IT'S enough to make you feel nostalgic for 1995: in the plush surrounds of London's Cafe Royal, the four members of at was once the biggest band in Britain shake their heads and smile wryly when informed that events two miles up the road are going to knock them off tomorrow's front pages, television shows and radio bulletins.
Blur are launching their new album in front of the world's media but the world's media have different ideas and they're off doorstepping Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit, who just happened to decide they were going to get married on the very same day, but later decided just 40 stay in abed instead. "It's a conspiracy," says an earnest young man yakking into a mobile phone, which seems very funny until you look out the Cafe Royal's window and see a familiar figure walking along the street outside - it's the other Gallagher brother, Noel. Better stick around, there might be a fight.
London town sure ain't big enough for both Oasis and Blur and a very changed Damon Albarn, Blur's lead singer, now freely admits that it was he and he alone who picked the fight in the first place and yes, he admits, Blur lost and lost in spades. Yes indeed, it was Damon in a fit of hubris who decided, in the great. Battle of the Bands debacle in 1995, to bring forward Blur's Country House single to compete in the same week with Oasis's Roll With It, thereby defying the music biz convention, instigated in the 1960s by the Beatles and Rolling Stones, that big bands would keep their single release dates apart for reasons of ego and/or money.
Blur won that battle but lost the war and have since decided to opt out of the debate altogether by "going underground". Excuse the pun Damon, but what's the story? "I went through the male menopause," says the 29 year old multi millionaire, before going on to add that their last album, The Great Escape, was "a huge mistake" and the County House single is "an embarrassment". Gosh.
Deflating the hyperbole and decoding the drama, what happened to Damon Albarn was that two years ago he found himself caught up in a tabloid feeding frenzy that was slowly corroding his soul and forcing him to compromise on his much cherished values of personal integrity and intelligence. Born to arty, liberal parents he went from being a drama student to the frontman of a Brechtian art punk rock band who seemed destined to languish in an indie music ghetto until a movement called Britpop prompted him and his band to reinvent themselves as Union Jack waving, born again cockneys who would sit around the of Joanna down Bethnal Green way singing songs that wouldn't have been out of place in the musical version of EastEnders. Fuelled by a hatred of the then dominant American music, particularly grunge, he facetiously remarked at the time that he "rubbed his hands in glee" when Kurt Cobain died, realising that his 15 minutes of fame had commenced.
Blur dragged Britpop onto the pages of the broadsheets, put them on the BBC and ITN and provided the all important counterweight in the battle of the bands", with Oasis. They were huge - but, when fans travelled halfway around the world and camped out in his front garden and when the tabloids starting taking pictures of him when he was on holidays, and quite possibly when Oasis went on, to outsell his band, he began to, crack. "I started to have panic attacks" he says, "really bad panic attacks that lasted for 18 months, and something had to give. It was never my intention to compete at that level, to aspire to that level of tabloid infamy. I just felt that somewhere along the way the whole notion of intelligence was being lost, both in terms of us acting intelligently and the music being intelligent. I had a look at the Fame Thing, dabbled in it, made a few mistakes and then got out."
There is also the never to be underestimated aspect of the British class system. One of the main selling points behind the tiresome Blur vs. Oasis debate was the manner in which it crystallised the British class system. Blur were nice middle class boys, most of, who had been to either drama or art school and were the very personification of a Home Counties upbringing. Oasis, by their own admission, are products of a council flat, glue sniffing, car stereo stealing background and always had that "mad Irish" dimension to tap in to when they saw fit. When Noel Gallagher said in an interview that he wished Damon would die, it was time to move on, tinge to remove himself from the picture and as the new album, simply called Blur, testifies, time to lose the screaminteenybopper fans and release an adult, arty and thoroughly uncommercial album.
Leaving Britain to wallow in the "pub rock" of his competitors, Damon looked anew at American music and went down the road that leads to Damascus. "I started to listen to a lot of the contemporary low fi American music because I was so disillusioned with the direction music was taking in Britain," he says. For a man who bused to worship the Anglo centric sounds of the Kinks and rubbished all things American in his lyrics, this was a 180 degree about face, particularly given his massive disenchantment with bay's Britpop bands.
"American bands like Pavement have a class background and ban attitude that is much closer to, ours than any other British bands have," he says. "By that I mean Pavement are slightly over educated, quite at home with discussion and they're just middle class - I was never uncomfortable with my middle classness. Britpop helped us get where we are now with this new album because we were forced to seek out our true contemporaries rather than convenient bedfellows."
Little wonder that when Ardal O'Hanlon was presenting Top Of The Pops last week and reading out the charts he made the deliberate mistake of saying that Beetlehum (Blur's No 1 single) was by a band called Pavement.
The conversion was complete when they recorded the album in the American fashion - "It was very un English," he says. "The way people like Beck (another yank) and Pavement record is all about freedom and I know that our demos sound like that. So, I wanted our records to sound like that too. I knew it was within us. It's an attitude, going into the studio, doing it, not, worrying about it too much. And once you're in that frame of mind, you write songs that are a little less fussy." Grunge? "Let's just say it's more gritty than grungy," he says, "I didn't want strings, brass and harmonies on this album, I wanted something visceral, I wanted f---in' rock music. If it felt right, we wouldn't try to tidy it up like we've done in the past (a real low fi trait). A few of the songs are us jamming. Vocals were done through tiny amplifiers and we f--ed about with them even after that. One of the songs on the album, Strange News From Another Star, has four drum kits playing on it, things like that . . ."
What about the teenyboppers? "Well, with this band being the way we are now, people will just shave to get used to the idea that they will have to start using their ears a bit more."
Lyrically too, he's a changed man. Gone are the "London character" songs from Parklife and The Great Escape, no more suburban tales about Mr Robinson and Ernold Sames. If the lyrics on Blur's last two albums were heavily influenced by the writings of Martin Amis, and particularly London Fields, this new album owes more than a bit to Douglas Coupland (Generation X, Shampoo Planet, Microserfs). "With the lyrics, I didn't try to be witty, I just went with my demo instincts. The feeling was that they should be unpredictable, slightly out of control and constantly changing - if necessary, even uncommercial."
Damon was badly hit by the death of journalist Leo Finlay, a Dub liner, late last year Finlay did more for Blur than many people recognise. "Leo was a close friend and he was the very first person to ever write about us. At one stage in the early days we asked him to be our manager but Leo, being who he was, told us to "f--- off". When he got married we played at his wedding, the only wedding we've ever played at." When Leo first saw Blur (then called Seymour) play in a pub many years ago, he rang a friend of his who ran a record company and got him down to the gig. His friend was so impressed he offered Blur a recording contract. "We're playing a gig in London tonight to launch the album and it's going to be a benefit for Leo's wife Jane and their two kids," he says.
AND Oasis? "They are so anti us. Probably because they're top dogs now and that instils a profound in security. . . There was a ridiculous thing at Cannes last year where Noel turned up at every party I went to and we stood at opposite ends of the room." He sighs.
"When he finishes by saying that the new Blur sound may "shock a lot of people," you sense that he's happy at last. Happy to be away from Oasis and the pressures of keeping up with the Gallaghers, happy to be away from Britpop and happy to be back doing the sort of experimental, cutting edge music that first prompted him to join a band. New Blur, new danger.
