It's the oldest story in rock ’n’ roll. Band achieves national stardom with singalong hits. Band becomes drunk, jaded and wracked with self-loathing. Band attempts to cull teenybopper fanbase with a willfully ‘difficult’ album.
Just four years after Blur won the so-called Battle of Britpop, pipping Oasis’s Roll With It to the UK No 1 spot with their own Country House, the London band were virtually unrecognisable on 1999’s 13: a sixth album that replaced pop hooks and parping horns with shrapnel riffs, bleepy noises and a sense of creeping dread. With frontman Damon Albarn nursing his breakup from Elastica’s Justine Frischmann on the lyric sheet and producer-of-the-moment William Orbit adding an icy sheen from the mixing desk, this was music to clear a house party. You either loved it or you hated it.
