The story of Blur

From Colchester to Goldsmiths

Damon Albarn was born on the twenty third of March 1968 in Whitechapel, east London, the son of Keith Albarn, an artist who later ran the Colchester School of Art, and Hazel, a theatre set designer. The household was bohemian and Quaker, and the records on the turntable were blues, Indian ragas and African music. When Damon was nine the family moved to a new estate near Colchester in Essex, and he never felt he fitted in. At the Stanway comprehensive he was, in his own words, really unpopular, but he loved drama and music, and one of his compositions won a heat of a national Young Composer of the Year contest.[1]

It was at Stanway that he met Graham Coxon. Graham was born on the twelfth of March 1969 in Rinteln, West Germany, where his father Bob was a clarinettist and bandleader in the British Army. The family lived near Derby before settling in Colchester. Damon's first words to him were a jibe about his shoes, but the two bonded over the Jam, the Beatles, XTC and Madness. They acted together in school shows too; in one operetta Damon played Jupiter, king of the gods, and Graham played a servant further down the cast list. Graham started out playing saxophone on Damon's songs before switching to guitar in little Colchester bands.[1] [2] [3]

The drummer came from the same town. Dave Rowntree was born in Colchester on the eighth of May 1964 to a viola player and a BBC sound engineer. He later described growing up in an alcoholic family on a council estate built on the old town rubbish dump. Music became his escape. He learned percussion at a Saturday music school where Graham's father also taught, played in a brass band, and spent his teens in punk pub bands. He trained in computer science and was working as a programmer for Colchester Borough Council when the call came to join Damon's band in London.[1] [2]

By 1988 Damon had quit drama school and enrolled on a music course at Goldsmiths College in London, joking that he only wanted access to the student bar. Graham was studying fine art there, alongside future stars of British art such as Damien Hirst. Through Graham they met Alex James, a bassist from Bournemouth who was studying French and who had caught the music bug from the Beatles film Help. Damon's group Circus already had Dave on drums, and when Alex joined in December 1988 they renamed themselves Seymour, after a J. D. Salinger story. They played their first gig in the summer of 1989, in the goods shed of a railway museum near Colchester.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Seymour becomes Blur

In November 1989 Andy Ross, a talent scout for the small label Food Records, saw Seymour play and brought the label's founder, David Balfe, formerly of the Teardrop Explodes, to watch more shows. They loved the band but hated the name. Food drew up a list of alternatives, which Graham recalled included The Shining Path, and the band picked Blur. Food signed them in March 1990. That spring they toured Britain supporting the Cramps, and in October 1990 their first single, She's So High, reached number forty eight. Its sleeve showed a naked woman riding a hippopotamus, and Balfe himself directed the video.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Finding a follow up was hard until Food paired the band with the producer Stephen Street, famous for his work with the Smiths. The result, There's No Other Way, was released on the fifteenth of April 1991 and reached number eight. Suddenly Blur were pop stars with bowl haircuts, part of a London clique the press nicknamed the Scene That Celebrates Itself. Even Kurt Cobain told the NME it was his favourite British song of that year. But the third single, Bang, stalled at twenty four, and the debut album Leisure, released on the twenty sixth of August 1991, reached number seven to mixed reviews. Damon later called it awful.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then the money ran out. The band discovered they were sixty thousand pounds in debt, largely through mismanagement, and took on a new manager, Chris Morrison. To earn their way out, Food sent them on a punishing tour of the United States in 1992. It was miserable. America was in love with grunge, audiences were indifferent, and the band drank heavily and fought each other with their fists. Homesick, Damon played a tape of the Kinks over and over, and said the only happy memory of the tour was listening to Waterloo Sunset. He began writing songs that sounded deliberately, defiantly English.[1] [2]

The single they released as the tour began, Popscene, was a blast of punk guitars and brass that the band thought was the best thing they had ever done. It reached only number thirty two. The Beastie Boys, guest reviewing for the NME, suggested it would sound better played at the wrong speed, and Graham later blamed Nirvana for killing it. Back home, the press had moved on to a new band, Suede, whose success enraged Damon. After a drunken, shambolic gig on the same bill as a triumphant Suede, Blur were in real danger of being dropped. Damon's answer was a manifesto: if punk was about getting rid of hippies, he said, he was getting rid of grunge.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Modern Life Is Rubbish

Food's boss David Balfe was sceptical of the new English direction, but he let Blur work with Damon's chosen producer, Andy Partridge of XTC. The sessions at a studio in Crouch End fell apart, and Partridge later recalled Balfe praising the mixes one night while stoned and calling them rubbish the next day. A chance meeting brought Stephen Street back, and the album was finished in December 1992. Balfe told the band they were committing artistic suicide, and Food rejected the record for lacking hits. So on Christmas Day Damon sat down and wrote For Tomorrow, a song about young Londoners lost on the Westway.[1] [2]

The American label SBK wanted changes too, including a new recording with Nirvana's producer Butch Vig, which Blur flatly refused. The album's title came from anarchist graffiti stencilled along Bayswater Road, and its working title had been Britain Versus America. The sleeve used a stock painting of the steam locomotive Mallard, chosen precisely because it was the last thing anyone expected from an alternative rock band. The lyric sheets even included Graham's handwritten guitar chords. Modern Life Is Rubbish came out in May 1993 with a sound built on the Kinks, the Small Faces and the Jam, full of brass, strings and sharp little portraits of suburban England.[1]

A publicity photo caused trouble. It showed the band in mod and skinhead clothes beside a mastiff, with the words British Image 1 sprayed on the wall behind them, and parts of the music press saw it as nationalistic. Blur answered with British Image 2, a camp restaging of a pre war aristocratic tea party. The album reached only number fifteen and sold about forty thousand copies at first, and in America just nineteen thousand. But the band felt they had found themselves. That August they set off on the Sugary Tea tour, played a storming set at the Reading Festival, and started trying out the songs that would become Parklife.[1] [2]

Parklife

Back in 1990 Damon had told journalists that Blur's third album would make them the quintessential English band of the decade, adding that he intended to write it in 1994. He was almost exactly right. Short of money, the band went into Maison Rouge studio in Fulham with Stephen Street in August 1993 and recorded quickly. David Balfe told the management the album was a mistake, and soon afterwards sold Food Records to EMI. The record was nearly called London, with a fruit and vegetable cart on the cover. Instead it showed racing greyhounds, and it was released on the twenty fifth of April 1994.[1] [2] [3]

The first single, Girls and Boys, was inspired by a holiday in Magaluf with Damon's girlfriend Justine Frischmann of Elastica, watching young Britons pairing off in tacky nightclubs. Alex summed up the sound as disco drums, nasty guitars and Duran Duran bass. Dave does not actually play on it; he programmed a drum machine instead and later said it was his favourite Blur song for exactly that reason. It reached number five in Britain and number fifty nine in America, still their highest American single. Graham found the success a shock, and Damon said he had his first panic attack shortly after it entered the chart.[1] [2]

The title track brought in Phil Daniels, the star of Quadrophenia, who had been lined up to read a poem on another song. Damon asked him to speak the verses of Parklife instead, and the take was done in about forty minutes. Daniels shrewdly chose a share of the royalties over a flat fee. Released in August 1994, it reached number ten and became a terrace favourite, still played before Chelsea home games. Elsewhere on the album, This Is a Low was finished the day before Damon went into hospital for a hernia operation, its lyrics lifted from a shipping forecast handkerchief Alex had given him for Christmas.[1] [2] [3]

Parklife entered the chart at number one and stayed on the album chart for ninety weeks, eventually selling just over a million copies in Britain, making it their biggest studio album at home. It was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, losing to M People. At the Brit Awards in February 1995 Blur won four prizes in one night, including best British group and best album. Graham said it was the moment they went from an arty left field band to a pop sensation. Parklife is still seen as one of the records that defined Britpop, alongside Definitely Maybe by a Manchester band called Oasis.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Battle of Britpop

Work on the fourth album, The Great Escape, began at the start of 1995, with Damon writing more third person tales of lonely, misfit characters. Its lead single, Country House, was a mocking portrait of a city high flier who retires to a mansion in the country, inspired, Damon said, by David Balfe, who had done exactly that. The video was directed by Damien Hirst, an old Goldsmiths contemporary, with the actor Keith Allen as the businessman and a Benny Hill style chase. Graham hated the video's sexism and would only take part if he could dress as a milkman.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Relations with Oasis had soured through 1995, and when Food moved the release of Country House to Monday the fourteenth of August, the same day as Oasis's Roll With It, the press turned it into a heavyweight title fight. It was framed as north against south and working class against middle class, and Damon even appeared on the evening news. Oasis mocked Blur as chimney sweep music; Blur called their rivals Oasis Quo. On the chart announced on the twentieth of August, Country House won, selling two hundred and seventy four thousand copies to two hundred and sixteen thousand. On Top of the Pops, Alex wore an Oasis T shirt.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The victory did not feel like one to Graham. At the record company's champagne party at Soho House he felt forced to celebrate, and he later said he tried to jump from a sixth storey window, and that it was Damon who talked him out of it. The rivalry also turned poisonous. That year Noel Gallagher said he hoped Damon would catch AIDS and die, a remark that still shocks. Years later Damon shrugged it off and said he liked Noel's sense of humour. The Great Escape was released on the eleventh of September 1995, sold one hundred and eighty eight thousand copies in its first week and went straight to number one, with glowing reviews.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then Oasis released What's the Story Morning Glory, which sold millions around the world, and the mood flipped. Blur were recast as inauthentic middle class pop stars, and the press joked that they had won the battle but lost the war. Alex later said that Damon went from the people's hero to the people's prick. At the 1996 Brit Awards Oasis won the big prizes and sang a drunken version of Parklife, retitled Shite Life. In February 1996, when Graham and Alex missed a mimed Italian TV appearance, a cardboard cutout and a roadie stood in for them. A Q interviewer found the band on the verge of a nervous breakup.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Scaring people again

Graham was drinking heavily and resented Alex's playboy lifestyle and Damon's control of the band. In protest against Britpop he immersed himself in noisy American indie bands like Pavement, and he wrote Damon a letter saying he wanted Blur's music to scare people again. Damon, who had once dismissed those tastes, agreed it was time to change. Sessions began in London in June 1996 and moved to Reykjavik, a city Damon had fallen for after seeing black sand beaches on television. For the first time the band simply jammed, and Graham was given a much freer hand.[1] [2]

Damon's writing turned inward too. He later admitted he had used heroin from the height of Britpop, saying he found it in the front room after coming home from tour. The first single, Beetlebum, was about the drug and his experiences with Justine Frischmann. Food feared it was commercial suicide, but on release in January 1997 it sold one hundred and twenty thousand copies in a week and went to number one. The album, simply called Blur, followed on the tenth of February 1997 and also topped the chart. Years later Damon called heroin incredibly productive for him, but also a cruel, cruel thing that isolates you.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The album's second track was a joke. Damon had a slow acoustic demo with a whistled chorus; Graham suggested they play it fast and loud, and told Damon to pitch it to the label as a single to blow their heads off. To his surprise the executives loved it. Song 2 lasts two minutes and two seconds, reached number two in Britain in April 1997, and turned Blur into a band America finally noticed, helping the album go gold there. It opened the video game FIFA Road to World Cup 98, the first licensed song in an EA Sports game, and it still echoes around sports stadiums.[1] [2] [3]

After a nine month world tour, Damon's relationship with Justine Frischmann ended in late 1997 after a last holiday together in Bali. He called it a spectacularly sad end. Blur replaced Stephen Street with William Orbit, whose remix of their song Movin' On had impressed them, and Damon said they needed someone like a psychiatrist. The sessions in 1998 were tense. Dave said people failed to turn up or arrived drunk and abusive, and Alex compared himself to a sulking George Harrison. The album 13, named after their studio, came out on the fifteenth of March 1999 and went to number one.[1] [2] [3]

Its first single, Tender, a gospel song about Damon's heartbreak with the London Community Gospel Choir, reached number two. Coffee and TV was Graham's song, written about giving up drink and relaxing with coffee and television. Its video, starring a lost milk carton called Milky searching for Graham, won awards, but the single stopped at number eleven, and Chris Morrison argued that some sales had not been counted. On the second of October 1999 Damon became a father when his new partner, the artist Suzi Winstanley, gave birth to their daughter Missy. The next year EMI released a best of album chosen partly by focus groups.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Think Tank and the split

By 2001 the four were drifting. Damon had launched Gorillaz, a cartoon band created with the artist Jamie Hewlett, and its first album sold over seven million copies. Graham had been making solo records since 1998. Alex formed the novelty group Fat Les with Keith Allen and Damien Hirst, whose football song Vindaloo reached number two. In November 2001 Graham checked into the Priory clinic for twenty eight days to be treated for alcoholism; he had his last drink on the seventeenth of that month. Blur began recording the next album without him, and Damon was hurt that Graham had not told him he was going into rehab.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Graham rejoined the sessions in early 2002 and spent what he called a few awkward afternoons recording. Then Chris Morrison told him the others did not want him in the studio. When Graham asked when he could come back, the answer was not really at all. He went to the toilet, looked in the mirror and thought he was being sacked, though Morrison insisted he was not. Graham has since said that undiagnosed anxiety drove his drinking. In September 2002 Morrison confirmed talks about the band's future, and the producer Fatboy Slim told a newspaper that Graham had left.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The remaining three recorded in a barn in Marrakesh and then in Devon, with the producer Ben Hillier and help from Fatboy Slim and William Orbit. Damon, a pacifist, had been campaigning against the coming war in Iraq, and in early 2003 he was due to speak at the huge London peace rally in Hyde Park but was too emotional to deliver the speech. Think Tank, with a cover stencilled by Banksy, was released on the fifth of May 2003 and went to number one. Graham played on just one track, the closing Battery in Your Leg. Simon Tong, formerly of the Verve, took his place on tour, and Damon later called those shows rubbish.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band then went quiet for years. Alex settled on a two hundred acre farm in Oxfordshire and became an award winning cheesemaker and writer. Dave, who had quit drinking in 1993 but later developed a cocaine habit, became notorious for a hostile 2003 Canadian TV interview with the journalist Nardwuar, which he has repeatedly apologised for, blaming a cocaine comedown. He got clean, trained as a criminal solicitor and became a Labour activist. Damon launched the Good, the Bad and the Queen and the stage show Monkey. In 2004 Graham said being in Blur had felt like being dragged around the world on someone else's megalomaniac trip.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The eccles cake reunion

The thaw came on the twenty second of October 2008. Damon was preparing an Africa Express show at the Koko venue in Camden when Graham turned up unannounced. They went round the corner, shared an eccles cake, and Damon said it took about thirty seconds for everything to be fine again. Alex got a call telling him to go and see Monkey because Graham and Damon had been hanging out, and found the two of them arm in arm. In December 2008 Blur announced a reunion show in Hyde Park for the third of July 2009. It sold out so fast they added a second night, around one hundred and thirty thousand tickets in all.[1] [2] [3] [4]

They warmed up in June 2009 in the same railway museum near Colchester where they had played their first gig twenty years earlier, then played Goldsmiths College, which the Guardian's critic gave five stars. On the twenty eighth of June they headlined Glastonbury, and the Guardian called them the best headliners in an age. Damon said that when he died, that set would be the moment that flashed before him. At T in the Park in July, Graham came straight from hospital after food poisoning and the band went on ninety minutes late. Afterwards Damon said he could not do it any more, and that healing things with Graham had been the real point.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Yet Blur kept coming back. A documentary, No Distance Left to Run, earned their first Grammy nomination, and in January 2010 the Parklife cover appeared on a Royal Mail stamp. In February 2012 they received the Brit Award for outstanding contribution to music. That year Damon also made peace with Noel Gallagher after a chance meeting in a Mayfair nightclub, and the two posed hugging at the Brits. Blur released Under the Westway, their first song recorded in a single take, and on the twelfth of August 2012 they headlined a Hyde Park concert marking the end of the London Olympics, with New Order and the Specials.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In March 2013 Damon and Graham performed Tender at the Royal Albert Hall for the Teenage Cancer Trust with Noel Gallagher, and Paul Weller on drums. That May a festival in Tokyo was cancelled, leaving Blur stranded in Hong Kong for five days, so they booked a small studio and jammed. Damon doubted the songs would ever be finished, but in late 2014 Graham secretly took the tapes to Stephen Street, quietly invited Alex and Dave back in, and then played the results to Damon, who flew back to Hong Kong for lyrics. The Magic Whip, their first album in twelve years, was announced in a Chinese restaurant on the nineteenth of February 2015.[1] [2] [3]

Released on the twenty seventh of April 2015, The Magic Whip went to number one, at times outselling the rest of the top five combined, and reached number twenty four in America, their best showing there. Stephen Street was back as producer and Graham was back on every track. Critics were warm; Rolling Stone called it a dark, seductive set that cements a legacy. Damon explained that the title had three meanings: an ice cream in Britain, a firework in China and a whip in the political sense. After a tour and a Hyde Park show that June, Blur went quiet again, reappearing only for a surprise Africa Express set in 2019.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Ballad of Darren and beyond

In the years apart, the members led very different lives. Damon released solo albums and kept Gorillaz going. In 2022 he apologised unreservedly after suggesting that Taylor Swift did not write her own songs. Graham scored the Channel 4 and Netflix series The End of the F World, published a candid memoir, Verse, Chorus, Monster, and formed the Waeve with his partner Rose Elinor Dougall. Dave composed for television, served as a Norfolk county councillor from 2017 to 2021 and released a solo album, Radio Songs, in January 2023. Alex hosted a food and music festival on his farm. In November 2022 Blur announced a show at Wembley Stadium, and it sold out in two minutes.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Damon had written two dozen songs while touring with Gorillaz in 2022, one of them in a hotel room opposite a mural of Leonard Cohen in Montreal. Blur recorded them in early 2023 at Damon's Studio 13 with the producer James Ford, and Damon called it the first real Blur album since 13, because they made it together in one room. The Ballad of Darren was released on the twenty first of July 2023, named after the band's longtime bodyguard Darren Evans, and became their seventh straight number one. Damon described it as an aftershock record, written after the pandemic and the deaths of close friends.[1] [2]

Before the album came out, Blur played their first show in eight years at the Colchester Arts Centre in May 2023. On the eighth and ninth of July they played Wembley Stadium to about one hundred and fifty thousand people, the biggest shows of their career, with Phil Daniels climbing out of a tent on stage to deliver Parklife. Damon admitted he almost looked for an excuse to cancel the second night, then called it their best show ever. In December he announced another break, but a late night offer to play Coachella in 2024, with five minutes to decide, changed his mind.[1] [2] [3]

The Coachella debut on the thirteenth of April 2024 became a talking point. When the crowd stayed silent through the singalong of Girls and Boys, Damon told them they were never seeing Blur again, so they might as well sing it. After the second weekend he said it was probably the band's final show. That July a documentary, To the End, reached cinemas, showing the four as old friends; Alex said that in a room together they were exactly as they had been at nineteen. The same year Dave's former wife, Paola Marra, who had terminal bowel cancer, ended her life at Dignitas in Switzerland.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Dave had offered to go with her, but she chose to travel alone, and he later said she called asking him to come before changing her mind again. He then spoke out, calling the British law on assisted dying psychopathic. Graham, who went through divorce proceedings at the High Court in 2024, keeps up his solo and Waeve work, and in 2025 Alex launched Britpop Classical, playing the era's hits with an orchestra. As of 2026 Blur have not formally split, but they have announced no new plans. Their legacy is a run of seven consecutive number one albums and a songbook that spans Parklife, Song 2 and Tender.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Blur

Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon. Schoolfriends from Stanway comprehensive in Colchester, they were the creative heart of Blur, Damon writing the songs and Graham giving them their strange, noisy edge. Their friendship collapsed during the Think Tank sessions in 2002, when Graham was frozen out after rehab. They reconciled over an eccles cake in Camden in October 2008, and Damon said that repairing their bond was the main reason for the reunion.[1] [2] [3]

Damon Albarn and Justine Frischmann. The Elastica singer left Suede and Brett Anderson for Damon in the early nineties, and the pair became Britpop's most famous couple, likened to an indie Posh and Becks. They were together from 1991 to 1998. Their breakup, after a last holiday in Bali, shaped the album 13, especially Tender and No Distance Left to Run. Damon also played keyboards on Elastica's debut under the anagram Dan Abnormal.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Damon Albarn and Noel Gallagher. They were the two faces of the Battle of Britpop in 1995, and the feud turned ugly when Noel said he hoped Damon would catch AIDS and die. In 2012 they broke the ice in a Mayfair nightclub and posed hugging at the Brits, and in 2013 they played Tender together at the Royal Albert Hall. Damon now says Noel is one of the few people who went through what he did.[1] [2] [3]

Blur and Suede. Suede were Blur's first real rivals. While Blur toured America in 1992, Suede became press darlings, which Damon took very personally, and a triumphant Suede set on the same bill as a shambolic Blur nearly got Blur dropped. The rivalry had a personal edge too, since Justine Frischmann had left Suede's singer Brett Anderson for Damon, and her friendship with Anderson later strained her relationship with Damon.[1] [2] [3]

Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett. They met in 1990 when Graham, a fan of Hewlett's Tank Girl comic, asked him to interview Blur, and Hewlett first found Damon arrogant. They became flatmates in west London around the end of Damon's relationship with Justine Frischmann, and while watching MTV they dreamed up Gorillaz. Tensions over the 2010 tour strained their partnership for a while, but Gorillaz continued.[1] [2] [3]

Blur and Stephen Street. The former Smiths producer contacted Blur after hearing She's So High, produced their breakthrough There's No Other Way and then produced four straight albums from Modern Life Is Rubbish to Blur. He stepped aside for William Orbit in 1998 without hard feelings, produced Graham's solo records, and returned for The Magic Whip in 2015 after Graham brought him the Hong Kong tapes.[1] [2] [3]

Blur and David Balfe. The former Teardrop Explodes keyboard player founded Food Records, signed Blur and directed their first videos. He clashed with Damon over the English direction of Modern Life Is Rubbish and told the band Parklife was a mistake. He then sold Food to EMI in 1994 and moved to a big house in Bedfordshire, which inspired Country House, their first number one.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dave Rowntree and Paola Marra. Dave married Paola Marra, a Canadian he met on the Camden music scene, in 1994, and they divorced in the early 2000s but stayed close. After years of brutal treatment for terminal bowel cancer, she ended her life at Dignitas in Switzerland in March 2024. Dave had offered to go with her. Afterwards he campaigned to change the British law, calling it psychopathic.[1] [2] [3]

Damon Albarn and Suzi Winstanley. The painter, who travels to remote places to paint wildlife, became Damon's partner around 1998, and their daughter Missy was born on the second of October 1999. Damon credited her with inspiring his first trip to Africa, which transformed his music. The pair are thought to have separated around 2023, and critics heard a breakup in The Ballad of Darren, though Damon has never confirmed it.[1] [2]

Alex James and Keith Allen. The actor played the businessman in the Country House video, and in 1998 he, Alex and the artist Damien Hirst formed the novelty band Fat Les. Keith wrote the words and Alex helped write the music for Vindaloo, a parody football chant for the 1998 World Cup that reached number two and became a genuine terrace favourite.[1] [2] [3]

Blur and Phil Daniels. The Quadrophenia star was drafted in to speak the verses of Parklife in 1994, taking royalties instead of a fee. He has been part of the family ever since, appearing on Think Tank's hidden track, at Glastonbury and Hyde Park in 2009, at the 2012 Brits, and at both Wembley shows in 2023.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Blur

• The band's early name, Seymour, came from J. D. Salinger's story Seymour: An Introduction. They used it from December 1988 until Food Records, who thought it sounded too studenty, gave them a list of alternatives in 1990. Blur was the one they chose.[1] [2]
• Blur's first ever gig took place in the goods shed of a railway museum near Colchester. It was the East Anglian Railway Museum at Chappel, in the summer of 1989. Twenty years later they chose the same venue for a warm up show before their 2009 reunion.[1] [2]
• As a six month old baby, Damon Albarn was a toy tester for his father's design company. Keith Albarn's firm made educational toys and play furniture with names like the Kissmequiosk and the Apollo Cumfycraft, and baby Damon was billed as a testing expert.[1]
• The cover of Leisure is a 1954 magazine photo from a fashion feature on bathing hats. Charles Hewitt took it for Picture Post in May 1954, for a story called Glamour in the Swim. It had nothing to do with the band.[1]
• Kurt Cobain named There's No Other Way his favourite British song of 1991. He told the NME so, which is ironic given that a year later Graham Coxon blamed Nirvana's success for the flop of Blur's Popscene.[1] [2]
• Coldplay said an early Blur song, Sing, was the starting point for their track Lost. Sing, from Leisure, was first demoed under the name Seymour in 1989, and it later appeared on the Trainspotting soundtrack.[1]
• Reviewing Popscene for the NME, the Beastie Boys said it would sound better played at the wrong speed. They suggested playing it at thirty three rpm instead of forty five. The single stalled at number thirty two and left the band crushed.[1]
• Modern Life Is Rubbish took its title from anarchist graffiti stencilled along Bayswater Road in London. Damon called the phrase the most significant comment on popular culture since Anarchy in the UK. The album's working title had been Britain Versus America.[1]
• Damon Albarn wrote For Tomorrow on Christmas Day after the label rejected the album for lacking hits. Food Records sent Blur back to write more singles in December 1992. For Tomorrow became the album's opening track and first single.[1]
• Dave Rowntree does not play drums on Girls and Boys. He programmed a drum machine for the track instead, and later named it his favourite song on the Blur best of because he was not really in it.[1]
• The single sleeve of Girls and Boys was taken from a pack of Durex condoms. The video, directed by Kevin Godley, set the band against footage of Club 18 to 30 package holidays. Godley called it Page 3 rubbish; the band thought it was perfect.[1]
• The lyrics of This Is a Low come from a shipping forecast handkerchief Alex James gave Damon. Damon wrote them against a deadline the day before a hernia operation, working round the sea areas from the Bay of Biscay to Dogger Bank.[1]
• Phil Daniels's vocal on Parklife was recorded in about forty minutes, and he took royalties instead of a fee. He had originally been approached to read a poem on another track, The Debt Collector, which ended up as an instrumental.[1]
• Thom Yorke once admitted on BBC Radio 1 that he wished he had written Girls and Boys. Speaking in 2003, the Radiohead singer jokingly called Blur bastards for getting there first.[1]
• The future London mayor Ken Livingstone speaks on the Blur song Ernold Same. Producer Stephen Street said he picked him for his nasal, boring voice, and that Livingstone insulted the pastel jumper Street was wearing that day.[1]
• Dan Abnormal, a character on The Great Escape, is an anagram of Damon Albarn. Damon later used the same alias when he played keyboards on Elastica's debut album, and Norman Balda on their second.[1] [2]
• Graham Coxon agreed to appear in the Country House video only if he could dress as a milkman. He was already weary of the music industry, and he refused to take part in any action he felt uncomfortable with.[1]
• In a 1996 Italian TV appearance, a cardboard cutout stood in for Graham and a roadie for Alex. The two were absent for the mimed performance in February 1996, a sign of how awkwardly the band were holding together at the time.[1] [2]
• Damon agreed to let EA Sports use Song 2 on condition the band got tickets to the 1998 World Cup final. It opened FIFA Road to World Cup 98, the first time a licensed song had appeared in an EA Sports game.[1]
• The cover of 13 is a painting by Graham Coxon, based on a character from The Name of the Rose. Graham first called the painting a self portrait, but his memoir revealed the figure was modelled on Adso of Melk from Umberto Eco's novel.[1]
• The Coffee and TV video's milk carton, Milky, was sold at an auction of Blur memorabilia in 1999. At the 2012 Olympics concert in Hyde Park, fans who bought a Blur T shirt were given a free replica milk carton.[1]
• The video for No Distance Left to Run shows all four band members asleep in their own beds. It was shot with night vision cameras and directed by Thomas Vinterberg. Alex said he dreamed he was a leopard in a German karaoke bar.[1]
• Blur wrote the call sign for Beagle 2, the British lander sent to Mars in 2003. Dave and Alex had campaigned for the mission. The lander went silent, but in January 2015 it was found on the surface, landed but with its solar panels only partly open.[1] [2]
• The Think Tank cover was stencilled by Banksy, and the artwork sold at auction in 2007 for seventy five thousand pounds. Banksy said he normally avoided commercial work, but did it because it was a good record and quite a lot of money.[1]
• Graham Coxon once stole sausages from a Camden butcher and was punched on the jaw when caught. He told the story of that low point in the late nineties, adding that he was wearing a denim skirt in front of a busload of people.[1]
• Under the Westway was the first Blur song ever recorded in a single take. Damon said that was only possible because, for once, he had finished the lyrics before they recorded.[1]
• Dave Rowntree has a pilot's licence and an amateur radio licence, with the call sign M0IEG. He qualified as a pilot in 1995 and got his full radio licence in 2016. He has also studied astronomy.[1] [2]
• Dave Rowntree explained Blur's fights by pointing out that all four members have one sister and no brothers. He said they became each other's surrogate brothers, able to understand each other deeply and push each other's buttons at will.[1]
• The Ballad of Darren is named after the band's longtime bodyguard, Darren Evans. Its cover is a 2004 Martin Parr photo of a man swimming alone at the Gourock outdoor pool in Scotland.[1]
• The Narcissist set a record for the longest gap between a band's entries on Billboard's Alternative Airplay chart. Blur's previous entry had been Crazy Beat in May 2003, twenty years earlier.[1]
• The Magic Whip was announced at a press conference in a Chinese restaurant in London's Chinatown. The event was hosted by Zane Lowe, and Dave said the band had kept the album secret under a blood pact.[1] [2]
• Damon Albarn was granted Icelandic citizenship in 2020. He first visited in the mid nineties after seeing black sand beaches on television, later bought a house in Reykjavik and recorded parts of Blur and 13 there.[1] [2]
• Ray Davies of the Kinks called Parklife perhaps Blur's best song and best record. He once swapped songs with Damon at a poetry festival at the Albert Hall, where Davies sang Parklife.[1]
• Alex James helped write the music for Vindaloo, the 1998 World Cup song that reached number two. It was released by Fat Les, his novelty band with Keith Allen and Damien Hirst, and was meant as a parody of football chants.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.