Blur didn’t begin with Parklife, Britpop or a battle with Oasis.
The four-piece came together in London in the late 1980s, initially playing as Seymour before signing to Food Records and becoming Blur. Their first album, Leisure, reached No. 7 in Britain in 1991 and produced the Top 10 single There’s No Other Way.
It sounds like the beginning of a fairly conventional march towards stardom.
It wasn’t.
Within a year, Blur were struggling. Their next major single barely troubled the charts, musical fashion was moving quickly, their experiences touring America weren’t particularly happy and the band that would soon become synonymous with British music suddenly looked decidedly vulnerable.
Then they made Modern Life Is Rubbish.
For me, that’s where the Blur story really starts.
How did the members of Blur meet?
Long before anybody used the word Britpop, there were Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon.
The pair knew each other from school in Colchester, Essex. Their friendship would eventually become one of the defining relationships in Blur – musically brilliant, sometimes difficult and, as we’ll explore later in this series, remarkably durable.
By the late 1980s, London had brought the eventual line-up together.
Albarn was playing in a band called Circus, which was joined by drummer Dave Rowntree. Coxon became involved too, while studying at Goldsmiths, where he met bassist Alex James. When James joined, the four musicians who would become Blur were finally in place.
They called themselves Seymour.
Food Records became interested, but Seymour didn’t survive the record deal. The label wanted a different name. Blur was chosen, and one of the most recognisable names in British music was born.
At that point, of course, nobody knew that.
Blur’s first taste of success came quickly
The band’s first single as Blur, She’s So High, reached No. 48 in Britain in 1990.
Then came There’s No Other Way.
If you’re a Blur fan, put it on now and the ingredients are already there: Coxon’s guitar, Albarn’s voice, James’s bass and Rowntree driving the thing along. But it’s also unmistakably a record from a particular moment in British music.
Released in 1991, it reached No. 8 on the UK singles chart.
That was a proper hit.
Their debut album Leisure followed and reached No. 7.
For a young band, that’s an enviable start. But listening backwards through Blur’s catalogue now, Leisure can sound almost like a band trying on clothes before discovering which ones actually fit.
Blur themselves would move a long way from it.
And they would have to.
Then things started going wrong
The British music scene was changing at considerable speed.
American grunge had arrived. Nirvana’s Nevermind was released in 1991. What had seemed fashionable in British guitar music could suddenly sound yesterday’s news.
Blur’s 1992 single Popscene reached only No. 32.
That number matters, not because No. 32 is disastrous in isolation, but because of what Blur had just experienced. A band that had reached the Top 10 with There’s No Other Way suddenly had a new single disappearing rapidly down the chart.
And Blur were spending a lot of time on the road.
Their 1992 American touring has become an important part of Blur mythology, but there is enough testimony from people around the band to establish the broad picture without embellishing it: they weren’t particularly happy.
Journalist and Blur biographer Stuart Maconie later recalled a volatile band returning from the American tour while struggling with both their new record and disagreements about musical direction.
For Albarn, America also appears to have clarified something creatively.
He wanted Blur to sound more British – not British as a flag-waving exercise, but something more observant and peculiar than that.
England as it actually felt: suburbs, roads, Sunday afternoons, ordinary people, modernity sitting awkwardly alongside the past.
Ray Davies and The Kinks were an obvious reference point.
And suddenly Blur began sounding much more like Blur.
Why was Modern Life Is Rubbish so important?
Here’s the strange thing about Blur’s second album.
Commercially, it wasn’t the breakthrough.
Modern Life Is Rubbish reached only No. 15 on the UK albums chart when it was released in 1993. Its singles weren’t huge either: For Tomorrow and Chemical World both peaked at No. 28.
If you looked only at the numbers, you might conclude that Blur were going backwards.
Listen to the record and you hear something else: a band finding an identity.
For me, Modern Life Is Rubbish is the bridge between the Blur who made Leisure and the Blur who made Parklife.
It’s there in For Tomorrow. It’s there in Chemical World. It’s there in Sunday Sunday.
The observations become sharper. The Englishness becomes more pronounced. Coxon’s guitar sounds increasingly like Coxon rather than whatever guitar music happened to be fashionable at the time.
Producer Stephen Street was important to that transformation.
Street had previously produced There’s No Other Way. He later recalled unexpectedly meeting a dispirited Coxon while Blur’s attempts to record their second album with another producer weren’t working. Street encouraged him; shortly afterwards Albarn called, and Street became involved in the album.
It’s one of those tiny moments in music history that becomes fascinating only in hindsight.
Blur and Stephen Street subsequently made some of the band’s defining records together. But in 1993 there was no guarantee any of that was coming.
Were Blur struggling financially before Parklife?
Yes.
This is another part of the story that gets lost when we remember Blur as one of the giant British bands of the 1990s.
By this period, Blur had reportedly found themselves around £60,000 in debt. Graham Coxon, producer Stephen Street and Food Records co-founder Andy Ross have subsequently described just how little money the band had around the Modern Life Is Rubbish period.
That makes what happened next considerably more interesting.
Blur weren’t sitting comfortably after two massive albums deciding how to conquer the world with number three. They needed the next record to work.
Was Modern Life Is Rubbish successful?
Not in the way Parklife would be.
It peaked at No. 15 and spent 19 weeks in the UK Top 100.
But commercial success isn’t the only useful measure of an album’s importance.
Graham Coxon later described Modern Life Is Rubbish as Blur being “halfway to somewhere”.
That’s exactly how it sounds to me.
Blur had stopped chasing what was happening around them and started building their own world.
Then, in 1994, everything clicked.
Girls & Boys changed the equation
Before Parklife arrived, Blur released Girls & Boys.
It reached No. 5 in Britain – their biggest single yet.
Then came the album.
Parklife entered the UK albums chart at No. 1 in May 1994 and would spend 120 weeks in the Top 100, including 36 weeks in the Top 10.
The contrast with the previous album was extraordinary: Modern Life Is Rubbish had peaked at No. 15. Less than a year later, Parklife was No. 1.
The band hadn’t simply become more popular. Something happening around Blur had changed too.
Suede had emerged. Pulp were rising. Oasis were coming.
British guitar music was moving back towards the centre of popular culture, and Blur happened to arrive there with an album perfectly suited to the moment.
Soon somebody would give the whole thing a name.
Britpop.
Did Parklife make Blur famous?
Blur already had hits before Parklife, but the album transformed their scale of success.
It gave them a No. 1 album and produced Girls & Boys, To the End, Parklife and End of a Century. At the 1995 BRIT Awards, Blur won four awards.
They were no longer simply a successful alternative band. Blur had become one of Britain’s biggest bands.
And this is where knowing what came before makes the familiar story much more interesting.
It’s easy to draw a straight line backwards from Wembley Stadium and imagine Blur were always going to get there.
They weren’t.
There was a Top 10 hit, then disappointment. There were difficult tours, financial pressure and uncertainty over their musical direction. Their second album didn’t make the Top 10.
The record that helped Blur discover what they wanted to be wasn’t the record that made them enormous.
That came next.
And success created a completely different problem.
Because another British band was coming.
They were from Manchester.
They were fronted by two brothers called Gallagher.
And in August 1995, what should have been an argument between music fans somehow became national news.
NEXT: PART 2 — What really happened between Blur and Oasis?
Watch the documentary
This series was inspired by Blur: To The End, directed by Toby L., which follows Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree as Blur reunite to record The Ballad of Darren and prepare for their Wembley Stadium concerts.
Rather than retelling the film, Beyond the Documentary independently explores the people, history and events surrounding its story.
Blur: To The End is available on DocPlay in supported regions.