FEATURE:
Mellow Song
Blur’s 13 at Twenty-Five
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THE amazing sixth…
studio album from Blur arrived on 15th March, 1999. 13 is an album that sort of signalled the end of Blur as we would know them. It may sound dark, though it was a period where relationships between the band members were strained; members frequently missing from the sessions. In terms of the lyrics, 13 is darker than Blur's previous albums. Inspired by Damon Albarn's breakup with long-term girlfriend, Justine Frischmann, that followed an increasingly strained relationship. 13 was the last for over a decade to feature the original line-up as Graham Coxon left the band during the sessions of their next album, Think Tank (2003), before returning for The Magic Whip (2015). Blur have since got back together again and released The Ballad of Darren last year. They are back on hiatus now. Even if 13 and the end of the 1990s was a struggling and tense period for the band, the album that came from that time is among their best. It contains two of their best-loved songs, Tender and Coffee + TV. I shall get to some reviews to end this feature. Almost twenty-five years after the release of 13, I think the album more than stands out. It is worth of a lot of love and celebration. In 2022, Dig! looked inside Blur’s end-of-a-century masterpiece:
“Released two years earlier, in 1997, Blur’s self-titled album had forced a rethink of everything the group had become known for: Albarn’s lyrics took a more introspective turn, and the band’s music expanded to encompass influences from US alt-rock while also incorporating new working practices that found them recording songs piecemeal in the studio. Shaped by two external factors – a relationship breakup and a cutting-edge new producer – 13 would double down on this new creative process.
Like the music they would record over the latter half of 1998, Blur themselves had been pulling in different directions, with guitarist Graham Coxon’s debut solo album, The Sky Is Too High, further embracing his love of US indie-rock, and Albarn working in secret on a dubby mash-up of styles that would soon emerge as Gorillaz’s debut album.
The latter came together in Albarn’s new flat – a place he shared with illustrator Jamie Hewlett, Gorillaz’s visual foil. Albarn had moved in with Hewlett since breaking up with Justine Frischmann, his longtime girlfriend and then lead singer with Elastica. “A lot of 13 stems from that period,” the singer told Blur biographer Stuart Maconie. “My life was not right. Not in harmony. Everything stems from your emotional life, and mine just wasn’t working at all. It was really dysfunctional. So I was misfiring everywhere.” Suffering from panic attacks, Albarn began working on a song whose lyrics would serve as a salve: “Tender is the day/The demons go away/Lord, I need to find/Someone who can heal my mind.”
Titled Tender, the finished version of the song would be as startling an album opener to 13 as Beetlebum had been to Blur: Coxon’s opening lo-fi guitar melody sounded all the more fragile for having been recorded through a Dictaphone, while the band created a beat by dropping planks of wood on the floor. Realising he needed to bring something entirely new, bassist Alex James swapped his patented pop bounce for a more sensitive bassline played on a double bass, while Albarn – having reportedly immersed himself in Otis Redding’s music – delivered a devastating vocal. Bringing the song’s soulful undertones to the fore, the group topped it off with a guest turn from the London Community Choir, whose repeated encouragement, “Come on, come on, come on/Get through it,” added to the fervour of a song Albarn described as “a celebration of love found and lost but not forgotten”.
“As soon as they started singing, it was instantly and obviously a No.1 record,” James wrote in his memoir, Bit Of A Blur, rightly clocking Tender as one of the best Blur songs of all time. “I’d never been so certain of anything.”
Released as 13’s lead single in February 1999, just three weeks ahead of its parent album, Tender was kept off the top spot by Britney Spears’ … Baby One More Time. But, having nailed the song early in the album sessions, it gave Blur the confidence to keep pushing forward.
Further encouragement came from their new producer, William Orbit. Fresh off the back of his work with Madonna on the all-conquering Ray Of Light album, and delivering what Blur felt were the standout moments on their then recent remix collection, Bustin’ + Dronin’, Orbit’s background in electronica helped take the group’s new material far beyond anything they had released before.
Though there was some trepidation about leaving their longtime producer Stephen Street (The Smiths, Morrissey) after a career-defining five-album run together, Blur also knew their new material needed an outsider’s ear. “It was such a personal thing going on, we needed to have someone who didn’t really know us,” Albarn said at the time. “William was a bit like a psychiatrist through all of this. Everyone encouraged the emotional blood-letting.”
If 13’s penultimate song, No Distance Left To Run, distilled those emotions into the most fragile-sounding Blur song to date, the album’s more uncompromising moments came out of hours’ worth of lengthy jams worked up in a drab warehouse in West London (the specific room they’d hired, Unit 13, gave the record its name) and the group’s adopted safe haven of Reykjavík, in Iceland. With Orbit then editing the recordings into something more closely resembling structured songs, the band were, Coxon realised, hearing their music “as someone else would hear it”. The experience was “a revelation”.
Under the strain of such emotional intensity and the demands of trying to keep their music unified amid an increasing number of new influences, experimental recording techniques and disparate individual interests all jostling for space on one record, Blur’s interpersonal relationships began to suffer. But while all involved have agreed that 13 was a challenge to complete, a decade together as a band had honed their musicianship to near-perfection. When they all plugged in, they managed a unity rare in even the most road-hardened of groups. Alex James recalled Orbit’s later admission that “the way we were able instantly to conjure an arrangement without talking about it had completely knocked him out. It had taken us a long time to be able to do that.”
One of a clutch of songs to look to faraway horizons, Battle sounds like a missive from an interplanetary craft, circling around a looped drum beat, mumbled lyrics and Coxon seemingly running a one-man insurgency with an array of combative guitar noises. Floating up from the melee, Albarn repeats the title word in falsetto, giving way to the suggestion – or perhaps decision, or capitulation – “Battle someone, ooh.” Elsewhere, Caramel takes Battle’s space-rock into zero gravity and Trimm Trabb lays these excursions on top of a mournful melody in which Albarn, though namechecking a pair of “flash boys” vintage Adidas trainers in the title, concludes, with bereft lethargy, “I’ve got no style/I’ll take my time/All those losers on the piss again/I doze, doze away/That’s just the way it is”.
In 2019, Stereogum commemorated twenty years of Blur’s 13. If it was a frazzled album in some ways that was signalling an end, it is also an apex. One of the great albums from the end of the Britpop era. The band and lead, Damon Albarn, broken down but set free:
“Of course, there was a plot to 13 — or, rather, a great deal of narrative surrounding it, which two decades on still makes it a crucial entry in Blur’s timeline and in the life of their frontman Damon Albarn. The album, famously, stemmed primarily from the end of Albarn’s relationship with Elastica frontwoman Justine Frischmann. For much of the decade, they’d been a Britpop celeb couple, and the final disintegration of their relationship left Albarn wounded and searching. What came out of him and Blur next was a strange mixture, an album that’s often downtrodden and defeated emotionally but liberated creatively.
Blur had rendered melancholy beautifully before, especially on career highlights like Parklife’s “This Is A Low” and The Great Escape’s “The Universal.” But those had been installments in greater tapestries, Albarn’s kaleidoscopic character studies of British life at the end of a century. He had never written from an explicitly personal place before, and 13 entirely changed this. Reeling from the loss of his relationship with Frischmann, he channeled longing and confusion and pain into songs that themselves were often breaking apart, or into songs that stand as some of the band’s most beautiful and heartrending compositions. The band’s visual language changed accordingly, too, as they fully abandoned the Technicolor Pop Art vibes of their previous albums for an oil painting done by guitarist Graham Coxon, a painting that communicated the dirty and inward-looking sounds of the album as much as it communicated its blend of physical and emotional hurt.
The whole thing, of course, opens with “Tender.” A totemic introduction, “Tender” remains not quite like anything else in Blur’s diverse catalog — a towering Britpop anthem aided by gospel, a lachrymose exorcism that can sound like the lowest point in your life at the same time as it can sound like a true salve. “Tender is the night” are the first lyrics Albarn sings on the album, sharing words with the title of a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, tapping into the desperate romanticism of another artist with an infamously fractious and public relationship. The song’s power is in how Albarn begins alone, remembering a partner who’s no longer there and singing paeans to love, and how the instrumentation continues to grow around him so that he is far from alone by its finale. Without any grand sweeping changes, the song gently climbs upwards, the chorus of voices by the end playing out like the healing Albarn pleads for in the lyrics.
If only the journey was that simple. “Tender” is one of the only moments on 13 that approaches true release. From there, 13 fires off in a lot of directions, almost all of them leading towards bleakness. There’s the caustic “Bugman,” the numbed routine of “Coffee & TV” grasping for the promise of “We can start over again,” the throbbing haze of “1992,” the spare loneliness of “No Distance Left To Run,” effectively the album’s closing statement. Perhaps the most striking tracks are “Battle” and “Caramel.” Both of them are haunting, spaced-out sagas, perfect representations of Blur’s experimental ambitions for 13 and the meditative headspace of the album thematically.
Those latter examples came from another of 13’s defining stories, that of heroin use. Hinted at throughout the years, and more explicitly discussed by Albarn earlier this decade, this was an era in which a lot of people in the scene were falling deeper into heroin use. Though Blur had offered narcotic odes before — like the self-titled’s opener “Beetlebum” — 13 is heroin music almost across the board.
Albarn’s been careful when approaching the subject. The creative exploration, the unlocking of a whole new vein of his songwriting at this juncture, he’ll credit that to heroin. But it’s also a wildly destructive force, one that lends 13 a depressive zone-out sound that once more aligned it with all the great comedown albums in Britpop’s final stretch. Like Be Here Now, Ladies And Gentlemen, and This Is Hardcore all did in their own ways, 13 combined a kind of unsexy hedonism with drained emotional landscapes. In the end it proved to be one of the band’s more difficult listens, but also perhaps their most rewarding, enduring, and evocative.
13 was, in many ways, the apex of Blur. The band had already restlessly sought out new sounds and ideas in the five albums they’d released in the preceding eight years. And the Britpop albums remain pivotal to the story of ’90s England and its music scene. Many fans might still identify one of those as their favorites, and Blur’s best songs are fairly evenly distributed throughout.
The nature of 13 demands a stronger connection. British listeners may have related to the scenery of the “Life” trilogy, but 13 is the sort of album that ingrains itself in a person’s life, that is there in our own darkest moments. Many of its songs, from “Tender” to “Trimm Trabb” to “No Distance Left To Run,” remain amongst Blur’s most beloved. And all of these existed on an album that should have sounded scattered and damaged and yet came together into such a moving whole that it seemed, definitively, to solidify the notion of Blur as true artists”.
I am going to end with a couple of reviews. A number one album in the U.K., 13 was definitely commercially successful. Produced alongside William Orbit, Blur created something meaningful. This is what Pitchfork said in 2012 when reviewing Blur 21 (a compilation of seven Blur studio albums):
"Graham used to say that he wanted to make an album that nobody would want to listen to," says drummer Dave Rowntree in the box's liner notes, "But you can't do that in a band with Damon." 13, their second masterpiece, finds Albarn and Coxon's opposing sensibilities bleeding into each other like a muddy watercolor. Both were hurting. Coxon was depressed and still at odds with the rest of the band, and Albarn's long relationship with Elastica's Justine Frischmann had just ended. A coping method he'd picked up from blues and DIY alike, Coxon knew how to translate personal pathos into Blur's music. Both the Blur songs on which he sings lead, "You're So Great" and 13's "Coffee and TV", are candidly about his drinking, and on 13, he guided Albarn toward confessional songwriting, too. Albarn had always used character songs to express emotion, but his songs on 13 strip away the protective covering of wit. "I hope you're with someone who makes you feel safe in your sleep," he croaks on the gorgeous closing lament "No Distance Left to Run", while the wounded pop-spiritual "Tender" is an obvious career highlight. William Orbit's brilliant, painstaking production pushes Albarn's ever-present pop sensibility to the brink of dissolve. The Third/Sister Lovers comparison feels more apt here: 13 is a record in a sustained state of elegant unravel, full of the unexpectedly beautiful sounds that pop songs (and people) make while they're falling apart”.
I am going to round up in a second. In 2019, XS Noize revisiting a classic album twenty years later. It is one I would urge people to listen back to as it approaches its twenty-fifth anniversary. An underrated and strong effort from Blur. An album that still reveals layers to this day:
“Wondering what direction the next Blur album was going to take was something that brought up many possibilities. Would they decide the experimenting was out of their system and return to writing catchy pop anthems again? After 'Song 2's success would this be their lo-fi grunge punk album? It was confirmed that the record would be produced by William Orbit, a dance musician who had previously worked with Madonna on her 'Ray Of Light' album. Would this be Blur's dance album? Far from being littered with club anthems and trance beats, '13' would turn out to be a brave, dense, ambitious, weird, noisy and emotionally fragile piece of work that sounds even more incredible 20 years on than it did back then. Before its release, the music press was alive with speculation about what the album, and when I first read about the album's first single, the band described it as a country-gospel song. When I first heard 'Tender' I realised that while it was indeed that, it was also a whole lot more.
I bought the single on its day on release from a record shop in Bath called Rival Records, and a few weeks later excitedly purchased '13' on the day it hit the shops. I recall hearing a few of the tracks previewed on Radio One in the week leading up to the album's release, but hearing the album in full was an utter revelation. I also instantly found it to be even more of a challenging listen than its predecessor, but after a while, every single moment of '13' grew on me in a most rewarding way. With its gospel choir and inventive percussion (made up from planks of wood being banged against the studio floor), it's hard to imagine anything more uplifting than the joyously soulful 'Tender'. But this glorious opener was something of a red herring when it came to what the rest of the LP would sound like.
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum is the blistering 'Bugman' with its brutal guitar fuzz and pneumatic drill noise that descends into utter chaos before a stinging bassline and raucous riffage take things to a new level. 'Coffee And TV' was noticeably more pop than anything else but even the album's most accessible moment had an off-kilter quality and a slightly weird feel to it, topped off with Graham Coxon's squealing, shredding guitar towards the end. Back then it sounded almost throwaway. Now, it's an essential part of '13' that adds some much-needed light relief and a great deal of charm. It's ironic that Coxon should pen the album's most melodic and accessible track since his fondness for blistering guitar noise was key in the transformation of Blur's sound on '13' and the self-titled album released two years earlier. 'Coffee and TV' was written while Graham was struggling with his alcoholism, which had increased throughout the hedonistic 90s, with the guitarist reflecting on how he would unwind by watching television over a cup of coffee to take his mind off the booze.
'Swamp Song' is a sludgy monster, covered in heavy, muddy riffage, and indulging in the sort of reckless, chaotic fun that went on at the "party pad" that Damon Albarn and his Gorillaz co-creator Jamie Hewlett shared during the late 90s. It's The Fall doing Bowie doing Elvis, and it's a total blast. It'll also destroy your brain when played at top volume. Much was said of the personal nature of the lyrics throughout the record, and revelatory they are indeed. Damon had been in a relationship with Elastica vocalist Justine Frischmann throughout the Britpop years, and the couple's break-up in late 1997 hit him hard. "That relationship just absolutely crashed. I mean, it really was a spectacularly sad end" he remembered. "It was the first time in my life that I'd been knocked for six emotionally. I'd been very lucky up to that point and had no real reason to explore that, so that's why it's happened now."
What wasn't so public at the time was Albarn's use of heroin. Suede and Elastica's problems with the drug were well-documented, yet people only found out years later that Damon was a regular heroin user from 1996 up until some point in the 2000s. In hindsight, the clues are all there: 'Bugman' refers to "the nodding dogs", with "chasing the bug" being slang for smoking the drug in tin foil. 'Caramel' is said to hint at the colour of heroin, the "I dose away" lyric in Trimm Trabb could be about a different kind of "hit" than the ones Blur were previously known for, and theories that the Damon-Justine break-up was down to heroin use are fuelled by 'Trailerpark's refrain "I lost my girl to the Rolling Stones". Those who did notice the drug references at the time assumed that they were all pointing to Frischmann when it's very likely that Albarn was opening up about his own state of mind.
Discovered as a demo on a cassette seven years after it was recorded, the solemn, unsettling '1992' is a musical relative of 'Sing' from their debut album 'Leisure', which seems to lyrically address themes of infidelity, while the dark, sombre music aches with shattered emotions and torn hearts as anguished guitars scratch and tear away at the surface. Meanwhile, blazing rave-up 'B.L.U.R.E.M.I' goes truly berserk with its punk riffs, deranged helium voices and some wild, bizarrely-placed melodica. Following one of the short instrumental segues that are found on a few occasions throughout '13', the album's magnificent centrepiece 'Battle' arrives. 7 minutes 42 seconds of extraordinary music that showcases the four members of Blur reaching a technical peak. It's the sound of beauty and decay, pulling off the feat of being both noisy and relaxing at the same time, pairing blissful ambience with more of the incredible sounds that emerge from Coxon's distorted guitar, as fluid keys ring out to create an otherworldly atmosphere. It's a fine example of the layered sound William Orbit brings to the record, and if you play it through a good pair of headphones, you'll experience something that words cannot describe.
Many of the songs were pieced together from jam sessions, and the four members of the band were rarely in the studio together at the same time. The tension in the group was running high during the recording sessions, with Orbit recalling "There was a battle between Damon's more experimental direction, and Graham's punk one and Graham prevailed. If that tension had been growing on previous LPs, it came to a head here." Meanwhile, drummer Dave Rowntree later revealed "Things were starting to fall apart between the four of us. It was quite a sad process making it. People were not turning up to the sessions, or turning up drunk, being abusive and storming off." Coxon admitted later "I was really out there around 13, which made for some pretty great noise but I was probably a bit of a crap to be around."
The mesmerising 'Mellow Song' switches from bare voice and acoustic guitar to a slow, humpy rhythm topped off with an addictive bassline and more of that melodica, an instrument that Albarn makes superb use of on '13'. The middle part turns into a magnificent psychedelic circus but plays well with the moody acoustic grunge verses. 'Trailerpark' instantly conjures up images of dirty ghetto streets with its tone of squalor. It was originally premiered a year previously at the band's 1998 headline set at Glastonbury. The half-rapped delivery is again highly reminiscent of The Fall's Mark E. Smith, especially so in its live incarnation, while his deepest and most solemn tone is saved for the chorus. Style-wise its a clear precursor to the hip-hop flavours of Albarn's hugely successful Gorillaz.
However, the vocalist's most emotional performance is reserved for the desolate ambience of 'Caramel'. It almost feels like you shouldn't be hearing something so personal, but clearly, this song couldn't have existed any other way. Ambient textures flow into one another dramatically as the overwhelming heartbreak is exhibited so openly and sincerely. 'Trimm Trabb' is made up of another rhythm formed from odd percussion sounds and a rather grungy acoustic riff, before exploding like a nail bomb at the end as Coxon unleashes a torrent of devastating guitar. The candid, spacious 'No Distance Left To Run' again finds Damon at his most fragile and soulful, complimented by an effectively minimal arrangement. '13' concludes with the lovely oddity 'Optigan 1, a short Joe Meek-esque instrumental with a nod to some of the fairground and end-of-pier vibes that featured on a few 'Parklife' tracks, but this time far more grainy, sounding like some long lost 78 record from the past.
When '13' was released I had been a Blur fan for five years and was always pleased to see them taking new directions, but this album did take a while to sound like the seminal piece of work that it represents today. 20 years later '13' is a record that resonates even more now than it did back then, and stands as perhaps the most essential Blur album. It cemented Blur's legacy and reputation as one of Britain's all-time greatest musical exports. The LP scored Blur their fourth consecutive Number 1 album in the UK and was nominated for the Mercury Prize. Years later, it's regarded as one of the group's finest works”.
On 15th March, Blur’s 13 turns twenty-five. Even though the band were dislocated and falling apart, we all know that they came back together. We can look at 13 now with less anxiety. At the time, it was quite tough for fans of the band; perhaps not realising that they were having real struggles behind the scenes. Even so, 13 stands as one of the best albums from the band. Beautiful, honest and hugely varied, its odder deep cuts stand alongside classic singles such as Tender. In ending the century, Blur put out an incredible artistic statement. The mighty and magnificent 13 is…
A tremendous album.