"I met him in a crowded room where people go to drink away their gloom. He sat me down and so began the story of a charmless man."
Originally a fair to middling Shoegaze band who had arrived too late in the game to be successful purveyors of the Manchester sound that dominated their early efforts, Blur eventually re-invented themselves as Brit-pop revivalists, and in the process, became one of the most important and influential U.K. bands of the nineties. Blur- and before that Seymour until they changed their name at the behest of their record company, in hindsight, a very wise move- were little more than scene-jumpers with a tepid first single, "She's So High," until coming under the influence of producer Stephen Street, who was best known at the time for his engineering and production work with The Smiths. Under Street's tutelage, Blur came up with their breakthrough single, "There's No Other Way"; however, internally, things were disintegrating: while Blur were quickly outgrowing their dependence on the Manchester scene for inspiration, Food Records was very resistant to a change in direction, as they were evidently more interesting in milking the Manchester sound for as long as possible. Things eventually came to a head on the ensuing U.S. tour in support of the band's debut L.P., Leisure, during which relations between band members began to disintegrate and homesickness reached epidemic proportions, as Damon Albarn recalls, "I just started to miss really simple things [....] I missed everything about England, so I started writing songs which created an English atmosphere." Thus, the seeds for Blur's transformation were sown. Despite an occasionally nationalistic tone, especially in interviews, Blur's decision to foreground the "Englishness" of their music was not unlike The Kinks' decision, 25 years earlier, to move from Mersey-Beat-influenced Garage-Rock to Ray Davies' psychedelic-tinged explorations of traditional British culture, with the irony being that in Blur's case, it made them superstars (at least on their side of the pond), while for The Kinks, despite resulting in unprecedented artistic heights for the band, it considerably diminished their mainstream commercial appeal (if only temporarily). With albums such as Modern Life Is Rubbish, Parklife, and The Great Escape, Blur were at the forefront of a British guitar-pop revival that included bands such as Suede, Pulp, The Boo Radleys, Elastica, and arch-rivals, Oasis, to name but a few. During these years, Blur cultivated a well-publicized rivalry with Oasis that, at times, verged on a feud; however, what distinguished Blur's brand of Brit-Pop from that of bands like Oasis was its post-modern sensibilities, not the least of which was the ability to sound simultaneously tongue-in-cheek, even humorous, and viciously satirical in a socio-political sense. Another aspect of the band that contrasted sharply with the competition was their penchant for artistic re-invention, a characteristic largely attributable to guitarist Graham Coxon. During their Brit-Pop years, Blur was quite dismissive of and staunchly resistant to the influence of American indie music on the British music scene, leading Albarn to claim at one point, "If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I'm getting rid of grunge." Nevertheless, by the mid-nineties, Coxon was falling under the influence of various American Lo-Fi and Noise-Rock bands and consequently had no interest in continuing in the vein of The Great Escape, something that very nearly spelled the end for Blur, as his band-mates were initially not eager to re-invent themselves at the height of their commercial and critical appeal. However, they eventually came around to Coxon's idea of making music "to scare people again." The result was Blur, which Albarn termed, "English slacker," an album that largely redefined the band's sound by assimilating American Lo-Fi influences such as Beck and Pavement and garnered the band critical acclaim while (at least initially) alienating their fan-base. Blur's final album of the decade, 13, saw the band move even further afield of their Brit-Pop past by ending their long-standing relationship with Stephen Street and enlisting William Orbit as producer, who reportedly gave Coxon free-reign in the studio and encouraged Albarn to explore his crush on gospel music. As a result, 13 stands as Blur's most stripped down and darkest album, but also its most self-indulgent. When all is said and done, Blur was probably the most consistently great British band of the nineties, which is even more impressive given the fact that, stylistically, they were not a band to rest on their laurels.
