Thinking about tomorrow

It is impossible to listen to Blur’s seventh album, Think Tank, without wondering what if… like if Graham Coxon’s trademark guitar sound was still there, would the collection sound quite so funky, so avant garde, so post-ironically post-modern.

Who knows what went on, that ended up with Coxon splitting from the band? Who knows what would have happened had he stayed? Well, Blur drummer Dave Rowntree has the answers to some of these questions – but he’s not saying.

“We are quite deliberately not getting involved,” he informs me. “I’m quite capable of talking to Graham: if I have any differences with him, I shall just sort them out – with him. I certainly shan’t do it via the press. Given that there were four people in Blur at the time, if you ask us individually, you will get four different answers as to what went on during those days.

“Graham is one of my oldest friends, and he is Damon’s oldest friend. I’ve been playing in bands with Graham since I was 17 years old and Damon has been playing in bands with him since he was 11, so you can bet your life, we haven’t seen the last of Graham.

“If we and him have things to work out, then I daresay in the fullness of time we will work them out, but at the moment he is simply only on one track on this record.”

Hmmm. So when Coxon left, early in the recording of Think Tank, did it ever cross the minds of the remaining trio (Dave, Damon and Alex) to recruit another axeman?

“No it didn’t,” he instantly avows, “and I’m glad it didn’t. I think what we really needed was an excuse to throw away the rulebook with this record – and one of the best ways of throwing away the rulebook is by trying to play instruments you can’t really play. That forces you to have a kind of naivity in the playing.

“So we decided we wouldn’t look for another guitarist. Anyway, you couldn’t replace Graham. He is a one-off. There is no hope of ever finding another Graham, not that we’re looking for one.”

What Rowntree terms naïvity, has resulted in what is arguably Blur’s most eclectic collection yet, from the hypnotic ‘Out Of Time’ to the pure punk of ‘We’ve Got A File On You’. Indeed, the video for the former song is one of their finest yet.

“It was directed by John Hardwick, who had this idea of cutting up a documentary and putting it to the music,” Rowntree explains. “The documentary he chose was a kind of love story about life on warships, which was aired on the BBC about two years ago. One of the programmes was about a woman who served on one warship and her husband, who served on another, and they had a young kid.

“The navy arranged it that one of them was always at home, looking after the baby, but they very rarely seemed to coincide. She would get home and two or three days later he would leave. They had kind of fallen out of love because they didn’t spend enough time with each other. It was very poignant and when he cut it up, it was obvious that it fitted in very well with the song.”

The album was recorded between London and Marrakesh in Morocco, although proceedings were delayed somewhat when the truck carrying all their equipment was impounded for not having the correct paperwork, leaving the band with one acoustic guitar, a laptop computer and a wasted week. All was not lost though.

“We went out to the local market and bought all the musical instruments we could find, and just sat down and started recording, and came up with ‘Moroccan People’s Revolutionary Bowls Club’. Eventually, our equipment arrived, and we finished it off using proper instuments, but that’s the reason it has such a dense percussion sound, because of all the Moroccan instruments we used.”

That’s not the only weird sound on Think Tank though. The unusual percussion sound of ‘Gene By Gene’ isn’t exactly from the ‘How To Record In Studio’ textbook.
“All of the crazy noises are actually done by hitting symbols and gongs and then dipping them into a fish-tank,” the drummer laughs.” We did that all morning, dipping stuff into a fish tank: the more we did it, the more fun we were having. We then spent the afternoon cutting those sounds up and making weird loops out of them. By the time we got to Morocco, we had put a whole load of extra stuff on, including a tractor, which was out the back of the studio.”

Blur have changed direction more times than a cross-country runner over the years, from the chirpy cockney chappies of Parklife, through the garage rock of 13 and onto the more subtle textures of Blur. This time around the combination of funk with white noise features strongly, calling to mind comparisons with The Clash.

“There’s no point in making music if you’re not constantly changing direction,” Rowntree says. “There’s no point in trying to do the same thing twice. I don’t see why anybody would want to. This album changes direction on every track, as do pretty much all of our albums. That’s the whole point, isn’t it – to play off each other and discover new things.”

So how different are the trio as individuals to the fresh-faced youths who gave us ‘There’s No Other Way’, way back when?

“I think we’re very different these days,” he muses. “The last three or four years have been the best of times and the worst of times, really. There have been an awful lot of changes inside and outside the band, personal changes and professional changes, and I think it’s made us all grow up a lot.

“I don’t think musicians can be too grown up these days. I think there is certainly room for fresh-faced, wide-eyed innocence but the notion of celebrity is fading slowly. People’s tolerance for celebrity bad behaviour is rightly fading: I think we should all just grow up a bit.”

So what of touring plans and a potential Irish date?

“The days of us having utterly free lives and being able to do a six month uninterrupted tour around the world are over. We’ve all got responsibilities outside the band now,” he responds pragmatically. “I think we’re going to have to concentrate touring plans on where the record is doing well. But I’m sure we shall be playing Ireland – as to when, we’ll have to wait and see.”

Into the Think Tank
Dave Rowntree guides us track by track through Blur’s new album.

Ambulance
“‘Ambulance’ is one of my favourite tracks on the album. It’s kind of two songs bolted together. It’s a really grown-up song I think.”

Out of Time
“Out of Time’ is the first single here in good old Europe. It is low key for a first single. We do have a habit of doing that.”

Crazy Beat
“That was a song we wrote with Norman Cook. We’d had two or three goes at it and they’d never really worked particularly well. Norman had a gut feeling about it, that instead of trying to wallpaper over the cracks, we should start from scratch again, so that was what we did. He was absolutely right. It has that Fatboy Slim swagger, the cocky arrogance that his music sometimes has, but still sounds like Blur in every respect.”

Good Song
“When we started working on the songs, they all had numbers, and I never really got the hang of the numbering system – they weren’t numbered in the order that we did them nor in the order that they appeared on the computer. ‘Good Song’ certainly is good: that’s all I can say.”

On The Way To The Club
“I didn’t actually play any drums on that at all. I was away that day, and if you’re not in the studio, you don’t get to play on the music they play that day. I did sneak a guitar line in there though: it’s my guitar debut in Blur.”

Brothers & Sisters
“All I can say about that track is to repeat one of the lyrics: ‘Brothers and sisters/ Rebuild your lives/ We’re all drug takers/ Give me something tonight’. That is the song.”

Caravan
“It was quite late and we were doodling around in the studio, as we sometimes do, just pick up the instruments and see what happens, and we played that one. One of the boxes was malfunctioning, and it put this huge distortion on everything. We immediately knew that was the X factor that had been missing. We were trying to be too nice with the song and we really needed to fuck it over. We needed to make it quite difficult to listen to, so that you had to work at hearing it, in some way. That’s why ‘Caravan’ has so much weird distortion on it.”

We’ve Got A File On You
“It’s one minute long, took two minutes to write, five minutes to record and 10 minutes to mix. Like ‘Song 2’, sometimes the ideas that you just have, are the ideas that work the most immediately.”

Moroccan People’s Revolutionary Bowls Club
(See main body of text)

Sweet Song
“It is a very pretty song. William Orbit worked on it. He’s another old friend of ours. He produced the last album in its entirety and had some input on two or three tracks this time around.”

Jets
“This has had some of the lunacy removed and has had some quite sensible ideas added to it, but it started out as an almost unlistenable track. I think ‘Jets’ is still quite a shocking song to listen to because you think you know what’s going on and then it suddenly whips the rug out from under you.”

Gene By Gene
“This was born out of the lyric that Damon came up with: ‘I wanna get to know you gene by gene/ You’re my jellybean’, where I assume he is talking about his family. It started out quite differently but it was missing that X factor. The genius of Norman Cooke is that he can come in half-way through a session and see immediately what it is you need to do to unblock you on a song. On ‘Gene By Gene’ he saw that the percussion track was leading everyone away from where the song should go.”

Battery In Your Leg
“That was the first track we did during our third week in studio, which was the last week Graham was in the studio with us, so it is Graham’s swan-song. It’s a classic Coxon guitar line, which just shows that the man is at the height of his powers as a guitarist. Graham is one of a kind really.”