It is late Friday afternoon in Boston, the hotel lobby is big enough to play five-a-side in. We are here to meet Blur. The lobby is swarming but these three veterans of the Britpop Wars are easy to pick out. They are the ones who haven't shaved, who slouch in a peculiarly English manner, who are not dealing with the heatwave by wearing khaki Gap shorts. Bassist Alex James's first words are: 'I've bought a trout farm! No I haven't!', followed by tales from the previous night's New York show and of not being allowed into a bar without ID until he showed the doorman a book by Noam Chomsky. We say hello to affable drummer Dave Rowntree, board a huge 'Reborn in the USA' bus and are greeted by singer and songwriter Damon Albarn. In his pants. And I don't mean American-for-trousers. 'Better dress if we've got company,' he grins and, rather than stepping back into the bus sleeping quarters, marches straight off the bus and into the Boston street to fish for trousers in the boot.
The USA is the last place on earth that you would expect to find Blur enjoying themselves. It was, after all, the trauma of an American tour in the early Nineties that gave to Britpop early impulse. And Albarn is as vocal in his distate of the present US administration as he used to be of Oasis.
It might also matter to such a competitive man that Blur are playing mid-sized venues on this tour compared to the aircraft hangars occupied by younger rivals such as Radiohead and Coldplay. 'We're a cult band here,' he says with a sigh. 'Always will be.' But the Damon Albarn that OMM finds is less chippy than before, if just as driven.
Certainly one enviable thing about the guy is his high level of fearlessness. He smokes in American public buildings. He marches alone through the dangerous areas of Washington DC before showtime. He sods off to non-tourist parts of Mali or Morocco, and busts right through the whole white Western paranoia thing. As he says later: 'It's about confidence. If you look people in the eye - it doesn't matter what culture they're from - and say, "This is me," where's the barrier? There is no barrier. If you have any kind of crusade in your life, you should walk it like you talk it.'
That attitude has just about seen Blur through Britpop and its messy fallout. It has seen them survive the loss of guitarist Graham Coxon late last year and a personal crisis that Albarn will go to talk about. And on this year's ablum Think Tank - which is gorgeous, weird and sexy, a thousand miles away from the winking cockney character comedy of 1994's Parklife and 1995's The Great Escape they are on better form than ever. Spend some time with them on tour and they will bitch and shout at each other - but the strange dynamic that has kept them moving forwards through 14 years will finally become apparent.
In this instance, Damon's intrepid nature brings forth a pair of jeans and we're off to The Avalon, a few-thousand-capacity club bang opposite Fenway Park, home of Boston's baseball legends the Red Sox, who are playing tonight. The band are met by Blur autograph hunters wearing bad replica Chelsea FC shirts. After the soundcheck the street outside is swarming, and its easy to pick the Blur fan minority; they're the young ones with the sickly pallor, the black post-punk or mod threads, the Anglophile outsider demeanour. The weirdness of the scene is amped up by several people wearing baseball shirts bearing the legend 'Damon'. Sadly, Damon is the surname of a Red Sox rounders player.
Dave Rowntree and I head into a diner to talk. He is arguably Blur's smartest member - smart enough to know that his visual ordinariness means he can get away with winding people up without making them feel threatened or undermined. He alone greeted the fans who had won a competition to see the soundcheck and it's he who asks the waiter to turn down the Coldplay and Jane's Addiction with such charm that they bring us a punchbowl-sized fluorescent-pink cocktail on the house.
Rowntree was the first member of Blur to stop drinking himself to death back in the Britpop heyday, and can only marvel at his beverage. Charming the general public face to face is part of his job. 'In a band, it's important to have one person who likes being on television and can stand up in front of 100,000 people and go, "Look at me," and one person who looks cute and vulnerable who the girls can swoon over. It just is. And it's important to have one person who can walk into a room full of people and make friends with them all. That's what I can do, so I do it. It would be churlish of me not to. I can't do what Damon and Alex can.'
What Dave at the age of 40 can also do is fly a plane (as can Alex) and he has built an animation company (Nanomation) successful enough to ensure that should Blur ever call it a day, he'll have no problem using his thumbs for something other than twiddling or whacking seven shades of Shinola out of a drum kit.
Damon, Graham and Dave were childhood friends from Colchester. Alex, raised in Bournemouth, joined them when shambolic art-punks Seymour became Blur in London in the late Eighties. All four of them started to explore extracurricular projects around the time of their first post-Britpop album, Blur, 1997's comedown from all the jollity. But when the band convened early last year to make a new record, Coxon simply didn't turn up. There were musical differences and right from the early days Coxon also hated touring. He has now left the band to make his own, low-key records - although the official line is that the door is always open for his return. 'Graham and the band felt relief,' says Chris Morrison, who has managed Blur since 1992. 'It's freed them all.'
Before Dave Rowntree leaves for the evening's performance, he tries to explain why the remaining Blurkaholics refuse to be content with one successful career. 'Charlie Watts famously said that he'd spent 25 years in the Stones and 20 of them sitting around. Well, I refuse to let that happen to me. We're all quite driven. We all gave up the right to sleep some time ago. We'll die young, don't worry. We will pay.'
'I wish selling records was about being a genius,' says Alex James the following day. 'But its about being turfed out of a bus at 8am in Washington, being confronted with people you hate, doing something you don't want to do, and coming back here feeling confused.'
After the Boston show the band have flown into the capital, and James and Albarn have come close to handbags over having their picture taken for OMM. No-one has enjoyed the experience of posing on the crowded steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 100ç heat, but Dave and Alex have tried to be troupers. Damon, however, refuses to troup. He disappears with Smoggy, Blur's bouncer, to get food; he moans and mumbles, but won't talk directly to our photographer; and, when Alex attempts to chivvy him into putting away his sandwich and cooperating, he finally snaps and turns on him. James is humiliated. 'You've seen what its like,' he says to me later in the hotel. 'It is messy, chaotic, dirty, smelly, bad-moody business, being in a band. It has to be.'
James was the band's party-glamour-boy in Britpop's heyday. He still goes to the Groucho Club but has knocked the wild binges on the head and married earlier this year. 'Was I drinking to escape or drinking to embrace something?' he wonders. 'Probably to embrace something. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. But it just gets ugly in your thirties. I certainly was a heavy drinker. Alcoholics Atrocious!'
Now, at 34, he is branching out into work as a television presenter, with his own science programme on the Discovery Channel; and he and Rowntree are keen supporters of Britain's attempt to land a spaceship on Mars this Christmas. He is looking slimmer than he has for years. 'Basically we started exercising. I'd kept putting it off. "Exercise! I'm a fucking rock star! No fucking way am I exercising!" But I didn't want to be the band fatty. And I've changed my identity. I get up for different reasons. When you do stop drinking you wonder how you ever had time to do it.'
Blur have done a great job of appearing not to care about their commercial status for some time now. The funny thing about James is that he always seemed the most carefree member of the band, even though he is the first member of Blur to have played Wembley Stadium - with Fat Les, the comedy band he formed with Keith Allen and Damien Hirst. But he is definitely hurt by the relative commercial failure of Think Tank, a record on which his louche bass-playing is more prominent than ever. 'When you think you're making the best music in the world, its just annoying when you're not the biggest band in the world.'
You're rich. You're making music you love. Why worry?
'You just wanna feel relevant. You wonder if anybody is listening sometimes. But it's true that none of The Velvet Underground were huge, nor The Smiths. Maybe what I mean is most important band in the world. He said. Pompously.'
'I find him completely frustrating,' Albarn says of James, 'because he is equal parts a really gifted musician and a complete fucking ignoramus when it comes to music.' Having soundchecked at six, Blur don't play that evening's show at the 9.30 Club until 11pm. Tomorrow is a free day, but you wonder what that can consist of on tour, as you wander into the venue's adjacent alleyway and catch James lying on a flight case trying to read his Alexander McCall Smith African detective novel with a dozen rats for company. So, after a run and grub from a favourite local soul-food takeaway, Albarn seems relatively pleased to while away some time talking in the bar. At first he seems on characteristic form, having a pop at his band-mate and then at his erstwhile rivals. When I ask a question about rock's current obsession with 1979-1981 post-punk and whether this signals vindication for a band that have been using that stuff for 15 years, he steers us onto a subject of which you would think he'd have had enough. 'People's perception of us got very clouded with the Britpop thing,' he says. 'Post-punk is where we come from.'
According to Albarn's theory, Blur were always more open than their rivals to a wide-range of interests (The Beatles, The Beatles and The Beatles in Oasis' case). But wasn't a desperation for a British rock identity exactly what Blur, Suede and Oasis exploited during Britpop?
'Maybe they did, but I didn't. I was trying to paint a picture of what I felt a kind of imaginary but soon-to-be-real Britain would be like. When we play 'The Universal' in Britain it has to be seen to be believed, the kind of reaction it gets. Every word is spat out [by the crowd]. All the stuff about satellites, the Lottery, karaoke - they just sing it out, it's incredible. I just wanted to paint a picture of my country, and how saddened I was that these things were happening and were going to be happening. And once I'd painted that picture, I was off. Off to Mali. Ha!'
That chronology obscures the fact that Blur enjoyed their second number one with the first single from Blur, the sexually, narcotically and otherwise suggestive 'Beetlebum'. With 'Song 2', which stopped just short of parodying grunge, they had their biggest hit ever in America. Then, with the cartoonist Jamie Hewlett, Albarn created the virtual pop group Gorillaz, who have far eclipsed Blur's success in the States. Blur has always been there for the 35-year-old Albarn, but he has also set up his own record label, Honest Jon's, which has released a series of acclaimed, off-beat records, as well as his own Mali Music with musicians from that country.
Last year, Damon suggested to Alex and Dave that they finish off Think Tank by going to Morocco and building a studio in a remote farmhouse. So, for six weeks last autumn, that's exactly what Blur, their families, and producer Ben Hillier did. 'I just wanted Blur to have the same blood coursing through its veins as I had from the work I'd been doing with other people,' Albarn says. 'Suggestions like that when Graham was playing a big part in the band were always received, if not with suspicion, then with downright disdain.'
You feel that that same disdain - a fear of the pretentious - has cast Blur out on a limb in a British rock world obsessed with appearing - ugh - down to earth. When Albarn used to tell you he didn't care about what the press and his peers thought of Blur you could always tell he was being somewhat economical with the truth. But these days this recent father (of four-year old Missy) is more convincing. Britrock's insularity is, according to Albarn, strangling the joy and art of it all. 'The British scene is very introverted and it doesn't really know much about the rest of the world, or even want to entertain the fact that there is a bigger world out there. I like white rock music, but when it loses that ability to stretch and mix its palette, it's pointless to me.
'The whole nature of rock music is that it doesn't have roots. The very definition of it is experimental. When rock considers that it has an identity it loses its point.'
Surprisingly, on this tour Albarn has retreated to his hotel room to record a series of songs written with a new Gorillaz album in mind - but he now intends to release them as they are as a solo album. The record has the working title Demo Crazy and, he says, 'sounds very American - and I don't know why'.
Not that he has totally made his peace with the American music biz. It seems that Albarn had a physical breakdown brought on by extreme dehydration after Blur's triumphant London Astoria shows in May when they played Think Tank live for the first time. The singer was also 'getting a lot of pressure at home' - presumably from his partner Suzi Winstanley - 'and felt my daughter needed me there.' So he got a doctor's note and took a week off, opting out of some radio-broadcast American festivals.
'All hell broke loose. There are two conglomerates who basically own all the radio stations in America. The attitude - which is the worst side of America - was, right, you don't play our game, we're cutting you out entirely. So, as it stands, we've been taken off the airwaves in America. I don't know if my anti-war stance has had any bearing on it. But I suspect that didn't help in their decision to be so aggressive.' He stops. Realises he's been ranting. 'This needs to be mentioned,' he says.
The Stop The War march and Hyde Park rally of February this year dismayed and inspired Albarn in equal measure. 'It was heartbreaking to see the subsequent marches just dwindle to nothing as the will of the Government carried the day,' he tells me. 'I think all the people who went on that march should have a reunion, and just talk about where we're at. Wouldn't it be great if you could have that as an annual thing, this cross-culture, cross-race, cross-age gathering that was like an independent debating group of the people? That's quite idealistic - but, fuck it, its not idealistic, because it actually happened on that day.
With Noel Gallagher, Blur were famous targets of New Labour's search for the Cool Britannia factor when still in opposition. 'Tony Blair said to me face-to-face that come the 1997 election, if you're still selling as many records, then we can do some business together. Now what that meant I don't know. And then John Prescott taking me aside afterwards, taking me to the bar and getting drunk with me. And saying, "The Conservatives have self-imploded deliberately because, in the next five years, everything is going to hit the fan, and they don't want to have anything to do with running the country during that period." What did all that mean? They haunt me, those words.
'Then I was almost shadowed by certain members of his youth office. I questioned whether it was the right signal for a future Prime Minister to be sending his kids to a grant-maintained school, and got a letter saying, "Don't talk about this." It led me to think there was something wrong. Their perception of their place. You got the sense that they were running through this programme which we now take as a given - this central control of everything.'
So you backed off.
'And Noel went to Number 10. And I know his typical answer was, "Well, who wouldn't?" Well - I wouldn't. And I didn't. Because I was already aware of what they were doing. I don't think he was aware of how cynical they were. But I mean, why should they care what we say? That whole era - it is without question that our energy was used as a smokescreen for New Labour.'
Damon Albarn's convictions run deep - as he lets you know - not least on the question of pacifism. He tells me he broke down at the Hyde Park march when scheduled to speak, overwhelmed by the occasion and its timing, close as it also was to death of his grandfather, Edward Albarn. 'It was a very, very emotional moment,' he says. 'All the residual memories of me seeing my grandad in his last... He basically decided he didn't want to live any more. So he went on hunger strike. Last year. Sometimes you don't grieve properly at the right moment.'
Edward Albarn was a conscientious objector during the Second World War. 'Then it really meant something. You were ostracised and he had to move into a closed community' - in the village of Holton-cum-Beckering in Lincolnshire - 'with other conscientious objectors. He spent 20 years there.
'This is something my family deeply believed in. My Dad refused the draft as well. But my grandad's principles never made him a happy man. The hunger strike was just another example of his bloody-mindedness' At the Hyde Park march, Albarn had 'this image of my grandad in his slippers reading the paper, knowing that his grandson had been involved in something which he'd put so much of his life into' and ' got over-emotional'.
'It obviously wasn't the best moment to get in that state, when you're at the head of the biggest peace march in the history of this country.'
Blur have not taken a stand against the war in Iraq, despite the strength of Albarn's convictions, not least because the other members don't necessarily agree with their singer's views. 'If there was an easy, quick-fix solution to the world's ills, someone would have applied it already and we would all be living in happy-clappy land,' says Dave Rowntree. 'I'm a fighter. I'm not anti-war in any sense.' He pauses. Realises how that might look. 'What I mean to say is, I'm not a pacifist. I think that sometimes war is an appalling thing, but sometimes people killing each other can be justified as the lesser of a whole bunch of evils.'
So Damon's view is not yours? 'It's not. Absolutely. I took a decision early on out of respect for him not to turn around and contradict him publicly, but anyone who knows us knows we're not Damon and his slaves.'
Alex James says that he is not happy with any political agenda for the band. ' The idea of a political band is never very sexy. I'm too much of a dreamer to engage with the mechanism of everyday life. And I don't think that's a fault.' As for the good citizens of the United States of America, James says: 'There is a lot of racism about the American in the street. There's the same proportion of British twats, the same proportion everywhere. Twat policemen. Twat teachers.' A slight but perfectly timed pause. 'And twat rock stars.'
'Pop is not about manifestos,' he says later. 'It's about punchlines.'
At the Washington show the band are at the top of their game, mixing a set of old and new, catchy and cosmic, funky and thrashy, with ebullient power. We get to watch from a stageside balcony, and can see both the telepathic interplay of Damon, Alex and Dave and the rapturous faces of the astonishingly young front rows. Albarn stage-dives in the middle of 'Crazy Beat' from Think Tank and drowns in a sea of young male and female bodies, before Smoggy carries the six-footer out like a small child. They play 'This is a Low' as a last encore and one fresh-faced girl who couldn't have been more than seven when Parklife came out is overcome by emotion, trying to sing but beaten by racking sobs.
As the show ends, Albarn says, 'Look after your country,' and, by the time we go down the short flight of stairs to tell Blur that we are not worthy, the tour bus is already pulling away. The tattooed, brick shithouse venue security guy is impressed by their Elvis-has-left-the-building getaway.
'Man, I ain't seen a band do that for years. Very cool.' He turns to his colleague. 'Who were they again?'
Four weeks after Blur disappeared into the Washington night, I'm back on another big bus with them at a rehearsal studio in London's King's Cross. This one is off to Yorkshire to headline the Leeds Festival. The previous night they had gone down a storm at Reading. The mood is good, despite the fact that Albarn fell off the stage and took a pretty heavy bruising. 'It was a two-hour set,' he says. 'Every song fucking brilliant.
'It's a relief, because I was nervous. This is the end of our rehabilitation, really. As one of Britain's finest. We got so utterly misrepresented during the Britpop era and just fucking bullied out of town by Oasis and everyone who went on their side. It's taken a long time to get back to where we were - where an audience is confident enough to enjoy us.'
That sounds more like the competitive Albarn, but in fact he now he seems humble. 'It's a joyous thing, music. And yes, it comes out of great pain sometimes, but it is joyous. I was so guilty in the past of being competitive, but I've grown up.'
So, within Blur there is harmony - even if their bass player insists that he wants to be in the most important band in the world.
'That doesn't bother me any more,' Albarn says. 'Don't take me too seriously! I'm a stupid idiot musician!'
It's all a blur
School days Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon meet at Stanway comprehensive, Colchester. Drummer Dave Rowntree joins to form art-punk band Seymour, the line-up completed when Coxon meets bassist Alex James at Goldsmiths College in London.
1988-89 Change their name to Blur and their style to be more in tune with baggy Zeitgeist. Sign to Food Records.
1990 Debut single 'She's So High' peaks at No 48 in October.
1991 Debut album Leisure hits No 7, following top 10 success of 'There's No Other Way' and 'Bang'. Beats Primal Scream's Screamadelica to Album of the Month in Select. When the magazine later lists its top 100 albums of the Nineties, Screamadelica takes top spot with Leisure nowhere to be seen.
1992 Single 'Popscene' stalls at No 32. Blur return from their US tour slated, drunken, depressed and fighting.
1993 Second album Modern Life is Rubbish receives a mixed reception and only reaches No 15. 'For Tomorrow' and 'Chemical World' don't make the top 20.
1994 As Britpop gains momentum, 'Girls and Boys', reaches No 5. Third album Parklife debuts at No 1 and stays in the top 20 for a year, spawning further hits 'To the End', 'Parklife' and 'End of a Century'.
1995 Blur win four Brits. After winning the battle with Oasis for No 1 ('Country House' v 'Roll With It' even makes News at Ten), fourth album The Great Escape hits the top spot.
1997 Embrace a lo-fi sound for fourth album Blur. 'Beetlebum' is the first single and reaches No 1, while 'Song 2' makes No 2, followed by 'On Your Own' and 'M.O.R'.
1998 Coxon sets up his own record label, Transcopic, and releases the first of four solo albums. James launches Fat Les with Keith Allen.
1999 Drop long-term recording partner Stephen Street for William Orbit for 13.
2001 Albarn launches Gorillaz with Tank Girl illustrator Jamie Hewlett and Dan 'The Automator' Nakamura.
2002 Albarn releases Mali Music on his Honest Jon's label.
2003 Coxon leaves.
The Blur-Banksy connection
The unique cover of this month's OMM featured the work of the graffiti artist Banksy, who has travelled the world spray-painting his work and who designed the cover of Blur's Think Tank. Banksy had never worked on a magazine cover before, so his appearance at the photo-shoot with OMM's Claudia Janke and the band was particularly exciting - when it finally happened. The idea of working with the artist, who doesn't like to use his real name or ever be photographed, had come up in conversation between Blur and OMM. The only problem was finding time for the band and Banksy to get together. A date was set for the afternoon of the group's headlining performance at the Leeds Festival but that almost fell through when, two days before the shoot, Bansky went awol. It later transpired that he had been arrested in Berlin for defacing a building. Then at the festival site, a flaw in OMM's planning also became apparent: there were no walls on which Banksy could work. Out in the countryside, we knocked on the door of Norwood House farm and explained our predicament to Mr and Mrs Stephen Walmsley. Fortunately, the side of their duck shed was big enough for Banksy's purposes - and the Walmsleys' daughter, Lucy, got to meet the (friendly) band. Also pictured in OMM exclusively were two other early designs for the cover of Think Tank.
