Mixtape Monday: I'll Watch You Play (A Blur Primer)

Last week, Blur released their first album in twelve years, The Magic Whip. It's not your typical decade-later reunion record. The most consistent thing about Blur has always been their unpredictability. From record to record, from track to track, Albarn and Coxon (the major creative forces behind Blur) have explored wildly varying influences from disco to grunge to lo-fi to electronic to Middle Eastern and African. The Magic Whip feels new and adventurous, but it also feels familiar to Blur fans, because it explores musical neighborhoods the band has visited before. You can hear Parklife ("I Broadcast"), The Great Escape ("Lonesome Street"), Blur ("Go Out"), even some Gorillaz ("Ghost Ship"). As a long time fan, it was nice to revisit some classic Blur sounds in new interpretations.

It was also really, really nice to hear the entire foursome working together again. I spent some time with one of my favorite autobiographies, Alex James's Bit of a Blur, ahead of the album's release. James describes two key songwriting sessions in the band's history, the creation of "She's So High," their first single, and "Tender," their biggest hit on their last album as a foursome. "Tender" wound up playing a role in the band's reunion: it was the emotional peak of their reunion show in 2009. The feeling of that live recording is something I think a lot of Blur fans experienced when they listened to The Magic Whip: something too immediate to be sentimentality, but something familiar nonetheless, like an emotional time-warp. I think it's too late to impart that real-time nostalgia on newcomers, but for those who perhaps only know Blur from their biggest American hit, "Song 2," here's a quick journey through their back catalog, as well as the solo careers and side projects of Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon, book-ended by "High" and "Tender."

I'll Watch You Play (A Blur Primer)

1991 - She's So High

     I was definitely up for playing in a band with Graham, and Damon, if he had the keys to a recording studio, and the other guy on drums. Dave, he was called - Dave the drummer. I went down to the payphone with Graham and we called Damon. 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a bass at the studio, come down on Friday.'
     So Graham and Damon and I met in the studio on the last day of the first term. There were a couple of things that Damon and Graham had been working on together that we bashed around for a while. I showed them some chords that I'd been strumming in my room. Graham started to play them on the guitar, there was a drum machine going boom whack and I started grooving along on the bass that was lying around. Damon started jumping up and down and saying, 'Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant! You're a natural!' He got his lyrics book out and started singing, 'She is so high, she is so high.'
     It all happened there and then. It was instantaneous, shockingly so. Graham wrote the lyrics for the verse, over the same chords, and sang a backing vocal on the choruses. I'd never been in a band with backing vocals. The two of them sang really well together, they'd been doing it for years. We made a tape and I went home for Christmas thinking, 'I'm in the best band in the world.'

2001 - Tender

     It was a biggish choir, about thirty strong. They'd learned the backing vocal and harmony parts and rehearsed them beforehand. They arrived en masse and assembled in the live room. We sat behind the window in the control room and William selected the large loudspeakers, turned up the volume and hit play and record. It was shattering. They nailed it first take. As soon as they started singing, it was instantly and obviously a number one record. I'd never been so certain of anything. It was the best thing we'd ever done. The song was a great collaborative effort between Damon and Graham, too, at a time when their relationship was quite edgy. The harmony of those massed voices and the resting consonance of Damon and Graham's solidarity overwhelmed me to tears. William was in a state of shock again. It was the best we'd all felt for a long, long time.

(Quoted text is taken from Bit of a Blur by Alex James, published by Little, Brown in 2007. The Magic Whip is currently available streaming on Spotify and for purchase on iTunes.)