10 years ago today: Blur returned with The Magic Whip

An extract from an interview with Blur, originally published in Hot Press in 2015:

Blur surprised everyone – including themselves – this year by releasing studio album #8, The Magic Whip. “It’s the unexpected, but much loved late child,” Alex James says, referring to the more than decade-long gap between it and its 2003 predecessor, Think Tank, which was recorded largely sans Graham Coxon. You have to go back to 1999’s 13 for the last time all four of them collaborated on an LP.

“The longer it went since the last album the more of a mountain to climb it was to make another,” James says of the prolonged studio hiatus. “We’re all proud of Blur; it’s something that we wouldn’t want to tarnish and have peter out. We’re also quite forward-looking and petulant about not wanting to be defined by our pasts. You want to live in the present, which is why we all decided, ‘If we’re to tour again there has to be new material.’ In May 2013, following the cancellation of a Japanese tour, we found ourselves with time on our hands and spent five days in Hong Kong working on ideas that Damon had on his iPad. It was, ‘What the hell, let’s just go and have some fun in the studio’, not, ‘This is us making an album.’”

Alex is adamant that there’d be no new Blur album, or coming to Ireland in September for Electric Picnic, if any of them had been less than 100% happy with what went down in Hong Kong.

“What happened is what always happens when the four of us get in a room together; the whole world falls away; it’s that first rehearsal and I’m 19-years-old again,” Alex enthuses. “Even though things went really well, it was 18 months between the initial batch of recordings that were the genesis of the record, and us all agreeing that Graham should try and shape them into something coherent.”

Like David Bowie’s The Next Day before it, everyone involved with the Hong Kong sessions and what followed was told in no uncertain terms that cojones would be surgically removed if word got out that Blur were go again.

“It was referred to as ‘Project Miriam’ in my office,” he smiles. “No one was allowed to refer to it by name or invoke the ‘Blur’ word. It was called ‘Graham’s album’ in the record company, I think. I had to tell my wife because she wanted to know where I was going, but the kids weren’t aware of what was afoot.

“I asked Graham when he started working on the recordings, ‘Do you want me to come down’ and he said, ‘No’, only to ring back a week later and go, ‘Actually, there’s some shit bass here, you need to do it again.’ Ben Hillier, who produced Think Tank, was by coincidence in the studio when I arrived and asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ I was like, ‘Oh, just playing some bass for a project of Graham’s...’ The cover story had to be maintained even with somebody we’re as close to as him. The less speculation there was, the less pressure there was. It was literally the day after it had been mastered that we admitted to The Magic Whip’s existence. Keeping it all secret until it was done was a big triumph.”

As all of the people who helped propel it to number one here will be aware, The Magic Whip is no rehashing of the past but instead a new and compelling chapter in Blur’s evolution from baggy also-rans into one of the most literate rock bands the UK has ever produced. Was there a specific moment in Hong Kong when Alex thought, “We’re nailing it here”?

“It all felt good when we were recording there,” he recalls, “but ‘New World Towers’ was the one we spent the most time on and set a tone of sorts. Then, in contrast, you had ‘Ong Ong’, a simple thing done in an hour.”

Dashed out or not, it’s a summery, Beach Boys-ian belter with harmonies that aren’t so much close as coagulating.

“When I eventually listened to ‘Ong Ong’ again 18 months later, it felt like hearing it for the first time. There was quite a bit of not knowing what we had until afterwards, which was exciting.”

I was pretty sure that the “Taking off again/The 5.14 to East Grinstead” couplet from ‘Lonesome Street’ was the first time the Sussex commuter town had been referenced in a pop song, but, nope, as unearthed by those investigative-types at East Grinstead Online, there’s a 1965 Benny Hill tune by the name of ‘Warlords Of East Grinstead’.

“East Grinstead Online? Fantastic! Benny Hill actually went to my school.”

As did King Crimson’s John Wetton, Charles Gray who played James Bond’s arch-adversary Ernst Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever and Christian Bale who was a Bournemouth School For Boys pupil up ‘til the age of 16.

“I don’t know whether to be impressed or scared that you know all that!” Alex chuckles.

When the 12-hour working days were done, Alex got to sample Hong Kong’s exotic foodie wares.

“The standout thing would be the Bird Nest’s Soup, which is incredibly glutinous but tasty. We talk about nose to tail eating here, but the Chinese are really into their different bits of animal.”

So not a lot for Morrissey to sink his fangs too?

“No, I think he’d have to stick to the noodles!”

While not short on either sonic experimentation or punk rock moments – ‘Thought I Was A Spaceman’ and ‘I Broadcast’ provide the respective proof – The Magic Whip is a proper grown-up record, which acknowledges Blur’s past but refuses to live in it. The lyrical references are veiled, but there seems to be an acceptance that with an average band age of 47 1/4 they’re as close to the grave as the cradle.

“Praying for death was a regular part of our hangovers back in the day,” notes Alex, who’s the baby of the band, “but I don’t think this is a particularly moribund record. In fact, it’s more of a joyous outpouring.

"With the four of us in a room jamming away, it was a very life-affirming and wonderful thing. The reason we wanted to be in a band is to express ourselves; that’s what makes it spiritually satisfying. Expressing something is not necessarily selling loads of records or ticking boxes.”

Perhaps born of the critical mauling their Leisure debut received way back in 1991 – Albarn has subsequently described it as “awful” – Blur have always had a bit of an ‘us against the world’ thing going on.

“We’ve had to fight for what we want to do since fucking day one,” Alex reflects. “That never changes. There’s always some fucker trying to tell you, ‘You can’t do that.’ You have to be strong and determined to exist. No one feels they can call themselves a musician unless they’ve had a number one in 50 or 60 countries now. The culture of indie music has kind of disappeared. Indie bands are like farms – the big ones are getting to be indescribably massive, and the small ones are disappearing.

“The world we grew up in was a very different one from today. It was a lot more chaotic, and we were lucky that we were allowed time by our record label to grow and find out who we were, musically. We had the luxury of being able to develop. Things happen much quicker these days.”

Listen to The Magic Whip below: