Damon Albarn felt 'quite lost' writing new Blur album

By Mark SavageBBC Music Correspondent

Damon Albarn says he felt "quite lost" and "sad" while writing Blur's new album, The Ballad Of Darren.

The singer penned the new songs while touring with Gorillaz last year, and a sense of melancholy pervades the music.

Albarn has called it an "aftershock record", dealing with the pandemic and the deaths of his musician friends Bobby Womack and Tony Allen, and Blur's tour manager Craig Duffy.

"There was a lot on my mind," he told BBC 6 Music's Steve Lamacq.

"But it's OK being lost. It's OK being sad.

"There's a panic that's bestowed on these emotions that I don't think is very helpful.

"Sometimes, if you're lost, it's exciting because you're in a place where you could discover something new. I think it helps [in] writing songs, sometimes."

Guitarist Graham Coxon agreed: "It's a good thing to consciously say, 'This is a temporary state', and make as much use of it as possible.

"Don't waste that sadness. All of these things are there to be used," he said.

The Ballad Of Darren is Blur's first album in eight years, and balances their buoyant, angular indie instincts with the more contemplative atmosphere of Albarn's solo albums. Several songs tackle grief and loss.

"Looked in the mirror / So many people standing there," he sings on The Narcissist; while the downbeat opener, The Ballad, finds him sighing: "I just looked into my life / And all I saw was that you're not coming back."

The songs are largely left open to interpretation, but Albarn has hinted that there's a personal angle to the record.

Talking to Germany's Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper, he said the lyrics of Barbaric ("I want to talk to you about what this break-up has done to me / I have lost the feeling that I thought I'd never lose") are based on a "very lonely Christmas" he recently experienced.

"The songs are already quite accurate inventories of my life. I'm pretty open here on this album," he added.

But when the subject matter gets heavy, there's always a buzzing riff from Coxon, or a leonine bass part from Alex James to lift the mood; and the record is awash with harmonies that highlight the importance of friendship in tough times.

"That's what makes it Blur, when Graham sings the harmonies," said Albarn. "[It's] the combination of our two voices."

Charm and musicality

The album (which is dedicated to Blur's former bodyguard Darren "Smoggy" Evans) is released on Friday, and early reviews have praised the way it embraces the uncertainty of middle age.

"Albarn was never a stranger to melancholy, but grief permeates many of his lyrics here," said Ryan Leas on Stereogum, describing the atmosphere as "Britpop, weathered by time".

The lyrics are "whimsical and weary in equal measure, hinting at friendships and romances that seem to have crumbled, but doing so from a place of isolation," wrote the Wall Street Journal's Mark Richardson. "But Mr Albarn delivers such heavy sentiments with an eye for the poetic and a good dose of wit."

The band may be "older and wiser", said Nick Reilly in Rolling Stone, but they "still manage to retain every ounce of the charm and musicality that made them such a brilliant prospect in the first place".

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In a recent Rolling Stone profile, Blur suggested the new album was a happy accident, written after they were invited to play two nights at Wembley Stadium.

After agreeing to the shows - bigger than anything they'd played at the height of Britpop - the group convened in the studio to see whether they could drum up any new material.

"As soon as we all sat down and started playing together, it was pure magic," said bassist Alex James.

"We didn't know we were pregnant, and we gave birth in the supermarket car park. It's like, 'Oh, my God, it's a beautiful boy!'"

Albarn's tour demos formed the basis of the record but, as he told Lamacq, "nothing was going to proceed unless Graham was into it".

The guitarist and the singer had a notoriously stormy relationship in Blur's heyday, which culminated in Coxon walking out during sessions for the band's 2003 album Think Tank.

This time, however, he was fully on board. "I remember listening through the demos and getting a pad out and trying to jot down the chords and thinking, 'There's a lot of chords here,'" he said.

"But good chords. Chords you can really get into. There's such a lot of opportunity for emotional things when the chords are that much more deeper."

He added that Albarn's musicality was the factor that set the band apart from their Britpop contemporaries.

"When songs are written on a piano, that's a completely different thing. You're not just playing G and C.

"I'm not going to [compare] us to another band beginning with 'B' and ending in 'eatles', but they had a lot of stuff on piano, too. They weren't just a rock and roll band."

Blur's Wembley gigs took place in front of 180,000 fans a fortnight ago, and the group were suitably overwhelmed by the occasion.

Drummer Dave Rowntree even posted an Instagram video from behind his kit, labelling it: "My little art-pop band headlining Wembley!"

"The weird thing about Wembley was, from the first moment we went on, on Saturday, to the moment we left on Sunday, the place had shrunk. It was like it had become really intimate," Albarn told 6 Music.

"It's the first time I've actually been excited about seeing what the film looks like," he added, "because I just have no idea what it looked like from outside."

For fans who couldn't attend the show, Blur also recorded an intimate gig in the BBC's Radio Theatre on Tuesday, mixing new tracks like St Charles Square and The Narcissist with classics including End Of A Century, Girls & Boys and Parklife (with a guest appearance from Phil Daniels).

The concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 2, and will be shown at 21:25 BST on BBC Two on Saturday as part of a themed "Blur night", which will also include a repeat of their 2009 Glastonbury headline set at 22:25 BST.

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