AnnieRowntree

Living in your tree

Noisey采访 part.2

“Out of Time” is the heartbreaker.

Oh absolutely that’s the big success of that album. It had a video that seemed to capture the public sentiment at the time. There was a documentary on TV about two people in the British navy and it was a very lonely doc because whenever one was home, the other was out on duty and vice versa. They didn’t even really see each other. It must have been heartbreaking for them, a young couple in love. The director took the doc and cut it up in a way that focused on the woman and talked about her experience. It came out during a time of global conflict and a lot of people were feeling uneasy about what was going on. The doc had double meanings, not overtly, but you could read it in two ways. It captured the spirit of what was going on in the world, and also the spirit of what was going on with the band.


5. LEISURE (1992)


The baggy sound was pretty popular when you were starting…

Yes, the record company had had big success with Jesus Jones and Parlophone had signed EMF who had even bigger success. I don’t want to point fingers, but it appeared to me at the time that they copied the production techniques of Jesus Jones, which Dave Balfe, the record label boss had come up with. It was a novel idea at the time to use dance samples in a rock band. That was all Dave’s idea. To make that work in an indie context was an interesting challenge. He signed Jesus Jones who were called something else at the time—Camoflage! They were a straightforward rock and he signed them on the condition that they took on these sample ideas and it actually worked extremely well. They had some big hits including “Right Here, Right Now” which went to number one in the States.


That’s crazy that Balfe was pushing that. I had no idea.

Well Balfe was an established musician in his own right. He’d been instrumental in the Teardrop Explodes and basically came up with their sound. And then he ran Food Records and helped come up with the KLF thing, that’s what Dave Balfe did—the unsung genius.


Then comes Blur. Live we were pretty crazy in those days: We’d smash things up and you never quite knew how or when the show was going to end. It would end when all the instruments were broken. I think Balfe signed us thinking he could develop this idea further and he was constantly trying to get us to use dance samples and baggy beats. To some extent at the start we went along with it and “There’s No Other Way” and “Bang” are the most obvious examples of that. We spent most of our career detesting “Bang”  and wondering how on earth could we have put that on the album, let alone the second track. When we came to listen to it [when rehearsing for the reunion shows] we realized it actually wasn’t that bad. Songs like “Fool” were much more representative of stuff we were doing before we signed and “Come Together”—you can imagine instruments being smashed at any point during that song. It’s incredibly fast and aggressive and counterintuitively happy but with frustrated lyric over the top.  


In the early recording sessions of that album we were still listening to the record label and they said, “Put samples in, you’ve got to use keyboards, you’ve got to sound like Jesus Jones and EMF, that’s what’s selling. This EMF thing is going to be massive, you’ll be riding on their coattails.” By the end of the album we were like, the samples and baggy beats are crap.


As a compromise we took the bits we liked of the keyboards, which actually ended up being more the hip-hop side of keyboards and sampling, rather than the Manchester dance side of it. Not that we sound like hip-hop records, but we were much more attracted to the way keyboards were being used in that kind of context rather than the way the keyboards were being used in the Manchester dance context.


Wasn’t it during this album that you had that disastrous debut tour of America?

It wasn’t the tour of the States that was soul destroying it was the circumstances under which we were doing them. Our manager had stolen our money, so we had to tour the States for months to pay off our debt. We had made our first album, first rung on the ladder, and instead of being able to capitalize on that we were essentially bankrupt and had to sing for our supper.


4. PARKLIFE  (1994)


This was of course the one that propelled us into the mainstream. Actually what it did, bizarrely was switch the mainstream so that we were part of it. It changed what mainstream music was in the UK. Up until then indie bands like us didn’t get into the real charts: You had the indie charts and the pop charts and never the twain shall meet. The indie charts meant you’d sold 20 records and the pop charts meant you’d sold 20 million. Parklife went to number one in the UK, we had a bunch of number one singles, and all that happened because of that album and what Oasis were doing. We changed people’s perceptions of what mainstream pop could be—it didn’t have to be Kylie Minogue. I think us and Oasis made albums good enough to kick off something new, and then everybody was like, “Oh yeah we like music that sounds like that and there were all these other bands doing stuff as well.” That spawned the many-headed beast [Britpop] that we all came later to regret, but it kicked off a new kind of career for us.


It drove Graham mad. Up till then if you went out to a restaurant or a nightclub and there’d be a gaggle of paparazzi outside, you’d walk past them completely unmolested, because they were waiting for Kylie. It was in that brief moment in our career when our nights out were accompanied by the flash of cameras and the shouts of the paparazzi. Our audience changed a lot over night too—they were much younger, more girls, more screaming.


Did you like that?

It was weird, you know? It didn’t upset me like it did Graham and equally it didn’t fuel me like it did Alex. To me it seemed like we’d always been doing what we’d been doing, and that was kind of true, but suddenly we’d become media darlings. There was one paper that ran a cartoon about us called The Blur Story—about the formation of the band—as if were a boy band! If it’d happened on the first album we’d have probably been alright about it because we’d have been willing to pose topless and put on cheesy grins and say how we wanted to find the one true girl we wanted to love, and how we make music for ourselves and if anyone likes it, it's a bonus! [He’s joking.] But by Parklife we were grumpy touring musicians who wanted everyone to piss off, to some extent, so the boy band thing landing on us seemed weirdly inappropriate.


Come on though—you were still young. You were in your mid-20s at that point.

I was 30, the others were mid to late 20s. We weren’t young, young. I still looked like I was 40, but I was 30!


What about the songs?

“Parklife” was a huge track obviously. We got in one of our heroes Phil Daniels who we knew best from this film Meantime by Mike Leigh in which he played a kind of proud, but disaffected man who grew up on a council estate struggling with the meaning of life if you didn’t appear to have a life, and what could it all possibly mean. Also, of course, Quadrophenia, the archetypal mod film with the soundtrack by The Who. They were our two favorite films, the ones we’d watch on the tour bus and knew most of the lines off by heart. We were slightly dumbstruck when we got him in. I think I wandered over and said hello, but no one else said anything to him! [Laughs.] He was very nice!


And “Badhead.” I love that song.

Me too. A hangover song—the first of many hangover songs. It’s got one of Damon’s beautiful melody lines that only he can do. There are some great tracks on there. In general I think that album just had loads of singles on it which is why it did as well as it did. “Magic America” is really hooky and it’s got “This Is a Low” on it which we pretty much finished every Blur show with from then onwards because it evokes such intense emotions.


3. 13 (1999)


The vocal sessions were done in Reykjavik, but mostly the sessions were done in studio 13, a big old building split up into light industrial units, so you’d get somebody making handbags, next to somebody preparing shoes, next to somebody making websites, and then this incredibly loud recording studio jammed in the middle that pissed everybody off. It lasted a few years before they got booted out, but that was a great place to record. We named the album after the studio, but people are so weird about the number 13. If you believe in these things 13 has always been rather lucky for us. We were also kind of tempting fate: Come on then! Do your worst.


You also worked with William Orbit on this record which changed the dynamic I’m sure.

We worked with him and Damian LeGassic which isn’t well known. He was the engineer. William would come in and loosely supervise the sessions by day and then Damian would turn up in the evening, take the material back to his studio and cut and paste and edit things into shape and bring it back in the morning and we’d carry on. It was a different way of working for us. It was much more freeform, much more improvisation. There are a lot of what I call studio noodles on that album like on the track “Caramel”—where you record lots of ideas, somebody else edits it into some kind of format, and you record more ideas over it, and again and again. “Coffee and TV” is a very traditional Blur tune, “Bugman” is another studio noodle—there was freedom in doing that. Damian doesn’t get the credit he deserves: most of the editing came from him and William, a lovely guy, was basically supervising jamming sessions rather than acting like a traditional producer. It was very different to how Stephen Street had worked. [Orbit] was much hands off.


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