FEATURE:
Soon It Will Be Gone Forever
PHOTO CREDIT: Reuben Bastienne-Lewis
The Importance of the Documentary, blur: To the End
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WE get music documentaries…
all of the time, yet most of them are on streaming services. It is not often the case that a documentary makes its way to the big screen. In the case of blur: To the End, you can order your ticket. It is released on 19th July. I am going to come to a few reviews for this documentary. There is something epic and romantic about this documentary. Considering the band released their first single, She’s So High, in October 1990, the fact they are still together and strong is testament to their bond and brotherhood. That has not always been so. In the period between the release of 13 in 1999 and Think Tank in 2003, there was this tension and breakdown. Graham Coxon dealing with substance issues. Maybe a sense that Damon Albarn was going solo or exerting too much control. Dave Rowntree and Alex James having to carry on. There was no telling whether, after Think Tank, Blur would find their way back to one another. I was very fearful that they would call it quits. Even though they did go on hiatus, they came back in 2015 with The Magic Whip. Last year, they released one of their very best albums. The Ballad of Darren could well be a farewell. I think Damon Albarn has said how there are no immediate plans to record anyway. You can never say never, yet I feel like there is something final about this album and recent gigs they have been involved in. Perhaps their 8th July show at Wembley Stadium will be the bowing out. A chance to say goodbye and thanks to fans. It means that this new documentary holds extra weight and emotion:
"A new feature-length documentary depicting the extraordinary and emotional return of blur, captured during the year in which they made a surprise return with their first record in 8 years, the critically acclaimed #1 album ‘The Ballad of Darren’.
blur: To The End follows the unique relationship of four friends - and band mates of three decades - Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree as they come together to record new songs ahead of their sold-out, first ever shows at London’s Wembley Stadium in 2023. Featuring performances of their most iconic, much-loved songs, footage of the band in the studio and life on the road, this film is an intimate moment in time with this most enduring of English bands, who have been at the heart of British cultural life and influence for over three decades”.
You can find more details and insight about the documentary. Not only will it celebrate the way Blur have riden through the highs and lows and still stayed together. It is also an emotional look at these friendships that broke down for a decade. How they were in the wilderness and there was very little chance of them being a band anymore. It is inspiring that, on their latest album, they are as together and strong as ever! This is a documentary for casual and diehard Blur fans alike:
“Tickets are on sale now with more cinemas being added through to release. Find your local cinema at blur.co.uk. Details of international cinema release coming soon.
Speaking in the film, Alex James said – “We’ve barely communicated for the last 10 years… I mean even when we really split up, it didn’t take this long to make a record, but what’s wonderful is as soon as the four of us get in a room together, it’s just exactly the same as it was when we were all 19….”
With Graham Coxon adding – “With each other… In the nineties, it was a very intense time. On the same sort of level as a relationship, or marriages and things like that. I think it’s okay to say that time apart was taken up with other friendships and just sort of recuperating or doing other things.”
Dave Rowntree said – “The fact that we haven’t always got on, that is one of the chemistry points that has led to us being able to make the music we do. I’m absolutely convinced of it.”
Damon Albarn said – “I don’t think any of us thought we’d make another record, especially not a record like this. I suppose that’s why I wanted to try and make it as good as possible.” Speaking later in the film, he added – “We all have hugely involving and complicated lives and we’re so lucky that we get to spend this time together, just the four of us. And that’s the beauty of it…”
blur: To The End is directed by Toby L and produced by Josh Connolly, via production house Up The Game.
Toby L said – “To The End is an intimate glimpse into relationships, motivation and mortality, the sights and sounds of longterm friendship unearthing a fresh new conquest to overcome together. On the subject of capturing a band that has been so well documented, we sat down at the start of the project and agreed that the film had to tell a new story, be shot entirely on location, and crucially, be honest. In To The End, that’s what I hope people can see, and most importantly, feel.
Working with blur on this documentary, over the past year has been the honour of a lifetime. They were the first band I ever saw – when I was 10 – at Wembley Arena. To consider that a little over 25 years later, I’d be making a film with the band that changed my entire world view on art, culture and music, remains utterly surreal. I hope that through watching it people feel a little closer to this incredible group of artists and friends, and have a richer insight for a life spent being in a band”.
I am going to come to some reviews for blur: To the End. That intense time during the 1990s. I can only imagine how tough it was to survive as a band. When they released their debut album, Leisure, in 1991, it did not get huge reviews. After a particularly disastrous U.S. tour, few felt Blur would continue. 1993’s Modern Life Is Rubbish was a step up but, again, they faced cynics and critics. 1994’s Parklife established them as a band here to say. By 1997’s Blur, they were very much survivors of that 1990s scene and the Britpop battle with Oasis – who, in 1997, were on the way down. With the excess, demands and burn-out many experienced in the decade, Blur (mostly) kept it together. I guess there was a natural sense of tension and reaching an end by the time of Think Tank. By that point, Blur has been together anamazing twenty-five years. I think it is that thing of the guys not getting on but being used to it. It is what happens in bands. They have survived their most testing days and come out the other end. Whether their Wembley gig is the final time they are on stage together, and whether or not another album comes, we can look forward to the documentary. Hearing the four members talk about their career and relationships. I want to get to some reviews for blur: To the End. This is what The Guardian wrote:
“The Blur fan does not want for documentaries. From the ramshackle Starshaped in 1993, which captured these Britpop Monkees pre-megastardom, to the slick New World Towers in 2015, this is a band that knows what the camera wants: deadpan daftness and onstage hijinks interspersed with melancholic reflections on age and Englishness. The 2010 doc No Distance Left to Run showed the quartet reuniting after a prolonged estrangement: “Let’s get the band back together one more time!” growled singer Damon Albarn. This latest look-back-in-languor can’t do much more than give the concept another run around the block, with added early archive footage. Now the band are back together again after a second prolonged estrangement, and they have a new dragon to slay: Wembley stadium. “The less we do, the bigger we get,” observes drummer and current Mid Sussex Labour candidate Dave Rowntree.
Armed with a new album (The Ballad of Darren), they play assorted warm-up shows – Wolverhampton! Eastbourne! – as well as a homecoming gig in Colchester, Essex. Here, Damon (looking like Albert Steptoe) and guitarist Graham Coxon (sounding like Dudley Moore) find that the music room at their former comprehensive has been named in their honour. Their suggestion that its ambience might benefit from some paisley wallpaper and a bowl of weed is met with muted horror by the head teacher.
Then it’s off to Wembley for two nights and a combined crowd of 180,000 fans. If that all sounds like a walk in the Parklife, the film is not without suspense. Will the gigs go ahead now that three of the four band members have dodgy knees? Will the prolific Damon find himself sufficiently stimulated? (“If you don’t keep him focused on the job in hand, he’ll literally write another opera,” marvels chain-smoking bassist and cheese-maker Alex James.) Will Alex’s punnet of farm-grown tomatoes meet with his bandmates’ approval?
In place of the long-gone messiness that made Starshaped so compelling is a geezerish sentimental sheen, a look-how-far-we’ve-come self-regarding awe, which chimes with the title song but wears thin over 105 minutes rather than three. The lack of any interesting structural or film-making choices doesn’t help, though the director Toby L wisely knows to hold the camera on Alex’s forlorn expression after he laments, of a recent night on the lash, that “there’s always a really good reason not to go to bed”. The decision to fillet or truncate every song, though, proves to be depressingly business-minded: complete numbers are being held back for a full-length concert movie later this year.
Throughout the film, the band remain affable company. Like Pet Shop Boys, they are relics of an age when pop stars were capable of droll copy, rather than just the controversial kind, even if there is a lot of waffle to wade through. “Ours is a brotherhood that has been sustained by a musical relationship … Music is a complete abandonment of the ego, and you’re just one of billions of atoms in that space.”
The one exemplary moment belongs to someone other than these four wealthy white blokes. Pauline Black, singer with 2 Tone stalwarts the Selecter, prepares for her support slot at Wembley by reflecting on why she’s still plugging away after all these years; she says that the racism, sexism and various other isms that seemed to have been vanquished are now back again, and as pernicious as ever. It’s a reminder that not everyone has had it as easy as the likely lads of Blur, and a salutary wake-up call amid the film’s popscene daydream”.
There are two other reviews I am keen to explore. Although there have been a fair few Blur documentaries, it seems that blur: To the End is among the most important and revealing. I had never considered it but, as Big Issue note in their review, the documentary explores the complexities of male friendships. I feel it might cast a light on male bands and those who have split. Those that remain together. How difficult it can be at times:
“If one moment sums up blur: To The End, a new film charting the return in 2023 of one of this country’s best bands of the last three decades, it is a quiet moment, during a break in recording, as the reunited band sit talking in the studio. Singer Damon Albarn slides into a tiny gap between guitarist Graham Coxon and bass player Alex James on a sofa. He leans into the warm, easy embrace from either side, as drummer Dave Rowntree looks on. It’s a rare moment of stillness and peace for Albarn.
This is a man constantly on the move, described in the film by James Ford – producer of Blur’s 2023 LP The Ballad of Darren, as “pathologically addicted to making new stuff all the time”. And it hints at the deeper story behind the band’s surprise, but hugely successful comeback.
Because when Damon Albarn hit a personal post-lockdown low, when he found himself living alone for the first time in decades, holed up in his secluded South Devon farmhouse, his finely tuned musical subconscious conjured the songs to bring his oldest friends to him. And they showed up for him.
The result was not only an album to rival any Blur have produced since forming in 1989 and the biggest UK shows of their career. Perhaps the even bigger result was a new, improved understanding between the four members.
Over the course of the film, we see Albarn, Coxon, James and Rowntree commune with their long and complex personal and musical histories and choose to cherish their commonality rather than dwell in their differences. And they ride this new wave of friendship and understanding all the way to Wembley Stadium.
So this is not the definitive Blur biography. Nor is it the inside track of the recording of The Ballad of Darren. And while we see the build-up to the two triumphant Wembley concerts in July 2023, rehearsals, back stage footage and highlights from the performances, a full-scale concert film is not arriving until September 2024. Instead, blur: To The End, expertly directed by Transgressive music group co-founder Toby L, strives for something more profound.
By showing four old friends coming together, blur: To The End is an all-too-rare depiction of long-term male friendship in all its complications and complexity, as well as an uplifting reminder of the power of music to transcend and heal.
The film opens with Albarn driving, precariously, along the narrow road to his home before welcoming his bandmates. He is nervous. A bit jumpy. “Blur are coming here,” he explains, as if he’s about to be visited by the ghosts of Christmas past. Guitarist Graham Coxon has never been before, he says. Bass player Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree have not been since Blur – temporarily a three-piece – recorded Think Tank in 2002.
We see the worries dissipate. The new arrivals wrap him in love. James joins his singer for a cold-water sea swim, they eat together, it is, says bass player James, like being back in halls of residence at Goldsmiths.
Later, as they listen back to completed tracks for the new record, we see Albarn nervously glancing at Coxon – seeking approval from his oldest and closest collaborator, there are echoes of Lennon and McCartmey always finding each other’s eye-line in Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary.
He needn’t worry. “The singing is fucking ace,” Coxon tells him, as the band lean into the emotion in the new material.
Few singers can convey heartbreak or melancholy like Albarn at his best. “This is an album about loss,” he explains, a little reluctantly, to the camera. “The aftershock of loss. Whether that is a dramatic break up or pandemic. Now I live alone in the countryside – and this record very much feels like that.”
Along the way, we see the roots of their friendship and hear about their history. There is even, for the first time, a recording of Real Lives – Albarn and Coxon’s first ever school music project. Albarn and Coxon return to their old school in Colchester, which now has a music room named after them. The singer tells the nonplussed current headteacher why he used to hide in the music room lest he get beaten up: “’Cos everyone thought I was a cunt.” Despite everything, he’s still giving frontman vibes. Still putting on a show. And still playing up for the camera, all those years after he was centre stage in every school production.
Albarn also recounts youthful hijinks, including risking life and limb to change the time on the New Cross Town Hall clock while on acid during their Goldsmiths years. And the band discuss how early lyrics from Leisure, Modern Life Is Rubbish and Parklife resonate even more today, the pressures of the Britpop success years and the impact on each of them, and why they have all felt the need to spend most of the last 10 years apart.
From there, we see the band preparing for Wembley. Coxon, never fully at home with the show element of showbiz, calls the stage show rehearsals in giant soulless enormo-drome a “great way to feel awful about everything you’re doing”. And the band are more fractious than in the studio.
But it is all viewed through the eyes of four 50-something men with a shared musical and personal history and increasingly dodgy knees.
So we see the way they understand each other now. Their different needs and personalities. Albarn confident, showy, always performing; Coxon more sensitive and shy; James a study in louche ambivalence is happiest to relive the heady days of hardcore drinking as the band set out on a warm-up tour; while Rowntree is more detached, a thinker, the current Labour Party candidate for Mid Sussex happier talking about the state of the nation than rock stardom.
Albarn is clearly the driving force. And the band accept this. “If we don’t keep him focused on the job in hand, he will literally be doing another opera before the third single is out,” James grins.
Between recording the album and playing at Wembley, Albarn has toured with Gorillaz, Coxon has been on the road with his band The Waeve, and James has been making cheese, running his farm and partying with his kids. And with Wembley approaches, Rowntree suffers a potentially tour-ending tennis injury.
But the band understand the significance of playing Wembley. “Me and Damon watched Live Aid on television together,” recalls Coxon. And their biggest ever UK gig coming at this stage in their career is not lost on them.
Then it’s showtime. After Jockstrap, after Sleaford Mods, after Self Esteem. After The Selector, after Paul Weller, it’s time for Blur to play Wembley Stadium.
“There is something very healing about creating a beautiful noise,” says Albarn, as this beautifully made film nears its end. “And I never know if it will be the last time”.
I am going to end with a five-star review from NME. As someone who discovered Blur in the 1990s and was a big fan, I am excited to see this. I never thought that we would be talking about them in 2024! It is amazing that they have stayed strong and have that incredible friendship. As much as anything, we will get some raw insights and revelations that explain and explore the complexities of their friendship. This is what NME said in their review:
“Time is not infinite,” offers Blur’s Damon Albarn in the opening scene of new documentary film, To The End. Born of the Britpop age that promised so much, the band now in their 36th year and on their second comeback seem acutely aware that they aren’t, as their gobby rivals once promised a generation, going to “live forever”.
We begin with Albarn enjoying a pastoral existence on the rural Devon coast; getting cut up by Land Rovers on winding roads, celebrating the first egg from his beloved pet chicken and living in a very big house in the country. But all’s not well. Shattered by the split from his partner of 25 years, the self-confessed workaholic turns his heartache into song – and can only do it with his oldest friends around him. As guitarist Graham Coxon puts it, “a boulder is dislodged” within his pal – with two decades of pent up emotion pouring out.
That frank and honest storyline alone (we often see the frontman struggling and in tears) would have made for a must-see film, but the stakes are higher. As well as charting the indie legends’ recording of their immaculate comeback album ‘The Ballad Of Darren’, To The End also follows them on the road to a pair of shows at London’s Wembley Stadium.
Directed by Transgressive Records founder Toby L, To The End is a joyful and touching tale of a band crawling out of their Last Of The Summer Wine years to get all Spinal Tap once more. Each member has a challenge to beat: bassist turned cheesemonger Alex James savours the party lifestyle while remaining fearful of his old problems with alcohol, Coxon wrestles with the notion of being a stadium band when he only ever wanted to be a punk, and drummer turned politician Dave Rowntree goes and breaks his bloody leg weeks before curtain-up.
Still, the highs are higher; it’s wonderful to see the band retrace their friendship right back to school, the live footage from their intimate warm-up shows and the Wembley gig itself put you right in the beer-soaked mosh-pit, and Coxon gets a laugh by doing something pretty gross with a can of Diet Coke. No Spoilers.
They bicker, they hug, they call each other c**ts, they get the job done. While Blur’s last doc and accompanying live movie No Distance Left To Run was a portrait of a band celebrating their legacy and giving a nostalgia-hungry world exactly what they craved, this spiritual sequel shows a band simply supporting each other. Whether they return again or not remains to be seen. But even if they don’t, this was one hell of a final fling”.
Even if blur: To the End has a title that suggests a closing chapter and goodbye, that has not been confirmed. It is going to be a chance to celebrate this legendary band. Also, for those of us growing up with their music, an intimate portrait of these four amazing musicians. They play Wembley next month and, after that, who knows?! Make sure you go and see the documentary on 19th July. As they say in To the End (from Parklife): “And it looks like we might have made it…
YES, it looks like we made it to the end”.