There are two sides to Blur’s sporadic reunions. There are the live shows – Glastonbury in 2009, a trawl around the world’s festivals in 2012, a global arena tour in 2015, an unexpected one-off performance at one of Damon Albarn’s Africa Express events in 2019 – which are reliably rapturously received: a chance, as Graham Coxon recently put it to “revisit all those great songs”, complete with a distinct emotional charge driven by nostalgia and the evidence that the once-fractured relationships within the band have been mended. And then there is the issue of recording and releasing new material.
By far the most adventurous band among Britpop’s big league, willing to change and push forward in a way their peers seldom were, it doesn’t fit Blur’s profile to reconstitute purely as a heartwarming exercise in nostalgia. But their actual recording process has been fraught since re-forming in 2008. Blur were reported to have made three attempts to record a new album, but only three songs emerged, as limited edition singles; Albarn apparently called time on album sessions in 2012 midway through recording, much to the chagrin of producer William Orbit. Albarn likewise suggested that the tracks recorded at impromptu 2013 sessions in Hong Kong would constitute “one of those records that never comes out”, before Coxon completed the music in secret and invited the singer to add lyrics: Albarn looked faintly surprised to be at the hastily arranged press conference that announced 2015’s acclaimed The Magic Whip.
