Music
10 Feb 26

On this day in 1997: Blur released their classic self-titled album

Credit: Fred Duval

On February 10, 1997, Blur released their self-titled fifth studio album. Featuring hit singles 'Beetlebum' and 'Song 2', Blur – produced with Stephen Street – topped the charts in the UK, Ireland and beyond, and became the band's most successful album in the US. To mark the album's anniversary, here are some special reflections from Dave Rowntree and Graham Coxon.

An extract from an interview with Blur – originally published in Hot Press in 2023:

In summer 1996, Blur wrapped up the Great Escape tour with an outdoor show at the RDS, in front of a teen crowd thrilled at having just completed their Junior and Leaving Certs. At the time, the band were experiencing a backlash in the UK, where Oasis were in the ascendant on the back of the all-conquering (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, and about to play two sold-out nights in Knebworth.

But like Radiohead and Manic Street Preachers – their most serious rivals as the best UK rock act of the last 35 years – Blur have always drawn a lot of energy from going against the prevailing cultural grain. At the RDS, they debuted two new songs, the wailing punk thrash ‘Chinese Bombs’ and the grungy anthem ‘Song 2’ – eventually to become a staple at sports events the world over – as they embarked on another reinvention, which eventually came to fruition on their self-titled fifth album, released in early ’97.

“Other than a short period where a couple of records sounded a bit more similar than usual, all the records have sounded very different from one another,” says Blur's drummer, Dave Rowntree. “That’s quite deliberate, we’ve never been particularly interested in doing the same thing twice.”

“On Blur we were thinking a bit more experimentally,” guitarist Graham Coxon recalls. “I was listening a lot more to American stuff. On the next album, 13, we made a choice to go with William Orbit and then things got really free-form. We could take advantage of digital recording and the DAW situation had a lot to do with all of that.

“With the first few albums, we had to be really rehearsed and know our stuff – we couldn’t take a chorus and stick it on the end as an outro to see how it worked. But when Stephen Street brought in the Radar system on Blur, we could start to make loops and be a bit more experimental.”