It’s a moment that comes out of nowhere and slaps you in the face. A few minutes into Blur: To the End, the raw new documentary about the band’s stirring comeback, they are gathered at Damon Albarn’s house in Devon to hear the demos that will become their 2023 album, The Ballad of Darren. As the music plays from the speakers, Albarn suddenly puts his head in his hands and starts sobbing. The album, it would emerge, was partly inspired by the end of his 25-year relationship with the artist Suzi Winstanley, with whom he has a 24-year-old daughter, Missy. After the split he had spent much of the time living alone in Devon.
How striking it is to see Albarn unravel so publicly. He has never lacked emotion, but there’s always been something unshakeable about him, with his brazen creativity and pathological forward motion. Yet the singer, 56, and his three bandmates are at the age when random bouts of tears are all too common. Although To the End culminates in the glory of their two shows at Wembley Stadium last summer, for much of the time it’s an honest and quite dark portrait of the artists as not-so-young men grappling with relationships, depression and dodgy knees.
It wasn’t a safe bet that Blur would be headlining Wembley in 2023. Three quarters of them are from untrendy Colchester, and they broke through into the parochial indie scene of the early Nineties before seizing the national imagination in the Britpop era. But their appearances this century have been sporadic as they each pursued an esoteric array of sidelines. Albarn composed operas, the bassist Alex James became a cheesemaker, the guitarist Graham Coxon struggled with alcoholism and forged a solo career and the drummer Dave Rowntree became a Labour councillor. Yet there they were, playing the shows of their lives at a venue normally reserved for Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen. A total of 180,000 people saw them at Wembley, many of them new fans in their teens and twenties. The concerts cemented Blur’s status as one of the defining bands of the past 30 years.
Toby L, the director of the documentary, wanted to avoid back-slapping, though. “There’s a version of this film that could be a PR puff piece,” he says, “and we all agreed that wouldn’t benefit anyone.” He has made documentaries about Rihanna and Liam Gallagher (boo, hiss) and runs a label, Transgressive, that has put out solo albums by Albarn and Coxon. In To the End he wanted to “explore the complexity of male relationships, especially as men get older … [how they] go through a lot individually and collectively and support each other”.
Although, being men, they often do it in a rather cack-handed way. When I ask James how he reacted when Albarn started crying, his response exudes blokey ineptitude. “I thought he was laughing,” he says. “I completely misread it.” James, 55, may not be great at reading emotional signals, but he’s the one who strives to stay in contact during the band’s hiatuses. “I get nothing out of Albarn or Coxon year to year,” he says. “Send the f***ers cheese on their birthdays, send them nice cards at Christmas. And then we get back in a room together and suddenly it’s magic. It’s just like putting the Blues Brothers back together every time. Graham said, ‘Can you stop saying that, Alex?’ But it is exactly like that. What band can even f***ing stand the sight of each other 35 years in?”
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Since the Wembley shows Rowntree, 60, has been campaigning to move to a very big house in Westminster, but his bid to win the constituency of Mid Sussex for Labour at the general election failed. “It was what has traditionally been one of the safest Conservative seats in the country so it would have been an absolute miracle had I won it,” he says. “The Lib Dems played a blinder and took the seat from the Conservatives, so that’s second prize really. First prize is I win, second prize the Conservatives lose.”
Will he have another crack? “If I do it again it will be in a seat that I have a hope in because it’s an awful lot of work,” Rowntree says. “It meshes weirdly with the electoral cycle,” he adds: the last time he ran for parliament, for the Cities of London and Westminster seat at the general election of 2010, came the year after Blur’s first reunion after a six-year break between 2001 and 2007. “We were playing Hyde Park and I got the lighting director to write ‘Vote Dave’ in big letters on the electronic backdrop. Then we realised that we hadn’t said which Dave — David Cameron came to power that year.”
In 2011 Cameron was a guest at the annual festival that James hosts on his farm in Oxfordshire, the Big Feastival. The Guardian branded that year’s incarnation “Worstival” and you wonder how it went down with Rowntree — or Albarn, who recently appeared at a charity event wearing a Diane Abbott T-shirt. “Politics is not a big topic of conversation in the band,” Rowntree says, sounding very like a politician. “We’ve known each other a long time; we know where each other stands on stuff. We’re a political band, but not a politics band.”
If Rowntree ever makes it to parliament would he play with Blur as a sitting MP? “No, I don’t think that’s feasible, unless it was a free gig in my constituency. I don’t think the electors would forgive that. I’m not in favour of second jobs for MPs, personally. I don’t think it’s a good look.”
James and Rowntree are often portrayed as the uncomplaining rhythm section who let the creative egos, Albarn and Coxon, 55, get on with the important stuff. “I just do what I’m told,” James says. Yet for Rowntree — who is a qualified solicitor and pilot, has worked as an animator and film composer and has published papers on computer graphics — being able to take a back seat suits him. “Being in Blur, you can be as involved as you want to be,” he says. “If you want to be at every meeting with the designers while they’re doing the inner sleeve, you’re more than welcome.”
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Neither he nor James overplay their roles. “Bass playing is like riding a bicycle downhill — it’s whoopee! all the way,” James says. “I don’t think bass players suffer in the way that guitar players and singers do.”
“Writing lyrics is baring your soul in a way that most musicians don’t have to confront,” Rowntree says of Albarn, adding that “it didn’t surprise me at all” when he broke down.
James has a way of defusing questions with a joke or a chuckle, but the film features another disarming moment when the jollity slips. He talks about coming downstairs to find his daughter Beatrix, unaware of his presence, singing along to The Narcissist, Blur’s new single at the time. “That was one of many times I cried last year,” he says. So it’s not just Albarn who’s tearing up, although the contrast is sharp between him, living alone, and James with his large, chaotic family. “I’ve got five teenage kids who all thought I was a dickhead — ‘F*** off, fatty’ was all I was getting — until they came to the Eastbourne show,” James says, referring to a warm-up for Wembley last year. “I mean, it’s worn off now. They think I’m a dickhead again.”
Toby L says his favourite bits of the film are “the tender dressing room moments” before the first Wembley show. The musicians hadn’t actually discussed how long he and his crew could stick around. Normally, he says, “about 15 minutes before stage time everyone empties out to give the band some space, but we were still in there with them filming. They just allowed us to stay.”
Is that how James remembers it? “No, we were all thinking about ourselves all the time.”
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For whatever reason the crew were able to capture the sanctity of Blur’s preshow routine. “As all bands do, they have a ritualistic set of songs they play before getting on to the stage,” Toby L says. “They put on The Night by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, which is an all-time northern soul classic, and they dance around the room and it’s both extraordinary and very normal. They’re just a group of friends, fixing a drink, checking their hair and getting their outfits ready. It was an incredible thing to observe a band in their natural habitat before going on and blowing the minds of 90,000 people.”
That sense of comradeship is becoming less common in the music industry. “The increase of solo artists is undeniable,” Toby L says. “I would love it if people could watch this and go, ‘I want to form a band with my friends.’”
A live album and a second documentary, also directed by Toby L, will revisit the Wembley shows, which the band see as a career high. Their performance of Tender, on which they were backed by the London Community Gospel Choir, was especially goosebump-inducing. “Unfortunately for me it doesn’t get better than that,” Albarn says in the first film, although he adds that Blur “will manifest itself again if it’s wanted”.
“I need two f***ing years to recover from a Blur tour,” James says. “Talk to me in two years.”
The minimalist approach is working, though. As Rowntree says in the film, “The less we do the bigger we seem to get,” which is a refreshing counterpoint to the sustained market saturation of Taylor Swift. “There’s a limit to how long you can write, record, tour,” Rowntree says today. “We discovered that when it nearly split the band up.” Coxon left the band in 2002. “We tried limping on without him and it was horrible. Luckily we started missing each other.” Coxon rejoined for the reunion in 2009 and has been sober since 2017. “But when we did get things back on the road, it was clear that we couldn’t go back to write, record, tour,” Rowntree says.
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• Blur: To the End review — a poignant portrait of the Britpop stars
• Blur: The Ballad of Darren review — the Britpop veterans’ latest is a heartfelt hit
“We never overcranked it,” James says. “It’s 20 years since I got married and moved to the farm and started cheesing it and wineing it, and we’ve only done, what, three or four dozen gigs in those 20 years. We’ve always wanted it to be special. What a wonderful thing to be able to dip in and out — why wouldn’t we want to keep doing that for ever?”
“We used to sneer at people with very big houses in the country,” Rowntree says. “It’s strange how all these things you were sure of in your twenties turn out to be phantasms. Am I going to again sneer at older people [like the Rolling Stones] playing music? Why the hell would I? I’m 60. Maybe when we’re 120 we’ll be wheeled on in bath chairs and play music with the power of our brains. And it’ll be just as good as ever.”
The 11 best Blur songs
11. There’s No Other Way (1991)
At the tail end of the Madchester scene, Blur got in on the act with an organ-led groover complete with classic guitar riff and baggy beat.
10. Parklife (1994)
Britpop in a nutshell: nonsense/laddish words from the mod hero Phil Daniels, Albarn coming in with a bit of mockney, and joie de vivre throughout.
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9. Tender (1999)
This simple singalong backed by a gospel choir is an unfailingly rousing ode to broken-heartedness — and the feelings of resolution that come in its wake.
8. Song 2 (1997)
Banish those painful memories of the student indie disco. The dirty riff from Blur’s lo-fi noisy favourite remains Graham Coxon’s greatest guitar moment.
7. The Narcissist (2023)
Faced with a crumbling family life, dealing with whatever demons drove him to be a rock star in the first place, Albarn showed real self-awareness on this thoughtful, late-career gem.
6. Beetlebum (1997)
Capturing the lazy, uncaring feeling that comes with heroin, Albarn also expressed deep sadness at his and his girlfriend Justine Frischmann’s youthful misadventures with the drug.
5. To the End (1994)
Blur’s groovy easy-listening moment, complete with strings, French vocal contributions from Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier, and general feeling of elegant ennui.
4. Coffee and TV (1999)
Postpunk spikiness at its best, with Coxon laying bare his struggles with booze and fame and realising the answer lies in normal, everyday banality.
3. For Tomorrow (1993)
From Blur’s wilderness years came an attempt to reclaim English pop in the face of America’s early Nineties grunge invasion. Words about London and a Kinksy melody drive the message home.
2. The Universal (1995)
Blur intended this lush, string-laden epic as a melancholic imagining of a sci-fi future and came up with something more beautiful and moving than they intended.
1. Girls & Boys (1994)
Albarn’s masterpiece, an urgent electronic attack on Club 18-30 holidays and the sexual escapades that go with them from an outsider looking in — with horrified fascination.
Will Hodgkinson
Blur: To the End is in cinemas from July 19; the Live at Wembley Stadium album is released on July 26 and Blur: Live at Wembley Stadium is in cinemas from September 6
