The Future's Been Sold

The Gallagher brothers were conspicuous by their absence, but no- one watching the show would have been surprised not to see them. A state of war had existed between Blur and Oasis since May, when the latter band’s new single ‘Some Might Say’ had entered the national chart at number one. Albarn had decided to pop in to Oasis’s victory party. ‘You know, just to say, “Well done”,’ as he later put it. Music, after all, was not a contest. But someone forgot to tell Liam Gallagher who, on seeing Albarn walk through the door, went right up to him, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Fookin’ number one.’ Albarn, taken aback, decided two could play at that game. ‘I thought, “Okay, we’ll see.”’ When he learned that Oasis was about to release its next single a week before Blur’s, thus sabotaging his band’s chances of hitting the number one spot, Albarn had no doubt as to what should be done. Delaying the release would make it look as though Blur was backing out of a fight, and neither the band nor its record company wanted to be called chicken. Blur and Food Records’ Andy Ross quickly came to a decision — the new Blur single, ‘Country House’, would be released on 14 August, the same day as Oasis’s ‘Roll With It’.

‘Country House’ was, as Albarn later admitted, the kind of song he wrote in his sleep — a catchy pop tune with clever lyrics built around a club-footed rhythm that Alex James had started referring to as ‘the Blur stomp’. The lyrics were in the updated music-hall tradition of ‘Tracy Jacks’ — a cockeyed look at a deluded English gent who decides to spend his way out of his mid-life crisis by buying himself a big old house in the country. It sounded no more like a hit single than a lot of the other clever, catchy pop tunes Blur had recorded for its new album. But when the band played it at the Mile End sports stadium in June, Albarn saw 36,000 arms swaying in time to the song’s jaunty beat and 18,000 mouths singing along to the chorus, and realised in a flash what kind of song he had on his hands. Plans were quickly made to have ‘Country House’ released as a single, and Damien Hirst was commissioned to make a video.

Anyone who imagined, upon hearing that the brightest star of Britain’s contemporary art scene had made a music video, that the result might go over the average Top of the Pops viewers’ head, was in for a surprise; ‘Country House’ was so defiantly lowbrow it made Warrant’s ‘Cherry Pie’ look like In the Realm of the Senses. Hirst cast Keith Allen as the ‘successful fella’ described in the song, and filmed him in a series of bawdy set-pieces with the members of Blur, comedian Matt Lucas, Loaded pin-up Jo Guest, an assortment of page three models, a marching band and a couple of pigs. The video was, in its own terms, a success — Allen was wickedly funny as the rat-race refugee, and Hirst threw in enough comic inventions to keep things interesting. But the impression it gave of Blur as a gang of madcap funsters — the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night let loose on the set of a Benny Hill movie — belied the fact that it came close to breaking up the band.
 
‘Country House’ became a sticking point in an ongoing argument within Blur. On one side were Alex James — playboy pop star and unabashed womaniser — and Damon Albarn — knockabout man of the people. On the other stood Graham Coxon — indie stalwart and political idealist. The video’s casually sexist scenario was bound to appeal to Albarn, with his newfound love of lads, lager and Loaded. It was also, as music writer John Harris has observed, exactly the kind of thing James, Damien Hirst and Keith Allen would have come up with during the course of a big night out at the Groucho Club. But for all these reasons, it stood for everything Coxon disliked about Blur in 1995. As a fan of smart indie-rock bands like Pavement and Sebadoh, Coxon found the video’s shameless populism embarrassing. And as a feminist, he saw nothing funny or ironic in the idea of his band being associated with page three girls and Carry On antics. The fact that he was, at the time, in a serious relationship with Jo Johnson of the riot grrrl group Huggy Bear made him even less inclined to do so. ‘How did Graham take it?’ asked the NME’s Steve Sutherland. ‘His life must have been hell.’ ‘Yeah,’ replied Damon Albarn, ‘I think it was.’

But Coxon’s right-on attitude, like the hardline political correctness of his girlfriend’s band, seemed to Albarn like a leftover from a bygone era, the ‘reclusive indie thing’ of the late eighties. Albarn believed that this outsider stance had more to do with cowardice and lack of ambition than principles, and a growing number of his contemporaries — from the Gallagher brothers to Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker — seemed to agree. By 1993, this idea had been enshrined in music-weekly law, and indie bands that adhered to ideals at the expense of their popularity were routinely ridiculed by press and peers alike. ‘The underground in London just deteriorated totally,’ said Johnson in 1995, reflecting on Huggy Bear’s beginnings. ‘Indie just became an abstract term for a style of music, not ideas or values, ’cause they were all signing to major labels. The reasons for being independent were snorted at.’

Huggy Bear had made itself briefly notorious in February 1993, when the band appeared on Channel 4’s The Word shortly before the start of a UK tour with Bikini Kill. After their interview was finished, the band hung around backstage, and watched a pre-recorded piece about a pair of supermodels called the Barbi Twins as it went to air. The members of Huggy Bear began heckling presenter Terry Christian from the side of the stage, which prompted Christian to refer to them on air as a ‘garbage-y band’ and eventually got them kicked out of the studio.6

The contrast between this and Blur’s appearance on Britpop Now two years later, in 1997, could not have been starker. Albarn didn’t sit on the sidelines and heckle the presenter — he was the presenter, and this suited him just fine, as did the sight of Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker hosting Top of the Pops. ‘Between us all,’ he said, ‘we run the pop culture in this country.’ Britpop had made rebellion redundant. It was no longer a counterculture, but the culture. Its stars were equally at home presenting on the BBC, standing on stage at Glastonbury, running from the Daily Star’s photographers or smiling from the cover of Smash Hits; its hits were just as likely to be whistled by milkmen as shouted by indie kids at Mile End. This, Albarn felt, was as it should be. He didn’t want to be in the kind of band that set up camp on the outskirts of society and poured scorn on normal people and the things they liked. He wanted Blur to be in society, and to give normal people exactly what they wanted. The trick to this, he felt, was to become normal himself, to let go of the idea that his job as an artist was to be a sort of professional complainer, and to learn to love the things that everyone else did — TV, pop music, page three girls, Jo Guest and football. ‘I just want to be a simple person,’ he told Sutherland. ‘I just want to be normal.’

Albarn’s slightly overzealous embrace of working-class culture meant that the subject of class was never far from any discussion of Blur. Now, the band’s chart war with Oasis brought it dramatically to the fore. When ‘Country House’ beat ‘Roll With It’ to the number one spot on 20 August, the Daily Mail’s headline described it as ‘the pop victory that makes it hip to be middle class’. One week later, nursing a pint in the Mars Bar, Albarn was approached by a woman who wanted his autograph. She described herself as a ‘Blur girl’ and dismissed Oasis as ‘northern louts’. In September, when Blur appeared on MTV to perform their new single, they warmed up with a mocking, music- hall rendition of ‘Roll With It’. ‘It’s not as complex as your music is it?’ remarked the host. His comment pointed to a strong subtext of the Blur vs Oasis argument: Blur supporters felt that ‘Country House’ was better because it was smarter and more refined; Oasis fans loved ‘Roll With It’ because it was honest and unpretentious. The Gallagher brothers, as the Stone Roses put it, were proper real; Albarn was a drama student, whose working-class props were part of an act.

Blur’s new material did nothing to dispel this impression. For all its populist sing-along appeal, ‘Country House’ had a cold, detached quality to it that, once the first flush of excitement had worn off, made its victory seem hollow. Sutherland joined a small but growing number of music critics who wondered whether Albarn’s fondness for the third person had more to do with a lack of commitment than a passion for objectivity. ‘You never climb off the fence,’ he complained. ‘It’s a cop- out.’ Albarn admitted he was reluctant to let on what he thought of his sea-changers and wife-swappers, but insisted that this was only a cop- out ‘if you, as a listener, demand some sort of judgement’. Albarn, it seemed, was a modern-day music-hall satirist who felt no need to form an opinion about his subjects. This curious admission revealed the fatal contradiction at the heart of Blur’s music. David Sprague’s Rolling Stone review claimed that The Great Escape ‘solidifies Albarn’s position as sole heir to a tradition of pop as social commentary’. But while the album sounded like satire, it confined its critique to cheap shots at easy targets because its author had no real wish to change the state of affairs. He wished, rather, to change himself and his songs to suit the state of affairs: to lead a normal life and not care about the problems of the world, and to write songs to provide the soundtrack to such a life.

Albarn had realised while touring Modern Life is Rubbish in 1993 that the Americanisation of the world was unstoppable, and had resigned himself to making a living from ‘having an occasional rant about it’. In Parklife, he was still complaining, although he admitted to the NME’s Keith Cameron that he wasn’t really sure why: ‘I just wish I could understand what I was really upset about.’ But the singer soon answered his own question. Discussing ‘End of a Century’, a song which gave voice to his feeling that the coming of the year 2000 would be a huge disappointment, Albarn admitted that he had no real hope for the future, and that he saw no sign that anyone else did either. ‘We’ve stopped being optimistic, as a species,’ he told Cameron. This would explain why the songs in Blur’s catalogue that rang truest were not the perky music-hall satires, but the admissions of defeat and hopelessness. Albarn’s strongest lyrics were those that reflected his belief that the world could not be saved, but that music might offer a pleasant distraction along the way. ‘There are a few important things in life,’ said Damien Hirst in 1994, ‘religion, love, art and science. At their best, they’re all just tools to help you find a path through the darkness. None of them really work that well, but they help.’ Albarn had come to see Blur songs in the same terms in which Hirst saw his ‘pharmaceutical’ paintings — as a consolation for hopelessness.

This strain of Albarn’s work began in 1991 with two songs on Leisure: ‘There’s No Other Way’, and the startling album track ‘Sing’ (‘I can’t feel / ’cause I’m numb / sing to me’). It continued with ‘For Tomorrow’ and ‘This is a Low’, and reached a gloomy crescendo with ‘The Universal’, the third single from Blur’s 1995 album The Great Escape. The song offered a vision of the third millennium in which people pass their time singing karaoke songs and dreaming of winning the lottery without ever wondering what their lives might mean, since The Universal — a cross between Prozac, MTV and Orwell’s Big Brother — has removed the bug in the programming of the human brain that allows it to ask questions. He admitted to the NME that the song was ‘probably very negative’. But while ‘The Universal’ was a nightmare, it was also a seductive one, since it grew from a sincere wish on Albarn’s part to be relieved of the burden of thought, ‘to just allow myself to become a complete ... what’s the word? Ghost.’ This was what the Blur singer meant when he talked about wanting to be normal. He imagined a world full of people whose lives passed in a happy stupor of TV, shopping and football, and longed to dissolve himself in this vast ocean of thoughtlessness. ‘If the days just seem to fall through you well just let them go,’ sang Albarn, as ‘The Universal’s achingly beautiful chorus surged up on a wave of strings and brass. It sounded joyous, but it was the joy of giving up.

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