a `feelgood' merchant, he thinks about things quite deeply. You can tell just by, his hairline that he's thought about things deeply. He laughs. "He's got a forehead that has thought a lot."
He's also got a knighthood, and The Beatles Anthology proves Damon's point that a lot of thought went into the Fab Four's music. What would a Blur anthology sound like, should such an artefact ever emerge in the distant future?
"Well, it'd be quite interesting, actually, because it is a very organic thing. It does start with me in a studio getting quite a lot of the ideas together, and having a very clear idea, and then taking it in and some of the ideas being accepted by Graham (Coxon), our guitarist, who sort of contributes the most after me. And it gets slightly twisted. And Alex (James) puts his bass on it and it gets slightly more twisted, and by that point it's probably us as opposed to me.
I suggest that, of all the Blur albums, The Great Escape sounds more like the work of one person, playing the piano in his bedroom, rather than an equal collaboration between all four members.
"I think that's got a lot to do with the fact that we. were making that album while our social lives were suddenly rocketing into a totally different place. You know, three weeks into starting that album we won four Brits. At that point we became mainstream, you know, and our lives became mainstream. I was suddenly getting constantly written about in tabloids. And doing that while you were making a record, everyone just became really disorientated. I felt I could have become just as disorientated. But I've got such a strong work ethic, which is why I'm here on a Sunday, because I want a successful gig in the RDS. It's our only gig here and I want it to be good. I probably kept the band all together, and that's probably why there's such a loss of extra instrumentation, because no one at that time including me really had the capacity at that time to concentrate together. Suddenly we didn't know each other again, because we were all going off to different parties, Alex was coming back and saying, oh, I had dinner with Marianne Faithfull and Mick Jagger, and I'd he coming back and saying, oh I've just met, I dunno, Terry Hall and Peter Blake. Every day was like that."
At least you made lots of new friends.
"A hell of a lot of new friends, but we did far more making of friends than we did anything else. It would have been brilliant to have recorded out in the countryside, but we recorded it slap bang in the middle of London, in the social centre of London, and that's why that album came out that way really, because it wasn't really an album of a cohesive band, it was made by people whose lives had gone completely AWOL. And remained AWOL until, really, the beginning of this year. On the arena tour we did last year we were four people who were not really communicating. We've slowly got ourselves back together, and now we're kind of back to what we were like three years ago, just making really good music together."
LET'S go back three years to when Blur really were a "left field, art school band". Their second album, Modern Life Is Rubbish had just been released, heralding a radical change of image from the post baggy, pseudo psychedelia of their debut, Leisure, to a more acute Anglocentric angle Modern Life was Blur's coming out album, a collection of songs which charted the ills of perfidious Albion, and which saw the band nail its Union Jack to the whipping post.
The critics loved it (well, at least this one did), but the pop kids were suspicious. After all, Richey from the Manic Street Preachers had slashed his arm to prove he was "4-Real". All Damon had to do was snap his braces. Ouch.
Parklife dispelled any lingering doubts about Blur's commitment to creating a uniquely British pop sound, and the album succeeded in cutting to the core of modern English life. It is easily Blur's, best album to date, a likeable, listenable, leisurely tramp down the same London streets which The Who, The Jam and Bowie once walked. It was vaguely anti rock, very anti American, and, with the lounge like To The End, even a little bit ante-room.
"Well, what we started off discussing is what I'm anti," says Damon, "but I'm not anti rocking out. If, you can do it in a way that is cool. I mean, Parklife was anti-rock, but now we're back in the dark days of rock. I'll tell you why rock is bad in that sense it's OK for some people, but when you've got a whole body of bands, it's crap, because rock only works when you've got some very special component that sets it above the dirge, which I think, in Liam, Oasis have to a degree, but that's the only thing."
OH, dear, he's only gone and done it. He's said the 0-word. I guess that means no subject is taboo any longer. So what about America, I ask, is it truly the Evil Empire, or will Blur stop slagging the US and sabotaging their cause there?
"I've actually got quite a lot of good American friends now, so I can't be that simplistic about it, because I have had a chance to see the culture in a very different light. And Justine (Frischmann, Elastica singer and Damon's girlfriend) is doing very, well in America.
"I've never really written anything about Americans. I've never really written that many songs about people, I've written about culture. A lot of people find it very hard to get their heads around that one. It seems such an odd thing for someone to be writing about. Culture. You know, journalists especially have a real problem with me, I think the ones who don't like me in the sense that I'm doing what they're doing, but I'm doing it to music, and they find that very confusing."
Sort of like the Guardian with guitars?
"Yeh, not very rock'n'roll, anyway.
But very read'n'write. If anything really motivates Damon to write songs, it is reading. He's been a big fan of Martin Amis, but more recently he has switched his allegiance to Scottish author Irvine Welsh. Indeed, the two seem to be such old muckers, it wouldn't surprise anyone if Welsh ended up doing the traditional guest spot on Blur's next album.
"I've always been quite spurred on by authors, I've sort of serial read certain writers, and it had a big effect on me. And through Trainspotting I got into Irvine Welsh, and I've read everything through to the new hook, Ecstasy. And the thing that struck me more than anything was, whereas someone like Martin Amis had been really excited by his sort of camcorder pornography, with Irvine Welsh it's just really visceral stuff, and that just really got me going. And I'd love to write songs which use words that he uses, not the actual words that he uses it's not just, oh, Damon and his Irvine Welshesque lyrics! It's not as simple as that ... I know him now and I've spent quite a lot of time with him, and I've got no problem with meeting people and learning things from people and using them as tools for helping me get across what I want to say more. My influences tend to be more literary and TV-led than musical. I mean, Graham is the total opposite. He's an audio obsessive and he just listens, listens, listens, listens. So he doesn't even listen to my lyrics sometimes, he just wants sounds. He gets turned on by sounds. That's why it's such good fun when we're working together, because if we're both firing on all pistons we make really interesting music.
