Blur at Hyde Park, July 2009. Photo credit: Martin Pettit, http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdpettitt/3699300756
Blur, veterans of the 1990s Britpop scene, are getting ready to have a resurgent year: On Tuesday, the band will reunite for a set at the Brit Awards, where they will also be recognized for their Outstanding Contribution to Music; it’ll be the first time the for have played together since a widely-lauded set T in the Park in Hyde Park in 2009. There are rumours and promises that a new album is in the works, the band’s first since 2003’s critical and commercial success Think Tank.
And, kicking off this banner year, Blur members Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon unveiled their new song, “Under the Westway”, “about the charming motorway in West London”, according to the Telegraph’s Lucy Jones, at their performance at the War Child benefit on Sunday.
Return to form? Possibly. Said Jones on The Telegraph, “Its a lyric-driven piano ballad that evokes End of A Century and Best Days. It’s not hard to imagine a welcoming crowd turning the pretty London ditty into an anthem, with emphasis on the ‘hallelujah’ line…. I’m hoping the new album will have some of the old hormone-driven sweat and lair, as well as grown-up croons like this one. Coxon’s deliciously gritty new album A+E (out April) and Albarn’s constantly innovating work (particularly with Kinshasa One Two) suggest slippers and Horlicks are far in the future.”
Good. Tim Chipping at HolyMoly agreed that the new song is “quite nice”, but added, “We bet Brits organisers are sh*tting it they’re going to do a medley of obscure stuff on Tuesday night.” But Chipping, like Jones, is more concerned with what this augers for the future and he’s looking no further than Blur’s “udder-squeezing, Tory-friending, McDonald’s promoting buffoon” Alex James, who recently told The Sun this might be Blur’s last go-round. After slagging James off for describing himself as a “cheesemaker”, Chipping noted, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new synonym for ‘twat’”.
Is it the end? But James did tell The Sun this weekend that “there is always a feeling that this might be Blur’s last bow”, explaining, “Pulling the band back together is like reassembling the A-Team for one last job. I’m a cheesemaker now. I did meet the chef James Martin at the Nantwich International Cheese Show this year but I have to say it wasn’t quite the same as sitting between Prince and Helena Christensen at the aftershow party in 1995. As much as we loved Blur, if you do anything day in, day out for 15 years, it becomes a job. We all needed to go our separate ways and do other things with our lives. Now when we play together, it’s for the joy of it, like in our early days. I’m so proud of what my bandmates have achieved.” So he is a cheesemaker.