If you asked the average listener who Blur is, you’d be lucky to get an answer that didn’t mention “Song 2,” the British band’s smash-hit-turned-stadium-anthem that launched them to transatlantic fame.
But the Britpop quartet — featuring Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Dave Rowntree and Alex James — saw their path to glory paved long before the song’s release in 1997. In fact, their first album, “Leisure,” released in 1991, may not have had the chart-smashing success of later projects like “Parklife” in ’94, but it did result in their first steps onto international soil and perhaps the establishment of the Britpop genre.
Not much is known about those early Britpop days, before Pulp set the world ablaze with “Common People” and Sleeper released “The It Girl,” an often-underrated album that captured the essence of the era to a T.
No, this is before Oasis and Blur duked it out in the infamous Battle of Britpop, before “Roll With It” versus “Country House,” before bassist James donned the rivals’ merch during a celebratory Top of the Pops performance.
At the time, Blur were on the heels of “Leisure,” and while they’d been given a nod or two in Britain, they remained relatively underground in the States. It would have been easy to lose those years to the moving hands of history, but Rowntree decided to pick up an Olympus OM-10 to “record their daily lives.”
Dave Rowntree of Blur poses while drinking a beer in a red sweater.
(Dave Rowntree)
“They’re unremarkable times. That’s why I took them, really,” Rowntree tells The Times. “They’re the times in between the big events in the Blur story, and those times are quite similar; there’s the traveling, hanging around in dressing rooms and all of that.”
Unbeknownst to him, he’d be capturing an early glimpse into the making of Blur and the birth of the Britpop scene. But, thankfully, he did, and he will share them with the world in his upcoming book “No One You Know,” out Sept. 9 on Hero Press.
Recently, Rowntree spoke with The Times about all its trials and tribulations — and, perhaps, indulge in some reminiscence.
What time period were these photos taken from? I gauged it was around “Leisure.” If I see Damon’s bowl cut, I know it’s pretty early.
There are some pictures from before we were even signed. But by and large, yes, it’s in the lead up to the first album and the tour that followed that, as far as I can tell.
Before you were even signed, were you still Blur or was the band called Seymour?
We were a number of names … it would be a mistake to think that the band was called Seymour for any length of time. That was just the name that we happened to settle on at the point we were signed … we might not have even been called Seymour. I think we were probably called Seymour for two gigs.
I know you took most of these photos, but who took the photos of you?
There are some early proto-selfies in there, but yeah, 99% were taken by me. Sometimes I just gave the camera to somebody … you can see because those photos are in pairs, because the photo I took of the other people, then I gave the camera to them and they took the photo of me.
You mentioned in the book that a lot of these photos you hadn’t remembered ever taking.
No, no, because they’re not the big events in the Blur story.
At various times in my life, I’ve kept a diary, and my diary has been full of those unremarkable events, the minutiae rather than the big ticket items, because they’re the things that bring out the flavor of the time.
They’re the things that nobody else was taking pictures of. Everybody else was taking pictures of us on stage and, you know, the kind of public-facing things; I wanted to remember what it was actually like in between those things.
Damon Albarn, from left, Alex James and Graham Coxon sit at a table.
(Dave Rowntree)
So why put them in a book?
As a collection, they are remarkable — they’re photos of the unremarkable times, which is what makes the collection remarkable. I think that’s what nobody else has.
Nobody really had all the behind-the-scenes stuff that showed what it was actually like to be in Blur, because we were on stage a tiny proportion of the time.
When you were taking these, did you ever think, “Hey, this could end up in a book one day?”
No, I never did. And I remember Damon asking me at one point what I was going to do with all these pictures. It wasn’t clear to anyone that this [the tour] wasn’t going to be it.
“No One You Know” was named after what Kenny, the bus driver, put on the front of the bus during our first American tour. But he was right.
In the UK, we were playing to these tiny little clubs to maybe 50 people, and the band, the music we were making, was deeply unfashionable at that point. We had to have our own chart, “indie chart,” because we were so unlikely to get into the main charts. All that changed later on, but at that time, it was by no means clear that this wasn’t going to be our only tour of Japan, our only tour of the States; we had no idea.
Alex James digs through a bin of Lego while on a tour bus.
(Dave Rowntree)
I remember listening to your podcast, the Dave Rowntree Show, and you told a story about touring the U.S. that kind of epitomized that.
This is astonishing, really, but yeah, that was in a place laughingly called Mile City. It had about three houses, and right in the middle there was a sign over a building saying “Casino,” and it had a slot machine in, so it was a real American backwater.
These kids bounded over and asked for our autograph. I thought, “Wow, we finally arrived.”
It became clear, after talking with them for a couple of minutes, that actually, they just never met a British person before, maybe never did again.
What was it like when you finally uncovered the metal box that held all of these photos?
It was a relief. But it’s not like I opened the box and gorged myself on the pictures.
Eventually, I threw myself into a few boxes of what I laughingly call memorabilia. It’s just stuff that I chucked in a box at the end of a tour rather than throw away. Then I thought, “Well, I’d better start looking through these photos.” And I didn’t hold out much hope for them, but when I did start to look through them, I realized that actually I’d captured something.
There was something there, a sort of energy, vitalism and naivety, that was actually quite interesting.
Do you remember why you stopped taking them?
What I told myself was that I shouldn’t be looking through the camera lens at this exciting, new life. I should be living it. But actually, I was only looking through the camera lens a tiny portion of it. So that wasn’t a good excuse.
And after a few years, it wasn’t really exciting and new. I was less dazzled by all these things because I’d done them before. Like the first time we flew into Japan, I was just blown over by the beauty of the place and the extraordinary people, and there are the kind of futuristic cities and all of that. But then we went to Japan three or four times a year, and after five years, there wasn’t that kind of intake of breath anymore, and so I just stopped taking pictures of things.
That’s one of my regrets, really. I gave up the piano when I was seven years old. That’s one of my biggest regrets. And I stopped taking these pictures after a few years, and that’s my second biggest regret.
Blur’s Damon Albarn sits to the left of a Japanese fan while appearing on a radio show.
(Dave Rowntree)
What would you say was the hardest part of putting it all together?
Not putting pictures in was the big thing. Because there’s great pictures that just haven’t gone in the book because they just didn’t fit in, not because they’re not good pictures. And I found that difficult.
I’m not quite ruthless enough to be able to do that, but in the end, I was forced to, because the publishers imposed a page count on me. I figured out how many photos that was going to be and just had to chuck out about 100 photos.
Do you think we’ll ever see those?
You know, there’s enough for another book. There’s only about half of my photos in there.
If I do another book … I think I’ve done that now, I’ll maybe do something else. But there’s enough interesting photos left to do something else with.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
