Blur return to studio - and may make comeback album
Wednesday, 6 June 2007
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Blur, one of the biggest Britpop acts of the 1990s, have agreed to meet for a recording session that may lead to a "comeback" album after years of silence.
The reunion in October could lead to a series of gigs and an album. While fans were hailing the move as a sign that the band would reunite, Dave Rowntree, the group's drummer, said no firm decisions had been made but that the group were cautiously optimistic.
"We will spend one week recording and see what happens," he told The Independent. "We're dipping our toes in the water. We have not made any decision but we'll see how we feel and if the spark is there."
While stressing the band were not technically reforming as "we have never split up", he said other studio get-togethers had led to the creation of albums and subsequent gigs. "That tends to be the way albums start," he said. "That's how the last one started. We get together and either we say 'it's not the right time' or we say 'brilliant'. We don't want to pre-judge the issue right now."
Asked whether he was confident the session would lead to the band making a comeback, Alex James, the band's bass player, said: "I do sincerely hope so but there's no point doing it unless all of us want to because that was what was so good about it. I'm hoping that it'll happen but there's nothing set in stone."
Blur, who had hits in the Nineties with "Parklife" and "Song 2", have never officially split but have not made an album since Think Tank in 2003. Damon Albarn, the band's lead singer, has gone on to enjoy with two other bands, Gorillaz and The Good, The Bad and The Queen, while the guitarist Graham Coxon has had solo projects. Rowntree moved into politics and James became a farmer.
Albarn and Coxon have reportedly had differences in the the past. By the time they completed their last album, they were said to have become disenchanted with their friendship and, in 2002, Coxon left the band early in recording sessions for Think Tank. Blur continued in his absence, with the album and a tour.
The band originally formed in spring 1989, when Albarn, Coxon and James were classmates at Goldsmiths College in London. They formed under the name of Seymour, taken from a J D Salinger novel, and later changed their name to Blur.
Known in the Colchester underground scene as an art rock band, they quickly gained popularity with their live shows. Their influences on their debut album, Leisure, included contemporary British alternative rock trends such as Madchester and shoegazing. Following a stylistic change in the mid-1990s, influenced by 1960s English pop groups such as the Kinks and the Beatles, the band released Modern Life is Rubbish, Parklife and The Great Escape.
As a result, the band helped to popularise the Britpop genre and achieved fame in Britain, aided by a famous chart battle with their Britpop rivals, Oasis. By the late 1990s, with the release of their fifth album, they underwent another reinvention, influenced by the indie rock style of American bands such as R.E.M, and gained US success with the single "Song 2".
The final album featuring the original line-up, 13, released in 1999, found Blur experimenting with electronica and gospel music.
The prospect of a Blur studio reunion and possible albumfollows a spate of recent revivals and reformations by groups such as The Police, who have undertaken a tour decades after splitting up, and Take That.
